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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
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?
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
I'd say that the new fish were indeed unable to breed with the fish without the adaptation, as those fish were dead
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.
Basically, it's labelled "evolution" when something succeeds in adapting to the change but "extinction" when it doesn't. Often, it's the pace of change which makes the difference.
If, for example, the now-extinct North American camels developed random mutations (or had a latent genetic ability) that allowed one of them to, say, start climbing giant redwoods and breeding before being eaten by their human predators, then you'd possibly have American Tree Camels today.
Random chance + selective pressure + sufficient time = evolution. The article indicates that it wasn't a continuous pressure either, which probably helped speed things up. e.g.
Year one: 99% of fish die, 1% survive & spend the next 364 days breeding resistant offspring...
Year 500 or so: 50% die, 50% survive & spend the next 364 days breeding more resistant offspring...
Current times: 10% die, 90% survive & spend the next 364 days breeding very resistant offspring...
It's not so uncommon really; the 'religious' aspect is merely a teaser giving the atheist fundies something to tease the creationist fundies with. For instance, I'm involved with researching pest insects that have developed high-level resistance to fumigants that have only been in use since WWII. In some cases, visible morphological and behavioural changes have resulted. If that ain't evolution I don't know what is, and I'm sure that if people had ritual rather than practical reasons for gassing silos we could be having the same discussion about bugs...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
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.
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
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.
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!