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New Zealand Tree Stuck In Evolutionary Time Warp
sciencehabit writes "A eucalyptus-like tree from New Zealand is still waging a battle that should have ended over 500 years ago. The tree continues to sport evolutionary adaptations, such as barbed leaves, to protect it from a large, flightless bird known as a moa. There's just one problem: the moa went extinct around 1500 AD."
That tree is stuck in an endless recursion of time.
So, they're implying that evolutionary traits should disappear after a relatively short period? Why? I'd suspect they may fade away over centuries, but not necessarily.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
And humans still have tailbones.
The kangaroo still hasn't come up with a better way to bring up it's kids. Having your embryo climb all the way up to your pouch is sooo last Megennium.
-- Cheers!
This does not prove anything.
Plant A, under evolutionary pressure, develops a mechanism with which it protects itself from moas.
Plant B, which is not under evolutionary pressure, does not develop such a system.
Evolutionary pressure disappears, but growing the defense mechanism does not constitute an evolutionary disadvantage, so it stays in place.
Under the influence of random mutations, some plants might revert back to the old style, but this is a big might, since evolution works more by accretion than by shedding things.
I really do not see anything relevant here.
If the leaves don't hurt the tree in its current environment, there's nothing that would keep trees with that particular trait from proliferating, even if the moa is no longer around to weed out the ones without the trait.
http://www.tenjou.net/
...why do men still have nipples. Film at 11.
Then one day by random chance a little tree will sprout that has smaller barbs, and if it survives might start a trend towards less pokey trees.
Something tells me none of us will be around by then unfortunately. I'd also wager the barbs help keep things like people and imported herbivores at bay as well, and until we go extinct maybe the trees will continue to poke when pecked, even if the poke is intended for extinct peckers.
So the assumption is that the true is doing something for reason X, but reason X is invalid, so the tree is crazy? How about ruling out that assumption and coming up with another reason for the behaviour?
With a bit less arrogance we might assume the tree has a GOOD reason for what it's doing, but that we just haven't figured it out yet.
In other news, humans still have an appendix.
Just because something is useless doesn't mean evolution will remove it - its only when it becomes actually detrimental and individuals start removing themselves from the reproduction chain that things change.
... that the theory of evolution is a moa.
Or maybe it's just silly to assume that evolution reacts to all changes and quickly.
Humans are exposed let's say to rapidly increasing sugar consumption, a death threat to teeth, still there is no sign of increasing thickness or better enamel or the ability to grow a third set of teeth, as a possible "logical evolutionary response".
to stop supporting the perfect perch for haast's eagle eggs as well
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haast's_Eagle
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Unless it's a disadvantage for the tree to have barbs there is no "reason" for it to change. Evolution is about survival, it is not about changing because something you have is no longer used. I cite our toenails as examples.... do we need them? No. Are they disadvantageous to have for our survival? No. Hence we still have them, even though a significant number of our modern population can no longer see then over their fat guts.
Perhaps it would take too much energy to change itself. If it's not broken, why fix it?
Or, maybe it thinks the bird still exists, and that it's doing an incredible job. How would it know the bird is gone?
...maybe it's still somewhat useful to protect itself from other things, like vicious koalas that are out to destroy it to harvest more eucalyptus.
[ irc.p2p-network.net -> #zomgwtfbbq ][ http://zomgwtfbbq.info ]
I find it a little presumptuous for any of us to know, with certainty, exactly why the tree evolved the barbed leaves in the first place. The moa bird *may* have been one of many different factors, and I doubt there is any way we could ever know what those other factors may have been. Applying relatively modern conditions to evolutions in the distant past, amounts to just a random guess doesn't it?
From TFA:
Browsing birds? Nowadays, Firebird is called Iceweasel ...
Intelligent design is simple, everything can be explained because a god decided it had to be so. So our eyes work the way they work because god said so and you can't go questioning god. However god is not perfect. Why are some men color-blind while some women can perceive an extra color? Why can't we see ultra-violet? Why is that other animals have 4 or even 5 cones while we got only 3? It doesn't sit well with the ID idea that birds and fish got far better vision then we do.
