Monthly Archives: June 2024

Subscribe to NewscastStudio for the latest news, project case studies and product announcements in broadcast technology, creative design and engineering delivered to your inbox.

Paramount+ has renewed Criminal Minds: Evolution for third season just a day before its second season is scheduled to premiere.

The show, which is a revival of the original Criminal Minds that ran for 15 seasons on CBS from 2005 to 2020, features much of the same core cast as in the final years of the original run, including Joe Mantegna, Paget Brewster, A.J. Cook, Kirsten Vangsness and Aisha Tyler.

The first season of Evolution featured Zach Gilford as Elias Voit, an unsub serial killer who blossomed during the COVID-19 pandemic by creating a network of followers, but was revealed to to be part of a mysterious Gold Star program in the season finale.

Season 2 (Season 17 in the series overall) of Evolution is set to premiere on Paramount+ June 6, 2024.

The latest announcement means the show will now run through Season 3 (Season 18 overall). A premiere date for the latest season has not been announced.

Production on Evolution Season 2 was significantly delayed due to the WGA-SAG-AFTRA strikes, within filming not resuming until January 2024 despite it being renewed about a year before.

Evolution is on Disney+ in select international markets.

See more here:

Paramount+ renews 'Criminal Minds: Evolution' for third outing - NewscastStudio

Everything in biology ultimately boils down to food and sex. To survive as an individual you need food. To survive as a species you need sex.

Not surprisingly then, the age-old question of why giraffes have long necks has centered around food and sex. After debating this question for the past 150 years, biologists still cannot agree on which of these two factors was the most important in the evolution of the giraffes neck. In the past three years, my colleagues and I have been trying to get to the bottom of this question.

In the 19th century, biologists Charles Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck both speculated that giraffes long necks helped them reach acacia leaves high up in the trees, though they likely werent observing actual giraffe behavior when they came up with this theory. Several decades later, when scientists started observing giraffes in Africa, a group of biologists came up with an alternative theory based on sex and reproduction.

These pioneering giraffe biologists noticed how male giraffes, standing side by side, used their long necks to swing their heads and club each other. The researchers called this behavior neck-fighting and guessed that it helped the giraffes prove their dominance over each other and woo mates. Males with the longest necks would win these contests and, in turn, boost their reproductive success. That favorability, the scientists predicted, drove the evolution of long necks.

Since its inception, the necks-for-sex sexual selection hypothesis has overshadowed Darwins and Lamarcks necks-for-food hypothesis.

The necks-for-sex hypothesis predicts that males should have longer necks than females, since only males use them to fight, and indeed they do. But adult male giraffes are also about 30% to 50% larger than female giraffes. All of their body components are bigger. So my team wanted to find out if males have proportionally longer necks when accounting for their overall stature, comprised of their head, neck and forelegs.

But its not easy to measure giraffe body proportions. For one, their necks grow disproportionately faster during the first six to eight years of their life. And in the wild, you cant tell exactly how old an individual animal is. To get around these problems, we measured body proportions in captive Masai giraffes in North American zoos. Here, we knew the exact age of the giraffes and could then compare this data with the body proportions of wild giraffes that we knew confidently were older than 8 years.

To our surprise, we found that adult female giraffes have proportionally longer necks than males, which contradicts the necks-for-sex hypothesis. We also found that adult female giraffes have proportionally longer body trunks, while adult males have proportionally longer forelegs and thicker necks.

Giraffe babies dont have any of these sex-specific body proportion differences. They only appear as giraffes are reaching adulthood.

Finding that female giraffes have proportionally both longer necks and longer body trunks led us to propose that females, and not males, drove the evolution of the giraffes long neck, and not for sex but for food and reproduction. Our theory is in agreement with Darwin and Lamarck that food was the major driver for the evolution of the giraffes neck, but with a emphasis on female reproductive success.

Giraffes are notoriously picky eaters and browse on fresh leaves, flowers and seed pods. Female giraffes especially need enough to eat because they spend most of their adult lives either pregnant or providing milk to their calves.

Females tend to use their long necks to probe deep into bushes and trees to find the most nutritious food. By contrast, males tend to feed high in trees by fully extending their necks vertically. Females need proportionally longer trunks to grow calves that can be well over 6 feet tall at birth.

For males, Id guess that their proportionally longer forelegs are an adaptation that allows them to mount females more easily during sex. While we found that their necks might not be as proportionally long as females necks are, they are thicker. Thats probably an adaptation that helps them win neck fights.

But giraffes necks arent their only long feature. They have very long legs, proportionally, which contribute to their height almost as much as their necks. Their long legs come at a considerable cost, though particularly for male giraffes. A disproportionate fraction of their body mass is stacked on top of their spindly front legs, which can lead to injury and mobility issues in the long run.

Graham Mitchell, a prominent giraffe biologist, has called the giraffe body a shape to die for. In captivity, where staff can determine the cause of death, well over half of male giraffes die from foreleg problems, which shortens their lifespan by 25% compared with females. Very few female giraffes die from health issues related to their legs.

Giraffes height also means they cant climb up steep slopes very well. My teams research has shown that this limitation has likely stopped them from traveling across the escarpments of the Great Rift Valley in East Africa. But the mating advantage from being tall must outweigh these costs to their health and mobility.

This research isnt ruling out the necks-for-sex theory entirely. The long neck likely does play a critical role in male neck-fighting and winning a mate. But our research suggests that male neck-fighting was probably a side benefit that came along with females getting better access to food.

In the future, my team will look into the genetic factors that led to the giraffes extraordinary stature and physique. We want to trace and reconstruct the evolutionary path they took to reach toward the skies.

