Category Archives: Evolution

Dobbs details little brother' Jennings' evolution from QB to receiver  NBC Sports Bay Area

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Dobbs details little brother' Jennings' evolution from QB to receiver - NBC Sports Bay Area

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Reconstructed life position of Helicolocellus on Ediacaran seafloor

Credit: YUAN Xunlai

Prof. YUAN Xunlai from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his team have discovered a late Ediacaran crown-group sponge,Helicolocellus, from the Shibantan Biota in Hubei Provincea fossil biota dating to about 550 million years ago., cause there is a spelling error in the original version.

This finding, which fills an important gap in the early evolution of sponges, was published in Nature on 5 June.

Sponges are often considered to be the most basal and primitive metazoan phylum. Early sponge fossils can provide important clues to the origin and early evolution of animals. Molecular clock estimates and controversial biomarker data suggest that sponges should have appeared around 700 million years ago. Enigmatically, however, no unambiguous sponge fossils have been found before the Cambrian Period (about 539 million years ago). Therefore, a 160-million-year gap exists in the sponge fossil record, a period in early sponge evolution known as the "lost years."

Two competing hypotheses have been proposed to explain the absence of Precambrian sponges: One hypothesis holds that, since most extant sponges have siliceous or calcareous spicules, the common ancestor of sponges also had mineralized spicules. Under this hypothesis, the absence of Precambrian sponge fossils can be attributed to poor preservation potential due to the chemical composition of porewaters. The other hypothesis holds that the common ancestor of sponges was non-biomineralizing animals. Only after the emergence of major classes did they independently evolve biomineralized spicules. Therefore, early Precambrian sponges lacked spicules, thus making it difficult for these sponges to be preserved and identified in the fossil record.

The newly discovered Helicolocellus shows morphological characteristics similar to those of glass sponges (Hexactinellida), such as a radially symmetric conical body, a discoidal attachment structure, a possible central cavity, and inferred excurrent canals. In addition, the surface of Helicolocellus consists of regular boxes, each of which is divided into four similar but smaller boxes, which in turn are subdivided into even smaller ones. This unique grid pattern is also found in some typical Paleozoic hexactinellids. Their shapes and structures are very similar; however, the grids in Helicolocellus are made of organic matter, whereas the grids in Paleozoic sponge fossils are made of biomineralized spicules. This study suggests that Helicolocellus may represent an early sponge without biomineralized spicules.

To further test this interpretation, the researchers constructed a morphological data matrix containing several extant and fossil animals and performed a rigorous phylogenetic analysis. The results show that Helicolocellus belongs to the crown group of sponges and is closely related to the hexactinellids.

The discovery of Helicolocellus indicates that non-biomineralizing sponges did exist in the Precambrian. It suggests that modern sponges should not be used as the sole guide for finding Precambrian sponge fossils, as early sponges may not have had biomineralized spicules and may not have had all the features of modern sponges. Moreover, early hexactinellid sponges first laid out the reticulate skeletal blueprint using organic material, and later added siliceous biominerals to the recipe for skeletal formation in the Cambrian.

Fossil assemblages on either side of the Ediacaran-Cambrian boundary are extremely disparate. The Ediacaran Period is dominated by the enigmatic and phylogenetically unknown Ediacara Biota, while in the Cambrian, modern marine ecosystems begin to take shape with the emergence of extant animal phyla. The discovery of Helicolocellus bridges the Ediacaran and Cambrian fossil assemblages, indicating that the Ediacara Biota have evolutionary links to Cambrian animals. As one reviewer commented, the discovery of Helicolocellus may be the "Rosetta Stone" for understanding animal evolution.

Observational study

Not applicable

A late Ediacaran crown-group sponge animal

5-Jun-2024

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Fossil discovery reveals early evolution of sponges - EurekAlert

Pyrite sulfur 34S values as a function of the natural logarithm of pore water sulfate concentration (r2 = 0.52). Colors correspond to TOC concentration. The solid black line is the line of best fit, with the equation y = 8.4ln([SO4]) 3.4. The two dashed black lines are parallel to the line of best fit and run 20 above it and 16 below it. Johns Hopkins University

One of Earths most consequential bursts of biodiversitya 30-million-year period of explosive evolutionary changes spawning innumerable new speciesmay have the most modest of creatures to thank for the vital stage in lifes history: worms.

The digging and burrowing of prehistoric worms and other invertebrates along ocean bottoms sparked a chain of events that released oxygen into the ocean and atmosphere and helped kick-start what is known as the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, roughly 480 million years ago, according to new findings Johns Hopkins University researchers published in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

Its really incredible to think how such small animals, ones that dont even exist today, could alter the course of evolutionary history in such a profound way, said senior author Maya Gomes, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. With this work, well be able to examine the chemistry of early oceans and reinterpret parts of the geological record.