But evolution is NOT a perfect replacement. We humans are detectors of patterns. That is why we see a face on mars or jezus on toast. Simple test. Imagine me holding something between my fingers. You see a short squared long white piece of wood of perhaps 4mm x 4mm x 3cm. What am I holding? Be honest, you think it is a match isn't it? It is a fair guess. You KNOW that most pieces of wood shaped like this are matches because that is really one of the only reasons to shape wood like this. And you might be right EXCEPT I might ALSO be holding a would be match that hasn't yet had its head put on OR a "toothpick" used by dentist to wedge teeth apart.
As pattern seekers we like to think that everything has a reason and evolution does not. Evolution just is. In this case, there were a dozen sapplings some of which had leaves that the bird didn't see and which were eaten. The ones that weren't, survived to reproduce. With the bird gone, the selector is gone but not the reason for the change. Over time more and more of the leaves might change and since now there is no bird to eat them, they might survive. It could well be that the leaves we see now are FAR less good at camoflage then the leaves 500 years ago, but with no selecting taking place anymore, all the plants are surviving.
that is evolution. Random minor variations that result in different species if the enviroment forces a selection of what variation survives till reproduction.
But there is no goal to it. The plant did not choose to have a certain colored leave. Just random mutation. Some work, some don't. But unless someone causes you to be eaten for a mutation, then there is nothing wrong with it and if you can attract a female with it, then you reproduce.
the original article btw never implies that the plant should have changed back. Just the "editors" that picked the story up.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Quite right too. Mad scientists will probably clone the Moa and then the tree will be OK.
One cannot be too careful about these things, I've been thinking about growing spikes too.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Moas are descended from dinosaurs, and we all thought they were extinct until they turned up behind the sofa.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
May as well be discussing five seconds.
POKE 36879,8
The tree is just keeping in step with it's environment.
You're assuming that the human appendix is useless, which isn't necessarily the case. There are at least two open suggestions as to its function.
It was discovered today that newborn humans still grow teeth. Scientists are baffled because the human species developed the technology to build smoothie machines 3 generations ago.
872835240
a lot of people unintentionally apply intentionality to evolution. also, just because we are capable of recognizing a more efficient development cycle or design of any given 'naturally' occurring life form does not mean that the efficient conception should have occurred. that's like saying that because we can watch mike tyson lose his edge we can say that it makes no sense that he still boxes. can he still stand? can he still swing his arms? when he swings his arms do people still get knocked out? if so, he has some survivability as a boxer. if not, he does not, and will fail as a boxer. things don't simply instantly disappear when it has been revealed that their methods aren't totally efficient.
Don't forget the human need to see ourselves (as a race, as a class, or as individuals) as being 'better' than everyone else; this leads directly to the late 19th Century believe amongst Anglo-Saxon rich people that rich, Anglo-Saxons were the 'most evolved' beings around, and so 'deserving' of being on top. (Don't blame those pathetic dweebs---they had been itching to give up the 'God made us to be on top' explanation for awhile.) The question of whether hierarchy is as fixed a mechanism in our heads as is pattern-recognition is an open one; we seem hard-wired to seem _some_ of it about, but how seriously we take it seems to be dependent on other factors, e.g. how afraid we are.
Could it be...wait a sec...got it! This sounds to me sort of like Norton AntiMoa.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Recursion
See "The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms" by Connie Barlow. For instance, Osage Oranges were eaten by extinct North American megafauna. In fact, the tree is rather similar to the one in this article, in that it also has sharp spines to defend it.
If you look into it, NZ is in many ways unique. If my memory serves me correctly, before European settlement there were no mammals on New Zealand, and most of the dominant animals were birds.
With a less diverse biome, perhaps there is less evolutionary pressure?
The Slashdot summary of this story is spectacularly bad, particularly the 'should have ended over 500 years ago'.
Five hundred years is completely negligible on an evolutionary timescale. If trees - TREES - you know, big woody things that grow really slowly - had evolved significant changes in that time it would be headline news.
The research that led to this story wasn't remotely aimed at calling evolution into question, quite the contrary. Scientists are interested in the causes of the changes that these trees go during their lifetimes - and they have shown that these metamorphoses are probably due to the moa bird. Which is quite interesting, if probably not Slashdot-worthy.
#define struct union
They are looking at evolution from the completely wrong point of view. From the point of view of the anthropomorphic species.
Lets start at the beginning.
1. There was a chemical in an environment which caused it to replicate.
2. Large numbers of these chemical replicators were created. Some with slight variations because no analog copying is perfect.
3. Some of the varied replicators were more efficient at replication than others. Some of the variations allowed the replicators to replicate in slightly different environments.
