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Religious Ceremony Leads To Evolution of Cave Fish
An anonymous reader writes "A centuries-old religious ceremony of an indigenous people in southern Mexico has led to evolutionary changes in a local species of fish, say researchers at Texas A&M University. Apparently since before Columbus arrived, the Zoque people would venture each spring into the sulfuric cave Cueva del Azufre to beg the gods for bountiful rain. As part of the ritual, they released into the cave's waters a leaf-bound paste made of lime and the ground-up root of the barbasco plant, a natural fish toxin. The rest is worth reading, but the upshot is that the fish living in the cave waters eventually got wise, genetically speaking."
that this thread will be characterized by civil discussion and insightful exchange of ideas, with little or no flamage
What a neat story!
It's like bacteria but on a multicellular level.
Boy thats an oxymoron.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
So, this isn't considered to be "selective breeding" why now?
Now I am off to make some religious offerings to my Roach killer.
Never trust a spiritual leader who cannot dance -- Mr. Miyagi
If the new fish were either unable or unwilling to breed with the fish without the adaptation then it would be evolution in progress, but the article fails to mention.
You're assuming any evolution is a macro evolution. You're mistaken.
Evolution does not have to be visible to naked eye. Developing resistance to a toxin is evolution, because the trait is passed to the offspring.
JMA
It was already known that evolution by natural selection could be triggered by human activity. Industrial melanism (e.g. the Peppered Moth) is a famous example.
JMA
Blasphemy!
A pagan cult leads to the pagan idea of Evolution. Such heresy would never have happened if those people were Christian! We sent Cortez a little bit too late.
--
The Church
Deja vu, anyone?
I'd say that the new fish were indeed unable to breed with the fish without the adaptation, as those fish were dead
Is there a difference between adaptation and micro-evolution?
Uh.....you do realize that natural selection is the process that drives evolution, right? That was kind of the point of Origin of Species
Qxe4
How can they be sure that any changes that have occurred are from the ceremonial poisoning and not the much longer exposure to the natural toxic sulfur environment. Seems to be a lot of attention grabbing assumptions and theories.
I can just hear them saying "but thats microevolution not macroevolution"..
It would be cool to see the expected "random mutation + natural selection" process, but actually the article is a little less exciting - it says that the fish who had already been resistant in the first place survived better than others and multiplied, which I would call "natural selection". In other words, this is not the place to discuss "micro- versus macro-evolution" or "new traits" :o)
From TFA: "Mollies able to tolerate the poisonous conditions survived and passed those traits to their offspring..."
Similar behavior by the native peoples drove half the large species in North and South America to extinction. Sort of hard to see how this could be labeled evolution.
Not with that attitude, anyways.
From the article:
"Since before the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the New World, the Zoque people of southern Mexico would venture each year during the Easter season deep into the sulfuric cave Cueva del Azufre to implore their deities for a bountiful rain season."
And later:
"Ironically, it was the last ceremony ever held, as the Zoques ended the practice that year due to political pressure from the government, which sought to preserve the cave as a hotbed for tourism and potential revenue."
So they stopped doing ceremonies for the weather gods. This is surely not the only case. So people stop worshipping weather gods, and the climate goes wild. Coincidence? Unlikely! So now we have proof: Global warming is man-made, by neglecting weather ceremonies!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's one rock-fall blocking the river away from that happening. Population isolation happens.
Troll-moderation is in force out today... How can the parent be more on topic than by discussing the damned article?
but saying "ceremony leads to evolution" is certainly over-stretching it.
Here is a similar story of humans pushing the natural selection of aquatic species in certain direction through religious ceremony.
To paraphrase the conclusion in the video above - all this has nothing to do with what the fish might want, selection is imposed from the outside.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Yet that's the main point Rosenthal, one of the authors, is trying to make: "We tend to have this wonderful Pocahontas idea that before Europeans came in, everything was pristine and in harmony" but no such thing as "pristine" wilderness because humans have been radically changing their environment since forever. Therefore climate change alarmists and other environmental loudmouths moaning about species loss and soil degradation should just shut the fuck up. (And leave the thinking to Biology PhD.'s.) This is reductionist - it's called the Fallacy of Division. Specific changes to the environment, like loss of large prey animals, while doubtlessly catastrophic for the existing humans, was for the existing biosphere probably just a blip in a normally flexible dynamic (arguments for "keystone species" aside.) What INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY has done might appear to be just the same thing just a lot bigger. However because the environment (and life in general) is an emergent system and not just the sum of it's parts, you cannot scale up and down this way and expect to make intelligent decisions. Further, the "pristine wilderness" that the author ridicules is itself an emergent property of a functioning biosphere. Most people who spend enough time in those few parts of the world that haven't been deeply degraded by humans can feel it, and feel it's absence, despite not yet having tools that would specifically measure what we're feeling. That feeling of pure wilderness is certainly not just some lame projection of human society's materialist-moralist-sexist "Untouched and Pure" valuation of virginal young daughters. That's just an anthropomorphism, and Rosenthal's just calling Nature a slut. Asshole.
None was doing the "selecting" of traits to try to promote into the next generation. The same religion could just as well dumped another chemical or even excrement into the murky pools that would've resulted otherwise. Evolution is about slow and gradual changes to the environment that ALLOWS the creatures to adapt as opposed to all the bullshit science that asserts Evolution as being one giant leap in response to an environmental catastrophe.
The only thing this article proves is that the gods are pro-Choice but they let the evolving children make "the choice."
Easter is the spring ceremony in many Northern hemisphere pagan religions.
