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In his fourth-floor lab at Harvard University, Michael Desai has created hundreds of identical worlds in order to watch evolution at work. Each of his meticulously controlled environments is home to a separate strain of baker’s yeast. Every 12 hours, Desai’s robot assistants pluck out the fastest-growing yeast in each world — selecting the fittest to live on — and discard the rest. Desai then monitors the strains as they evolve over the course of 500 generations. His experiment, which other scientists say is unprecedented in scale, seeks to gain insight into a question ( http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140717-the-new-science-of-evolutionary-forecasting/ ) that has long bedeviled biologists: If we could start the world over again, would life evolve the same way ?
Many biologists argue that it would not, that chance mutations early in the evolutionary journey of a species will profoundly influence its fate. “If you replay the tape of life, you might have one initial mutation that takes you in a totally different direction,” Desai said, paraphrasing an idea first put forth by the biologist Stephen Jay Gould in the 1980s.
Desai’s yeast cells call this belief into question. According to results published in Science in June ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24970088 ), all of Desai’s yeast varieties arrived at roughly the same evolutionary endpoint (as measured by their ability to grow under specific lab conditions) regardless of which precise genetic path each strain took. It’s as if 100 New York City taxis agreed to take separate highways in a race to the Pacific Ocean, and 50 hours later they all converged at the Santa Monica pier.
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/evolution-paths-fitness/
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Saturday October 04 2014, @06:43PM
The human race is neither "above evolutionary pressures" (whatever that means) nor isolated from them. We have actually been evolving quite rapidly for such a large animal with such a slow reproductive cycle.
The only sense that you could possibly be correct is that since we have created rapid transportation, we have been merging into a single gene-pool, but I'm not convinced that's really happening, and even if it were this still wouldn't isolate us from evolutionary pressures. What you might mean is that our current evolutionary pressures are quite different from those of our ancestors of 10 generations ago. That's probably correct, but changed pressures isn't at all the same as absence of pressure.
It is quite plausible that on a few decades genetic engineering will become common enough that you could reasonably claim that we have isolated ourselves from evolutionary pressures. I would still be dubious, but in that situation there would be reasonable grounds for the claim, and a need to take it seriously. But whenever there is differential survival in a population that isn't due to random chance there are evolutionary pressures....unless the descendants don't reflect their ancestors (which is why genetic engineering might make an arguable difference).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 04 2014, @08:31PM
The races are negroid, caucasoid, mongoloid, and australoid.
Human is a species.
On top of this, race is a pseudoscientific thing.
Though Abel and Baker may appear to be of the same race, Abel's genome could easily be closer to Charlie's--even though Charlie appears to be of a different race than Abel and Baker.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by art guerrilla on Sunday October 05 2014, @12:57PM
thank you...
some poodles think their shit don't stink, and make a point of putting down the mixed cur dogs,
but we are all the same dog, dog...
some dogs have curly hair, some dogs do not;
some dogs have darker coats, some dogs lighter;
some dogs have larger phenotypes, some smaller;
but we are all the same dog, dog...