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Resurrection Ecology Gives Life to Old Eggs
Ant writes "ABC News reports that scientists are bringing the past to life by hatching eggs once thought to be dead and producing colonies of animals as they existed decades ago. They are calling it 'resurrection ecology,' and it's a whole new field that quite literally allows scientists to observe evolution as it occurred, using animals that were quite different than their kinfolk today."
Resurrection Ecology Gives Life to Old Eggs
;-)
Maybe this will put an end to those viagra emails I keep getting too.
How does this demonstrate evolution? Don't they know the eggs were planted there just to fool them???
Just KNOWING that creatures an be a hatched after that long stalled period makes you wonder about what life really is.. Offtopic, but this seems to help imply that death and birth don't really have beginnings or ends. Kind of scary to me at least.
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
Not exactly. There have been experiments which, for all intents and purposes, have been solid arguments for evolution. The evidence at this point is overwhelmingly present. However, many do not accept it despite the evidence.
I mean, this will still not prove it for most creationists, since it will only show what can happen under closed, controlled conditions. It's never realistic enough to change the lives of the people to whom absolute, totally undeniable proof of evolution would be a faith-shattering experience.
There will always be room for another Scopes Monkey Trial, even today. There are still creationist education groups. It's not like the evidence will be easily accepted by them, either. It will take more than just some simulated ecosystems.
This should probably be phrased as: "Can this possibly be used to show that evolution is more than just a theory?"
What more is there to be than "just" a theory?
Evolution is "just" a theory because, although a theory is a statement of what we think something to be like, that includes in itself an inherent understanding that we can't know more than that, that we could always possibly be wrong . . . so evolution has trouble standing up to things like Creationism and it's masquerade/reinvention as "Intelligent Design", which offer eternal and proclaimed truths at their core. They have the gift of certainty; and unreal concreteness is often more persuasive than truthful equivocation.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Slashdot poster brings back memes thought to be dead and produces jokes as they existed decades ago. He calls it "resurrection karma".
Unfortunately, no good can come of it, as those memes are the same ones we have today.
But speciation has been observed. The Australian Eastern Rosella had a range extending from near Adelaide in South Australia to the Macpherson Ranges in SE Queensland. The sprcies had a continuous variation in colouring though this range from SW to NE. You could take a pair of birds of opposite gender and they would mate without needing any particular prompting.
In the 1930's the Murrumbidgee Irragation Project destroyed a large slab of habitat in the center of the range of the bird. There were now two populations of Eastern Rosellas. In each group colouration tended to the mean of each region, with the result that now birds of opposite gender from the two regions will not interbreed without major human intervention (colouring the birds, or feeding them sex hormones etc).
Given that the definition of species is a population of organisms that will mate and reproduce spontaneously under natural conditions, the Eastern Rosella is a text book case of Speciation, as outlined in the Origin of Species.
The "no new species have been observed" objection is dead in the water. Note also that we're not talking about plankton or bacteria or virus here - we are talking about a parrot a bit bigger than a pidgeon.
Hmm... by that definition, Stephen Hawking is a zooplankton.... so I think the definition is a bit broad....
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"There are numerous speciation events on record."
Most rational creationists accept that micro-evolution - the development of new species, sub-species, and distinct populations - occurs regularly, thanks to adaptive survival and the remarkable propensity of the genome to re-activate inactive DNA. I remember a recent example where a species of bacteria unable to digest lactose developed that ability within a few generations after being grown in a lactose-rich solution. The bacteria didn't gain this ability through random mutations, but by the activation of a previously unknown gene in the "junk DNA" part of the genome.
There's also an excellent article in the latest American Scientist detailing the specifics of spider speciation in the Hawaiian islands. There seems to be little doubt that this sort of micro-evolution occurs constantly.
However, many people (like myself) believe there is little or no persuasive evidence for macro-evolution, the spontaneous generation of radically new organisms marked by completely new genes, chromosomes, and physiological characteristics. There is pretty much no explanation of how such changes could occur at the molecular level. Michael Behe refers to it as a black box problem, since such macro-evolution can currently only be explained by treating very complex biological and chemical systems as black boxes. It's easy to imagine in macroscopic terms how a freckle might turn into an eyeball. It's impossible, however, to explain the process in molecular-evolutionary terms.
In other words, macro-evolution is not really a theory, because no theoretical framework even exists yet. Note that one need not be a creationist to reject macro-evolution and abiogenesis as viable scientific theories (though there are admittedly few other options).
Incidentally, I have read a fair amount on the subject, including the online article "29 Evidences for Macroevolution" and the relevant rebuttals. Nothing was persuasive; every "evidence" offered (1) were not necessary indicators of common ancestry, and (2) would not disprove the theory by their absences. They were simply interesting facts that could explained both by macro-evolution and by creation.
(Please don't flame me here, I'm trying to make some honest and intelligent points about a topic that gets a lot of crazy people into an irrational frenzy. Don't be one of those people!)
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.