To better understand how changes in oxygen levels influenced large-scale evolutionary events, Gomes and her research team updated models that detail the timing and pace of increasing oxygen over hundreds of millions of years.

They examined the relationship between the mixing of sediment caused, in part, by digging worms with a mineral called pyrite, which plays a key role in oxygen buildup. The more pyrite that forms and becomes buried under the mud, silt, or sand, the more oxygen levels rise.

Researchers measured pyrite from nine sites along a Maryland shoreline of the Chesapeake Bay that serves as a proxy for early ocean conditions. Sites with even just a few centimeters of sediment mixing held substantially more pyrite than those without mixing and those with deep mixing.

The findings challenge previous assumptions that the relationship between pyrite and sediment mixing remained the same across habitats and through time, Gomes said.

Conventional wisdom held that as animals churned up sediments by burrowing in the ocean floor, newly unearthed pyrite would have been exposed to and destroyed by oxygen in the water, a process that would ultimately prevent oxygen from accumulating in the atmosphere and ocean. Mixed sediments have been viewed as evidence that oxygen levels were holding steady.

The new data suggests that a small amount of sediment mixing in water with very low levels of oxygen would have exposed buried pyrite, sulfur, and organic carbon to just enough oxygen to kick-start the formation of more pyrite.

Its kind of like Goldilocks. The conditions have to be just right. You have to have a little bit of mixing to bring the oxygen into the sediment, but not so much that the oxygen destroys all the pyrite and theres no net buildup, said Kalev Hantsoo, a doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins and first author on the article.

When the researchers applied this new relationship between pyrite and the depth of sediment mixing to existing models, they found oxygen levels stayed relatively flat for millions of years and then rose during the Paleozoic era, with a steep rise occurring during the Ordovician period.

The extra oxygen likely contributed to the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, when new species rapidly flourished, the researchers said.

Theres always been this question of how oxygen levels relate to the moments in history where evolutionary forces are ramped up and you see a greater diversity of life on the planet, Gomes said. The Cambrian period also had a massive speciation event, but the new models allow us to rule out oxygen and focus on other things that may have driven evolution during that time.

Trends in estuarine pyrite formation point to an alternative model for Paleozoic pyrite burial, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (open access)

Astrobiology, Astrogeology

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An Unlikely Hero In The Evolution Of Life On Earth: Worms - Astrobiology - Astrobiology News

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Evolutionary radiation strategy revealed in the Scarabaeidae with evidence of continuous spatiotemporal morphology ... - Nature.com

Its a common cliche that college is a time of change, of finding yourself as you enter into adulthood. Its a cliche for a good reason according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, 30% of undergraduates change their major at least once within their first three years. On top of that, 10% of undergraduates change their major more than once.

Anecdotally, it certainly feels as though my friends and I have been circling closer and closer to finding a future path that rings true to ourselves. I was pre-med when I started at UW, and after a year, I decided to switch to humanities a story that Ive heard echoed by many of my peers.

Initially, I was worried about money, like many. I didnt see a way forward in the humanities that would provide me the kind of life I wanted. I realized, though, that I have a real passion for linguistics, and Ive never looked back. Its incredibly refreshing to learn things that truly excite you.

The paths people take in college are often unique and individual, so I interviewed three other seniors about their college journeys at UW..

John Stephenson is a graduating history major, who began in business.

I started out at WSU in Pullman, Stephenson said. And my plan was to be a finance major there. I didn't actually really have a clear goal of what I wanted to do. I just figured I'll major in finance because that seems like a decent path to make money.

After realizing he didnt find his business classes fulfilling, Stephenson transferred to Bellevue College while he decided what he wanted to do.

I was still taking a couple of business classes, and then I applied to transfer to UW and I applied to the Foster School of Business and didn't get in, Stephenson said. So that was the point that told me, Yeah, I dont think business is my future. What I discovered is I have a passion for history throughout taking all these courses, whether at Bellevue or UW. I've always taken history courses and I always liked it a lot more than business.

Stephenson eventually intends to pursue a legal career.

I think [majoring in history] changed the way I look at the world, Stephenson said. I find it a little bit more applicable to my daily life than what I would learn in finance. My history classes have taught me how to look at the world through, like, more of a critical lens.

Grant Kulberg is a senior graduating with degrees in geography (emphasis on cities and migration) and political science.

Originally I was going for computer science, Kulberg said. I'm a transfer from community college; I went to North Seattle here ... I took humanities, I took political science and geography courses, and they just immediately clicked with me in a way that computer science classes just weren't.

Kulberg switched to political science, and then transferred to UW to pursue that program.