Excerpt from:

Female giraffes drove the evolution of long giraffe necks in order to feed on the most nutritious leaves, new research ... - The Conversation

Ive known Dan Brooks for 40 years now. Somehow were still talking to each other.

Weve followed radically different trajectories since first meeting back in the 80s. Over the decades, Dan built a truly impressive rap sheet as an evolutionary biologist, with over 400 papers and book chapters, seven books, and too many awards, fellowships, and distinctions to count on your fingers and toes. I, in contrast, left an academic career in marine biology in a huff (industry funding came with, shall we say, certain a priori preferences concerning the sort of results wed be reporting) and became a science-fiction writer. Its a position from which, ironically, Ive had more influence on actual scientists than I ever did as an academicadmittedly a low bar to clear.

And yet our paths continue to intersect. Dan offered me a post-doc in his lab around the turn of the century (DNA barcodingI really, really sucked at it). A few years later I helped him relocate to Nebraska, leading to an encounter with the armed capuchins of the United States Border Patrol and eventual banishment from that crumbling empire. The protagonist of my novel Echopraxia is a parasitologist suspiciously named Daniel Brks. And I once ended up one creepy handshake away from Viktor Orbn, when Dan finagled a speaking gig for me at Hungarys iASK Symposium.

The dance continues. Sometimes we hug like brothers. Sometimes we feel like punching each others lights out (also, I suppose, like brothers). But one thing we never do is bore each otherand whenever Dans in town, we manage to meet up at a pub somewhere to reconnect.

What follows is an edited record of one such meeting, more formal than most, which took place shortly after the publication of A Darwinian Survival Guide, authored by Dan and evolutionary biologist Salvatore Agosta.

In this corner, the biosphere. Weve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; were wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and were losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And were expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.

In response to all of this, the last COP (Conference of the Parties, the annual international climate change meeting held by the United Nations) was held in a petrostate and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company; the next COP is pretty much the same thing. Were headed for the cliff, and not only have we not hit the brakes yet, we still have our foot on the gas. In that corner: Dan Brooks and Sal Agosta, with a Darwinian survival guide. So, take it away, Dan. Guide us to survival. Whats the strategy?

Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what were dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we dont change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanitys future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but thats the behavior were seeing now.

Stepping back a bit, Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didnt want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, Its OK; I can fix Darwinism. This guys name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, I can fix Darwinism. Well just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of whats-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, were going to call it survival of the fittest, and its whatever is best now. Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from evolution is long-term survival to evolution is short-term adaptation. And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Well, fast-forward and hows that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencers ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwins ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwins original message, we not only find an explanation for why were in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

Why is it that human beings are susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea and are not?

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually dont think thats in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. Whats really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call technological humanity, or better said technologically-dependent humanity, to survive.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, theyre going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and theyre dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that weve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who cant survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. And so, if there is the kind of nature collapse that the Melbourne Sustainable Studies Institute is talking about, how are those people going to survive?

A completely dispassionate view would just say, Well, you know, most of them wont. Most of them are going to die. But what if it turns out that we think that embedded within all of that technologically dependent society there are some good things? What if we think that there are elements of that existence that are worth trying to save, from high technology to high art to modern medicine?

In my particular case, without modern medical knowledge, I would have died when I was just 21 years old of a burst appendix. If I had managed to survive that, I would have died in my late 50s from an enlarged prostate. These are things most would prefer not to happen. What can we begin doing now that will increase the chances that those elements of technologically-dependent humanity will survive a general collapse, if that happens as a result of our unwillingness to begin to do anything effective with respect to climate change and human existence?

So to be clear, youre not talking about forestalling the collapse

No.

youre talking about passing through that bottleneck and coming out the other side with some semblance of what we value intact.

Yeah, thats right. It is conceivable that if all of humanity suddenly decided to change its behavior, right now, we would emerge after 2050 with most everything intact, and we would be OK. We dont think thats realistic. It is a possibility, but we dont think thats a realistic possibility. We think that, in fact, most of humanity is committed to business as usual, and thats what were really talking about: What can we begin doing now to try to shorten the period of time after the collapse, before we recover?

In other wordsand this is in analogy with Asimovs Foundation trilogyif we do nothing, theres going to be a collapse and itll take 30,000 years for the galaxy to recover. But if we start doing things now, then it maybe only takes 1,000 years to recover. So using that analogy, what can some human beings start to do now that would shorten the period of time necessary to recover? Could we, in fact, recover within a generation? Could we be without a global internet for 20 years, but within 20 years, could we have a global internet back again?

Are you basically talking about the sociological equivalent of the Norwegian Seed Bank, for example?

Thats actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy. This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.

Well, that said, thats kind of a repeated underlying foundation of the book, which is that evolutionary strategies are our best bet for dealing with stressors. And by definition, that implies that the system changes. Life will find a way, but it wont necessarily include the right whales and the monarch butterflies.

Right, right. Yeah.

And you take on quite explicitly the neo-protectionists, who basically want to preserve the system as it exists, or as it existed at one point in the idealized past, forever without end, as opposed to allowing the system to exercise its capacity to change in response to stress. You cite anoxic ocean blobs; you cite, quite brilliantly I thought, the devastating effect beavers have on their local habitat.

Yeah.

And you take on the sacred spirit animal of the World Wildlife Fund, the polar bear. And the bottom line here is that shit happens, things change, trust life to find a way, cause evolution hasnt steered us wrong yet.

Yeah.

