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Fish Evolve Immunity To Toxic Sludge
RedEaredSlider writes "Fish in the Hudson River and the harbor in New Bedford, Mass., have evolved resistance to PCBs. In the Hudson, a species of tomcod has evolved a way for a very specific protein to simply not bind to PCBs, nearly eliminating the toxicity. In New Bedford, the Atlantic killifish has proteins that bind to the toxin (just as they do in mammals) but the fish aren't affected despite high levels of PCBs in their cells. Why the killifish survive is a mystery."
It's good for evolution!
I'm sorry, but i can't hear you over the sound of how awesome those fishes are!!
Ananda Chakrabarty developed a microorganism that actual feeds on PCBs by simple selection in his lab some 40 years ago.
We have weeds that have evolved resistance to glyphosate in the wild. That is a much more impressive adaptation because glyphosate interferes with the production of key amino acids by plants.
Life on earth has been adapting and evolving to its environment for billions of years. Why would anyone think it would stop?
That which kills other fish only makes them stronger!
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
How long until deer evolve to not walk in front of my car?
"All fish not immune to toxic sludge killed by said toxic sludge"
Because that is really what evolution in this context means. The fish didn't react to the toxic sludge and develop immunity to it; There was already a population of fish at least somewhat immune to the toxin, and due to them being the only survivors, the whole population living in the sludge now is immune.
So what happens to the animals that eat them and that aren't immune to the PCB?
And you know who is at the top of the food chain ......
N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.
Problem solved!
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Soon totally new organisms will crawl out of that river and demand welfare and voting rights.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Fish Evolve Immunity To Toxic Sludge
If fish can do it, then it should be no problem for humans. You left wing environmentalists lose again. We Conservatives can pollute and know there is nothing wrong with it. Again, more evidence promoting the Conservative lifestyle.
Even though a single evolutionary change can mean the difference between living and dying I would think it also effect everything else, especially when it has to do with metabolism. In this case the fishs' genes have found a local maxima, so to say, that makes them resistant to PCB; nobody knows what evolutionary possibilities they've sacrificed and what it does to them in the long run.
This is gonna make it much harder to finally wipe them out.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
This is simply a case of fish that have a certain trait mating and passing on that trait to offspring, not a case of spontaneous evolution.
Why or how? *facepalm-slashdot-editors*
...only they will be healthy. I, for one, welcome our new piscine masters.
I'll wait until I hear from Al on this one. everyone knows Al Gore is the only trusted opinion when it comes to anything environmental. From global Warming, to Spotted Left Foot Owl/Squirrel Hybrids, he is the real leader in the field.
It says a lot about PCB distribution and signal strength if multiple species have evolved responses over sub-century time frames.
It was convenient while it lasted for the fish who ingested our industrial waste stream to grow carbuncles and remove themselves from the human menu by simple visual inspection. But I guess we're heading back to the days where the host takes a brave first bite, and all the guests applaud if dinner proceeds. We'll all be double checking the Russian royal penumbra to ensure our host doesn't carry any midichlorians of Rasputin lineage.
Canaries in the coal mine all the way up the food chain. Tag, you're it.
These trivial problems like "pollution" have a way of fixing themselves.
Have you heard that microevolution != macroevolution? Well, now you have! It would not do to imply that an all-powerful, all-knowing being needs not play with their creation like an ADD toddler playing with their ant farm.
...you refer to selection as evolution. Selection is well understood, and pretty much everyone from the most fundamental creationist to the most outspoken evolutionist will agree on the fact that when a species is faced with an unavoidable situation in which most of them will be killed off, only those that exhibit traits allowing them to survive will persist to pass on their genes. If it can be demonstrated that not a single one of them had that trait previously, then that would be interesting, to be sure, but proving that is nigh impossible.
Misspelling the word "they" in the summary doesn't help your credibility either.
IOW, the others just died from the PCB and the ones that we have now are the survivors. As per Darwin prediction. Excellent, in a marauding way.
This guy nailed it. I went through a Catholic high school as one of the "hardcore evolutionists" and got to college and encountered a small enclave of fundamentalist creationists who irritated me to no end. Ironically, they got me to be a better scientist as I started questioning my own biases. I had no formal background or experience with biology yet I just took all the evolution stuff at face value. I'll learn more about biology soon enough I guess.
Anyway, +1 Insightful parent. -1 Douchebag me for being a coattail rider.
What bad science. This is just another article pushing evolution as the theory of how everything works.