I think it was last summer when I added on the geography major, Kulberg said. It was mostly because I had already taken a bunch of geography courses. Geography has been my best subject for as long as I can remember, from elementary school even. It felt really good to finally just embrace that and to find out I was pretty much on track to graduate at the same time with a new major, even though I was halfway through another one.

Before college, Kulberg moved to Seattle as a contractor for the Google campus, with goals to eventually work at Microsoft.

During that time at Google, there were a lot of factors that led me towards political science, Kulberg said. In 2019 I was a part of the unionization push at Google, at least in the Seattle area, and we were able to win a contract for the Seattle metro area.

Kulberg wanted to continue with labor rights work with his political science degree, but found that the courses were better suited for students who wanted to be lawyers or go into politics. This led Kulberg to search for courses that were more aligned with his goals.

Once I started taking geography courses, I started realizing that some of those opportunities were more prevalent within geography, Kulberg said. And since then, a lot of my career goals have shifted towards public sector service, more of developing and improving things within government. I am really focused on transit and/or housing.

Kulberg is 28, making him older than many of his graduating class. He believes that waiting to go to college helped him achieve his goals in the long run.

If I had gone [to college] earlier, I think I either would have stuck it out with computer science, or dropped out completely, Kulberg said. I was in the culinary industry for 10 plus years, I've done some of the worst jobs imaginable as well, and I think that has really influenced me to think about the things that affect the everyman.

Angela, the last senior I interviewed, is a comparative literature major who switched minors during her college years. She started out as a Russian literature minor.

I literally went to university being like, I know that I like two things. I like reading Slavic and Eurasian history and literature, so not just Russia, but all the Eastern and Central European, Central Asian [literature], Angela said. I also knew that I really liked sci-fi, but I was not going to be a STEM major. So I took Russian literature courses.

She felt as though the choice was random, and was embarrassed to tell people her minor. After her 100-level Russian professor took a leave of absence to write a textbook, she found the classes more difficult with the new professor, and decided to make a change.

I met someone who I started dating who studies ACMS (applied & computational mathematical sciences), Angela said. He was like, Instead of trying to do a Russian minor, do a data science minor, because if you think about it, it's not that different from the analytical or observation-based work that you do in literature.

Angela found more and more intersections between literature and data science.

Data science or critical data studies, which is what more of what I do, is not really dissimilar to literary studies, Angela said. If you think of the text as data, and you're performing that kind of analysis and forming these connections and thinking of the broader significance, thats what you do when youre trying to put together an analysis based on the data collected.

Angela says that the data science minor has opened doors for her career-wise, and she wants to work with philanthropists who tend to need lots of data analysis.

She also took lots of science fiction courses, and wrote her English honors thesis on the genre. She emphasized that not everything at university has to contribute to a future career.

Angela said her key takeaway was to not feel like she had lost anything by switching minors.

Regretting past experience, it doesn't make any sense to do that, because you just build upon past experiences; that's life, Angela said. Prioritizing doing what you like I think that's what motivated all this. I know not a lot of people can afford to do that, but I'm glad that I had the chance to just have fun with it.

No matter the path they had to take, these three students found ways to make their time at UW fulfilling. Eventually, you find a way to make it meaningful whether you open up career options you had never thought of, or major in something youre passionate about.

Although not every major guarantees you a job or wealth or status, there is something valuable to pull from in every pathway. There is no shame in taking a windy, twisted road to your degree. The key to your future could lie around any corner.

Reach writer Samantha Ahlhorn at specials@dailyuw.com. X: @samahlhorn

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The evolution of dreams | Grad Edition 2024 | dailyuw.com - Dailyuw

Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 2 (aka Criminal Minds Season 17) debuts Thursday, June 6. Heres how to capitalize on a limited-time Paramount Plus deal to watch the new episodes online for less.

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InEvolutionSeason 1, the BAUs elite profilers went up against Elias Voit, an UnSub who had spent the COVID pandemic cultivating a network of serial killers. Season 2 picks up as the team investigates the mystery of Gold Star. As that conspiracy unfolds, the BAU is met with an unexpected complication when Voit negotiates a deal that transfers him to federal custody, in the BAUs own backyard.

Paget Brewster (as Emily Prentiss), Joe Mantegna (David Rossi), A.J. Cook (JJ Jareau), Kirsten Vangsness (Penelope Garcia), Aisha Tyler (Dr. Tara Lewis) and Adam Rodriguez (Luke Alvez) are all returning as are both Zach Gilford (as Voit) and Ryan-James Hatanaka (as onetime person of interest Tyler Green). Additionally former S.H.I.E.L.D. directorClark Greggis now heading up the FBI, and Desperate Housewives Felicity Huffman will show up as Jason Gideons ex-wife.

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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.

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

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.

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The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt? - Nautilus

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

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.

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Astonishing Study Shows Evolution Really Does Repeat Itself - ScienceAlert