Now, this is an argument that some might say can be invaded by cheaters. I read this and I thought of the Simpsons episode where Montgomery Burns is railing to Lisa, and he says, Nature started the struggle for survival, and now she wants to call it off because shes losing? I say, hard cheese! And less fictitiously, Rush Limbaugh has invoked essentially the same argument when he was advocating against the protection of the spotted owl. You know, life will find a way. This is evolution; this is natural selection. So, I can see cherry-picking oil executives being really happy with this book. How do you guard against that?

Anybody can cherry-pick anything, and they will. Our attitude is just basically saying, look, heres the fundamental response to any of this stuff. Its, hows it working out so far? OK? Theres a common adage by tennis coaches that says during a match, you never change your winning game, and you always change your losing game. Thats what were saying.

One of the things thats really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings dont like to hear bad news, especially if it means that theyre personally responsible for the bad news. And thats a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.

This is neo-protectionist languagethat any change is going to collapse the biosphere. Thats bullshit.

There seems to be a mismatch within our brainthis is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So thats why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and thats why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation. Because everything that human beings have done for 3 million years has seemed like a good idea at the time, but its only been in the last 100 or 150 years that human beings have begun to develop ways of thinking that allow us to try to project future consequences and to think about unanticipated consequences, long-term consequences of what we do now. So this is very new for humanity, and as a consequence, its ridiculous to place blame on our ancestors for the situation were in now.

Everything that people did at any point in time seemed like a good idea at the time; it seemed to solve a problem. If it worked for a while, that was fine, and when it no longer worked, they tried to do something else. But now we seem to be at a point where our ability to survive in the short term is compromised, and what were saying is that our way to survive better in the short term, ironically, is now based on a better understanding of how to survive in the long run. Were hoping that people will begin seriously thinking that our short-term well-being is best served by thinking about our long-term survival.

What youve just stated is essentially that short-term goals and long-term goals are not necessarily the same thing, that one trades off against the other. When you put it that way, it seems perfectly obviousalthough I have to say, what youre advocating for presumes a level of foresight and self-control that our species has, shall we say, not traditionally manifested. But yeah, a widely adhered-to view of evolution is a reactive onethe pool is drying up, and evolution looks at that and says, oh my goodness, the pool is drying up! We should probably get those fish to evolve lungs. Whereas what evolution actually does is say, oh look, the pool is drying up! Good thing that fish over in the corner that everybody picked on has a perforated swim bladder; it might be able to, like, breathe air long enough to make it over to the next pool. Too bad about all those other poor bastards who are going to die. And to hone that down to a specific example that you guys cite in the book, youre saying high fitness equals low fitnessthat you need variation to cope with future change.

Right.

So optimal adaptation to a specific environment implies a lack of variation. When youre optimally adapted to one specific environment, you are screwed the moment the environment changes. And the idea that high fitness equals low fitness is what I call a counterintuitive obvious point: It is something that seems oxymoronic and even stupid when you first hear it, but when you think about it for more than two seconds, its likewho was it that responded to The Origin of Species by saying, Of course! How silly of me not to have thought of it myself. Ive forgotten who said that.

A lot of biology professors, who then wrote articles about how they actually had thought of it for themselves, but nobody paid any attention to that!

And that might be one of the more essential values of this bookthat it reminds us of things we should already know, but never thought about rigorously enough to actually realize.

Shifting gears to another key point in the book: democracy, which you describe as the one form of government that allows the possibility of change without violence. But you also admit, and this is a quote: Our governance systemslong ago co-opted as instruments for amplified personal power have become nearly useless, at all levels, from the United Nations to the local city council. Institutions established during 450 generations of unresolvable conflict cannot facilitate change because they are designed to be agents of social control, maintaining what philosopher John Rawls called the goal of the well-ordered society. They were not founded with global climate change, the economics of well-being, or conflict resolution in mind.

So what you are essentially saying here is that anyone trying to adopt the Darwinian principles that you and Sal are advocating is going to be going up against established societal structures, which makes you, by definition, an enemy of the state.

Yes.

And we already live in a world where staging sit-down protests in favor of Native land rights or taking pictures of a factory farm is enough to get you legally defined as a terrorist.

Thats right. Yeah.

So, how are we not looking at a violent revolution here?

Thats a really good point. I mean, thats a really critical point. And its a point that was addressed in a conference a year ago that I attended, spoke in, in Stockholm, called The Illusion of Control, and a virtual conference two years before that called Buying Time, where a group of us recognized that the worst thing you could do to try to create social change for survival was to attack social institutions. That the way to cope with social institutions that were non-functional, or perhaps even antithetical to long-term survival, was to ignore them and go around them.

So let me give you an example: I was speaking with member representatives of a rural revitalization NGO in Nebraska a year ago, and they said, OK, this rural revitalization stuff and climate migration, this sounds like a really good idea. How are we going to get the federal government to support these efforts? And I said, Theyre not going to. I said, You have to understand that in the American situation, the two greatest obstacles to rural revitalization and climate migration are the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is a party of big cities; they dont want to lose population. The Republican Party is the population of the rural areas; they dont want people from the cities moving into their areas. Both parties are going to be against this. This is why Joe Bidens, you know, the climate president, but hes not doing nearly enough. Not even close. Because these people are all locked into the status quo.

And so I told these people, I said, You dont ask for permission, and you dont go to the federal government. You go to the local towns in these rural areas and you say, What do you need? What do you want? You then advertise for the kinds of people you want to come in. You want to have electricity self-sufficiency in your town. You need somebody who knows how to build and maintain a solar farm. Advertise for people like that in the big cities. Get them to come and live in your town. Dont ask the government; do the right thing. Never ask for permission; just do the right thing. Theyre not going to pay any attention to you. And these people said, Yes, but then if were successful, the politicians will come in and claim credit! And I said, So what? Who cares! Let them come in, do a photo op, and then they go back to Washington D.C. and theyll forget you.

