Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 54

At The Scientist: Horizontal gene transfer happens “more often than anyone thought”

DNA passed to and from all kinds of organisms, even across kingdoms, has helped shape the tree of life, to a large and undisputed degree in microbes and also unexpectedly in multicellular fungi, plants, and animals.

Christie Wilcox, “Horizontal gene transfer happens more often than anyone thought” at The Scientist (July 5, 2022)

Well, of course, anything that horizontal gene transfer did, Darwinian evolution did not do. And if HGT is quite common, it’s going to be much harder to tell what Darwinism actually did.

You may also wish to read: Horizontal gene transfer: Sorry, Darwin, it’s not your evolution any more

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At Mind Matters News: Retro future: In a 1960s take on the 2020s, chimps do our chores

And driving cars. The Rand Corporation actually put out a video promoting the idea…

Jane Goodall sure wouldn’t like it:

The idea that chimpanzees are just furry people must have been well entrenched in those days. It was during the same time period that some prominent scientists, including Frank Drake and Carl Sagan (1934–1996), were actively researching the idea of communicating intelligently with dolphins as well.

But the sad reality is that efforts to integrate chimpanzees (and dolphins) into the human world have often entailed considerable cruelty to the animals. World-class chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall (1934– ) has a lot of information on that.

First, chimpanzees are cute when they are young but, like all animals, they have their own wants and needs, which don’t include learning to do housework. In fact, as they mature, they find it increasingly difficult to even live in a typical human environment

News, “Retro future: In a 1960s take on the 2020s, chimps do our chores” at Mind Matters News

Then they bite off human fingers.

It seems such a crazy idea now. Is that because we have greater awareness of chimpanzees as they really are? Let’s hope so.

It’s good to think we’ve made some progress in the last half century in understanding that chimpanzees are not “almost people.” We must still work on recognizing that we are not “almost chimpanzees” either.

Just for fun:

You may also wish to read: But, in the end, did the chimpanzee really talk? A recent article in the Smithsonian Magazine sheds light on the motivations behind the need to see bonobos as something like an oppressed people, rather than apes in need of protection.

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At The Conversation: It’s getting harder for scientists to collaborate across borders – that’s bad when the world faces global problems like pandemics and climate change

Lund University Professor Tommy Shih writes:

The United Nations and many researchers have emphasized the critical role international collaborative science plays in solving global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss and pandemics. The rise of non-Western countries as science powers is helping to drive this type of global cooperative research. For example, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa formed a tuberculosis research network in 2017 and are making significant advancements on basic and applied research into the disease.

However, in the past few years, growing tensions among superpowers, increasing nationalism, the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have contributed to nations’ behaving in more distrustful and insular ways overall. One result is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for researchers to collaborate with scholars in other nations.

The near-global cessation of collaboration with Russian scholars following the invasion of Ukraine – in everything from humanities research to climate science in the Arctic – is one example of science being a victim of – and used as a tool for – international politics. Scientific collaboration between China and the U.S. is also breaking down in fields like microelectronics and quantum computing because of national security concerns on both sides.

I am a policy expert who studies international research collaboration as it relates to global problems and geopolitical polarization. I understand the need for democratic countries to respond to the the growing strength of authoritarian countries such as China and acute crises like the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But reducing or stopping international research comes with its own risks. It slows down the production of knowledge needed to address long-term global problems and reduces the potential for future scientific collaboration.

The development of scientific capacity in many parts of the world and the building of academic ties is critical when it comes to responding to a new virus or tracking changes in climate. The more countries that share data and coordinate policy responses, the easier it should be to contain a virus or understand global warming.

Global consequences

Many researchers in the U.S., Europe and China have voiced concerns that geopolitical rivalries are curtailing international research collaboration at a time when the world needs it the most.

There is a major risk that the impediments to international scientific collaboration will further increase, further harming data sharing, the quality of research and the ability to disseminate results that contributing to solving problems.

The Conversation

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Quantum theory of consciousness put in doubt by underground experiment

A controversial theory put forward by physicist Roger Penrose and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff that posits consciousness to be a fundamentally quantum-mechanical phenomenon has been challenged by research looking at the role of gravity in the collapse of quantum wavefunctions. Based on results from an experiment done under Gran Sasso mountain in Italy, the new work concludes that Penrose’s and Hameroff’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (Orch OR) is “highly implausible” when based on the simplest type of gravity-related wavefunction collapse – although they point out that more complex collapse models leave some wiggle room.

