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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."
And humans still have tailbones.
...why do men still have nipples. Film at 11.
A register-limited processor from the 1970s is still waging a battle that should have ended over 150 months ago. The processor continues to sport evolutionary adaptations, such as compactly-encoded instructions, to protect it from a small, slow memory configuration known as 640K. There's just one problem: that configuration went extinct around 1990 AD.
The tree is just keeping in step with it's environment.
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.
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Could be design by comitee. I never really heard a good reason for choosing monotheism over polytheism.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
Oh, please. The idea of a utopian ideal where "we've outgrown greed" is so funny in both evolutionary terms and biological terms it's... well, it's like thinking that randomness ill cause your hostess's underwear to jump several feet to the left for quantum uncertainty reasons. It can be amusing to discuss, but it isn't going to happen for "evolutionary" reasons. You'll just have to get her underwear moved the normal way, alcohol and fast talking.
Look, as far as the tree is concerned, the defence is working - it hasn't been attacked by a moa for 500 years. Why would it change?
How about your kids go first. Then they can all work for my kids.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
I would have assumed the plants kept their evolutionary advantages against herbivores because there is insufficient pressure to remove the spines on the leaves. Kind of like why we still have an appendix. Its useless, but appendicitis is sufficiently uncommon that there isn't enough evolutionary pressure to do away with it completely.
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