Maybe. But in cases where its been tried, the power utilities step in and squash such efforts as though they were bugs. Set up solar panels and the utility will charge you for infrastructure maintenance because by opting out of the grid, youre not paying your fair share. Drive an electric vehicle and you might be subject to an additional road tax because, by not paying for gasoline, youre not paying for road work. The system actively works to make these initiatives fail. And this power goes beyond just stifling progress. They have control of armed forces; they have a monopoly on state violence. We are not allowed to beat up the cops; the cops are allowed to beat us up.

I suppose I have more faith in human nature than is warranted by the evidence. Sal and I do not think such local initiatives will be easy or that they will mostly succeedat least not until things are so bad that they are the only workable option. What we are saying is that these local initiatives are the Darwinian response to trouble (move away from trouble, generalize in fitness space, and find something that works), and if we recognize trouble early enough, we can opt to begin surviving now. At the same time, during climate perturbations, lots of organisms do not make it, so we need as many individual efforts as possible to increase the chances that someone will survive.

There is evidence that some people are doing this, sometimes with the blessing of local and state authorities and without arousing the interest of national authorities. What people need to do is have a commitment to survival, decide what their assets are and their local carrying capacity, and then go about doing the right thing as quietly as possible. As for your point about state violence: What happens if the cops in a small town are the people you go to church with?

Thats an interesting question.

Thats the point. I mean, what were trying to find out, one of the experiments that rural revitalization and, and climate migration is going to resolve for us, is, what is the largest human population that can safeguard itself against being taken over by sociopaths? Let me explain what I mean. Generally speaking, the larger the population, the smaller the number of people who actually control the social control institutions. So you have five different language groups in the city, but somehow it turns out that the people in charge of the religion, or the banks, or the governance only represent one of those language groups. They end up controlling everything. This is a breeding ground for sociopaths to take control.

And sure enough, by about 9,000 years ago, when this is all in place, we begin to see religious and governance and economic institutions all support the notion of going to war to take from your neighbors what you want for yourself. And weve been at war with ourselves ever since then, and this was not an evolutionary imperative; this was a societal behavioral decision. Its understandable, in retrospect, as a result of too many people, too high a population density. So you live in circumstances where people cannot identify the sociopaths before theyve taken control. And thats the subtext in the idea that one of the ways that we should deal with the fact that more than 50 percent of human beings now live in large cities in climate-insecure places, is for those people to redistribute themselves away from climate-insecure areas, into population centers of lower density, and cooperating networks of low-density populations, rather than big, condensed cities.

Life will find a way, but it wont necessarily include the right whales and the monarch butterflies.

Lets follow this move back to the rural environment a bit, because its fundamental. I mean, you brought it up, and it is fundamental to the modular post-apocalyptic society youre talking about.

Sure. Not post-apocalyptic: post-collapse.

Post-collapse. Fair enough. So, another quote from the book: Neo-protectionists compliment the ever-larger citys perspective by suggesting that the biosphere would be best served if humans were maximally separated from the wild lands.

Right.

This makes no sense to most humans, and that is why no post-apocalyptic or dystopian novel or film depicts large cities as places of refuge and safety during a crisis. Just putting up my hand, I can vouch for that, having written my share of apocalyptic sci-fi.

Nobodys running to the cities.

Any attempt to separate humans from the rest of the biosphere would be detrimental to efforts to preserve either. And I believe at some other point you reference neo-protectionist arguments that we should put aside half of the natural life

Yeah. Thats E.O. Wilsons half

And putting aside, for the moment, my sympathies for that sentimentin defense of the neo-protectionists, all of human history says that whenever we interact with nature, we pretty much fuck it up.

No. It doesnt say that. First of all, when you talk of most of human history, youre talking about the last thousand years, 2,000 years, 3,000 years. What has been the actual historical record of humans for the last 3 million years?

I take your point. And its a legitimate point when you talk about a global human population, that you mention, in the millions. But were at a population of 8 billion now. So accepting, wholesale, without argument, your argument that cities are basically wasteful, unsustaining, pestholes of disease and so on

That benefit a few people a lot, and treat the great majority as a disposable workforce.

Yeah. But we still are dealing with a planet in which 94 percent of mammalian biomass on this planet is us and our livestock, so how does that kind of biomass integrate intimately with what remains of our natural environment without just crushing itor are you anticipating, like, a massive cull of a

But, see, youre repeating a bunch of truisms that are not borne out by the actual evidence. We dont crushHomo sapiens doesnt crush the biosphere. Homo sapiens interacts with the biosphere in ways that alter it. See, evolutionary alteration of the environment does not mean collapse. It means change. This is the neo-protectionist languagethat any change is going to collapse the biosphere. Thats bullshit. I mean, what human beings are doing to the biosphere right now is nothing compared to what blue-green algae did to the biosphere 4 billion years ago.

Absolutely.

And what happened? Us, OK? The Chicxulub asteroid: If it hadnt killed the dinosaurs, there would be no us.

I actually, personally, find comfort in the idea that there have been, what, five major extinction events? And that in every single case, there has been a beautiful, diverse

Because there was sufficient evolutionary potential to survive.

Exactly.

Not because a whole bunch of new magical mutations showed up.

Right. But, it took anywhere from 10 to 30 million years for that to happen

So?

and I would argue that most peopleI mean, Im kind of on your side in this, but Im also increasingly sympathetic to the human extinction movement. I think most people are hoping for recovery in less geological terms, timescale-wise.