4. GOTO 2 until 4 billion years have passed.
And so the replicators colonised the planet.
That's it. That's all evolution is.
All humans (or any species) are is an environment which allows the chemical replicators to replicate efficiently.
Deleted
500 years on an evolutionary timescale for slowly evolving speices like trees is bugger all time at all. Come back in a few thousand years please.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
Whoever modded the parent as Redundant was clever, but it really should've gotten +1 Redundant. Get on that option, slasheditors!
I remember having swordfights with the leaves when I was a kid.
This is just evolution. As far as I can tell, for the last 500 years these barbed leaves have done the trick: no moa attacked the plant. So if I was that plant, I would be all like "damn, I must be doing something right, I should keep this up!"
Seen that seam under your ball sack? You really don't want to know why that's there.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's like saying we humans should soon lose our intelligence that provided us a means to survive despite being ill equipped otherwise, without fangs, claws, etc. Now that we're the dominant species on the planet and no one preys on us, we should devolve into a more stupid version....oh, wait
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Please believe me when I tell you that many things in New Zealand are stuck in a Time Warp... not just the trees. Even the computer I'm typing this on is from the last century.
There are a good number of trees older than 500 years. Come on. Nobody's expecting a species to evolve in its own lifetime (outside sci-fi movies), give it a few generations at least. Humans haven't evolved different skins in 500 years and some trees live for a couple of thousand years.
a new study suggests... the evidence is speculative...
Suggestive speculation. That's all it is.
How does the tree "know" it is being eaten by a bird, or anything for that matter? How many centuries of getting some leaves stripped off does it take for the plant to say to itself, "Hey, there's a bird --I **know** it is a bird and not an elephant that is eating on me so I'll add some information into my genetic code to grow some spikes to stop it." ?
No, the tree was designed with the information to have spike growth, the purpose (probably) to ensure that every tree does not become defoliated thus ensuring some will survive.
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver --Proverbs 25:11
The tree isn't giving up it's spiny leaves because of us!
Clearly the Moa will be extinct for only a short while- until we revive the species.
So inconvenient to lose the spines, only to have to get them back a mere 500 years later.
Theologically: unity is perfect, God is perfect, hence, there is one God. Whether unity is perfect is a philosophical question.
In Constantine's time, the the Eastern empire was indeed under his political control. Later, after his death, the empire fractured. The eastern half became vulnerable to invasion by Islamic nations and was decimated. Islam is monotheistic and not dictated by Constantine or any Roman Emperor.
Monotheism pre-existed Constantine by about 2100 years. Books of the hebrew bible, which represent God monotheistically, were written perhaps as early as 1800 BC.
Monotheism was not selected over polytheism only because Constantine said so.
Well, that bird had it coming and it's nice to see the tree is still doing it's job to keep us safe from such unsavory semi-avians.
Last 500 years the human being tastes has played such strong role that if people liked this tree it's an positive random adaptation to its environment.
So that means Koalas read the Science website. Or at least Slashdot ? Kool.
The tree didn't "grow barbs" to protect itself from a predator, that isn't how evolution works. In fact, it isn't even the correct usage of the true definition of the word "evolution" (a change in a population over time). The tree just happened to mutate to have thorny trees, which just happened to be a good defense against predators, and natural selection favored that configuration of tree over other close versions of it.
So a nerve circuit that controls how you enunciate is ridiculously complicated in humans but simple in fish. As if a fish talks. Show me a talking tilapia, then we can talk.
I once had a signature.
Hey, its worth watching to see whether some predator evolves that wants to eat the lancewood tree. Plantae could have premonition and fork the universe to save their kind! Please just don't tell my wife, she slammed me yesterday for "not knowing what she's thinking" because we've been together for almost 10 years.......Don't want her to know that even plants are more sensitive than us men.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
It would be nice if the dates given where actually correct...
The Moa was believed to have gone extinct around the time of the first English landing in New Zealand (1769), with isolated groups surviving in the south island till the 1850's. So we are looking at a few hundred years, which is nothing in evolutionary time lines.
Quoting wiki, where no citation is given is just incompetence.
The Eucalyptus merely anticipates the return of the Moa.
Ancient legend recalls the wall painting that depicted the Moa coming from the spirits of the Kiwi and Ostrich and being ridden to victory by Aboriginal astronauts wielding large cans of Fosters Lager.
