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Rate of Evolution Metrics Observed
eldavojohn notes an article up at Science Daily on research demonstrating that smaller animals with warmer blood evolve faster than larger, colder animals. From the article: "Across species from fish to mammals, they found that rates of protein evolution showed the same body size and temperature dependence as metabolic rate. Specifically, their mathematical model predicts that a 10-degree increase in temperature across species leads to about a 300 percent increase in the evolutionary rate of proteins, while a tenfold decrease in body size leads to about a 200 percent increase in evolutionary rates."
Using the estimated rates, scientists projected evolution to have started about 6,000 years ago. ;)
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I wonder if this has to do with survival rates; shorter lifespan vs longer lifespan, more active vs passive animals, more energy vs less energy?
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Evolution is just a theory! I live in Kansas and my teacher was forced to tell me that!
Interesting to note that humans have a lower body temperature than most mammals, actually that's one of the reasons we can get leprosy and almost no other animal can carry it, armadillos being the exception, it thrives in cooler temperatures.
more cell division, shorter lifespan, and more more abundant reproduction. All of these mean mutations collect in the population faster. Bacteria evolve much faster than mice, BTW, and they're not warm-blooded since they have no blood. Yet, they reproduce at a much faster rate and the mutations add up faster.
I didn't read TFA, but TFS tells us nothing common sense and a basic high-school understanding of biology couldn't predict as a hypothesis. That someone has gathered evidence to support the hypothesis empirically is pretty cool, though. Even what seems apparent should be tested, or it's not really science.
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I think you have to factor rate of reproduction into this. Whales and elephants don't breed often; that would retard the propagation of genetic changes. Smaller mammals like mice and rabbits tend to breed very often, allowing them to propagate genetic changes faster and more often, making it easier for them to weather (no pun intended) changes in the environment. I don't know how this would factor to "cold-blooded" animals.
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Except that the evidence has tipped heavily in favor of dinos, or at least a large number of families of them, were, in fact, warm-blooded.
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My college buddy's ferret had a fever once. Before it was over she evolved wings, grew a sixth digit on each paw, became super-intelligent and built an interociter which she used to summon a rescue saucer from a race of hyper-sapient star-ferrets.
> So that means the dinosaurs (huge cold blooded reptiles) were an evolutionary dead end?
Dinosaur Spokesman: We had a good what, hundred, two hundred million year run? How long you human critters been around? Two mil? Odds on making it to three?
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that word theory. i'm not sure it means what you think it means.
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Dinosaurs weren't reptiles. There's more and more evidence that shows that they were warm-blooded. And dinosaurs didn't really disappear. They just look different now. Step outside and look at all those feathered things flying around. Those are modern dinosaurs.
smaller got eaten by bigger, and generally, hot is tastier than cold.
It *does* mean that smaller animals can evolve faster if under lots of evolutionary pressure. Note that since smaller animals tend to breed faster, this is already the case.
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During the extended sunless period after the K-T boundary impact, most any animal that wasn't a scavenger found themselves at an evolutionary dead end.
Look asshole, maybe to you a whale/elephant hybrid is "retarded", but to me, it's "fucking awesome".
or, (if you prefer a less vulgar joke)
Man, I really gotta start watching the Discovery Channel more often. I always assumed that whales and elephants didn't breed at all, but "not often"? Wicked!
Using the term "evolutionary rate" is pretty misleading: whats happening is that the genomes are changing faster, but almost all of that change isn't from any selective pressure. Its mostly "neutral drift", things changing randomly in a way that does not impact the fitness of the organism.
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b) Like many posters, you're forgetting or don't understand how evolution actually works. Humans are not "more evolved" than other animals. Every species that is currently still in existence is the pinnacle of evolution for its particular environmental niche. If that environment changes, the species will either die out or evolve further to survive in the niche.
The main evolutionary advantage humans have is our brains - they have allowed us to become more adaptable without evolution than many animals, and survive and thrive in many environments and through envrionmental changes. In order to have such a complex brain, it has to be of a certain minimum size, and our body has to be of a minimum size to support it. A brain as complex as ours most likely simply could not evolve in a mouse - but we couldn't live in the niches mice do, for a variety of reasons. Opposable thumbs have helped us as well - but would they be an advantage without the other advantages we have? What would a mouse *do* with opposable thumbs, without the brain structures to use them intelligently? Would they be an evolutionary advantage for a mouse at all? Or take a dolphin, who has one of the brains closest to ours in the animal kingdom - what would a dolphin do with opposable thumbs (assuming it evolved some fingers at the same time)? They wouldn't help it swim, which is one thing it has to be really good at to get food and escape predators. In fact, a dolphin with hands instead of fins would probably fare worse than other dolphins, because it couldn't swim as quickly and adeptly. What is an evolutionary advantage to one species can spell doom for another species.
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If we were to assume that evolution had a goal, we would have to conclude that that goal was to produce beetles.
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No. Dawkins explains this nicely in his book Climbing Mount Improbable.