Many scientists regard consciousness as a global manifestation of individual calculations by the brain’s billions of neurons. Penrose and Hameroff instead argue that consciousness is based on the non-computational collapse of coherent quantum superpositions between cellular structures within neurons known as microtubules. They reckon that while the superpositions guide classical neuronal processes, it is the continual gravity-related collapse of the quantum states that gives rise to our sense of self-awareness.

As a physicist, I’ll have to say that random interactions between collapsing wavefunctions is not a feasible way to generate the conscious state we all know as self-awareness. Readers may be familiar with the speculative quantum concept known as observer-created reality, in which an observer causes the collapse of a quantum wave function into a specific state. Here, the researchers appear to posit the reverse process, in which an observer is caused by collapsing wave functions within the brain. The idea may have an imaginative appeal, but let’s be realistic, our consciousness is not the manifestation of random natural processes, no matter how such processes is embellished with esoteric concepts from modern physics.

In the latest work, Catalina Curceanu of the Frascati National Laboratory near Rome and colleagues assess the plausibility of Orch OR in the light of results from an experiment they set up to probe gravity’s possible role in wavefunction collapse. Standard quantum theory leaves open the question of what causes a state’s wavefunction to collapse, simply providing the probabilities of the system collapsing into one classical state or another and implying that the process is random. But several physicists over the years have attempted to identify a physical mechanism behind the process.

The researchers add that not all is lost for Orch OR. While they reckon that the theory seems implausible if based on the simplest wavefunction collapse model, it may become more plausible if a more sophisticated model can be developed – one, for example, that conserves energy (something not true of Diósi’s current model). “In future work,” they say, “we intend to develop such variants of the Diósi-Penrose collapse dynamics and then reexamine the tubulin superposition scenarios discussed above.”

See the complete article at Physics World.

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Marks: Non-Computable You Won’t Achieve Immortality Through an AI Machine

David Klinghoffer reports at Evolution News: What aspects of human beings can’t be duplicated by a computer algorithm? Oh, just a few, including qualia (what life feels like), sentience, understanding, emotion, creativity, consciousness, and spirituality.

Promoters of AI hype vaguely elide these, as Non-Computable You author Robert J. Marks made clear in a presentation at the recent Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. That’s up on YouTube now:

Marks, a distinguished computer engineer at Baylor University, is introduced by mathematician William Dembski, who had the privilege of introducing Dr. Marks himself to intelligent design. A “towering intellect,” as Dr. Dembski puts it, Marks has since becoming a leading thinker in the field.

What does the subject have to do with the intersection of science and faith? One upshot of the argument here is that dreams of achieving immortality by having your consciousness uploaded to an AI machine, merging man and computer in the predicted 2045 “Singularity,” are just that — dreams, never to be achieved. Computers, no matter how fast or futuristic, will only operate by algorithms. Professor Marks cites the Church-Turing Thesis, that “anything you can do on a computer today or a computer of the future could be done on Alan Turing’s original 1938 Turing machine.” What separates these machines is only speed. The computational method won’t change. The most exceptional things about us as humans are not algorithmic, that is, not computable. If immortality can be won, therefore, it will have to be by some other means. Marks believes that he knows what that other means must be. Watch and enjoy.

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At Phys.org: Uncharted genetic territory offers insight into human-specific proteins

When researchers working on the Human Genome Project completely mapped the genetic blueprint of humans in 2001, they were surprised to find only around 20,000 genes that produce proteins. Could it be that humans have only about twice as many genes as a common fly? Scientists had expected considerably more.

Now, researchers from 20 institutions worldwide bring together more than 7,200 unrecognized gene segments that potentially code for new proteins. For the first time, the study makes use of a new technology to find possible proteins in humans—looking in detail at the protein-producing machinery in cells. The new study suggests the gene discovery efforts of the Human Genome Project were just the beginning, and the research consortium aims to encourage the scientific community to integrate the data into the major human genome databases.