Perhaps there is wisdom to be found in this.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
On a lighter note..I'd just like some of those trees to keep the neighbors kids out of my yard..
I recall reading somewhere [citation needed] that, rather than being completely useless and best removed, the appendix serves as a back-up repository of useful/necessary intestinal bacteria.
is that it is an excellent way of solving yesterday's problems. This tree is a classic case in point; now that it has perfected this defence against the moa, the moa is no longer around. Hmm... maybe the defence worked better than expected?
that this might be intelligent design after all.
1. A longer neural path between brain and vocal cords might force more time between thought and speech, although it's quite clear that many humans barely think before speaking.
2. Rerouting the nerve keeps it out of the way of the penis during fellatio.
Isn't that a blink of an eye from an evolutionary standpoint? It is from a geological viewpoint.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Looks like I came late to the party.
First off, trees have lives on par with if not longer than humans. It has been pointed out time and again in the comments on this story that they repopulate slowly. Thus slowing down the rate of evolution. Simple theory.
In all technicality, we should base our timelines for projected evolution dates on generations, not years.
Secondly, this is an adaptation, not evolution. This tree losing it's barbs would be an adaptation. Maybe the barbs are still there to keep people from climbing the trees. Maybe a few moa still exist. Maybe not enough generations have gone by for the tree to remove it's barbs. Maybe it never will.
DISCLAIMER:
THIS IS A BIG ASS DISCLAIMER
A REALLY HUGE ONE
AS IN YO' MOMMA HUGE
I am not yet taken by the theory of evolution on the grounds that we have not yet observed one species change into another. Yeah yeah, this means you can call me a creationist bugger now.
Warp != war.
Article less interesting than previously imagined.
This story is ridiculous. All life has evolved as a result of 'pressure' from the environment surrounding it. It's not a conscious decision on the part of the plant, it's a permanent adaptation. It's not going to just say, "Oh ok, now I don't need to do this anymore".
If we were able to obliterate all insect life on earth, would we be studying the Venus Fly Trap and the Pitcher Plant and saying, "Oh wow! These plants are still trying to capture insects we obliterated years ago!". I feel stupider having read that article.
Ace
Greed is a problem, for sure. But it isn't exactly a light switch that you can just turn off.
Greed is generally not a problem in, say, a cell colony. The cells basically stand and fall together. Whatever benefits the group benefits all the individuals. So the cells do not need to display individual survival strategies. They gain no survival advantage from putting their own private good above the good of their neighbor cells.
However, as a species, we are not one giant cell colony. We are loosely-bound herd of individuals. In order for our species to survive, individuals must survive. In order for individuals to survive, they must accumulate and maintain control over resources that keep them alive. So long as we remain individuals, with individual identities and individual motivations that may-or-may-not perfectly coincide with a group motivation or group identity, we will need to continue to exercise behaviors that are appropriate for individual survival.
So, we display greedy behaviors not just because it is an instinct, but because it is a logical consequence of our having individual identities, and functioning autonomously.
The only way to completely eliminate greed would be to eliminate the psychological structures that give us a sense of separateness from our fellow man. Once we see all other humans as extensions of our own body (or fellow members of a greater body), we will then be able to see any benefit to a neighbor as being identical to a benefit to the self. Then, and only then, can we have perfect cooperation, perfect reciprocal altruism, and the perfect greed-free utopia that you would like to see.
So, I put to you this question: are you willing to give up your sense of self, all of your individuality, and all of your personal freedom, in order to live in this greed-free society?
If so, you would make a very good communist, and I wish you the best of luck. Unfortunately, I fear you won't see much progress in your lifetime, as most of humanity is not willing to sacrifice their "selves" in the name of a greater good.
The diagram here http://www.voiceproblem.org/glossary/images_05.asp does a better job of showing what evolution did there.
It is probably looped around the aorta because it once was the nerve for the 6th gill/pharyngeal arch which moved posterior and dragged the nerve with it. Other gill arches became part of the jaw, and some can now be found in our ear as the central part of our hearing system!
The summary seems to imply that the tree is still evolving new defenses against the moa. (ie that the barbed leaves evolved after 1500 AD). But the article just says that an evolutionary defense that was there in the days of the moa is still there. The surprising thing would be if it wasn't.
It kept the obsolete defense to surprise scientists who then popularize and study it, therefore lowering its chance of going extinct from some remaining threat.
