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The New Science of Evolutionary Forecasting
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists may not be able to predict what life will be like 100 million years from now, but they may be able to make short-term forecasts for the next few months or years. And if they're making predictions about viruses or other health threats, they might be able to save some lives in the process. "Biologists have found cases in which evolution has, in effect, run the same experiment several times over. And in some cases the results of those natural experiments have turned out very similar each time. In other words, evolution has been predictable. One of the most striking cases of repeated evolution has occurred in the Caribbean. ... Each time lizards colonized an island, they evolved into many of the same forms. On each island, some lizards adapted to living high in trees, evolving pads on their feet for gripping surfaces, along with long legs and a stocky body. Other lizards adapted to life among the thin branches lower down on the trees, evolving short legs that help them hug their narrow perches. Still other lizards adapted to living in grass and shrubs, evolving long tails and slender trunks. On island after island, the same kinds of lizards have evolved."
The thing is, they're filling the same roles in the same ecosystems. Suppose trees were square on one island, or very sticky on another, or very short and smooth, or poisonous, or covered in ants. In these cases the lizards would have evolved very different forms.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Luckily all you have to do to fix your pointlessly nihilistic philosophical problems is kill yourself. Poof no more boredom with the intricate mechanisms of reality. All done.
The rest of us can keep pushing that boulder up the hill for whatever reasons happen suit us, no matter how absurd.
"The kiwi looks like a mouse"
But it doesn't have a scroll wheel
"water dragons look like iguanas"
Are they from Harry Potter, LOTR, or Anne McCaffreys books?
It does not appear to be quite the same thing as convergent evolution (but I'm a physicist not a biologist!). My understanding of covergent evolutions is that it is when two wildly different evolutionary paths end up with the same solution to a problem e.g. an octopus eye and a human eye are functionally very similar even though our last common ancestor certainly had nothing like it.
This is rather the claim that evolution is reproducible in the short term i.e. if you put the same strain of bacteria in the same conditions they will evolve in the exact same way and not find different evolutionary paths to the same goal. This means that evolution becomes predictable and you can then predict with some degree of accuracy how a virus, bacteria or cell will evolve. This has obvious applications for disease control and perhaps cancer too.
That's the point. When they know certain conditions, they can predict, with some level of accuracy, what evolutions will take place.
Niels Bohr famously said, "Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future." I think he was on target, even factoring in possible facetiousness.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.