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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
The difference is the method of selection: In one case, humans are altering the environment of a species, resulting in evolutionary changes.
Selective breeding involves just that, selecting the traits you want in the animal and then breeding only animals with those traits. Selecting what you breed.
The environmental alteration version doesn't involve any conscious desire for selection; any meddling that alters survival and breeding rates is good enough. These people aren't purposefully poisoning the water to select the fish in the river that are hardest to poison.
I'd say that the new fish were indeed unable to breed with the fish without the adaptation, as those fish were dead
So, this isn't considered to be "selective breeding" why now?
If you've been hoping to breed fish by throwing fish toxin in the water, trust me... you're doing it wrong.
Basically, there's no difference in mechanism between selective breeding and evolution. It's just a difference in intent. The idea is that the people weren't specifically breeding the fish in the same way that people specifically bred cows and wheat and whatnot. In any case, the organisms most suited to their (human influenced) environment reproduced most successfully.
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.