Why do science journals insist that they somehow can't be taken seriously if they use pictures? Would it kill them to show us the fish, the cave, or the people doing this? Anything but a TL;DR block of text.
At least the story was interesting....this time.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
this thread will be characterized by civil discussion and insightful exchange of ideas
Sure, let's debate whether it's the religious ceremonies that cause evolution or vice versa
And people say god can't make animals evolve!
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
...why Christians deny evolution? Does God command us to turn off our brains? (you would hope not...) Does this concept, if proven true, contradict something in the bible so directly that it would prove Christianity is false? What's the deal? Why are they so scared of this?
The only real science is physics, all the rest ... well, look at this.
a) collect some fish and systematically poison them. Observe time to death;
b) conclude any resistance must be due to evolutionary adaptation; and
c) make pithy remarks about catering to the native culture by making process sustainable.
Uh guys ... it was sustainable before you got there since they've been doing it for a very very long time and only stopped when they were made to ie. NOT because the fish all died.
And if it was evolutinary lots more fish would have the gene no? So maybe include fish from NOT in the cave/stream at all and see if they have similar 'resistance' ratios?
And the final blow. Perhaps just perhaps the fish had this genetic resistance _before_ the natives started doing their thing ... hard to say as nobody was there to measure millenia ago.
Physics starts with first principles and speculates on the universe ... it predicts and then searches for validation. Biology, lacking similar first principles simply collects examples (that regularly surprise) or conduct pseudo science with grandiose conclusions.
Oh well, the grant money eventually finds its way back in to the economy and these guys a happy doing what they do so its all good.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
If you build a better mousetrap you'll evolve a better mouse.
Therefore climate change alarmists and other environmental loudmouths moaning about species loss and soil degradation should just shut the fuck up.
Seriously? You need to think it through a little more. This is not a rational position.
The main flaw of your argument is scale. You bet we can screw with nature and it will repair itself - to a certain critical mass of damage. Certainly, the scale of our activity dwarfs anything past even 100 years ago. Remember, in 1800 there were only 1B people on earth. All of that time just to get to 1B? Within 200 years we're at 2B. What people are talking about now is the concern of the scale. A system only has so much tolerance.
Selah.ca. Pause, and calmly think on that.
Really.
...but I can summarize my eventual response regardless:
That is NOT evolution.
--joe.
instead of saying "the fish got wise" how about saying"
"the fish that were not resistant to the toxin died"
this will help people understand evolution better.
Would this be effective proof of punctuated equilibrium? I don't think many seriously doubt that today (unless they doubt evolution completely), but proof is always cool.
So the climate change alarmists should actually be population change alarmists.
Because a climate change "alarmist" cannot persuade people by advocating we slaughter 5bn people from 6bn (or are we at 7bn now?), the only available alternative is to reduce each human's footprint by a factor of 1/6.
So they stopped doing ceremonies for the weather gods. This is surely not the only case. So people stop worshipping weather gods, and the climate goes wild. Coincidence? Unlikely! So now we have proof: Global warming is man-made, by neglecting weather ceremonies!
Yes, absolutely. Now bring me more poison-tainted leaves, or suffer an inconvenient winter storm!
But for some reason I couldn't post my complete post. /. kept sending me back to edit it. Maybe it was hitting some wordfilter?
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
And then beat him with a baseball bat. Or a false argument. Whichever comes first.
You know. Like you just did there.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
By the time we get our footprint reduced by 1/6 the population will have grown another billion. Makes sense if your only real intent is more government taxation and bureaucracy.
So your proposed solution is either (0) no such thing as anthropogenic climate change; (1) let us all die out because we can't help it without regulations, which are worse than mass extinction; or (2) kill every last human except we elite Slashdotters?
Your solution (full bore communism) has been shown to cause mass extinction everywhere it has been tried (check out North Korea). My solution (full bore capitalism) has been shown to solve every problem it has encountered, in spades. Capitalism is a law of nature, nature doesn't need communism (religion).
If the new fish were either unable or unwilling to breed with the fish without the adaptation then it would be evolution in progress, but the article fails to mention.
Actually, if the new fish were either unable or unwilling to breed with the fish without the adaptation then it would be speciation in progress.
Evolution is different from speciation. Speciation happen due to evolution, but evolution don't require speciation - any change of allele frequency due to natural selection (ie, any adaption) is an example of evolution. Speciation is certainly a fantastic facet of evolution, though.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
So they developed a resistance to the toxin. Big whoop. They're still fish. The same species even. That's not evolution, its adaptation.
That's the same thing. Evolution is just inherited adaption, leading over major amounts of time to creation of major features. Each single step is very small, and every single step has to be adaptive
Now, if they grew legs to get out of the cave, that's evolution.
That's evolution of a major feature - as far as I know, nobody serious thinks that that happen over so few generations.
TFA said that the natives "inadvertently kick-started the evolutionary process of natural selection..." Since when is evolution and natural selection the same thing?
Natural selection and reproduction is the same thing as evolution. It's been that way since the term evolution was introduced for this concept by Charles Darwin in "The Origin of the Species".
If this is all it takes to declare evolution, then automagically adjusting sunglasses evolve every time you go from a bright to dark environment.
If sunglasses reproduced and the children of sunglasses that were in the bright environment where dark, then yes. However, since they don't reproduce, it doesn't fit.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
I wonder if we do this to the Mexicans by always sending off some toxic cloud into their side of the border, if after awhile, they would develop some form of resistance, pretty sad, that we as humans seem to so destroy and desecrate all other life forms on this planet without the slightest bit of remorse, yet only when do we really do something as offensive to each other do we realize we might not be living by rational standards.