This is a really critical point, because this, then, loops back to the whole Asimovs Foundation thing. Do we wait 30,000 years for the empire to rebuild, or can we do it in 1,000 years? Thats what were talking about. We have great confidence that the biosphere is going to restore itself, withinyou know, no matter what we do, unless we make the whole planet a cinder, the biospheres going to restore itself within, you know, 10 million years. Whatever. Thats fine. And weyou know, some form of humanitymay be part of that, or may not.

But the reality is that what we want to do, as human beings, is we want to tip the odds in our favor a little bit. We want to increase the odds that were going to be one of those lucky species that survives. And we know enough to be able to do that. We now know enough about evolution to be able to alter our behavior in a way thats going to increase the odds that well survive. So the question is, are we going to do that?

So this whole business of whether or not, you know, whats going to happen in 3 million yearsyoure right: Thats not important. But what happens tomorrow is not important either. Whats important is what happens in the first generation after 2050. Thats whats important. That first generation after 2050 is going to determine whether or not technological humanity reemerges from an eclipse, or whether Homo sapiens becomes just another marginal primate species.

Reprinted with permission from the MIT Press Reader.

Lead image: kkonda / Shutterstock

Posted on May 31, 2024

Peter Watts is a Hugo Award-winning science-fiction author and a former marine biologist. His most recent novel is The Freeze-Frame Revolution.

Cutting-edge science, unraveled by the very brightest living thinkers.

Read more here:

The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt? - Nautilus

Image source: Louvre Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I recently finished reading science writer Philip Balls new book,How Life Works: A Users Guide to the New Biology. Ball is a gifted writer and science communicator, making this a pleasant volume to read. But what I found most fascinating is how often Ball, in describing this new biology, feels the need to appeal to design language despite his overt disavowal of any support for intelligent design. Its almost as if the evidence forces his hand against his will!

The main thrust of the book is that a reductionist genetic essentialism is no longer a tenable view of how life works. DNA is not a simple blueprint for building an organism. The instructions contained in the genome are subject to interpretation by a myriad of cellular and organismal systems rendering it impossible to make any predictions about the phenotype of an organism simply by analyzing its genotype. In Balls view, agency acts at all levels of organismal structure (shades of Denis Noble) making the processes of life far more complex and dynamic than the old gene-centered view allowed for. But in making this argument, Ball is forced into employing design tropes and explicit design language in ways that I think even he finds a bit embarrassing given his desire to remain biologically orthodox.

To be clear, Ball makes his anti-ID stance explicit near the end of the book: I do want to be clearthat there is no obvious challenge in any of what I have said or say hereafter to the core principles of Darwinism or perhaps we should say of neo-Darwinism (453). And about the appearance of agency in evolution he says, There need be nothing mystical about the question it is not a backdoor for intelligent design (460). Ball feels the need to assure his readers of his biological orthodoxy, but this just serves to emphasize how aware he is that what he says about how life works could easily be seen to support design thinking. Examples of this abound.

To start, Ball recognizes the intractable problem at the heart of origin-of-life scenarios:

The fact that DNA can only be made with the help of proteins (such as DNA polymerase), and that proteins can only be made with the help of DNA, poses a chicken-and-egg conundrum for how the whole shebang could have got started when life on Earth began (109).

Kudos to Ball for recognizing this problem. Unfortunately, he simply ignores the more important question of whether this conundrum renders naturalistic origin-of-life scenarios moot. He certainly offers no naturalistic explanation himself. He just leaves the conundrum hanging and ignores its larger significance.

On the matter of junk DNA, Ball praises the ENCODE project for showing that much of the human genome actually has function, and he further recognizes that this does not sit well with many evolutionary biologists. He cites Ford Doolittle to the effect that if most of the human genome is not junk, we would have to be unique among animals. Doolittle scornfully termed this genomic anthropocentrism. But Ball pushes back in defense of ENCODE, writing, To accuse an internationally renowned team of scientists of opening the door to intelligent design is akin to an ideological accusation of a betrayal of the faith (123). Ball doesnt see it this way. He supports the findings of ENCODE even as he rejects intelligent design. But his language becomes more and more design-laden as he goes.

Consider his discussion of intrinsically disordered proteins, proteins that remain in a mostly unfolded state until they are needed to perform a function at which time they take on the appropriate form. Ball (citing Polish cancer researcher Ewa Grzybowska) says of intrinsically disordered proteins that they enable cells to respond quickly to a change in circumstances, giving access to a wide variety of possible routes for transmitting and directing signals that are and this is crucial! not programmed into the system (164). But how do cells know how to respond in unprogrammed ways to unexpected circumstances? Is Ball implying some sort of cellular or even molecular cognition similar to that considered by Barbara McClintock in the 1980s? He does not say (though later it appears he is leaning this way). Once again, he tantalizes us with non-Darwinian, ID-friendly possibilities, but simply ignores the obvious implication.

However, when we get to Balls discussion of causal emergence, the cat is out of the bag. He calls causal emergence a general design principle for life (217). And in a discussion of body-patterning processes in embryonic development he writes:

Here again we can see one of natures design principles: to find the right balance between top-down, bottom-up, and middle-out mechanisms for building organisms, so that adaptation and variation can happen, and innovations dramatic new solutions to the challenge of design are possible without producing a dangerous sensitivity to small changes (330).

So nature and life possess design principles, do they! And where might these principles have come from? A designer, perhaps? Ball again has nothing more to say. He once again tantalizes us with overt design language and then moves on.