Note that so-called orphan genes have been discussed in-depth at Evolution News:

Orphan genes (sometimes called ORFan genes in bacteria) are those open reading frames that lack identifiable sequence similarity to other protein-coding genes. Lack of similarity is hard to prove, given the size of the genomic universe. Methods vary from researcher to researcher, so each study needs to be evaluated carefully. There is also always the possibility that any given ORF has no function. No doubt some orphan genes will prove to be artifacts of incomplete evidence (see below). But orphan genes are a reality, nonetheless, based on numerous and substantial studies.

Thus, the existence and prevalence of orphan genes raises a number of significant questions.…

Then there is the elephant in the room that evolutionary biologists don’t want to acknowledge. Perhaps we see so many species- and clade-specific orphan genes because they are uniquely designed for species- and clade-specific functions. Certainly, this runs contrary to the expectation of common descent.

Continuing with the Phys.org article…

New gene sequences remained out of reach

In the past few years, thousands of frequently very small open reading frames (ORFs) have been discovered in the human genome. These are spans of DNA sequence that may contain instructions for building proteins.

Traditionally, protein-coding regions in genes have been identified by comparing DNA sequences from multiple species: the most important coding regions have been preserved during animal evolution. But this method has a drawback: coding regions that are relatively young, i.e., that arose during the evolution of primates, fall through the cracks and are therefore missing from the databases.

So now the task is to integrate the largely ignored ORFs into the largest reference databases, because researchers have so far had to specifically search for them in the literature if they wanted to study them.

ORFs likely play a role in common diseases

Dr. Sebastiaan van Heesch, group leader at the Princess Máxima Center for pediatric oncology, says that their “research marks a huge step forward in understanding the genetic make-up and complete number of proteins in humans. It’s tremendously exciting to enable the research community with our new catalog. It’s too soon to say whether all of the unexplored sections of DNA truly represent proteins, but we can clearly see that something unexplored is happening across the human genome and that the world should be paying attention.”

“It is especially remarkable that most of these 7,200 ORFs are exclusive to primates and might represent evolutionary innovations unique to our species,” reports Jorge Ruiz-Orera, an evolutionary biologist working in Hübner’s lab at the MDC. “This shows how these elements can provide important hints of what makes us humans.”

Read the complete article at Phys.org.

Another “elephant in the room” is the question of how did the significant amount of information needed for novel protein-coding regions arise without intelligent design?

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At Nautilus: Life Helps Make Almost Half of All Minerals on Earth

Joanna Thompson writes:

A new origins-based system for classifying minerals reveals the huge geochemical imprint that life has left on Earth. It could help us identify other worlds with life too.

The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests, and oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can be easy to miss.

A comprehensive new survey of our planet’s minerals now corrects that omission. Among its findings is evidence that about half of all mineral diversity is the direct or indirect result of living things and their byproducts. It’s a discovery that could provide valuable insights to scientists piecing together Earth’s complex geological history—and also to those searching for evidence of life beyond this world.

In a pair of papers published on July 1, 2022 in American Mineralogist, researchers Robert Hazen, Shaunna Morrison and their collaborators outline a new taxonomic system for classifying minerals, one that places importance on precisely how minerals form, not just how they look. In so doing, their system acknowledges how Earth’s geological development and the evolution of life influence each other.

BEYOND FOOL’S GOLD: Three different kinds of pyrite, which can form in 21 different ways under widely divergent conditions of temperature and hydration, with and without the assistance of microbes. Photos coutesy of ARKENSTONE / Rob Lavinsky.

Take, for example, pyrite crystals (commonly known as fool’s gold). “Pyrite forms in 21 fundamentally different ways,” Hazen said. Some pyrite crystals form when chloride-rich iron deposits heat up deep underground over millions of years. Others form in cold ocean sediments as a byproduct of bacteria that break down organic matter on the seafloor. Still others are associated with volcanic activity, groundwater seepage, or coal mines.

“Each one of those kinds of pyrite is telling us something different about our planet, its origin, about life, and how it’s changed through time,” said Hazen.

For that reason, the new papers classify minerals by “kind,” a term that Hazen and Morrison define as a combination of the mineral species with its mechanism of origin (think volcanic pyrite versus microbial pyrite). Using machine learning analysis, they scoured data from thousands of scientific papers and identified 10,556 distinct mineral kinds.

