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Evolution Can Occur Much Faster Than Previously Thought (ox.ac.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: An Oxford study on chickens discovered that evolution can make significant changes to a genome in as little as 15 years. "For a long time scientists have believed that the rate of change in the mitochondrial genome was never faster than about 2% per million years. The identification of these mutations shows that the rate of evolution in this pedigree is in fact 15 times faster." Professor Greger Larson, senior author on the study, said, "Our observations reveal that evolution is always moving quickly but we tend not to see it because we typically measure it over longer time periods."
See the Earth is only 4,000yrs old :)
The long term changes in DNA didn't always get there in a straight line. So measuring over a shorter time would indicate a faster rate of change. But interesting nonetheless.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
GOD DOESN'T EXIST! SEE EVOLUTION
This is not evolution you fucking morons, it's the same selective breeding that every goat herder has known about since mankind first appeared on this earth.
The real question is why the fuck don't you understand the same thing is true for humans ESPECIALLY with different races?
Well considering that for the longest time, fossils were our main source of viewing evolution through time, of course it would seem to be slow. Who knows how many speciation events happen and die off before being able to leave a mark in the fossil record.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
15 years? The researchers observed 2 SNPs in a population of chickens over 50 years; which is "15x faster" than the previous estimate of 2% evolution every million years. There also wasn't much selection on these chickens, as they were lab chickens, so even less-fit mutations would persist. One SNP was non-synonymous (meaning it results in a codon change), and one SNP was synonymous (no codon change).
I'm not seeing where they got "Significant changes in 15 years" out of the article.
Nobody has thought for decades that evolution is a slow continuous process. Rather that it has periods where nothing much happens, then there's a spurt of changes, then another period of calm.
Pick the right time interval and duration and you can see either one or the other, as you want. Great way to make data fit your favorite theory :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The study did not observe evolution. Not one single biological trait conferring a survival advantage was detected. All that was observed were two mutation of unknown origin. The authors surmise "paternal leakage", but nobody really knows the source of the mutations. The act of mutation itself was not observed. It was only detected by comparing samples over a long time span.
This is similar to what astronomers' do when they "blink" star fields -- switching between early and late images to make any change easy to pick up visually. When a change is picked up, the astronomer knows nothing about the cause, only that the change occurred.
But here we are, science and media over-reaching. The researchers themselves asserting that evolution is happening, and happening faster than before. We've never observed evolution yet -- some scientists only assume it from observed differences in the fossil record.
Why do scientists feel the need to over-reach in their conclusions? I can only guess. Funding, probably.
I've read that chickens were domesticated from the "red junglefowl (Gallus gallus)". According to one source, they were domesticated in China in 8000 BCE. They've been selectively bred over a long period of time. So my point is, trying to draw conclusions about natural mutation rates from an animal that has been intentionally altered by selective breeding over thousands of years is flawed. Drawing conclusions from some animal that is relatively untouched by civilization and has only been changed by its environment would be acceptable. But trying to use a chicken as a test subject sounds like someone had an agenda and was trying to intentionally create controversy.
Domesticated animals have changed significantly in the past few few decades let alone the past few thousand years. Modern broilers (meat chickens) can't even self procreate due to the changes but also grow from chicks to food in a couple months. Dairy cattle are another example, Today 9.3 Million dairy cattle produce 59% more milk than 25.6 Million cattle produced in the 40s. This isn't limited to animals, grain producing plants have significantly changed since the 30s, corn specifically has went from around 25 bushels per acre in the 30s to over 140 bushels per acre today. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of farming could have told you this. It should be noted though that while these plants/animals work well for modern farming, most would almost certainly go extinct after a few years without human care due to their extreme specialization (grain production, milk production, meat production, egg production etc).
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The mechanisms for Evolution itself should also be under selective pressure. I would expect that traits, that allow for a quicker adaption to a changed environment, are a huge improvement of fitness. One example seems to be sexual reproduction as this allows for mixing of different sets of traits and allows sexual selection. But there should be other mechanisms as well. Random mutation seem to be quite ineffective, mechanisms that cause more specific mutations with a higher likelihood of increasing the fitness should be possible.
