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Convergent Evolution Upends Honeyeaters' Taxonomy
grrlscientist writes in with a beautiful piece of science, beautifully explicated. The poignant bit is that the birds in question are all extinct. "Every once in awhile, I will read a scientific paper that astonishes and delights me so much that I can hardly wait to tell you all about it. Such is the situation with a newly published paper about the Hawai'ian Honeyeaters. In short, due to the remarkable power of convergent evolution, Hawai'ian Honeyeaters have thoroughly deceived taxonomists and ornithologists as to their true origin and identity for more than 200 years."
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nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger
first post and all that
hurr
There have been debates over the taxonomy of odd creatures (with similarities to other known creatures) forever. Sometimes simple physical resemblence just doesn't really tell the tale. Of course, evolution producing similar looking/behaving birds is nothing new either (just look at how similar African parrots and South American parrots are to one another).
The really great debates come when zoologists get into trying to classify an animal that looks like (or behaves like) two DIFFERENT known creatures. One of my personal favorites is the Red Panda. The bottom of its body and claws look like a bear's (you can see it clearly in this picture) and it eats only bamboo, just like a Giant Panda. But the rest of it looks like a raccoon. This cute little furball finally had to be given its own unique family, because no one was quite sure where to put the little bastard. And it's still debatable if it truly deserves its own family.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Dylan
LAinhart
LEET HAXOR 1st postyed bitches
This type of non-linear genetic branching is also found in some areas of the Appalachians.
Maliki liki Maka you crazy genetic rebels!
Ah, nothing like the predictive power of evolution for ya! Despite the fact that it's basically just a theory at this point, it can be used to "prove" pretty much anything you want! The birds are the same? Evolution! They're not the same? Uh, convergent evolution. That's it!
A while ago there were two papers I remember, where one of them observed that women dress sexier when fertile, while another observed women walk sexier when *not* fertile. Ah, inconsistent results that need more study, right? Nope! Evolution explains BOTH of them! Everything's consistent with evolution!
It really is just a theory folks. How about some warnings for the textbooks?
and I was looking forward to something about the birds AND the bees.
A cat with six toes is still a cat.
The link to the name is to a newer entry in the blog in question, which is not surprisingly hers.
Her slashdot page is here. I see no comments, I wish she would join more discussions, her journals are interesting enough.
Where'd all these girls come from lately, anyway? It's as if all these women were wondering where to get a man who wouldn't be too scary, and then "oh wow, I know a place where there's lots and lots of guys and they're all scared of US! Too bad they're all nerds, but you can't have everything..."
Free Martian Whores!
The author is obviously a Godless, Satanist, anti-Christian, elitist, feminist, nazi, communist pinko!
Don't turn your backs on Jesus! Quit reading "science" and "facts" All the answers you need are in this dusty Iron age book!
I realize that in this case (being dead for 200 years) it is more difficult, but why don't they _just_ use DNA sequencing to determine the classification of animals?
Observation (of both behaviour and appearance) is influenced by the observer and is variable. Two people never see the same thing the same way. Ask a man and wife what colour the living-room couch is and you will get two different answers! =)
The DNA sequence will never lie, and that sequence will tell us FAR more about common evolutionary traits then our eyeballs will.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Nice blog reporting on a nifty bit of biological research. In the last forty years we have seen a change from constructing phylogenetic trees based on phenotype to constructing them based on genotype. This has resulted in a number of nice surprises like this. Good to see Mayr's hypothesis about these birds borne out.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
My friend had a parrot but one time I fed it Alka-Seltzer and it felled down and fizzy stuff was coming out of its mouth and butt and it never got up again.
What happened?!
Forget about those concepts of evolution and those widdle cutey birds, because you're COVERED WITH SCORPIONS? Covvverrrred with scorpions!
You will now do my bidding. Give me all your lunch money!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I was always impressed by the similarities between sharks, dolphins, and icthyosaurs. Similarly, there's a phenomenal similarity between the flying reptiles such as the pterodactyls and bats with finger bones modified with flaps of skin to make wings. There's also the similarities between various species of gliding tree mammals, the flying squirrels and lemurs and the like. One can also talk of amazing developments with marsupials which had armored herbivores similar to a rhino and carnivores like a leopard-form. (and let's not forget that a Triceratops is built awfully similar to a rhino down to the armored hide, horns, and heavy, stocky legs.) All of these from obviously unrelated lines of descent converging on similar forms to satisfy ecological niches. If I recall correctly, there's also a type of fish that developed a false-placenta for live-birthed young -- it's not a true placenta because it isn't a placental animal but it serves the same purpose. I believe this fish was in the extended shark family.
