Darwin got it right - it's survival of the fastest (Lewis Smith, timesonline.co.uk, 11/17/06)
THERE’S nothing like the threat of being eaten to make an animal evolve in double-quick time, a study of lizards has shown.
Twice within a year the brown arole lizard has evolved changes in its body and behaviour to outwit a predator — confirming Charles Darwin’s theory on natural selection.
Changes in limb length were observed by biologists after they introduced a predator, the northern curly-tailed lizard, to islands off the Bahamas where the brown arole is found.
In the first six months the brown arole, Anolis sagrie, developed longer legs so that it could outrun its predator, Leiocephalus carinatus.
Over the second six-month period the arole changed its behaviour so that it spent far less time on the ground and longer on branches and plant stems.
After a year the surviving aroles had much shorter, stumpier legs that were more suited to clinging on to thin branches. "We showed that selection dramatically changed direction over a short time, within a single generation," the researchers reported in the journal Science.
18 November 2006
In Which I Am Forced To Notice Darwinism
I've been keeping the blog clear of Darwin, mostly because I just don't care. But this really is the stupidest thing I've seen yet on the subject:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
Peter: I think we should submit a paper to some biology journal. In it, we'll claim to have studied a marsupial native to 2 small islands in the south Pacific. As part of the experiment, we walked around one of the islands shooting the shorter adults. At the end of the experiment, we were amazed to find that the population of the first island had evolved greater height compared to the control island in just one day in response to predatory pressure.
This is a dangerous topic to bring up, David, since you utterly wussed out of answering my question about how your own random-mutation-over-natural-selection Theory of Evolution could explain stasis.
Oh, darn, I always did mean to get back to that. I try to get to it asap, although this is not a great week to get things done in North America.
Mr. Burnet;
Neither. I suspect it's like comedy writers at the end of a long day, when even the most humorous have been worn down to the point where he can no longer distinguish funny from not-funny. I suspect the writers and reviewers have obsessed so much that they've overloaded and shut down their critical facilities.
David:
Great! To save time later, I am widening my eyes, dropping my jaw and raising my forefinger in a gesture representing Eureka-ish enlightenment now, in anticipation of reading the theory that will revolutionise evolutionary biology.
Way to increase the pressure.
Of course, when I do answer, it's just going to be something awful close to the modern synthesis.
Well I did tell you it was a dangerous subject to bring up.
Post a Comment