I read about these fish about a 2 weeks ago, Here a link to a online version if you want to read it. http://creation.com/rapid-tomcod-evolution
Basically the fish are an example of mutations and natural selection. The damage genes in the fish make it better suited to it's environment but it doesn't show it getting more complex, actually the opposite, a weaker fish. But you dont get published without towing the line of Evolution.
Notice how the mutations are limited to the Hudson area. The fish are less fit than the wild fish in the oceans.
(I define evolution as change going up hill, or as to quote a catch parse, "goo to you via zoo". I do not defined it as "things changes", as Natural Selection & Mutations cover that area already.)
Of course I will be modded down as always, I just thought that a different view should be presented, take it or leave it, its up to you.
More than a study, I think this is just an excuse to lower the standards and dump more pollution into the river.
Sorry, but every change in the environment has significant changes in many factors of life, marine or ground.
Nope. Otherwise we wouldn't be seening all the attempts such as "teach the controversy" and "teach both" in schools.
Maybe on Internet sites it is zealots vs zealots. But in the real world it is zealots vs everyone-else.
And what, exactly, is a "hardcore evolutionist"? Since current medical/biological science is 100% based on evolution.
So far, so good.
Nice. But you haven't identified anyone who is doing that.
But it is easy to find the Creationist zealots.
It's only a matter of time before we experience the same effects. Its kind of the like the "bird in the mine" What happens to our fellow world companions will soon happen to us. Thank You
[($)]
They're in my fridge right now!
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
If so, all they need to accept now is the fact that random gene mutations happen, and they'll accept evolution as actually happening. The starting point and the origin may be still debatable, but I dare say that it's hard for creationists to deny actual evolution happening on this planet as we speak, and in the past.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Now the evolutionists and the anti-environmentalists will get together. This will mean the anti-evolution people will have to adopt an environmental stance.
Quick, somebody play The World Turned Upside Down.
this is a very nice story
Evolution is a tricky argument for we the living.
Gently reply
to be made at the Little Lisa Recycling Plant.
Am I supposed to be surprised?
"life, uh... finds a way."
All genes have tons of variants, and these variants had to be introduced into the population at some time. Evolution doesn't need to for traits to be introduced due to environmental pressures in order to work; they are introduced at random by mutations. So whether the trait was introduced before or after the dumping of PCBs began really isn't that interesting as it is just a matter of chance, and doesn't prove anything about evolution. The interesting part is that it occurred at all.
These fish couldn't be selected for their immunity to PCBs if some of them hadn't already obtained the trait in some manner to begin with, and selection is an integral part of evolution. Thus arguing that this is "just" selection and not evolution is making a distinction without a difference.
Life finds a way. What I find really amusing is that we humans have convinced ourselves that we need to take care of our environment for the sake of other animals that live among us. In reality, we should be worrying about our own survival. You see, since we lack basic survival skills, we have developed large brains to create a buffer from harsh environments, thus slowing our own evolution (micro and macro). It's not the end of the world if we destroy our environment. Life will find away....without us. tl;dr? This comic sums it all up: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/upload/2011/06/what_mother_nature_thinks_of_u/sweetnature.jpeg
Because you abuse it you fucking pathetic asshole. In civilised countries you would be held accountable.
Oh and fuck you racist.
http://articles.cnn.com/1996-09-06/us/9609_06_fishy.name_1_mayor-george-carter-peta-animal-rights-group?_s=PM:US
pretty funny actually
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Don't let the Republicans know... They'll come after you with pitchforks and bibles!
Nothing presently suggests that any of these fish will accumulate more PCB simply because they're resistant to its toxic effects, and thus predators will not learn to avoid them based on heightened PCB content. The Tomcod in particular will actually accumulate much less PCB, because the biochemical component with which it used to bind will simply let it pass.
In fact, these resistances could be one of evolution's many double-edged swords: if the predators learn anything, it may be that they should eat these fish, because PCBs are very dangerous teratogens (they fuck up embryo development), and any prey containing less of those poisons could lead to higher levels of survival in the predators' offspring.
The are intelligently rev'ed.
more cowbell
I've been reading the biblical creationist perspective on this since Feb 2011: Rapid tomcod ‘evolution by pollution’? Yeah, right and wrong.
This is not the kind of "evolution" needed to evolve lower-order organisms into higher-order ones. In fact, a better description for this particular case is "develution"
If you look close enough at any of these examples of evolution we keep hearing about, they're never the kind that molecules-to-man evolution requires.
Try again
Selah.ca. Pause, and calmly think on that.
