Category: Convergent evolution
Convergent eye evolution shows that evolution is “easy”?
| July 31, 2018 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Here’s an inventive turn of phrase from Nature: “Eye evolution came easy for simple sea creatures Family tree shows that jellies and their relatives evolved eyes independently at least eight times.” Jellyfish and their kin have no brains and make do with rudimentary nervous systems. But an analysis now shows that these simple sea creatures […]
Why some birds are smarter than others?: They have larger brain structures that mediate information
| July 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Convergent evolution, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: University of Alberta neuroscientists have identified the neural circuit that may underlay intelligence in birds, according to a new study. The discovery is an example of convergent evolution between the brains of birds and primates, with the potential to provide insight into the neural basis of human intelligence. “An area of the brain […]
Convergent evolution: Green blood evolved four times in lizards
| May 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Darwinism, Intelligent Design |
From Louisiana State U: Green blood is one of the most unusual characteristics in the animal kingdom, but it’s the hallmark of a group of lizards in New Guinea. Prasinohaema are green-blooded skinks, or a type of lizard. The muscles, bones and tongues of these lizards appear bright, lime-green due to high levels of biliverdin, […]
Why a four-eyed fossil lizard is a problem for Darwinism
| May 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Darwinism, Design inference, Evolution |
Yes, four eyes. From Gunter Bechly at ENST: Based on two fragmentary fossils, Smith et al. (2018) just described the new monitor lizard Saniwa ensidens from the 49 million year old Bridger Formation in Wyoming. Both known specimens surprisingly had four eyes! Additional to the normal pair of lateral lens eyes, and the usual parietal […]
Spiders evolving disguises separately, in parallel, are another problem for Darwinism
| March 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Darwinism, Evolution |
Spiders evolving disguises separately, in parallel, are another problem for Darwinism Not that one can directly admit it. From Catherine Offord at The Scientist: The Hawaiian stick spider has evolved the same three color morphs on multiple different islands in parallel, according to research led by biologists at the University of California, Berkeley. The team’s […]
Secrets of 520 million-year-old brain debated, raise conundrums
| March 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Cambrian explosion, Convergent evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Andrew Urevig at National Geogaphic: Contradicting some previous accounts, the team argues that this new evidence appears to show that the common ancestor of all panarthropods did not have a complex three-part brain—and neither did the common ancestor of invertebrate panarthropods and vertebrates. … That structure can be traced back through the fossil record. […]
Convergence: Fish develop a variety of strategies in order to eat other fishes’ scales
| January 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: A small group of fishes — possibly the world’s cleverest carnivorous grazers — feeds on the scales of other fish in the tropics. The different species’ approach differs: some ram their blunt noses into the sides of other fish to prey upon sloughed-off scales, while others open their jaws to gargantuan widths to […]
Spiders and ants independently developed baskets for carrying sand
| January 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Nature: Desert spiders are master engineers A spider living in the Sahara Desert excavates its burrow by hauling out bundles of sand fastened with silken cords, while another carries sand balls in a ‘basket’ of its own bristles. … A similar basket evolved independently in desert ants, the authors note.More. See also: Evolution appears […]
Convergent evolution: Researcher “amazed” by similarities between long-extinct marine reptiles and modern life forms that are NOT their descendants
| January 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Researchers were surprised when sauropterygians with very different lifestyles had evolved inner ears that were very similar to those of some modern animals. “Sauropterygians are completely extinct and have no living descendants,” said Dr James Neenan, lead author of the study. “So I was amazed to see that nearshore species with limbs that […]
Stake in heart of school Darwinism lesson: Bilaterian nerve cords probably evolved many times
| December 15, 2017 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
“This puts a stake in the heart of the idea of an ancestor with a central nerve cord,” says Greg Wray, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “That opens up a lot of questions we don’t have answers to — like, if central nerve cords evolved independently in different lineages, […]
Convergent evolution: Independent origin of lizard toepads = evolution a “tinkerer”?