The other thing that really amazes me is how the theory of evolution makes certain predictions that you'll simply not see contradicted. For example, there's the general rule that animals will adapt existing limbs for various purposes so you might see a rodent develop forelimbs into wings but you will not see a rodent sprout brand new wings from its back while retaining the previous four limbs. Even the weirdest body parts you can find can be seen to be modifications, not wholly new structures sprung forth from nothing. You won't see a bird suddenly come with three eyes or an elephant with a cyclopean eye or a cat with eight legs like a spider (barring genetic defects that will be unable to reproduce).
What's also amazing is how the lines between species get blurry. The old definition is that two populations are split as a species when they cannot interbred and create viable offspring. But we've seen from zoos that populations that don't mix in the wild can produce viable offspring such as ligers, tygons, then there's the blonde grizzlies that are a hybrid of grizzly and polar bear that did occur in the wild... All of these animals come from common ancestors if you go back far enough and it makes you wonder just how freely genes could be traded back and forth with the right technology and a proper understanding of genetics.
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This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Hawaiian birds are wimpy and cannot compete with other species.
Maximum likelihood phylogram constructed from analysis of up to 421 nucleotide sites of b-fibrinogen introns 5 and 7 combined. At nodes are Bayesian posterior probabilities and ML bootstrap values (100 repetitions).
There are two kind of people in the world...the kind that thinks the new Day the Earth Stood Still is science fiction, and the kind that thinks it would have been if Klaatu had said to Barnhardt something like that.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Mod parent down, mod all other replies up (except this one). Parent is clearly FUD.
I for one, welcome our new estrogen-based overlords!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
it would be reasonble that, given Ninjas and Pirates are both active in the same space, i.e. on the Internet, then over time, we're going to see their populations converge into some type of hybrid hooked-hand peg-legged metal star thrower with stealth parrots on their shoulders?
AC cowardly says...
This, of course, is why most things ending in *ology aren't real science.
I'd be very curious to know how you managed to decide that from an article and a comment about taxONOMY (i.e. the study and method of naming the taxa)...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
The first problem in that statement is you bring up "belief". Scientists do not "believe". They disprove(refute) or they support .
There, fixed that for you. It's much more accurate this way. Science can never prove anything, because there will ALWAYS be factors that are not or cannot be observed.
I otherwise fully agree with you. I just wanted to clarify this, because people with little or no understanding of science or the scientific method (like the poster below) will jump on you for it.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
What I find interesting is that we apparently have enough money and ENERGY to waste running laboratories that research extinct species, but all those same scientists are gonna moan and wail if I say, "Let's drill in the ANWR." Where do they think the power comes from for running lights, computers, DNA sequencing machines, microscopes, etc...? Let alone MAKING lights, computers, DNA sequencing machines, microscopes, etc...
For instance, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory is a new "energy efficient" facility that spends nearly 1.2 MILLION dollars JUST ON UTILITIES per year. Well, if we assume 8 cents per kilowatt hour (approximately what I pay for my home), then we're looking at about 15,000,000 kilowatt hours used in JUST THIS ONE FACILITY. I googled "15000000 kilowatt hours"... guess what I came up with? This: http://www.lipower.org/newscenter/pr/2004/jan29.reap.html
That's right, the Long Island Power Authority spent $355 MILLION in order to save that exact amount of energy.
Now, I just bring up this one lab as an example of what labs in general cost in energy. This was an energy efficient lab, but there are TONS of labs out there that aren't nearly as energy efficient and so consume a LOT more energy.
You can't drive your SUV and you've gotta scrimp and save energy everywhere, but we can run a big power sucking lab for 10 years to find out if some obscure side branch of bird is related to another obscure side branch of bird.
And yes, I'm an "Anonymous Coward". I'd rather not get vilified because I dare to question the hypocrisy of ecologists.
Please clarify your definition of "natural", because your final point makes no sense.
scientific evidence that could point to a, shall we say, "supernatural" explanation (creation) is disregarded on the premise that the theory it supports (creation) is not a scientific theory.
This is a complete contradiction in terms. By "natural" in science, we are referring to that which can be observed and independently corroborated. By definition, any evidence must be natural and not supernatural, as supernatural indicates unobservable or unable to be corroborated.