Ball goes on:

Indeed, even single, functional biomolecules like proteins represent their environment in a sense, for example in the way that the polypeptide chains are designed to fold on the assumption that they will do so in water, and the way enzymes have active sites that in a sense anticipate their respective target ligands (361).

Ball tries to protect himself here by the use of scare quotes. But he really cant have it both ways. If polypeptide chains are designed to fold in water, then they are designed to fold in water and there must have been a designer. If they are not designed, then their ability to fold in water must be the result of undirected material processes. And if the latter, why bother to use the wordsdesignandanticipateonly to undermine their meaning by using scare quotes? Clearly the evidence for design is compelling to Ball, but he must try to maintain his commitment to biological orthodoxy at the same time, leading him to twist himself into a bit of a pretzel.

In another defensive move, Ball has this to say:

I have talked here about cellsdecidingtheir fate:electingwhich valley of the landscape to go down. This sounds like very anthropomorphic language, but it neednt be. After all, we speak routinely of computer systems making decisions too, especially in artificial intelligence (262, emphases in the original).

Does Ball really want to go down this road? Computer systems make decisions only because they have been designed that way by their intelligent creators. No decision-making computer has ever arisen as the result of an undirected physical process. If the existence of decision-making computers implies the existence of an intelligent computer engineer, then the existence of decision-making cells likewise would imply the existence of an intelligent creator of those cells. Balls analogy threatens to undermine his whole anti-ID stance.

To go even further, Ball favorably quotes biologist Dennis Bray:

living cells have an intrinsic sensitivity to their environment a reflexivity, a capacity to detect and record salient features of their surroundings that is essential for their survival. This feature is deeply woven into the molecular fabric of living cells (263).

Ball doesnt even exclude the possibility of cellular sentience. And yet, to maintain credibility with his scientific readers, he simply cant bring himself to entertain the obvious conclusion being forced upon him by the accumulating biological evidence: Neo-Darwinism is dead, but intelligent design is looking more and more likely.

I appreciate Balls willingness to fully engage with this emerging dynamic view of how life works. He is right to pronounce the old gene-centered view dead on arrival, even if it is being kept artificially alive in many quarters due to fears that the alternative doesnt fit so neatly with naturalism. Yet despite Balls strenuous disavowal of intelligent design,How Life Worksjust might be one of the more important ID books to appear in recent years. And that irony should not be lost on anyone.

Read the original:

Intelligent Design in a Non-ID Book - Discovery Institute

Share this Article

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license.

Researchers have unveiled insights into the origins of the common German cockroach.

It turns out the cockroach, Blattella germanica, found across the globe, is a pest of our own making.

For centuries, the German cockroach has thrived in close proximity to human populations, infesting homes, apartment buildings, work offices, and other structures.

Unlike many other pest species, which have natural populations in diverse habitats, German cockroaches have no known natural populations, says Edward Vargo, professor of urban entomology in the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Department of Entomology. They rely solely on human activity and manmade structures.

For years, many scientists have wondered where these household pests originated and how they came to scurry across our kitchen floors.

The new research addresses these lingering questions by diving deep into the DNA of cockroaches from across six continents. Their analysis uncovers the evolution of this insect species and sheds light on the German cockroachs close association with human habitats.

While their name might indicate origins in Germany, that name came from a taxonomist presented with a specimen from Germany, but that is not considered their origin.

Many people speculated over the years that the species origins came from Africa or Asia, Vargo says. It has been intriguing to find out that those who said Asia were right all along.

The study provides a detailed genetic analysis that shows German cockroaches originated from the Asian cockroach approximately 2,100 years ago. Alongside this development, the cockroaches began to adapt to human-built environments, eventually leading to a dependence on living inside manmade structures.

These cockroaches are known for their small size, resilience, and ability to thrive indoors. In addition to their dependence on human-built structures, they have also relied on human transportation for dispersal. As civilizations and travel advanced, it turns out our crisscrossing the world included the German cockroach as a secret passenger.

What is truly interesting here is how fairly recent that evolution occurred and how the German cockroachs origin is related directly to its association with humans, Vargo says.

Understanding the origins and evolution of the German cockroachs spread across the world is a crucial discovery for understanding the challenges these pests present. New infestations still occur through the transport of infested items like furniture, appliances, moving boxes, and travel bags.

The adaptability and resilience of this species has also led to a resistance to many different insecticides. Vargo says this reality enhances our understanding of what we might expect from this species in the future and prompts us to consider new and innovative ways to mitigate their presence in our daily lives.

Understanding the German cockroachs history and how quickly it adapted to human habitations and evolved is important because it relates to the pest control resistance of the species now, Vargo says.

Knowing how they came to exist and thrive can help us better understand how the species might adapt and cause more issues worldwide.

The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: Texas A&M University

View original post here:

German cockroaches have humans to thank for their evolution - Futurity: Research News

Evolution is often thought of as a haphazard process acting on an assortment of traits that randomly appear through genetic variation.

So much so that if we were to wind back the clock on evolution and "replay the tape of life," the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said, he doubts "anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again."

But a new study of stick insects suggests that evolution may sometimes repeat itself in a predictable manner, which could help our understanding of how organisms may change in response to selection pressures.

Patrik Nosil, an evolutionary biologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, and colleagues studied the camouflage patterns of stick insects, primarily Timema cristinae. With 30 years of field study data from 10 separate locations, they found repetition is a key part of stick insect evolution.

Since the 1990s, Nosil and colleagues have been netting the flightless insects from along roadsides in the mountains near Santa Barbara, California.

Three distinct varieties of T. cristinae camouflage themselves, either with white stripes or a plain green color to match their favored host plants, or a rarer darker shade. The stick insects only lay eggs once a year, so each year in the study represented a new generation of stick insects, without overlap.

With more than 32,000 insects netted and cataloged, the team could tease apart the trends finding that in all 10 of the geographically separated populations, the frequency of green and striped stick insects cycled year to year in a predictable way. If stripes became less common one year, they increased the next, and vice versa.

However, the proportion of rarer, dark-toned insects, which blend into the forest floor, stayed fairly low and stable over time.

"Our results imply that evolution is both repeatable and complex for the same trait," Nosil and colleagues write in their published paper.

The findings are reminiscent of past studies trying to understand why evolution keeps making (and unmaking) crabs, with their side-scuttling body plans, hardy shells, and outsized claws. Research has also shown that other organisms, such as stickleback fish, have a similar tendency to evolve the same traits again and again.

However, most of those findings are from studies of one or a few populations, or short lab experiments that aren't long enough to capture the emergence of genetic mutations that might give rise to useful traits.

This new study harks back to decades-old questions of determinism and chance in the history of life, but it could have future implications too. Scientists not involved in the work think that understanding that evolution sometimes works in predictable ways could help researchers predict how organisms change and therefore manage populations.

But since Nosil and colleagues only looked at T. cristinae and its relatives, they can only speculate how the results may differ in other taxa or if evolution is similarly predictable in other parts of the animal kingdom and plant world, too.

There certainly seems to be a stack of examples now, from moths and butterflies to fish, finches, sheep, and deer, of species following predictable evolutionary paths, returning to tested traits that help them survive.

The study has been published in Science Advances.

Read the original here:

Astonishing Study Shows Evolution Really Does Repeat Itself - ScienceAlert

Cal linebacker Cade Uluave was limited during spring, but his impressive freshman campaign now has him locked in as one of the leaders on a defense in transition.

Uluave had one session with the media during spring practice.

Whats the key to staying engaged?

Definitely been on the mental side of the ball, as our far as our defense goes, defense changes every year. So we're going to have to adjust and adapt.

And for me to be in the film room, getting mental reps, this huge for me because, I'm not able to get on this field yet.So getting those mental reps every play, watching myself will keep me engaged and keep me ready for whenever I step on the field.

On his freshman breakout campaign

Personally, coming in as a freshman I wasn't expecting to play a whole lot to be honest. And so when my time came, I knew how to set things up. And I knew had to be that guy and, run the defense and everything. And so what I did well is I felt like I learned the defense really well, adjusted really well.

I was able to make some plays and what not and just bond with the defense and learn the defense better, which is what's really helped me.

Some things that I can work on is probably being, like I said earlier, being more mental in the game, being able to understand different formations, what the offense is trying to run, different pass concepts and run concepts out of each formation and personnel group.

And so just that and then also being an alpha on the field as a freshman, having a season under my belt, now it's time for me to level up on the field, be more of a leader and be more of a better teammate.

On the game slowing down for him

I think my my first rep against defense against Oregon State, I was in there and I was like, what happened?

And so then the, last few games, Im reading everything read my keys, everything's going smoothly. And I just felt more confident like a better player. And so the game slowed down.Everything's making sense more.

And so I strive to get better each day and improve myself as a player or a person athlete, whatever it may be.

On confidence going into sophomore year

I think my game will excel and level up, got to keep working, got to stay hungry. Can't be good with where I'm atsatisfied.

Got to keep going. Keep leveling up each day, daily thing.

On working with the running backs last year helped him

I was like, cool, Like this could be cool. I was kind of open to whatever.

I was like, because I had to get on the field. However, I can get on the field and make plays and contribute to a team I was up for. And so going with the running backs was an adjustment, was fun . You got to run the ball, you score touchdowns, whatnot.

But also I am grateful for switching to running back for those few weeks because I was able to understand more of the offense and what the offense is trying to do in the objectives offense are trying to do and then apply it to defense.

I know what the offense is trying to run and it just helps me sense we have to make better plays and stuff.

What do you think of how the defense has come together this year so far?

Defense, it's good. I think it's I think it's solid defense. I think we're going to level up our game and we're going to be a force to be reckoned with. Got some new transfers and everything.

And those guys seem to be learning the system really well.There's ball making plays, having fun, just learning it, being confident and just going out and doing our thing.

On the new inside linebackers

They're doing great. I think they're adapting really well, learning the defense and everything, especially from our new guys, are new freshmen coming in early. You can tell they put in the time in the film room and got extra reps and worked on their technique to, you know, contribute to the team.

On the weight

Probably around the 235 range. You know, maybe I could go down to 230, maybe go to 240 if I'm feeling good. But aanywhere in that range is where I'm comfortable and last year, I was about 220, towards the end of the season, probably 222, 223.

So, you know, I was able to get it up and you got to make sure you can still move it up a little bit more and not lose a step. We're able to track our speed and everything. And so as I was putting on weight, I was able to keep my speed.

Read the original here:

Cal LB Cade Uluave on his evolution from freshman standout to defensive leader - Write For California

In a village near the ancient Silk Road town of Yarkand, on the edge of the Taklamakan desert in the far-western region of Xinjiang, the gongzuodui has been busy. The term means work team. In Xinjiang it refers to a group of officials dispatched to a poor rural area to change the way Muslim residents live and think. In this village, called Konabazar, the team has been engaged in ideological mobilisation. The aim is to persuade reluctant farmers to head off and do other forms of work.