| October 19, 2017 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Darwinism, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Travis Hagey, Michigan State University evolutionary biologist, shows how different groups of lizards — geckos and anoles — took two completely different evolutionary paths to developing the beneficial trait of sticky toe pads. In a paper published in the journal Evolution, Hagey showed that anoles seemed to commit to a single type of […]
Reptile had bird-like head 100 million years before birds
| October 18, 2017 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Darwinism, Intelligent Design |
From Jake Buehler at Gizmodo: Imagine an animal with the body of a chameleon, the feet and claws of an anteater, the humped back of a camel, and a tail that is both flattened like a beaver’s, but also like that of a scorpion. If you’re thinking this sounds like someone just threw your local […]
Archaea vs. bacteria: Convergent evolution of molecular propeller
| September 26, 2017 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Origin Of Life |
Abstract: The archaellum is the macromolecular machinery that Archaea use for propulsion or surface adhesion, enabling them to proliferate and invade new territories. The molecular composition of the archaellum and of the motor that drives it appears to be entirely distinct from that of the functionally equivalent bacterial flagellum and flagellar motor. Yet, the structure […]
Convergent evolution: Speciation in butterflies an unusually tough mess
| September 23, 2017 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Intelligent Design, speciation |
Convergent evolution of mimetic species confounds classification. From ScienceDaily: The scientists discovered numerous cryptic species-two or more species erroneously classified as one species-as well as single species mistakenly described as two or three. Frequently, species discriminated with genetic data are each others’ closest relatives, but can be distinguished by stark genetic differences; this suggests a […]
Convergence: Wallabies do have placentas as well as milk that does placenta jobs
| September 13, 2017 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Evolution |
From Sara Reardon at Nature: Wallabies are kicking over scientific conventions surrounding mammalian placentas, the organ responsible for protecting and nourishing a developing fetus. A study finds that contrary to what scientists thought previously, mother tammar wallabies (Macropus eugenii) have both a functioning internal placenta and milk that performs some of the organ’s usual roles. […]
Lee Spetner: What challenges do convergent evolution and antibiotic resistance pose to Darwinian evolution?
| September 6, 2017 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Convergent evolution, Intelligent Design |
First, from Casey Luskin in 2014 on Lee Spetner’s The Evolution Revolution here: Many ENV readers might have read, or at least heard of, a well-argued 1996 book by Lee Spetner, Not By Chance. Spetner, who holds a PhD in physics from MIT, has recently published a sequel titled The Evolution Revolution: Why Thinking People […]
Convergence or parallelism?: Kevin Padian at Nature on Jonathan Losos’ Improbable Destinies
| August 22, 2017 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Darwinism, Intelligent Design |
Integrative biologist Kevin Padian reviews Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution by Jonathan B. Losos at Nature. He likes it but with quite a few qualifications: Early in Jonathan Losos’s Improbable Destinies, the narrative goes off the rails. Losos sets up the problem of historical contingency in evolution by repeating the story that 66 […]
Does convergent evolution point to libraries of patterns in life forms?
| May 15, 2017 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Intelligent Design, News |
From Anurag A. Agrawal and Editor: Judith L. Bronstein at The American Naturalist: Abstract: A charm of biology as a scientific discipline is the diversity of life. Although this diversity can make laws of biology challenging to discover, several repeated patterns and general principles govern evolutionary diversification. Convergent evolution, the independent evolution of similar phenotypes, […]
Convergent evolution: “Emerging view” that evolution is predictable?
| April 17, 2017 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, News |
From ScienceDaily: Changes in a single color-vision gene demonstrate convergent evolutionary adaptations in widely separated species and across vastly different time scales, according to a study publishing on April 11 in the open access journal PLOS Biology by David Marques of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and colleagues. The study, which combined genetic analysis […]
Possible live Tasmanian wolf sightings?
| April 4, 2017 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Evolution, extinction |
From Mike Wehner at Yahoo News: Multiple reports of Tasmanian Tiger sightings are starting to flow in from everyday citizens in Australia. Several people have recently claimed they’ve spotted the animal… The marsupial Thylacine, believed extinct, is really much more like a wolf than a tiger, in appearance and ecological role. Australians have occasionally claimed […]