Science deals only with the natural because the natural is the only thing that can be observed and measured. And, guess what... Science works. And guess what else, the scientific method that gave you the computer that you are typing this on is exactly the same as the scientific method that has (and continues to) worked out the theory of evolution.
One last little note:
And then, of course, we start arguing about what defines "micro" and "macro," what defines a "species," etc...
Not to get into an argument about it, but I just want to point out that WE define what species are, and our definitions are arbitrary. Nature doesn't really give a damn how we classify things. It will do its own thing independent of us. There is no difference, biologically speaking, between micro- and macro-evolution. The only real debate comes up when speaking about taxonomy.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I like to pose it to people thusly:
In science-speak a law is an equation, or something formulaic and bounded, while a theory is a collection of thought on a hopefully coherent topic. Typically a theory contains many laws, along with questions, conditionals, and known uncertainties.
Laws more or less represent simple machines, eventualities if you will, based on initial or persistent conditions.
For instance, in lay speech, "what goes up must come down" is essentially a law of gravity, and for non-exceptional definitions of "what" (e.g. not something "lighter than air") and for expected definitions of "up" and normative values of "goes", the law is true, and for millennium it was all as true as it needed to be.
We have always understood that conditions were part of the law, like we always understood that if we are under water and the "what" is a cork, then the law will not hold as the cork will go up and stay there for as long as we are likely to willingly observe.
It wasn't until the advancement of particular understandings came (though science I might add) to lead us to discover that the magnitude of "goes" was so important. Outside the original floaty exceptions "what goes up must come down" was a universal known. Then we discovered escape velocity and orbital mechanics and all that stuff, and now we know that what goes up may well never come down, or it may even come down in a context that invalidates our old definitions of "down". After all, in the old context, did the mars rover come down in the 12th century sense when it landed on mars? It matches our expectation of down, but surely not theirs. And we knew about escape velocity and orbital mechanics long before we could fabricate rockets of the type and strength necessary to prove or disprove that new understanding.
So that law of gravity, that what goes up must come down, is true but the domain over which it is true has been strongly circumscribed.
So in science, "a law" is a spesific expression of a "what" and sometimes it has a good dose of "how" stuck to it by necessity of expression.
But the only expression of "why", the only parts of science that purport to explain anything, are the theories.
And just like scientific pursuits, this description, this distinction, is a good starting place, but when you look deeper, when you understand what I have said for the analogy that it is, you will find that this explanation is only true in a limited and somewhat allegorical way... it can be picked apart and tested and disproved bit by bit until its all but gone... but now you are doing science.
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I wonder if convergent evolution is more likely than it appears. Given that birds can evolve most easily in typical ways, with the same selection pressure, the effect would be similar. As an example, a pressure for a mammal to be taller can be met in a limited number of ways (longer legs, longer torso, longer neck, longer arms, two-legged stance) - some will be easier for the mammal to evolve in than others (especially given if other environmental selection pressures are the same, including diet for building material, gestation period), and one of those is more likely to be selected for. Perhaps very often, one way is significantly easier, and so will be very likely the one selected for.
I'm suggesting that a species has affordances in how it responds to selection pressure. There are favored dimension of change. Another example is that to increase intelligence, the easiest way, affordance or dimension of change seems to be neoteny.
Without reading the background to these comments - I wonder: if the ratio is based on an observable (phenotypical) trait, and the trait is the result of a commonly occurring (genotypical) mutation in the population, or a coin-toss developmental process (the level of darkness was not entirely determined by the genotype) couldn't an environmental change produce a change in the observed ratio without actually changing the underlying genotype?
If blackness or whiteness at maturity was equally likely for a given genotype, and an environmental change resulted in higher predation of whites, then there would be more blacks at maturity. The observed ratio would track the environmental change, even though at (unobserved) birth the ratio would not. If the environment reverted to its former state, so would the observed ratio.
I guess the obvious test to see if the ratio could be explained this way would be to test the ratio against age of moth. It's an interesting example (I did briefly scan the wikipedia article mid-comment). I'm intrigued by the fact that the moth melanism reverted. I think I would have been more convinced that evolution had occurred if it had not reverted.
IANAEB (evolutionary biologist) - in my PhD thesis, I only observed evolution occurring in robot control hardware ;-)
[url]http://xkcd.com/322/[/url]
"A cat with six toes is still a cat.
Only if the cat can find another cat that will mate with it.
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My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling