Category Archives: Evolution

DANVERS Not all food truck owners want to open a permanent cafe or restaurant, but lately, some have decided to roll with the idea.

Two local food businesses on wheels, Cookie Monstah of Danvers and Joes on a Roll in Beverly, have opened or are in the process of opening a storefront. Meanwhile, the Goodnight Fatty cookie pop-up in Salem has a semi-permanent location along the alley of Higginson Square, while its founders set about building a commercial kitchen.

Cookie Monstah has opened a bake shop at 75 Newbury St., whileJoes on a Roll plans to open a takeout window this summer on Federal Street in Beverly.

Bill Samenfink, dean of the School of Hospitality Management at Endicott College, said gourmet food trucks are an evolution from the canteen trucks that used to serve workers at construction sites.

They have their advantages over brick-and-mortar restaurants.

Its a lower cost of capital for a startup business, Samenfink said. It gives you more flexibility because you can go to where the people are. Food trucks also provide a boost to local businesses, such as craft breweries, that often dont serve food.

Its not a given, however, that a food truck will morph into a restaurant or cafe.

I dont think its the main goal of people starting out with a food truck, Samenfink said.

Joes on a Roll

The Joes on a Roll food truck (its a trailer pulled by a pickup) can be found during the season on Water Street, Friday through Sunday, and at the Beverly Farmers Market on Monday afternoons. It originated from the Birarelli familys lobster business.

Three years ago, Nicki Birarellis husband, Joe, a commercial fisherman, died from liver cancer at age 45. Now, two of their three sons, Tim, 20, and Tom, 17, run two lobster boats, Shooting Star and Hat Trick, respectively. Their third son, Trey, is 14.

I started Joes on a Roll in honor of my husband, Nicki Birarelli said. The lobsters that feed the food truck come fresh from her boats.

Joes on a Roll is now in its third season since Birarelli first outfitted the trailer, added a logo, and parked it on Water Street. Its menu is simple: lobster rolls for $14, hot dogs for $3, clam and corn chowda or lobster bisque, each for $6.

The first year in business, she sold 5,700 lobster rolls; last year, more than 10,000.

I think its caught on, Birarelli said. Our community has been so welcoming and so wonderful.

To grow the food truck business, Birarelli needs her own commercial kitchen, so she bought a commercial building on Federal Street. The plan is to create a walk-up, takeout location there.

I think it will be a nice addition to the neighborhood, she said.

Cookie Monstah

Cookie Monstah, which sells cookies and ice cream sandwiches in downtown Boston, is the brainchild of Melissa Missy Gale and her family. Gale is the foodie and the baker, who learned to bake from her mother, Rita.

After studying hospitality at Boston University, she prepared desserts for West Street Grill, Locke-Ober and other restaurants, according to the company website. She opened her own bakery at Filenes Basement named Dessert Oasis.

After selling the bakery, she worked in management for Starbucks for eight years.

I learned so much about the integrity of the product, she said. A little over six years ago, the mother of four, her husband, Scott Lindeman, and her brother, were all out of work at the same time. Gale, who has the entrepreneurial bug, said the only way to get her back into baking would be with a food truck.

They built one, and July will mark the sixth anniversary of the Cookie Monstah. They are now building out their fifth truck.

It was never our plan to go brick and mortar, Gale said. But after outgrowing one location in Danvers, they rented a space on Route 1, doing the baking out back. But Gale asked her husband to save some space up front. She thought the bake shop would only serve vanilla and chocolate ice cream, and be a place where someone would pick up cookies on their way home from work.

Now, they have 19 seats and serve 10 flavors, and the cafe is busy from 2 to 9:30 p.m.

The town has taught me something, Gale said. Not only was there a need for another hangout, but there is just something about the fun of the throwback of just having cookies and ice cream.

Goodnight Fatty

Goodnight Fattys co-owners Jennifer Pullen and Erik Sayce, both 29, say their goal is tomake their pop-up cookie business sustainable.

After starting their late-night cookie pop-up last fall, they toured Salem eateries, popping up at Notch Brewery and Tap Room, Ugly Mug Diner, Deacon Giles Distillery, Far from the Tree Cider, Bitbar and Derby Joe.

The engaged couple, who have day jobs at Salem Academy Charter School, have leased space from the multimedia production company Sperling Interactive in downtown Salem for a pop-up on Friday and Saturday nights.

The pop-up is accessed through a storefront on Higginson Square, an alley that runs from Essex Street behind the block of buildings along Washington Street that contain Rockafellas restaurant. Pullen, who has a background in food safety, said customers often find them by following the scent of freshly baked cookies.

But to make sure their business remains viable, not only have they leased space, they are building a new commercial kitchen on Jefferson Avenue, which could also serve as a base for delivery orders or catering. They are renting a commercial kitchen at the moment.

Right now, the goal is not a food truck or a cafe. They want to make sure they can keep their cookies popping up.

We sell cookies and milk and thats it, Sayce said. And I think that the more simplistic and the more honed in we can keep it, the better.

The No. 1 conclusion that we came to when we thought of this idea, Pullen said, was if we do this, we are going to keep it clean and simple.

Staff writer Ethan Forman can be reached at 978-338-2673, by email at eforman@salemnews.com or on Twitter at @DanverSalemNews.

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Food truck evolution: Some food truck owners moving toward more ... - The Salem News

Our May Insights puzzle was inspired by recent discoveries of some rare, intriguing patterns of inheritance that hark back to Jean-Baptiste Lamarcks theory of evolution and its emphasis on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Elementary textbooks often present Lamarcks theory as a failed 19th-century rival to Charles Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection. But reality, as usual, is far more complicated. There is indeed a great deal of evidence that most acquired characteristics are not inherited, but as the new findings have shown, this proscription is not absolute. The famous verkalix study, for example, showed that men who were exposed to a poor food supply between the ages of 9 and 12 were found, two generations later, to have conferred a measurably lower risk of diabetes and cardiovascular death to their grandchildren. Adaptive Lamarckian inheritance does seem to be possible, and epigenetic mechanisms for it have been found. These mechanisms modify DNA in ways that differ from those of heredity.

But at a deeper level this kind of inheritance can be naturally selected for in the traditional Darwinian way, provided certain environmental conditions are satisfied. So Darwinian natural selection remains the fundamental basis of evolution and can produce Lamarckian inheritance: The theories are not rivals after all! Using simple models, our puzzles show how natural selection can sustain Lamarckian inheritance. The requirement is that environmental conditions, such as famines, follow patterns that persist across several generations and are repeated over long stretches of evolutionary time.

Imagine there exists an animal that has a new generation every year. Every normal individual has an average of 1.6 surviving offspring in a normal year, which can be defined as the animals fitness (lets call itf), after which the animal dies. During a famine year,ffalls to 1.3.Now suppose there are a bunch of smaller individuals whosefvalues are 1.5 in normal years but 1.35 in famine years: Their smaller food requirement helps them survive famines better. How long would a famine have to last for the small individuals to do better than normal ones? How many famine years before small individuals make up 90 percent of the population?

The basic mathematics of natural selection is simple. For every group, you just multiply the fitness numbers across multiple generations. You then find the ratio between the numbers you obtain for the different groups. This gives you their relative populations, assuming that the initial numbers were the same. (Note that these numbers dont signify the actual populations of each group, but they indicate their relative success. If f is larger than 1, then the product may grow extremely large after many generations. In the real world, there are many checks on the population of a species, so at equilibrium, the population is actually stable. What does change are the relative ratios between the populations of the different groups, which are accurately reflected in the above calculation.)

For Question 1, assuming we start from a normal year, we have to find a positive integer n such that 1.5 x 1.35n > 1.6 x 1.3n. You can do this analytically using logarithms or by setting up a spreadsheet and reading off the values. After two years of famine, the smaller individuals already have a population over 50 percent. (If you want to bookend the famine with normal years on either side, then it requires four years of famine for the small individuals to be ahead of the normal ones a year after the famine is over.)

As Ty Rex noted, for smalls to make up more than 90 percent of the population, the number of famine years needs to be greater than [log(9) + log(1.6/1.5)]/log(1.35/1.3) ~ 59.9. So, 60 famine years are needed for smalls to make up 90 percent of the population.

Suppose there exists an initially normal mutant group of individuals called Epi2s, whose germ cells are affected by a year of famine in such a way that their progeny changes to the small type for two generations before they revert back to normal in the third generation, through epigenetic mechanisms. Consider a 13-year period that starts and ends with normal years but has a one-year famine, two two-year famines and a three-year famine in between. Which of the three groups (normals, smalls, Epi2s) will be most successful? Are there famine patterns in which Epi2s overwhelm the other two groups over the very long term?

As a couple of commenters noted, there is an ambiguity here: What happens when Epi2s that have changed to the small type encounter a year of famine? Is their status reset and do they continue to be smalls for another two years, or do they continue on their original timetable and revert to normals two years after the original famine year? Most commenters assumed the former. I had the latter in mind, because otherwise the Epi2s behave very much like smalls in extended famines. In any case, the choice of the assumption does not change the answer to this question. As Ty Rex noted, if we start with equal populations, the ratios between the normals, smalls and Epi2s become 85.5 to 83.8 to 86.1, assuming Epi2s reset, so the Epi2s do best by a small margin. If there are no resets, then Epi2s do even better, their relative ratio going up to 87.4. With no resets, Epi2s are adapted to famines that are three years long, so the pattern NFFFNFFF gives them an even larger advantage over the other two groups. With this pattern, Epi2s will make up 90 percent of an initially evenly divided population in 329 years.

Lets add another type of animal to the above: the Epi1s, which like the Epi2s switch to small progeny after a famine, but in this case the progeny revert back to normal after just one generation. Over a period of 20 years, can you come up with a famine-year schedule such that all four types of animals (normals, smalls, Epi1s and Epi2s) exist in virtual equilibrium over this time period?

For this question, note that the numbers of the normal and the small groups are only affected by the number of famine and nonfamine years and not their temporal arrangement. So we have to find a positive number of nonfamine years n such that 1.6n1.320-n is as close as possible to 1.5n1.3520-n. This happens for seven nonfamine and 13 famine years, which gives a relative ratio of 813 to 845 for normals to smalls. How do the years need to be arranged to equalize the numbers of Epi1s and Epi2s? As noted above, without resets, Epi2s are best adapted to famines that last three years, and similarly, Epi1s are best adapted to famines that last two years. So our 20-year pattern needs to have famines of both these durations. The pattern NFF NFFF NFF NFFF NFF NFN meets all the conditions mentioned and gives relative scores of 809 for Epi1s and 817 for Epi2s on the above scale, which are both within 0.5 percent of the number for normals. This seems to be the best approach to virtual equilibrium.

So what these simple models teach us is that it is possible to come up with environmental conditions that will lead natural selection to favor epigenetic inheritance across generations if the selecting factor (here, famine) occurred frequently enough in an animals evolutionary history in the right pattern. Furthermore, there can be patterns that maintain different groups of the species at relatively constant numbers, ready to take advantage of a change in climate, rendering the species as a whole more stable and prepared for several different eventualities.

As I discussed in the puzzle column, scientists have found molecular mechanisms that can implement these transgenerational changes by suppressing the activity of certain genes through the attachment of methyl groups (DNA methylation) or through changes in the configuration of the protein that packages the DNA (histone modification). Transgenerational inheritance is even easier in small organisms that do not go through a germ cell stage, such as bacteria. These organisms can use even more efficient mechanisms that have allowed the evolution of the spectacular DNA-cutting system called CRISPR, which is currently revolutionizing genetic engineering. This system uses bits of DNA called transposons or jumping genes that can jump around from one location to another in genomes. Its amazing what natural selection can achieve in evolutionary time!

Thanks to all who participated in this Insights puzzle. I enjoyed reading your comments and especially my dialogue with Josh Mitteldorf. The Quanta T-shirt goes to Ty Rex. Congratulations!

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Solution: 'Darwinian Evolution Explains Lamarckism' - Quanta Magazine

1 : one of a set of prescribed movements

2a : a process of change in a certain direction : unfoldingb : the action or an instance of forming and giving something off : emissionc (1) : a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state : growth (2) : a process of gradual and relatively peaceful social, political, and economic advanced : something evolved

3 : the process of working out or developing

4a : descent with modification from preexisting species : cumulative inherited change in a population of organisms through time leading to the appearance of new forms : the process by which new species or populations of living things develop from preexisting forms through successive generations Evolution is a process of continuous branching and diversification from common trunks. This pattern of irreversible separation gives life's history its basic directionality. Stephen Jay Gould; also : the scientific theory explaining the appearance of new species and varieties through the action of various biological mechanisms (such as natural selection, genetic mutation or drift, and hybridization) Since 1950, developments in molecular biology have had a growing influence on the theory of evolution. Nature In Darwinian evolution, the basic mechanism is genetic mutation, followed by selection of the organisms most likely to survive. Pamela Weintraubb : the historical development of a biological group (such as a race or species) : phylogeny

5 : the extraction of a mathematical root

6 : a process in which the whole universe is a progression of interrelated phenomena

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Evolution | Definition of Evolution by Merriam-Webster

The marketplace is not unlike nature; both are filled with fierce competition, survival and extinction, tremendous diversity, changes to the environment, and seemingly infinite techniques to thrive.

Nowadays, were seeing species especially hard hit by climate change, like polar bears, or species threatened by changes in habitat, such as tigers and other large predatory mammals. And were seeing the marketplace equivalent with markets moving from brick and mortar to online, like the travel industry for example, and other industries natural habitats, if you will, are shrinking, like Western manufacturing.

John Cambers, chairman of S&P 500-listed company Cisco Systems, predicts that within the next 10 years 40% of all businesses will go extinct unless they modify their business models to incorporate new technologies.

Building on the wildlife metaphor, one finds three distinct species of online companies: great white sharks, piranhas, and swordfish. These digital beasts are the companies which can thrive in their new online environment.

The most obvious are the digital great whites. These are the massive online companies companies often native to their digital environments. Google, Facebook and Amazon, to name a few, are perfect examples of the digital great whites and are characterized by diverse product portfolios and massive assets. And with a substantial market presence, it follows that there tend to be very few of these behemoths, much like their aquatic versions.

Where the great white shark has a tremendous appetite to fit its size, a digital great white like Google has to stay competitive by having a presence in many industries. In entertainment, Google has YouTube and Google Play, the dominant Android app distributor. Google Fonts and Web Designer help Google stay competitive in designing software, an area traditionally dominated by Apple, another digital great white. In order to stay at the top R&D is often made a priority and to that end Google has been expanding their artificial intelligence portfolio of late.

The digital piranhas are the species that a digital David Attenborough might want to keep his or her eye on. Companies like these are small but highly competitive and aggressive towards their prey. BlaBlaCar, Shazam and slack are but a few in this school.

Most of these companies stay heavily focused on their products. Unlike the digital great whites, they stay focused on their specific, sometimes even niche, markets and prioritize specialization over diversification. Their competition is almost exclusively those companies that offer the same products. And like real-world piranhas they need to stay fast and fit to have a chance to dominate the market.

The iGaming industry is a perfect example of the fierce competition and product-centric business models that are so prevalent in this digital species. Online casinos bgo and Mr Green offer customers free spins and matched deposits in order to entice customers and stay competitive. The iGaming industry is further representative of digital piranhas inasmuch as they have yet to reach their maturity. By incentive and specialization they are hoping to corner the market and with such fierce competition their products and development can be some of the quickest.

Somewhere lying between piranhas and great whites are the swordfish. Not quite as agile as the piranha, not yet as diverse as the great white, companies like Airbnb, Netflix or Zalando are big and fast enough that they are rarely threatened.

Their market share means that its unlikely they will disappear anytime soon. While digital piranhas can come and go the chances of an Uber, for example, vanishing overnight is unlikely. Still more numerous than the great whites, a few companies tend to lead the way for whatever industry they are in.

IMG_0407(CC BY 2.0)byswruler9284

Nearly at peak growth, these companies still have a chance of growth, but focus on expanding their models on vertical-specific products. To take an example, as a company which started by posting DVDs, then broadband streaming, Netflix is poised to become a global TV and film producer. With series like Marseille, what would have traditionally been reserved to an exclusively French audience can now be viewed around the world thanks to subtitles. Netflix has come quite a way since those red envelopes.For the digital swordfish its vital that they remain innovative enough to begin branching out into industries complementary to their core competencies.

As it is in the animal kingdom, in the digital marketplace evolution holds a great many surprises and none can immediately say what will or wont succeed.

Image Source: 1, 2

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From Piranha to Great White Shark Evolution in the Digital Marketplace - The Merkle

A couple of weeks ago, a white 22-year-old named Sean Christopher Urbanski was accused of fatally stabbing 23-year-old Richard Collins III, an Army Lt., who was black. The incident took place on the University of Marylands campus, which Urbanski attended.

Urbanskis membership in an alt-right Facebook group has led many to believe this was a racially motivated hate crime, though he hasnt been charged with that yet.

No need to think too much about the reason, though, because the Institute on the Constitutions David Whitney knows why it happened. He explained in a sermon at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church that the motivation was wait for it the teaching of evolution.

As in all public schools, evolution is inculcated and it teaches that there is no Creator God and that everything in the universe came into existence by chance and mistake, accident and is wholly without purpose and without meaning of any kind, Whitney preached. [Urbanski] was taught that mankind, including himself, was nothing more than a long compilation of mistakes and mutations and chance occurrences.

We should not be surprised then if Sean, with that background and education, concluded that life is meaningless, without any purpose at all, he continued. Or, if there is a purpose in life, it would be to advance and further the process of evolution; a process in which the strong destroy the weak and indeed, ultimately, that is the purpose for existence. Survival of the fittest therefore has some rather dastardly consequences which we see in the murder committed by a secular humanist of a Christian young man.

Evolution is also the basis of racism, [and] many assert that racism played a role in the motivation for this murder, Whitney said. You see, evolution is essentially racist. So where did Sean Urbanski learn racism? He learned it in his classes on evolution at the local public high school that his parents sent him to and his parents funded that school by the payment of their property taxes.

Thats not how evolution works. Its an explanation, not an excuse. It doesnt mean members of a species just kill each other for the sake of it or that a murder alters the course of how the process works. (Hell, you could make a compelling argument for why evolution promotes altruism and working together, too.)

Furthermore, Whitney never bothers to explain why the rest of us who understand and accept evolution arent running around killing everyone else or why there are so many Christians in jail. Its almost like theres more to an accused murderers mindset that a class he took in high school

But that sort of nuance is too complicated for this guy. Its so much easier to blame anything and everything else for a crime as long as youre not implicated in it.

(via Right Wing Watch)

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Christian Pastor Blames Evolution for a White Student's Alleged Murder of a Black Student - Patheos (blog)

The Hindu

Evolution of mothers in cinema: Mum's the word The Hindu Did screen mothers ever come alive, get real, have a life, in the tiresome days of the Kheer Age? The climax of Johny Mera Naam (1970) is near. Sulochanawhite sari, dishevelled bun, Bombay cinema's widowed mother par excellencehas been ... and more »

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Evolution of mothers in cinema: Mum's the word - The Hindu

Men are attracted to bisexual and gay women and still want to produce offspring with them, claims a new study, which has put forward an explanation for how lesbianism survived and flourished through evolution. The theory has attracted fierce rebuttals.

A team led by Cypriot Menelaos Apostolou from the University of Nicosia interviewed 1,509 heterosexuals both men and women to find out how they would feel about their partner sleeping with the same sex.

It was found that heterosexual women did not desire partners who experienced same-sex attractions, but a considerable proportion of heterosexual men desired partners who experienced same-sex attractions. In addition, it was found that men were more sexually excited than women by the same-sex infidelity of their partners, and they desired more than women, their opposite-sex partners to have sex with same-sex individuals, concluded the study published in Science Direct, as quoted by Pink News.

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More precisely, 34.3 percent of males and only 7.8 percent of women would prefer a partner who is attracted predominantly to members of the opposite-sex but occasionally of the same-sex.

One explanation is that in evolutionary terms, women were not reproductive rivals to straight men.

A woman, driven by her sexual desires, may seek sexual contact outside of her long-term intimate relationship. When this woman has sex with another woman she does not have sex with another man which translates into same-sex contact reducing the risk of cuckoldry,said the study.

Another explanation, put forward by previous studies on the subject, is that a man would welcome the addition of a new woman into his partners social circle as a chance to spread his seed further without repercussion a polyamorous relationship in which everyone benefits.

It is, however, notable that only about 15 percent of those surveyed desired to see bisexual tendencies in their long-term partner.

Conversely, in a mirror scenario women would not presumably benefit from the father of their child being distracted by another suitor, even if male, nor would they desire confusion about the identity of the progenitor of their offspring.

The study has been greeted with hostility from published media, and Twitter, where many accused Apostolou of trying to downplay the existence of lesbianism, or failing to provide robust evidence.

"The paper totally ignores a lot of other possible hypotheses and makes claims that are really not supported by the evidence they provide," Diana Fleischman, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, told the International Business Times.

Beyond the online outrage, there are several questions not addressed by the study. While bisexuals are potentially attractive, what about strictly lesbian women, with no interest in reproducing with men how did they survive? Or homosexual and bisexual men, who, as the study suggests, hold no premium as partners for women looking to reproduce? Also, how transferable are the modern-day attitudes towards lesbians to prehistoric times and relationship models?

I believe also that there are additional factors that need to be taken into consideration if same-sex attraction in women is to be understood, admitted Apostolou to Pink News. The publication of my theory gives the opportunity for a fruitful academic dialogue, where another scholar may attempt to refute, alter, or expand it and replicate my findings.

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Lesbians survived evolution because men found them attractive, claims study - RT

In 1835, the Galapagos Islands shaped the thoughts of a young British naturalist named Charles Darwin, and helped inspire his world-shaking theory of evolution. For that reason, the islands have become something of a Mecca for biologists, who travel there to see the same odd creatures that enthused Darwin.

I like seeing wildlife in general, but some of these creatures have become iconic in evolutionary biology, says Leonid Kruglyak from the University of California, Los Angeles, who visited the Galapagos in 2012. The famous finches, with their well-adapted and variously shaped beaks, are especially famous, but Kruglyak found them underwhelming. He was more drawn to the flightless cormorants.

There are around 40 species of these birds in the world, and all but one of them can fly. The sole exception lives on the Galapagos, and can be seen on the coasts of the Isabela and Fernandina islands, drying its shriveled and tatty wings in the sun. Compared to other cormorants, this one is about 60 percent bigger. Its wings are smaller and its feathers shorter. Its breast muscles, which would normally power a flapping stroke, are smaller, and the part of the breastbone that anchors those muscles is stubbier.

Kruglyak wanted to know why this bird couldnt take to the skies. Specifically, as a geneticist, he wanted to know what genetic changes had grounded it. When he got back to his lab, he reached out to a research team that had collected blood samples from 223 flightless cormorantsalmost a quarter of the total endangered population. He and his own team used these samples to sequence the cormorants genome, then compared its DNA to that of three other cormorant species, looking for mutations that are unique to the flightless one, and that are likely to alter its genes in important ways.

They found a long list of affected genes. Many of these, when mutated in humans, distort the growth of limbs, resulting in extra fingers, missing digits, and other similar conditions. Some of them are also responsible for a group of rare inherited disorders called ciliopathies, where ciliasmall hair-like structures on the surface of cellsdont develop correctly. Cells use cilia to exchange signals and coordinate their growth. If these hairs dont form correctly, many body parts dont develop in the usual way. In particular, some people with ciliopathies grow up with short limbs and small ribcagesa striking parallel with the stunted wings and small breastbone of the flightless cormorant.

All of this is circumstantial. It suggests, but doesnt confirm, that the cormorants flightless wings might result of a kind of benign ciliopathy. To make a stronger case, Alejandro Burga, a member of Kruglyaks team, focused his attention on a couple of genes. One of themIFT122controls the development of cilia across the animal kingdom. The Galapagos cormorant has a single mutation in a part of the gene that is always the same in other species.

The ideal experiment would be to alter the same gene in another species of cormorant, to see if they develop shorter wings. But cormorants arent exactly easy to work with in a lab, so Burga turned to a more amenable animal: the tiny roundworm, C. elegans. He used the gene-editing technique called CRISPR to change the worms version of IFT122 to match the cormorants. And sure enough, its cilia stopped working correctly.

Burga also focused on another gene called CUX1, which controls the activity of many other cilia-building genes. Its especially active in the cartilage-making cells that lay the foundations for our skeletons. And here too, the cormorant has an unusual changeits missing a 12-letter stretch of DNA thats present in almost all other back-boned animals. And when Burga deleted this same stretch from the mouse version of CUX1, the cartilage-making cells divide more slowly.

All of these experiments paint a consistent picture. By building up mutations in several genes, the ancestors of the Galapagos cormorant changed the workings of its cilia and so altered the growth of the cells that form its skeleton. The result: shorter wings, smaller breastbones, and the loss of flight.

Still, there are plenty of missing details. As Kimberly Cooper, from the University of California, San Diego, notes in a piece that was published Kruglyaks results, cilia play important roles all over the body, and humans with ciliopathies have problems with their kidneys, vision, and nervous system. How has the Galapagos cormorant escaped this fate? Do its mutations specifically affect the cilia in its limbs? Or has it evolved safeguards in other organs? Or maybe theyre just weaker mutations, that tweak the function of the genes but dont disrupt them to the same extent as in human ciliopathies, says Kruglyak.

Id love to see similar studies in other lineages of flightless birds, because I imagine there are many different pathways to the loss of flight, says Natalie Wright from the University of Montana, who studies the evolution of flightlessness. She notes that cormorants dive for their food, and shorter wings make them less buoyant and more streamlined underwater. Most species can only shrink their wings so far without disrupting their ability to fly. But when cormorants landed on the Galapagos, they found a paradise with year-round food and zero predators. They didnt need to flee or migrate, so they could fully adapt to a diving life by shrinking their wings.

But other island birds that have become flightless, like rails, pigeons, parrots, owls, and songbirds, arent divers, and wouldnt benefit from shorter wings. Wright suspects that they lost their flight for reasons of efficiency: It takes less energy to grow small flight muscles. Perhaps different genes are involved, she suggests.

A decade ago, it would have seemed implausible to ever test if Wright is right. But Kruglyaks work show just how powerful genetics has become, and how quickly todays scientists can uncover the evolutionary secrets of intriguing animals. In five years, I went from seeing this unusual creature in the wild to doing its genome to getting a lot of good clues about what happened [to its wings], he says.

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How an Icon of Evolution Lost Its Flight - The Atlantic

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The fossilized piece of a cheek bone was spotted in a chunk of sandstone sticking out of the dirt in the scorching badlands of northeastern Ethiopia.

Zeresenay Alemseged knew almost immediately that he had stumbled upon something momentous.

The cheekbone led to a jaw, portions of a skull and eventually collar bones, shoulder blades, ribs and perhaps most important the most complete spinal column of any early human relative ever found.

Nearly 17 years later, the 3.3-million-year-old fossilized skeleton known as the Dikika Baby remains one of the most important discoveries in archaeology, one that is filling in the timeline of human evolution.

When you put all the bones together, you have over 60 percent of a skeleton of a child dating back to 3.3 million years ago, which is more complete than the famous australopithecine fossil known as Lucy,' Alemseged, a 47-year-old professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, told The Washington Post. We never had the chance to recover the face of Lucy, but the Dikika child is an almost complete skeleton, which gives you an impression of how children looked 3.3 million years ago.

The fossil, also called Selam peace in the Ethiopian Amharic language has revealed numerous insights into our early human relatives. But Alemseged said one of the most startling findings comes from the toddlers spine, which had an adaptation for walking upright that had not been seen in such an old skeleton.

The result, he said, is a creature whose upper body was apelike, but whose pelvis, legs and feet had humanlike adaptations.

If you had a time machine and saw a group of these early human relatives, what you would have said right away is, What is that chimpanzee doing walking on two legs? Alemseged said.

The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show for the first time the spinal column was humanlike in its numbering and segmentation. Though scientists know that even older species were bipedal, researchers said Selams fossilized vertebrae is the only hard evidence of bipedal adaptations in an ancient hominid spine.

Yes, there were other bipedal species before, but what is making this unique is the preservation of the spine, which simply is unprecedented, Alemseged said. Not only is it exquisitely preserved, but it also tells us that the human-type of segmentation emerged at least 3.3 million years ago. Could there have been other species with a similar structure, yes, but we dont know for sure.

Human beings share many of the same spinal structures as other primates, but the human spine which has more vertebrae in the lower back, for example is adapted for walking and running on two feet.

Among the larger questions researchers are trying to answer include: When did our ancestors evolve the ability to be bipedal? When did we become more bipedal than arboreal, or tree-dwelling? And when did our ancestors abandon an arboreal lifestyle to become the runners and walkers that eventually populated Africa and then the world?

One of the barriers to those questions is that complete sets of vertebrae are rarely preserved.

Though he has been studying Selam for nearly two decades, Alemseged thinks the fossil has more secrets to share.

I dont think she will stop surprising us as the analysis continues, he said. Science and tech is evolving so much that Im sure in a few years well be able to extract even more information that were not able to extract today.

For many years we have known of fragmentary remains of early fossil species that suggest that the shift from rib-bearing, or thoracic, vertebrae to lumbar, or lower back, vertebrae was positioned higher in the spinal column than in living humans, but we have not been able to determine how many vertebrae our early ancestors had, said Carol Ward, a curators distinguished professor of pathology and anatomical sciences in the University of Missouri School of Medicine, and lead author on the study. Selam has provided us the first glimpse into how our early ancestors spines were organized.

Unpacking the intricacies of Selams spinal structure would not have been possible without the assistance of cutting-edge technology, researchers said.

After 13 years of using dental tools to painstakingly remove portions of the fossil from sandstone which risked destroying the fossil Alemseged packed up Selam in his suitcase and took the fossil from Ethiopia to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, in 2010. Alemseged and the research team spent nearly two weeks there using high-resolution imaging technology to visualize the bones.

The fossil had undergone a medical CT scan in 2002 in Nairobi, Alemseged said, but that scanner was unable to distinguish objects with the same density, meaning that penetrating bones encased in sandstone was impossible. Once in France, that was no longer a problem, and the results, he said, were mind-blowing.

We were able to separate, virtually, the different elements of the vertebrae and were able to do it, of course, without any damage to the fossil, Alemseged said. We are now able to see this very detailed anatomy of the vertebrae of this exceptionally preserved fossil.

The scans revealed that the child possessed the thoracic-to-lumbar joint transition found in other fossil human relatives, but they also showed that Selam had a smaller number of vertebrae and ribs than most apes have.

For researchers, the skeleton is a window into the transition between rib-bearing vertebrae and lower back vertebrae, which allowed our early human ancestors to extend at the waist and begin moving upright, eventually becoming highly efficient walkers and runners.

Though he has been studying Selam for nearly two decades, Alemseged thinks the fossil has more secrets to share with the modern world.

I dont think she will stop surprising us as the analysis continues, he said. Science and tech is evolving so much that Im sure in a few years well be able to extract even more information that were not able to extract today.

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Ethiopia's 'Dikika Baby' offers clues to human evolution | The ... - The Columbian

May 30, 2017 Flounders with different spawning behaviors are two species with distinct evolutionary histories. Credit: left: Mats Westerbom. right: Alf Norkko.

A research group at the University of Helsinki discovered the fastest event of speciation in any marine vertebrate when studying flounders in an international research collaboration project. This finding has an important implication on how we understand evolution in the sea.

The researchers found out the pace at which two groups of flounders in the Baltic Sea became distinct species had been extraordinarily fast, approximately 2400 generations. This is by far the fastest event of speciation in any marine vertebrate to date.

"This is possibly one of the best examples of ecological speciation, that is the process by which selection generates new species, in the marine environment because the species evolved by adapting to different ecological niches, rather than by being separated by geographic barriers for a very long time," says Paolo Momigliano, post-doctoral researcher from the Ecological Genetics Research Unit.

What makes this finding important is that in the marine environment barriers to dispersal are rarely absolute, in other words currents can move larvae around and adult fish swim around. Hence, models of speciation which can act in the absence of complete geographical isolation, such as ecological speciation, have likely played an important role in the evolution of marine biodiversity. Yet, to date, evidence of ecological speciation in the sea is scarce.

"Our study has important implications on how we understand evolution in the sea," confirms Momigliano.

There are new interesting questions for the researchers to solve, such as how are species arising, in some cases at a speed that once would have been thought to be unimaginably fast.

"The answer may lay in so called magic traits, meaning traits that are under selection which at the same time cause reproductive isolation as a byproduct. In theory, selection on such traits could play a central role in rapid speciation events. The mating strategies and reproductive traits of the two flounder species could act as magic traits," clarifies Momigliano.

As the study confirms that there are two species of flounders instead of one, how can you distinguish them from each other?

"They are morphologically nearly indistinguishable but have different spawning behaviors and adaptations. Both species winter in deeper waters and feed in shallow coastal waters in the summer. In spring, however, one species spawns pelagic eggs in deep water basins, where salinity is high enough and eggs can become neutrally buoyant. The second species spawns smaller, but tougher, eggs in shallow coastal waters. These differences have been known for some time, but only now we realize that flounders with different spawning behaviors are two species with distinct evolutionary histories," describes Momigliano.

The flounders are economically important for fishing and their numbers have declined markedly on the Finnish coast. Today, the percentage of pelagic flounders is very small on the Finnish coast, but an ongoing research suggests that in the 1970s and 1980s they made up the majority of the population. The pelagic flounders could not have spawned successfully on the Finnish coast because they require higher salinity. They were probably spawned in the south when conditions were more suitable, and transported to the Finnish coast by the currents. I.e. the Finnish coast was a sink population for the southern type of flounders, much as was the case for cods during the same period. Today we almost exclusively get the demersal species.

Explore further: Reproductive isolation driving evolution of species

More information: Paolo Momigliano et al, Extraordinarily rapid speciation in a marine fish, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2017). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1615109114

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Again, and evident cheat to try to "validate' "evolution". The claim that the two flounders constitute two different species. To be sure, they likely do mate in different areas, have eggs that thrive under different conditions, but that could be a case of two genetic predispositions, like what are termed "phases", in the one population. If sperm from one group of fish were placed into eggs from the other "phase", whether they produce sexually viable offspring will indicate if they are separate species or not. Frankly, if they are all still flounder, they are technically all the same.

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Evolution on the fast laneOne flounder species became two - Phys.Org