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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (2485)	4/16/2009 4:54:49 PM
From: LLCF	Respond to of 69300

Dr. Hall gave a great talk on the history of Evolution since Darwin here @ ASU where he teaches now... here's a piece by him: ijdb.ehu.es Including reference to Ernst Haeckel of course. "Evo-devo" is also helping erase some of the many "gotcha's" that creationists keep grasping at: <<One of evo-devo’s greatest strengths is its cross-disciplinary nature, bridging not only evolutionary and developmental studies but gaps as broad as those between fossil-hunting paleontologists and molecular biologists. One researcher whose approach epitomizes the power of such synthesis is Dr. Neil Shubin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum (see Shubin's Book: "Your Inner Fish"). Last year, Dr. Shubin and colleagues reported the discovery of a fossil fish on Ellesmere Island in northern Canada. They had found Tiktaalik, as they named the fish, after searching for six years. They persisted for so long because they were certain that they had found the right age and kind of rock where a fossil of a fish trying to make the transition to life on land was likely to be found. And Tiktaalik appeared to be just such a fish, but it also had a few surprises for the researchers. “Tiktaalik is special,” Dr. Shubin said. “It has a flat head with eyes on top. It has gills and lungs. It’s an animal that’s exploring the interface between water and land.” But Tiktaalik was a truly stunning discovery because this water-loving fish bore wrists, an attribute thought to have been an innovation confined strictly to animals that had already made the transition to land.>> <<Evo-devo has also begun to shine a light on a phenomenon with which evolutionary biologists have long been familiar, the way in which different species will come up with sometimes jaw-droppingly similar solutions when confronted with the same challenges. Among the placental mammals of the Americas and the marsupials of Australia, for example, have evolved the same sorts of animals independently: beasts that burrowed, loping critters that grazed, creatures that had long snouts for eating ants, and versions of wolf. In the same way, the cichlids have evolved pairs of matching species, arising independently in separate lakes in Africa. In Lake Malawi, for example, there is a long and flat-headed species with a deep underbite that looks remarkably like an unrelated species that lives a similar lifestyle in Lake Tanganyika. There is another cichlid with a bulging brow and frowning lips in Lake Malawi with, again, an unrelated but otherwise extremely similar-looking cichlid in Lake Tanganyika. The same jaws, heads, and ways of living can be seen to evolve again and again. The findings of evo-devo suggest that such parallels might in fact be expected. For cichlids are hardly coming up with new genetic solutions to eating tough snails as they each crank up the BMP4 or tinker with other toolkit genes. Instead, whether in Lake Malawi or Lake Tanganyika, they may be using the same genes to develop the same forms that provide the same solutions to the same ecological challenges. Why not, when even the beaked birds flying overhead are using the very same genes?>> <<So, with just these two genes, not tens or hundreds, the scientists found the potential to recreate beaks, massive or stubby or elongated. “So now one wants to go in a number of directions,” Dr. Tabin said. “What happens in a stork? What happens in a hummingbird? A parrot?” For the evolution of beaks, the main tool with which a bird handles its food and makes its living, is central not only to Darwin’s finches, but to birds as a whole.>> nytimes.com DAK