Morrison and Hazen also identified 57 processes that individually or in combination created all known minerals. These processes included various types of weathering, chemical precipitations, metamorphic transformation inside the mantle, lightning strikes, radiation, oxidation, massive impacts during Earth’s formation, and even condensations in interstellar space before the planet formed. They confirmed that the biggest single factor in mineral diversity on Earth is water, which through a variety of chemical and physical processes helps to generate more than 80 percent of minerals.

But they also found that life is a key player: One-third of all mineral kinds form exclusively as parts or byproducts of living things—such as bits of bones, teeth, coral, and kidney stones (which are all rich in mineral content) or feces, wood, microbial mats, and other organic materials that over geologic time can absorb elements from their surroundings and transform into something more like rock. Thousands of minerals are shaped by life’s activity in other ways, such as germanium compounds that form in industrial coal fires. Including substances created through interactions with byproducts of life, such as the oxygen produced in photosynthesis, life’s fingerprints are on about half of all minerals.

One implication of Hazen and Morrison’s findings is that our watery, living planet is probably much richer in mineral diversity than other rocky bodies in the solar system. “There are many minerals that simply couldn’t form on Mars,” said Hazen. “It doesn’t have penguins pooping on clay minerals, it doesn’t have bats in caves, it doesn’t have cactuses that are decaying or things like that.”

Hazen believes that the new taxonomy might even help with detecting life on planets around distant stars. Light from exoplanets detected by the James Webb Space Telescope and other sophisticated instruments could be analyzed to determine the chemical composition of their atmospheres; based on the measurable oxygen content, the presence or absence of water vapor, relative carbon concentrations and other data, researchers could try to predict what kinds of minerals would be likely to form from light-years away.

“In a really zoomed-out, broad-scale way, we are understanding not just our planet [but also] our entire solar system, and potentially solar systems beyond,” Morrison said. “That’s really incredible.”

Nautilus

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The James Webb Space Telescope’s first images are here, and they’re spectacular

The ability to see the beauty of the cosmos, as revealed by telescopes like the James Webb, puts me in awe. The vastness of this universe and its visual beauty thrills the imagination. Even the level of technological design success in bringing these images home to Earth is cause for amazement.

NASA has released the first suite of images from the newly operational James Webb Space Telescope, revealing the wonders of our universe in more detail than ever before.

Stars explode in spectacular orange and blue light. Galaxies writhe and dance around each other in a tangle of dust and baby stars. An alien planet pulses with haze. Some of the oldest light in the known universe — emitted more than 13 billion years ago — bends around massive potholes of gravity to shine before our eyes, clear as day.

“Every image is a new discovery and each will give humanity a view of the universe never seen before,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a press conference today (July 12) before revealing the images. “This telescope will be able to penetrate dust clouds and see light from the far corners of the universe.”

But to showcase the telescope’s capabilities today, NASA — along with representatives from the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency — released five debut images of fascinating objects located a little closer to home.

Stephan’s Quintet, a galactic party of 5Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies, is best known for being prominently featured in the holiday classic film, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Today, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals Stephan’s Quintet in a new light. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)

Webb’s first targets include Stephan’s Quintet, a group of five tightly-bound galaxies located 290 million light-years away in the Pegasus constellation. Four of the tight-knit galaxies continuously swoop past one another in a dangerous dance of near-collisions, NASA said. 

The incredibly crisp new image reveals that two of the galaxies are actually in the process of merging into each other. Gouts of gas and dust heat up between the colliding galaxies, resulting in the creation of new stars.

Studying galaxy groups like this could help scientists better understand how gravity behaves at the largest scales, possibly yielding insights about the mysterious substance known as dark matter — an invisible, massive entity that’s thought to hold much of the universe together.

The Carina Nebula, a cosmic baby boomThis landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)

Another stunning image showcases the Carina Nebula, a bright and gassy hotbed of star formation located approximately 7,600 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Carina. The nebula is one of the most active star-forming regions ever discovered, Live Science previously reported, and is home to many stars much larger than our sun. 

