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Index » Regional/Local » USA/Canada » Evolution! Page: Previous  1, 2, 3, ... 121, 122, 123  Next
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Posted: Jun 16, 2021 - 9:56am

The Longest-Running Evolution Experiment

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Posted: Apr 19, 2021 - 10:31am

How Many Tyrannosaurus Rexes Ever Lived on Earth? Here’s a New Clue.
An estimation of the iconic predator’s total population can teach us things about dinosaurs that fossils cannot.
For living species, John Damuth, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, came up with a mathematical relationship, now known as Damuth’s law, between the average body mass of an animal and its expected population density.

The relationship is not universal but generally holds for large classes of animals like lizards or meat-eating mammals. So, for Tyrannosaurus rex, they had to not only plug in the weight of the dinosaur — about six tons, give or take a few — but also derive other numbers in the law.

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Posted: Mar 30, 2021 - 10:49am

Alien Languages May Not Be Entirely Alien to Us
Evolution should favor some universal traits in the emergence of any form of communication on any planet
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Posted: Mar 1, 2021 - 11:35am

 R_P wrote: 
Yes, but could they lie?
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Posted: Mar 1, 2021 - 11:28am

Neandertals had the capacity to perceive and produce human speech
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Posted: Feb 13, 2021 - 11:16am

How a Love of Flowers Helped Charles Darwin Validate Natural Selection


Mention of Charles Darwin, for most, conjures up images of intrepid Victorian sea voyages, giant tortoises and Galapagos finches. Few of us associate Darwin with plant sex. That honor tends to go to his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who wrote erotic poems on the topic.

Although Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which describes his theory of evolution by natural selection, has eclipsed all his other research, his career continued for over two decades after the landmark work’s publication. Much of the aging naturalist’s time was spent studying botany, and his research produced discoveries that, had he not become famous for natural selection, would have made him a well-known botanist. (...)

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Posted: Feb 11, 2021 - 1:37pm

 rhahl wrote:
My all-time favorite theory is that humans arose from the crossing of a monkey with a pig.  
 
Of course even if it was true, that would have been a pre-monkey and a pre-pig producing a pre-human, but it's still fun to say.
 
More like a pigheaded hypothesis.
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Posted: Feb 11, 2021 - 12:31pm



 rhahl wrote:

My all-time favorite theory is that humans arose from the crossing of a monkey with a pig.  
 
Of course even if it was true, that would have been a pre-monkey and a pre-pig producing a pre-human, but it's still fun to say.
 
All about getting some extra meat in the manwich...

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Posted: Feb 11, 2021 - 12:04pm

 R_P wrote:
Modern human origins cannot be traced back to a single point in time
Genetic and fossil records do not reveal a single point where modern humans originated, researchers have found.
 
My all-time favorite theory is that humans arose from the crossing of a monkey with a pig.  
 
Of course even if it was true, that would have been a pre-monkey and a pre-pig producing a pre-human, but it's still fun to say.
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Posted: Feb 11, 2021 - 11:14am

 R_P wrote:
Modern human origins cannot be traced back to a single point in time
Genetic and fossil records do not reveal a single point where modern humans originated, researchers have found.
 
IOW Piltdown Man never really had a chance...
{#Wink}

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Posted: Feb 11, 2021 - 11:06am

Modern human origins cannot be traced back to a single point in time
Genetic and fossil records do not reveal a single point where modern humans originated, researchers have found.
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Posted: Feb 10, 2021 - 5:22pm

An Evolutionary Timeline of Homo Sapiens
Scientists share the findings that helped them pinpoint key moments in the rise of our species

The long evolutionary journey that created modern humans began with a single step—or more accurately—with the ability to walk on two legs. One of our earliest-known ancestors, Sahelanthropus, began the slow transition from ape-like movement some six million years ago, but Homo sapiens wouldn’t show up for more than five million years. During that long interim, a menagerie of different human species lived, evolved and died out, intermingling and sometimes interbreeding along the way. As time went on, their bodies changed, as did their brains and their ability to think, as seen in their tools and technologies. (...)

