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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."
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.
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.
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.
You are correct, it doesn't prove or disprove creationism because creationism isn't a scientific theory.
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.
But thats what evolution is. A small fraction of those traits will have come from mutations, not from the previous generation.
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Evolution is essentially the same thing as survival of the fittest followed by passing its traits on to the offspring because it enabled the fittest to reproduce more or live long enough to reproduce... and over time, the offspring with that trait will begin outnumber other members of its species without the trait because they have a better chance of survival. Also, spontaneous evolution is an oxymoron.
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.
The problem here is that any argument (I hesitate to call it debate or even discussion) involving evolution vs creation is that it immediately degrades into an "us" vs "them" fight.
To the hardcore evolutionists, all creationists get lumped together. It doesn't matter if their stance is "I don't think the big bang was an accident" or "the Bible says the Earth is 4000 years old, so that's how old the Earth is". You're a superstitious and mentally deficient nutjob who is at best to be ignored and at worst should be sterilized and exiled.
The converse also occurs. To a fundamentalist creationist, anyone ranging from "I could see how evolution might account for certain things" to "evolution is the correct and only possible explanation" is a godless empty shell of a human who at best should be shunned and at worst should be burned at the stake.
Modern science is built around the idea that you can never actually prove a theory, only disprove it and build a better theory. When you stop trying to disprove your models and accept them as truth, you stop being a scientist and step into the realm of faith.
It's been my experience that fights are not between scientists and zealots; they are between zealots and other zealots.
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Most creationists I know don't believe in speciation, but do believe individual species change and adapt.
They also believe in animals having sex to spread genes and adapt. It's simply an argument about the source of Bio diversity.
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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.
How do you think evolution produces different species? You have the same species in 2 different areas. The conditions change in one area or favor certain traits over others. Eventually, the animals in that area evolve into a different species. You cannot say that one species is weaker that the other. What you claim to be the "stronger"fish would not survive in the Hudson, while these "weaker" ones can. Each one is stronger than the other in their respective environments.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The only difference between the two is TIME. They are the same process, you bible-thumping nitwit.
There's just two problems with that one:
1. There's enough evidence for evolution that it must be mostly correct
2. If evolution is flawed, it won't result in concessions towards the creationist stance
For instance, take Newton. Yes, he wasn't entirely correct. But what he figured out, in the conditions he tested it in, worked. That Newton wasn't 100% correct didn't suddenly mean that the reality was any more aligned with the view of Aristotle.
The same way, the argument isn't about whether evolution exists. That got figured out long ago, even before scientists figured out how genetics work. The current arguments are all about the details of it. That the current understanding isn't 100% correct isn't going to suddenly mean that the creationist stance is right, it's just going to mean that some of the details weren't entirely correct, like exactly how some features evolved, how important different mechanisms are, and so on.
Repeat after me: "Evolution does not work that way".
Evolution isn't something that magically allows plants and animals to adapt to a specific set of circumstances, that is an entirely random process. This mutation probably happened decades or centuries ago (or possibly even *due* to the PCBs, which would be ironic but difficult to prove) and has now, as you've said, been brought to prominence because all the fish without it have died off due to the high levels of PCBs in the water.
The fish *have* evolved immunity to the toxic sludge, but it's not a causative statement and hopefully wasn't intended as such.
How long until deer evolve to not walk in front of my car?
They already have. Those are in the woods, safe and sound. You're doing your part to help clean up the evolutionary dead ends.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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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.
You're implying a symmetry that isn't there.
Creation versus evolution is one of those cases of pseudoscience where the unscientific side (the creationists, if I must spell it out) claims that they want to "compromise" between the two sides by claiming that each side can account for some things, or that each side has a certain amount of faith, or "we have no way to be sure about creation, but we have no way to be sure about evolution either". Almost any time someone says this it's a case where the science and the pseudoscience aren't equal at all, the person who is trying to "compromise" supports the pseudoscience, and they don't like that science is completely on the other side and they would rather that the two sides at least be equal.
All creationists get lumped together because the "compromise" creationist is just as wrong as the blatant creationist. Either you accept evolution or you don't. "I'm not saying the creationists are right, but evolution can't explain this" followed by a list of misconceptions means you don't.
An all-powerful, all-knowing being would create perfect beings with free will at the very beginning unless he was some kind of psychopath. Else, he is not all-powerful or not all-knowing. And also there is no difference between micro and macroevolution, or what barrier is there for macroevolution?
The problem here is that any argument (I hesitate to call it debate or even discussion) involving evolution vs creation is that it immediately degrades into an "us" vs "them" fight.
Well, yes, humans have an instinct to be tribal, and humans may act in a tribal way around any social disagreement that is large enough to partition society.