Jan
Within 15 years, Europe will not have any more white people.
Bah, it only took the Colonel six years to breed the octochicken. Standing 18" tall, this 8-legged, 4-breasted behemoth has been bioengineered to deliver searing hot salty deliciousness to a bucket near you.
There's a common misconception that fear can cause your hair to turn white. It's wrong, but true. What happens is that your hair us going white. It's 10% white, and nobody notices. 30% white and people can see it clearly, but don't point it out. But when you are at 30% white and have a strong fear event, you can have some hair fall out. The hair that falls out is disproportionately non-white. So it gives the appearance of a sudden whitening of your hair, caused by fear.
And my first thought on this was the same thing. Random mutation is long-term. But when a selection event happens, the "hidden" trait isn't created, but selected for. There is no "evolution", but a selection pressure that reveals the previous mutation as a preferential trait, making it appear to happen suddenly and revealed by the "cause" but not actually caused by the "cause".
Learn to love Alaska
Their understanding of this phenomenon is slowly... well, you know.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Evolution would have to happen very quickly for such a diverse variety of people to descend from just Adam and Eve in only 6,000 years.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Take only six days and be impossible without an intelligent designer? Didn't think so.
By seeing your comment through a very, very thick principle of charity lens, I'll say you are correct that that evolution BY NATURAL SELECTION requires SURVIVAL-BASED SELECTION OF random mutations.
Evolution is a more general concept, and is not even limited to biology.
From one of the articles:
More specifically, we estimated the mitochondrial mutation rate, tested for instances of non-maternal inheritance, and examined the degree to which mitochondrial mutations were responsible for the divergent phenotypes of the two selected lines.
OK, as a layman, I've seen documentaries or even read magazine articles about using a mitochondrial clock. They use this to do things like guesstimate the time of the last common ancestor of humans and chimps for instance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_molecular_clock.
So this seems to just be another study showing the trickiness of using that 'clock'.
The paper is here but it is probably paywalled. (I have institutional access, so I'm not sure what that link will do to people who don't.)
This is part of an ongoing debate about rates of evolution. To a large extent it was kicked off by a 2005 paper by Simon Ho et al. (Ho is second author on this paper.) They observed that estimates of mutation rates derived from studies over short time periods are much higher than mutation rates derived from studies over long time periods. Short time periods are up to a few thousand years, e.g. comparing populations that have been separated by for a few thousand years, or ancient DNA compared to modern DNA in the same species, or multigenerational studies over a few years or decades such as this one. Long time periods are from comparing species whose common ancestor is typically millions of years ago.
This apparent acceleration in mutation rates is controversial.
I'm going to read the paper now, so I may have more to say later.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
We have already observed recent mitochondrial evolution in the human population, with a few mutations specific to Polynesian populations that must have arisen during radiative settlement a few hundred years ago:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Ask me about repetitive DNA
So, you folks finally watched X-Men?
Maybe I am missing something here. But the article is referring to mutations in mitochondrial DNA, not nuclear DNA. Its the DNA in the nucleus that determines phenotypes in the resulting organism. So mtDNA mutations do not result in "evolution" in the common use of the word. Now the mitochondria are essential for aerobic respiration, so its possible there could be an improvement in function from mutation, but the vast majority of the time it will have no effect, or kill the organism.
Maybe its valid to extrapolate mutation rates of nuclear DNA from the mutation rates of mtDNA, but from a high level this looks dubious.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Chickents just doesn't sound like it'll resonate with the public in quite the same way.
Couldn't faster evolution develop as a trait, to evolve out of certain situations? If so, it is entirely possible that the earlier rate of evolutionary growth was correct and what we should be looking at is rate of rate of evolution.. but maybe rate of rate of evolution is also changing, in which case we should be looking at rate of rate of rate of evolution.. but maybe....
Flies/ frogs and other small lifeforms have been shown to evolve on much shorter timescales than 15y