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Fish Raised On Land Give Clues To How Early Animals Left the Seas
sciencehabit writes When raised on land, a primitive, air-breathing fish walks much better than its water-raised comrades, according to a new study. The landlubbers even undergo skeletal changes that improve their locomotion. The work may provide clues to how the first swimmers adapted to terrestrial life. The study suggests that the ability of a developing organism to adjust to new conditions—its so-called developmental plasticity—may have played a role in the transition from sea to land.
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http://www.livescience.com/475...
The ability to adjust to new conditions played a role in fish adjusting to new conditions!
I, for one, welcome our Earth's newbie, developmental plasticity fish overlords...
You put an amphibious fish on land and it develops its fin muscles for walking and you keep one in water and their muscles develop for swimming... and this was the big discovery?
This is very interesting, but unfortunately adds itself to the vast body of evidence that supports the Scientific Theory of Evolution, and therefore will be derided and railed against by the usual suspects. Im fully expecting this study to be banned in various States and the study's authors to have their names dragged through the conspiracy mud in Fox News.
These creatures take to land like a fish takes to water.
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They bought 149 fish and based their experiment on 111 in a terrarium and 38 in the control?
Seriously? Who got to choose the fish that went into the overloaded terrarium ?
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http://mcduke.net/stuff/jesusf...
Perhaps it served some other purpose in the shallow swamps where such fish evolved, and it could be co-opted to movement on land.
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No, no, no! You have it backwards. Here on Soviet Slashdot, developmental plasticity fish overlords welcome you!
Ironically, it's a revival of Lysenkoism, which has its supportive roots in Soviet era propaganda - making your comment quite apt, given that there was official party support from Stalin, to the point of those opposing the idea being executed. It's gained popularity again due to possible epigenetic mechanisms, but this hasn't really panned out in terms of direct heritability of the induced characteristics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
by living in periodically shallow waters for perhaps thousands or tens of thousands of generations.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
An organism benefits from plasticity in changing or not optimal environments. About every organism shows signs of a certain plasticity. It doesn't just thrive under optimal conditions, but it can also exist in not so advanturous environments, but it doesn't grow to the same size, reaches the same age or produced the same amount of offspring. Nevertheless, thanks to plasticity, it can overcome the situation.
It's getting hard to distinguish Lamarckianism, Lysenkoism and epigenetics these days.
What the experiment mainly does is demonstrate the endurance of the creatures to stay on land for extended durations. Unsurprisingly these extended stays on land gives the fish get an upper body workout so they get better at moving around.
I doubt they're viewing any on going development, likely the thing already had genes present to allow it to develop differently if given a season with less water available.
In the beginning, we were all fish swimming around in the water. Then one day a couple of fish had a retard baby, and the retard baby was different so it got to live. So retard fish goes on to make more retard babies. Then one day a retard baby crawls out of the ocean with its mutant fish hands, and it had butt sex with a squirrel or something and made this, retard frog squirrel. Then that had butt sex with a monkey and had a retard baby which was a monkey fish frog, and then that monkey fish frog had butt sex with another monkey, that had a mutant retard baby that screwed another monkey, and that made you. So there you go, you're the retarded offspring of five monkeys having butt sex with a fish squirrel, congratulations.
All the creatures have some slight bone changes, due to the absence of water and the effect of gravity.
Over time, those whose genes allow for greater changes breed true, while those whose genes limit these beneficial changes tend to breed less.
Eventually someone gets a mutation that makes it slightly easier to walk and effectively makes it much harder to swim. As they no longer swim, that mutation gets bred into everyone.
Ta da, the 'temporary plasticity' has become permaennt.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I've heard the same story as most...fish left the seas to spawn amphibians, reptiles, and other land animals.
Such stories never address invertebrates. If, as the headline suggests, all land animals come from fish who left the water, does this mean insects and other land invertebrates evolved from fish?