I hope I can convince you to relegate your "environmental karma" to the fiction department, where frankly all such nonsense belongs. Karma has a (very) dark side, the caste system. But that's entirely beside the point. "Environmental karma" is bogus because :
Your extinction theories are not how evolution works, except in a rudimentary absolutist pre-20th century understanding perhaps. So let's this time include theories from the 20th century (imagine that, biology did not stop evolving after Darwin ...). Here's the idea of what happens if a predator eats PCB infected fish.
A population of predators eats a population of PCB resistant fish. Some of the fish will be infected with a virus. Some of the virusses inside the fish will have copied the resistant version of the gene into the viral DNA. Happens all the time. In practice every lifeform is constantly infected with hundreds of different viruses, so this is not as unlikely as you would think.
Some of the predators will get infected with the fish. Some of the female predators will get their eggs infected, some of the males their balls (or equivalent ...). BTW: it's usually the males that get their eggs ("sperma") infected. Look up how it works, and it will be obvious why. These fish, with the "infected" genes, being ever so slightly more active (evolution massacres entire races because they're 1% worse performers in a matter of a dozen generations, sometimes faster) take over the entire population. For fish, with generation lengths of at most 1 year, mostly less than that, we're talking a decade or less.
Does that satisfy you ? We *cannot* kill any significant part of nature. No matter how hard we try to do so. Nor can Krishna relegate "evil" species to dalit status and make slaves out of them, so you can you please not scare people with such eventualities ?
That species expansion only happens if natural barriers go up. Global transport is the real cause of species extinction'. The fact that people and goods move to all regions of this planet, bringing new diseases, new rodents, cats, dogs, and sometimes even new predators to all remote regions of this planet, where they proceed to destroy the local fauna that never evolved a defense against them. We're connecting the islands, google "island species".
The parties the most responsible for species extinction are probably the British empire, the east-india trading company and the Spanish kingdom. Remember : species' diversity loss is not exactly a recent problem.
It's not oil, it's not poison, it's not heavy metals (not even the music), it's not co2, it's not rising sea level, it's none of those things. It's tourism, discoveries and transport, and it doesn't matter *at all* whether said tourism happened by unpowered sailing ships, or kerosene-spewing 747's. You want to save species and races (including the diversity in human races) ?. Destroy tourism. Destroy international trade. Destroy *every* long distance interaction you can think of, first and most important in things to destroy would probably be the internet.
You want to save species diversity ? Break the connection, restore the islands. (read up a bit on island species on google and you will understand what this means). If this is not done, expect one human race to become utterly dominant (> 90% of the population) in at least 99 human species that didn't make it. For most animal and plant species this number will be far, far higher. The vast majority of species created by evolution ... lose. Link the habitats, even for memes, and where there used to be 300 countries and, for example, languages, there will remain only one. Every Western European, from Swedish kids, to Italian infants speak English, it's only a matter of time till they decide that's the easiest way to communicate. The only languages that seem to be pushing back are French and Chinese. Please remember that there are currently 394 lan
"there are intentional mechanisms built into the DNA pathways that deliberately cause genetic mutations during stress events"
While that sounds very unorthodox I may be wrong.
Do you have any reference to support this? Or is it wishful thinking? ;)
It would really help to see some references.
Check Jonathan Falcon. His penumbra is royal, to say the least, and as such indicative of Rasputin's piercing powers.
Falsifying the Newtonian (implied) hypothesis that spacetime was flat merely added a correction term into the Newtonian laws of motion. Falsifying the theory of phlogiston was a major first step to modern chemistry. The GP is confused as to the difference. Nobody bothers to try to "disprove" Newtonian mechanics when designing a car, because they are a good enough truth for almost all terrestrial engineering. Whereas anyone who doesn't try to disprove the Phlogiston model won't get far with chemical engineering.
Evolution is very definitely in Newtonian mechanics territory; no biochemist, drugs researcher or animal breeder is ever going to fail in their goals through a blind belief in evolution, no matter how complicated the details become at the molecular and ecosystem level.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Incidentally, if you ever happen to spend time with some real theologians, rather than Bible-addled thumpers, they will be among the first to point out the infinite regress in the idea that the Universe came into being through the agency of a "God". The really big philosophical question is "why is there anything at all", and "God did it" cannot be the answer because the next question is "Why is there anything at all, including the God you just postulated?".
For some modern theologians, the other big question is "where do concepts like truth and justice come from?". (Philosophers may claim ownership of these problems too).
Do they matter? If you are concerned about the kind of society you inhabit, I think they do.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This is an extremely old study (or rather observation). Completely outdated and not worthy of topic for discussion.
We've got Killerfish resisting all our efforts to kill them, defying scientific explanation. This is the start of the fish takeover! Take to the high ground!
This is adaptation, not evolution. Whoever wrote that headline should have paid more attention in science class.