Gee, Who Knew?

Every so often, Science Daily comes out with a story that, perhaps needs to be restated but is amusing nevertheless. They write:

Climate changes profoundly influenced the rise and fall of six distinct, successive waves of mammal species diversity in North America over the last 65 million years, shows a novel statistical analysis led by Brown University evolutionary biologists. Warming and cooling periods, in two cases confounded by species migrations, marked the transition from one dominant grouping to the next.

I am quite sure that there is more to the Brown study than meets the eye since this information simply reflects what we already knew about how natural selection works in the wild. The story does, in fact, provide detailed information about mammal extinctions and radiations. It is the way in which Science Daily words the headline that is amusing.

This “lack of randomness” was the crux of a piece that I wrote for CFSI a bit back. If anti-evolutionists or ID supporters are willing to argue that evolution is a “godless, random process” then they have to be willing to argue that climate change on the planet is also a random, godless process, since that is what drives biotic change. I haven't heard any of them say that yet.

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You Can Never Go Back Home

ScienceDaily has a report of research from the University of Oregon in which it has been shown that evolution is a one-way trip. The author writes:

The team used computational reconstruction of ancestral gene sequences, DNA synthesis, protein engineering and X-ray crystallography to resurrect and manipulate the gene for a key hormone receptor as it existed in our earliest vertebrate ancestors more than 400 million years ago. They found that over a rapid period of time, five random mutations made subtle modifications in the protein's structure that were utterly incompatible with the receptor's primordial form.

This seems to indicate that once evolution in a species has proceeded down a particular path, it doesn't go back. Once upon a time, the ancestors of humans had four premolars (bicuspids, if you are a dentist). We now have two because the first two have been lost along the way. I remember my advisor Fred Smith remarking once upon a time that once a trait has been lost evolutionarily, it never comes back. A species might follow a different path than the one it originally took to get to a similar place, however. This explains why whales and icthyosaurs don't look the same, even though they are both exploiting an aquatic niche. Read the whole thing.

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