Scientists have studied this nebula extensively, but the new image reveals the “cosmic cliffs” of Carina in more stunning detail than ever before. Hundreds of newborn stars, previously invisible to telescopes, shine throughout the gassy landscape of the nebula. Jets and eddies of dust swirl through the image, creating strange structures that scientists can’t even identify, according to NASA.

Studying nebulae like Carina, scientists will uncover fresh insights into the birth of stars, perhaps even exploring the origins of our own solar system.

Webb’s Deep Field, the deepest image of the universe EVERNASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)

The image shows the deepest view of the universe ever captured, revealing light that was emitted 13.5 billion years ago — very near the estimated beginning of the universe, roughly 13.8 billion years ago, according to NASA. 

These full-color images are the culmination of NASA’s 20-year project to launch a next generation space observatory to succeed the iconic Hubble Space Telescope. Costing nearly $10 billion to build, the Webb telescope is approximately 100 times more powerful than the Hubble, and capable of capturing incredibly crisp images of cosmic objects located billions of light-years away.

Live Science

Please refer to the Live Science article for more images and descriptions.

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A new giant dinosaur gives insight into why many prehistoric meat-eaters had such tiny arms

A team co-led by University of Minnesota Twin Cities researcher Peter Makovicky and Argentinean colleagues Juan Canale and Sebastian Apesteguía has discovered a new huge, meat-eating dinosaur, dubbed Meraxes gigas. The new dinosaur provides clues about the evolution and biology of dinosaurs such as the Carcharodontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex—specifically, why these animals had such big skulls and tiny arms.

The study is published in Current Biology, a peer-reviewed scientific biology journal.

An international team that includes a University of Minnesota Twin Cities researcher has discovered a new big, meat-eating dinosaur, dubbed Meraxes gigas. Credit: Jorge Gonzalez

The researchers initially discovered Meraxes in Patagonia in 2012 and have spent the last several years extracting, preparing, and analyzing the specimen. The dinosaur is part of the Carcharodontosauridae family, a group of giant carnivorous theropods that also includes Giganotosaurus, one of the largest known meat-eating dinosaurs and one of the reptilian stars of the recently released “Jurassic World: Dominion” movie. 

Though not the largest among carcharodontosaurids, Meraxes was still an imposing animal measuring around 36 feet from snout to tail tip and weighing approximately 9,000 pounds. The researchers recovered the Meraxes from rocks that are around 90-95 million years old, alongside other dinosaurs including several long-necked sauropod specimens.

Meraxes is among the most complete carcharodontosaurid skeleton paleontologists have found yet in the southern hemisphere and includes nearly the entirety of the animal’s skull, hips, and both left and right arms and legs. 

“The neat thing is that we found the body plan is surprisingly similar to tyrannosaurs like T. rex,” said Peter Makovicky, one of the principal authors of the study and a professor in the University of Minnesota N.H. Winchell School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “But, they’re not particularly closely related to T. rex. They’re from very different branches of the meat-eating dinosaur family tree. So, having this new discovery allowed us to probe the question of, ‘Why do these meat-eating dinosaurs get so big and have these dinky little arms?’”

With the statistical data that Meraxes provided, the researchers found that large, mega-predatory dinosaurs in all three families of therapods grew in similar ways. As they evolved, their skulls grew larger and their arms progressively shortened.

The possible uses of the tiny forelimbs in T. rex and other large carnivorous dinosaurs have been the topic of much speculation and debate. 

“What we’re suggesting is that there’s a different take on this,” Makovicky said. “We shouldn’t worry so much about what the arms are being used for, because the arms are actually being reduced as a consequence of the skulls becoming massive. Whatever the arms may or may not have been used for, they’re taking on a secondary function since the skull is being optimized to handle larger prey.”

The researchers also found that carcharodontosaurids including species from Patagonia evolved very quickly, but then disappeared suddenly from the fossil record very soon after.

“Usually when animals are on the verge of extinction, it’s because they’re evolutionary rates are quite slow, meaning they aren’t adapting very quickly to their environment,” explained  Juan Canale, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the National University of Río Negro. “Here, we have evidence that Meraxes and its relatives were evolving quite fast and yet within a few million years of being around, they disappeared, and we don’t know why. It’s one of these finds where you answer some questions, but it generates more questions for the future.”

