Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
...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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Whoever modded the parent as Redundant was clever, but it really should've gotten +1 Redundant. Get on that option, slasheditors!
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 one of the things that I've always found amusing about Catholicism in particular. For a monotheistic religion, they sure pray to an awful lot of different beings.
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