It is all but impossible for journalists to find out what those ethnic-Uyghur farmers made of the work teams efforts, which involved lecturing villagers at flag-raising ceremonies and holding night-school classes. Since early 2017, when China began sending a million or more people, most of them Uyghurs, to vocational education and training centres (detention camps, in effect), it has become increasingly difficult to get first-hand accounts from victims of Chinas repression in Xinjiang. The state justifies its actions in the name of stamping out terrorism, separatism and religious extremism. Western scholars believe the camps were wound down around 2020. But they say official accounts, such as the report about Konabazar, suggest widespread forced labour is still being used for a similar purpose.

Originally posted here:

The evolution of forced labour in Xinjiang - The Economist

The exceptionally named necks-for-sex hypothesis of giraffe evolution suggests their long necks are the result of competition among males, but new research suggests it could be something much more prosaic.

Male giraffes practice neck sparring, violently swing their necks into each other to assert dominance, so the hypothesis formed that males with longer necks mayhave been more reproductively successful.

But, more recently, biologists have proposed that neck length may instead be driven by females foraging behaviour. Being able to forage deeply into trees for otherwise difficult-to-reach leaves would be an advantage for females, who have increased nutritional demands due to gestation and lactation.

Now new research has found that female Masai giraffes (Giraffa tippelskirchi) have proportionally longer necks and trunks than males.

The necks-for-sex hypothesis predicted that males would have longer necks than females, says Doug Cavener, a biologist at Pennsylvania State University in the US and lead author of the study in the journalMammalian Biology.

And technically they do have longer necks, but everything about males is longer; they are 30% to 40% bigger than females.

The researchers analysed photos of hundreds of wild and captive Masai giraffes to investigate the relative body proportions of each species and how they might change as giraffes grow and mature.

The female has a proportionally longer axial skeleton a longer neck and trunk and are more sloped in appearance, while the males are more vertical, says Cavener.

This supports previous research, which found female South African giraffes (G. giraffa) have proportionally longer necks than males.

Rather than stretching out to eat leaves on the tallest branches, you often see giraffes especially females reaching deep into the trees, he says.

Giraffes are picky eaters. They eat the leaves of only a few tree species, and longer necks allow them to reach deeper into the trees to get the leaves no one else can.

Once females reach four or five years of age, they are almost always pregnant and lactating, so we think the increased nutritional demands of females drove the evolution of giraffes long necks.

The researchers also found that adult male giraffes have longer forelegs and wider necks than females, probably to assist in mating and for male neck sparring behaviours, respectively.

If female foraging is driving this iconic trait as we suspect, it really highlights the importance of conserving their dwindling habitat, Cavener says.

The team is also using genetics to better understand which males are successful at breeding, with the aim to guide conservation efforts for this endangered species.

Populations of Masai giraffes have declined rapidly in the last 30 years, in part due to habitat loss and poaching, and it is critical that we understand the key aspects of their ecology and genetics in order devise the most efficacious conservation strategies to save these majestic animals.

Continued here:

"Necks-for-sex hypothesis of giraffe evolution challenged - Cosmos

Summary

Criminal Minds: Evolution has officially been renewed for season 3. While Criminal Minds has been airing since 2005, its new era, Criminal Minds: Evolution, began with season 16 of the series. Criminal Minds: Evolution season 2 season 17 of the overall series airs its first two episodes on June 6. From there, Criminal Minds: Evolution season 2 will air episodes weekly on Thursdays through the end of July.

Per Variety, Criminal Minds: Evolution has now been renewed for season 3. This season will go into production later this year, likely following the end of Criminal Minds: Evolution season 2. Casting information has yet to be announced, but it will likely feature a number of recurring cast members from the previous iterations of the series.

The timing is key for the renewal of Criminal Minds: Evolution. While any renewal announced this week would be considered a fairly early renewal for the series, Paramount+ has decided to renew the show before the season 2 premiere airs. This indicates that Criminal Minds: Evolution is a huge point of focus for Paramount+, as the network clearly has faith in it.

Criminal Minds: Evolution introduced a controversial new character, and in the upcoming season 2, they're going to bring more chaos to the BAU.

This faith is a great sign for the shows longevity, as increased confidence in Criminal Minds: Evolutions ability to succeed may come with perks like an increased budget. Over the years, Criminal Minds has lost key players including Shemar Moores Derek Morgan, who left Criminal Minds after season 11, when Moore sought other creative opportunities. Showrunner Erica Messer has since indicated that Moore is unlikely to make even a cameo appearance, due to his starring role on the TV series S.W.A.T.

Even with this major cast departure and other changes over the years, Paramount+ is confident in the success of the show given its early renewal. The upcoming season of the show will feature the core team of investigators as they look into the Gold Star mystery. On this quest, they have to face a vicious serial killer named Elias Voit. Criminal Minds: Evolution season 2 features cast members Joe Mantegna, Krsitin Vangsness, Aisha Tyler, A.J. Cook, Ryan-James Hatanaka, Paget Brewster, and Adam Rodriguez who make a great ensemble.

Criminal Minds: Evolution is available to stream on Paramount+.

Source: Variety

In Criminal Minds: Evolution, the FBIs elite team of criminal profilers come up against their greatest threat yet, an UnSub who has used the pandemic to build a network of other serial killers. As the world opens back up and the network goes operational, the team must hunt them down, one murder at a time. Original cast members continuing their roles include Joe Mantegna, A.J. Cook, Kirsten Vangsness, Aisha Tyler, Adam Rodriguez and Paget Brewster. Zach Gilford joins the dynamic cast as a recurring guest star in a season-long arc.

Expand

Original post:

Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 3 Renewed By Paramount+ - Screen Rant