Note that the conclusions from the evolutionary model are contradicted by the fossil evidence presented.

The research was funded by the National Geographic Society, Municipalidad de Villa El Chocón, Fundación “Félix de Azara,” and the Field Museum in Chicago.

EurekAlert

This study provides an opportunity to ask the question: Does adaptation evince rationality? The authors of the article are searching for and expecting to find a sensible explanation for what they term a natural adaptation seen in their observations of past living creatures. This type of rational explanation is different from what is used to explain observable phenomena in the physical sciences. (“Why is the sky blue?” “Because blue light scatters from air molecules up to 16 times more strongly than red light does.”) A physics explanation simply agrees with the mathematical predictions of the laws of physics. In contrast, there is no law of nature that mathematically predicts that carnivorous theropods should have “dinky little arms.” So, what warrant do we have to expect that unguided processes within an evolutionary model should yield rational outcomes? The expectation that the features of living things should have a rationally convincing purpose belongs within the paradigm of intelligent design.

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Ancestral genetic variation essential for rapid evolution of Darwin’s finches

Åsa Malmberg at Uppsala University reports:

In a study, published in Science Advances, an international team of researchers have identified 28 gene regions that have been particularly important in the evolution of Darwin’s finches. These genetic variants do not represent recent mutations but constitute ancestral genetic variation that has accumulated over time as different species of Darwin’s finches have evolved with striking differences in beak morphology.

Credit: Kiwi Rex, CC BY-SA 4.0

Adaptive radiations are groups of closely related species that have diversified in ecology and morphology from a common ancestral species within a relatively short period of time, often after a new geographic area has been colonized. Darwin’s finches are an iconic example of this, wherein 18 species have evolved within the last million years after the ancestral species arrived on Galápagos. An important question in evolutionary biology is how such rapid evolution can take place?

Darwin’s finches have evolved in a relatively undisturbed environment: the archipelago is located about 1,500 kilometers west of mainland South America. Permanent human settlements have only existed within the last 100 years, and no species of Darwin’s finches has become extinct due to human activities.

Diversification of beak morphology

A key evolutionary change among these birds is the diversification of beak morphology that has allowed different species to utilize different food resources including seeds of various sizes, insects, pollen and nectar from cactus flowers as well as blood from other species.

This new chapter in the genetic characterization of Darwin’s finches started with a field trip to Galápagos for the collection of blood samples to be used to construct a high-quality map of the entire genome of Darwin’s finches. The researchers brought portable sequencing instruments and carried out DNA sequencing on site on Galápagos.

Compared the genomes

The researchers next compared the genomes of small, medium and large ground finches. These three species are similar but show striking differences in body and beak size.

“Our genetic analysis revealed 28 gene regions that showed consistent differences among these three species,” explains Erik Enbody, who performed this analysis as a post-doctoral fellow at Uppsala University. “We were surprised that these gene variants were also present among other types of Darwin’s finches implying that they have a longer evolutionary history than the species themselves. A major message is that these gene variants have been used and reused during the evolution of Darwin’s finches.”

“Next we explored the function of the identified genes and noted that many of these genes are expressed in the developing beak, in line with our assumption that genes affecting beak morphology must have had a prominent role during the evolution of Darwin’s finches,” continues Carl-Johan Rubin.

The loss of biodiversity

The loss of biodiversity, measured as the increasing number of species that have become extinct due to the loss of natural habitats and human activities, is of major concern at present.

“Our study indicates that the situation is even more alarming than what is generally assumed because our main conclusion is that the rapid evolution of Darwin’s finches was dependent on genetic variants that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years,” explains Leif Andersson at Uppsala University and Texas A&M University who led the study. “In order to maintain biodiversity for future generations, it is as important to maintain large populations of common species as it is to save rare species from extinction, because the former is best equipped to adapt to future changes of the environment.”

Phys.org

Key takeaways:

As the researchers ponder: “An important question in evolutionary biology is how such rapid evolution can take place?”

The ability of the finches to adapt their beak morphology was found to depend on gene variants already present within the finches. Darwin’s finches are not an example of random processes generating from scratch new information resulting in new functionality.

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