In evolutioary term, all costs are relative.
If, in the time that there have been no Moa to eat the plant, no genetic mutation has spontaniously developed that results in no thorns, then why would we expect these trees to have lost stopped growing thorns? Thorns are only expensive if some of your peers are not growing them and you are.
Since these thorns appear to be a defining characteristic of this plants phenotype, and there has only been a small amount of time in which to evolve away from this phenotype (evolutionary time scales are a lot larger than 500 years), it's stupid to assume that they would have dissapeared by now.
Evolution has no plan, it has no engineers deciding what the best design is now that the Moa are dead, it is the net effect of environmental selective pressures combined with the accumulation of small genetic point mutations over time that make one genetic line more likely to reproduce more prolifically, crossed with a whole lot of random chance.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Last time I checked humans still had tailbones!
This article appears to misunderstand evolution for reasons that other comments have eluded to. Every species on the planet is exactly as evolved as every other, from bacteria to humans. We have all adapted to a particular niche, these trees included.
Trees with different characteristics will be selected for, only when they out-compete existing trees. As others have said, neither time nor proper conditions have allowed for this to happen yet.
The title of the article seems to suggest that this tree is doing something unexpected, or even paranormal. Someone even casually familiar with the theory of evolution would understand otherwise.
"Thomas Givnish, a plant ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, adds that the hypothesis could be strengthened by "exposing these plants to ... emus or ostriches to demonstrate that these traits deter browsing by birds"
When I was studying evolution at Canterbury University in 2000 one such scientist from the US was about to conduct this experiment with emus I believe. I finished uni the following year and never did find out the results of the experiemnet, anyone know?
In any species some traits are more susceptible to mutation than others. I think it's possible that over a long enough period of time this species and it's predecessors may have endured intermittent threats from various animals. If exposed to such a threat that comes and goes, the species may have been conditioned to protect the genes encoding the defensive trait to prevent loss of the trait, so as to be ready for defense when the next threat manifests. In human terms, if you've found that you get shot at once in a while chances are you'll wear a bullet proof vest much of the time even if you're not getting shot at at the moment.
Bit of a side point but the appendix looks like maybe it is not as useless as once thought. If you get a bad case of something like cholera and crap your intestinal flora out, it is hypothesized that your appendix, because it's a side-pocket, will retain enough of all the various bugs to re-establish everything relatively quickly.
e.g. it's the boot disk for your digestive system
In a few years they are going to suddenly change from being long thin straggly plants with sharp leaves into large trees, completely changing the character of the road.
Mind you, I think that may be an improvement.
And when they are in their "teenager" phase they look just plain weird.
Mind you, so do teenagers. :-)
Let me be the first to say that that tree isn't the only thing "Stuck In Evolutionary Time Warp". Just look at our politicians, school system, roads....
Maybe the barbed leaves are just a way to attract female trees for breeding and thus to have a natural selection to improve the breed. And the silly scientists of course couldn't even come up with that one. I say that they should have considered creationism more seriously. And saying a meaningless prayer or two before eating the food you worked for also wouldn't hurt. Heretics!
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Don't evolutionary traits evolve as mutation/aberration? Wouldn't these trees essentially have to spawn a non-barbed version that proliferated in order for this barbed adaption to begin reverting in the wild?
I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but some of the responses here seem to indicate that evolution is some sort of act of will or a direct response to environmental pressure. Although environment is a contributing factor to success, it is not the root cause, mutation is. It was my understanding that they are basically 'fortunate accidents' combined with environment. In other words, unless the barbs cause this tree to be less competitive (they obviously served a purpose before and they don't appear to be a detriment now), then I would think they will stay around until either:
A) Mutated strain of the tree grows without these barbs and thrives (as there are no more Moa).
- This seems likely to happen if mutations sometimes have regressive traits that pop up much like humans have regressive genes (Does this happen in plant life? Is there a biologist in the house?)
B) Some environmental change take places in which the barbs become a detriment to the tree making it less competetive.
- Would the result of removing barbs reduce the energy needs of a tree enough to make a non-barbed variety more likely to thrive than it's barbed counterparts? It obviously does well enough even with the barbs?
They didn't grow barbs as a result of the Moa, but rather a mutated barbed strain grew that happened to be resistant to Moa giving it an effective advantage over the non-barbed variety.