Modern science is built around the idea that you can never actually prove a theory, only disprove it and build a better theory. When you stop trying to disprove your models and accept them as truth, you stop being a scientist and step into the realm of faith.
Here you seem to be adopting the standard anti-science argument - that since "science can't prove anything", then we should accept all hypothesis as equally valid. And that is the problem. All hypotheses are not equally valid. The entire fields of modern genetics and molecular biology is built around the theory of evolution. The evidence for evolution is so strong that it is literally inconceivable to people who are educated in these fields that people outside the field could dismiss it. And let's be clear: the dismissals of evolution are not scientific - they do not propose an alternative testable hypothesis, they just wave their hands in the air and claim that a mystical magical man did it. That is not science. That is why scientists and other educated people dismiss it. It is not scientists who have adopted their models as absolute truth, it those who have rejected science who claim that they have the absolute truth - the mystical magical man. Come to think of it, I've actually never, ever, met a creationist who would even admit that they might be wrong. And that says it all, really.
That's referring to the idea of "microevolution", which they later define further down the page, and which is, itself, a bit of a misnomer since it merely refers to adaptation and selection. I'll repeat again: it's an overstatement to refer to selection as "evolution". It's a mechanic of it, but it is not it.
2. If evolution is flawed, it won't result in concessions towards the creationist stance
I'm confused by this statement. How do you possibly know this, other than by assertion you're psychic as to the future determinations of science? You wouldn't consider a biological structure that -could not- come into existence apart from design, due to the probability of the aggregate mutations required while retaining survivability, to be a "concession"?
I'm not asserting such will be found, I'm wondering by what means you are asserting it -will not- be found.
Really, though, I've already fallen into your misleading equivocation of meaning "evolution" as "an exhaustive explanation of origins" rather than "a set of biological processes that are observed to occur". This is, the equivocation of "evolution occurs" to "-only- evolution occurs". Yes, I understand you absolutely need the second to be the case for your worldview preference to be viable, but it is, despite you personally needing it to be otherwise, of course, a wholly untestable, unfalsifiable, and unscientific premise.
Well, actually, it might be falsifiable, but only in the sense that it already has been falsified. We cannot account for all biological features through evolutionary processes, as an issue of fact, rather than conjecture, ever since we ourselves started doing the designing. We know this falsification via the news, as one of hundreds of sources. How you know it won't also be further falsified by further examples from earlier timeframes, a priori, is beyond me, outside of your apparent psychic powers.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Minor point of conflict: you cannot have a universe that contains both:
1. at least one all-knowing entity and
2. at least one other entity which has free will.
The propositions conflict with one another.
By definition, the future actions of an entity with free will cannot be known. By definition, an all-knowing entity knows the future actions of all entities. Hence, a contradiction exists, and both propositions cannot be true. This is a fairly common form of logical disproof.
It's like an immovable object and an irresistible force; they simply cannot be in the same universe, because the existence of one precludes the existence of another.
Because as formulated, that's not scientific. It's not enough to just make a statement "X was designed", there must be some testable consequence of that, and you're not offering any.
So for instance, Netwon disagreed with Aristotle and said that everything falls at the same speed in a vacuum, regardless of weight. You can go and test that.
So if something had to be designed the result is... what exactly? What could somebody go and test in a lab?
"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.
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.
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Don't see how. First there's a lot of evidence of descent. Parts get reused over and over, species can be organized as a tree, and change is seen gradually through it. A designer wouldn't need to do incremental improvement. They could suddenly go and plug an entirely new part somewhere, but there's no evidence of that. (if you have any please provide it).
And as a design, ours is incredibly lousy. Why would a designer leave in various junk like a the remains of a tail (humans can be born with one), wisdom teeth, appendix (which does more harm than good these days), goose bumps (which would raise our fur if we still had any) and the ability some people have to move their ears (which makes perfect sense for monkeys with large ones)?
I was watching a crazy show a while ago called Ancient Aliens. One of the theories was that there is a group of genes that may have been inserted by aliens to use us as slaves for mining gold. Our ancestors were not intelligent enough to order around, and tended to be too violent. By messing with the ape genes and adding some of their own they created a slave race and could get them to mine gold for them as gods
This site describes the discovery of these genes and why it seems unlikely to be slow genetic drift. I don't see why bacteria insertion could not be the cause though, unless there are no other copies of this group of 223 genenes in our biosphere.
Personnaly I find this interesting but pretty far fetched. But I rank it above the creationist ideas. There are a lot of old religions that have people from the sky visiting or creating humans. It is not that hard to imagine ancient people would see a fire spewing ship as a dragon or the visitors as angels.
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