A very interesting article from The Guardian...
From the article:
>>>Emily Standen is a scientist at the University of Ottawa, who studies Polypterus senegalus, AKA the Senegal bichir, a fish that not only has gills but also primitive lungs. Regular polypterus can breathe air at the surface, but they are “much more content” living underwater, she says. But when Standen took Polypterus that had spent their first few weeks of life in water, and subsequently raised them on land, their bodies began to change immediately. The bones in their fins elongated and became sharper, able to pull them along dry land with the help of wider joint sockets and larger muscles. Their necks softened. Their primordial lungs expanded and their other organs shifted to accommodate them. Their entire appearance transformed. “They resembled the transition species you see in the fossil record, partway between sea and land,” Standen told me. According to the traditional theory of evolution, this kind of change takes millions of years. But, says Armin Moczek, an extended synthesis proponent, the Senegal bichir “is adapting to land in a single generation”. He sounded almost proud of the fish.
>>>Moczek’s own area of expertise is dung beetles, another remarkably plastic species. With future climate change in mind, he and his colleagues tested the beetles’ response to different temperatures. Colder weather makes it harder for the beetles to take off. But the researchers found that they responded to these conditions by growing larger wings. The crucial thing about such observations, which challenge the traditional understanding of evolution, is that these sudden developments all come from the same underlying genes. The species’s genes aren’t being slowly honed, generation by generation. Rather, during its early development it has the potential to grow in a variety of ways, allowing it to survive in different situations. “We believe this is ubiquitous across species,” says David Pfennig of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
I guess its not like the whole Darwinian paradigm should be thrown out, but perhaps Lamarc was actually on to something.
ReplyDeleteA biologist i know whos a hard core atheist have always argued that the timeframes for the formations of new species in a lot of cases just doesnt add upp.
Hes not arguing for ID or anything like that, but that there is something fundamental about evolution that were at most scratching the surface of in science.
Exactly. But it´s probably not "teleology" either in the sense usually understood, since that implies humans are the end-goal of the process. Which is hard to believe for many reasons!
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