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Posted: Feb 9, 2021 - 7:30pm

Not a living fossil: How the Coelacanth recently evolved dozens of new genes

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Posted: Jan 25, 2021 - 2:34pm


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Posted: Jan 1, 2021 - 11:32am

Evolution is the reason you want to watch cat videos online
Being distracted by cute animals is one of the most important characteristics of being human today, argues media researcher.
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Posted: Oct 3, 2020 - 8:21am

Not-so-hostile takeover: Human Y chromosome displaced the Neanderthals’ version
Neanderthal genes increase risk of serious Covid-19, study claims
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Posted: Sep 22, 2020 - 8:50pm

Japan-Canada team discovers bone cancer in dinosaur leg

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Posted: Aug 1, 2020 - 12:14pm

British naturalist Charles Darwin got it right, but maybe we got Darwin wrong.

Most people assume that Darwin was talking about physical strength when referring to “survival of the fittest,” meaning that a tougher, more resilient species always will win out over its weaker counterparts. But what if he didn’t mean that at all?

Scientists Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, both researchers at Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, believe something else has been at work among species that have thrived throughout history, successfully reproducing to sustain themselves, and it has nothing to do with beating up the competition.

Their new book, “Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity,” posits that friendly partnerships among species and shared humanity have worked throughout centuries to ensure successful evolution. Species endure — humans, other animals and plants — they write, based on friendliness, partnership and communication. And they point to many life examples of cooperation and sociability to prove it.

“Survival of fittest, which is what everyone has in mind as evolution and natural selection, has done the most harm of any folk theory that has penetrated society,” Hare says. “People think of it as strong alpha males who deserve to win. That’s not what Darwin suggested, or what has been demonstrated. The most successful strategy in life is friendliness and cooperation, and we see it again and again.”

“Dogs are exhibit A,” he says. “They are the extremely friendly descendants of wolves. They were attracted to humans and became friendly to humans, and changed their behavior, appearance and developmental makeup. Sadly, their close relative, the wolf, is threatened and endangered in the few places where they live, whereas there are hundreds of millions of dogs. Dogs were the population of wolves that decided to rely on humans — rather than hunting — and that population won big.” (...)

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Posted: Jul 21, 2020 - 2:54pm

Coronavirus has mutated 590 times so far in Bangladesh, government research shows
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Posted: Jul 17, 2020 - 7:54pm

How Viruses Evolve
Pathogens that switch to a new host species have some adapting to do. How does that affect the course of a pandemic like COVID-19?
(...) This evolutionary two-step — first spillover, then adaptation to the new host — is probably characteristic of most viruses as they shift hosts, says Daniel Streicker, a viral ecologist at the University of Glasgow. If so, emerging viruses probably pass through a “silent period” immediately after a host shift, in which the virus barely scrapes by, teetering on the brink of extinction until it acquires the mutations needed for an epidemic to bloom.

Streicker sees this in studies of rabies in bats — which is a good model for studying the evolution of emerging viruses, he says, since the rabies virus has jumped between different bat species many times. He and his colleagues looked at decades’ worth of genetic sequence data for rabies viruses that had undergone such host shifts. Since larger populations contain more genetic variants than smaller populations do, measuring genetic diversity in their samples enabled the scientists to estimate how widespread the virus was at any given time.

The team found that almost none of the 13 viral strains they studied took off immediately after switching to a new bat species. Instead, the viruses eked out a marginal existence for years to decades before they acquired the mutations — of as yet unknown function — that allowed them to burst out to epidemic levels. Not surprisingly, the viruses that emerged the fastest were those that needed the fewest genetic changes to blossom.

SARS-CoV-2 probably passed through a similar tenuous phase before it acquired the key adaptations that allowed it to flourish, perhaps the mutation to the polybasic cleavage site, perhaps others not yet identified. In any case, says Colin Parrish, a virologist at Cornell University who studies host shifts, “by the time the first person in Wuhan had been identified with coronavirus, it had probably been in people for a while.”

It was our bad luck that SARS-CoV-2 adapted successfully. Many viruses that spill over to humans never do. About 220 to 250 viruses are known to infect people, but only about half are transmissible — many only weakly — from one person to another, says Jemma Geoghegan, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Otago, New Zealand. The rest are dead-end infections. Half is a generous estimate, she adds, since many other spillover events probably fizzle out before they can even be counted. (...)

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