"The Evolution Explosion", book review

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New York Times May 27, 2001

Unsafe for Any Species

Evolution that is brought about by humans can be disastrous.

By CARL ZIMMER

No one set out to create dogs. When Paleolithic hunters tossed scraps of meat to some curious wolves, they didn't have a Doberman or a shar-pei in mind. And yet, by creating the conditions that favored doglike traits, our ancestors unconsciously steered their evolution. Since those early days of genetic engineering, we've become more aware of our evolutionary powers. Starting around 10,000 years ago, people began breeding and hybridizing plants and animals, selecting the traits they wanted in their cows and corn, their pigs and potatoes.

Today scientists can graft genes from flounders into strawberries. But despite our accelerating cleverness, much of the evolution we cause is still unplanned. Sometimes it's even disastrous. No one set out to breed strains of tuberculosis-causing bacteria resistant to antibiotics, but we have done just that. According to Stephen R. Palumbi, the author of The Evolution Explosion, it is time we started taking responsibility for our evolutionary actions. We will pay for the consequences if we don't.

As Palumbi explains, scientists now recognize that evolution is not some primordial force that disappeared with the dinosaurs. They can watch it transform animals and plants over the course of years, not eons. On the Galápagos Islands, the beaks of finches expand and shrink as droughts and rains change the supply of seeds the birds eat. When guppies in Trinidad find themselves in ponds full of predators, evolution dulls the flashy red spots that males use to attract females, leaving them with a drab, inconspicuous body. Take away the predators, and gradually the sexy colors re-evolve. We humans create rapid bursts of evolutionary change as well. For decades, fishermen in the Pacific Northwest have caught pink salmon returning to the rivers of their birth to mate. By killing big fish rather than small ones, the fishermen encouraged the evolution of slow growth. Pink salmon have evolved to be two-thirds the size of their ancestors that lived only 50 years ago.

Palumbi, a biologist at Harvard, does an excellent job of showing how man-made evolution is not only real but relevant. A person infected with H.I.V. becomes a Darwinian test chamber, in which viruses continually adapt to their host's immune system and the drugs used against them. The success of the newest anti-AIDS regimens lies in their ability to stop H.I.V. from evolving, at least for the time being. ''We must learn how to control evolution in order to survive the evolutionary skills of H.I.V.,'' Palumbi writes.

The same can be said for the insects that gorge themselves on our crops. They have evolved resistance to just about every pesticide used against them over the past century. Now scientists are offering farmers a new weapon: they have inserted a bacterial gene into plants that produces an insect poison. These plants can grow their own pesticide. This technology may sound like a magic bullet, but Palumbi predicts that it will fail if farmers ignore the reality of evolution. Under a constant, intense pressure to evolve resistance, mutant insects will emerge that can't be stopped by the poison. In order to put off this evolutionary defeat, farmers will have to set aside parts of their fields for ordinary plants. These refuges will shelter insects that do not carry resistance genes, offering them crops they can eat without being poisoned. They will mate with bugs from other parts of the field and stop the resistance genes from becoming too widespread.

Farmers, in other words, will have to sacrifice some of their crops if they don't want resistant insects. Unless they have a firm grip on the facts of evolution, they may be sorely tempted to skip the refuges. If they do, they'll create a race of mutant pests that will ruin everyone's crops.

For the most part, Palumbi has chosen his evolutionary examples well. Even our own biochemistry, he points out, has evolved over the past few thousand years. Cattle-herding peoples who are different in many respects have evolved the same ability to digest milk as adults; genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis may be byproducts of adaptations that protect against cholera and other diseases. And diseases like AIDS and malaria are continuing to shape the human genome.

But when Palumbi turns to the way culture evolves, his book bogs down. In 1976, Richard Dawkins of Oxford University proposed that elements of culture spread and evolve like genes. These ''memes,'' as he called them, could be nothing more than jokes or jingles, or they could be entire technologies or religions. ''Memetics'' -- the study of memes -- is trendy these days, but Palumbi correctly points out that in many ways ideas do not evolve like DNA. Yet his arguments are ultimately unsatisfying, not because they are weak but because memetics is less a science than a grab bag of analogies and untestable thought experiments. Palumbi ends up boxing with a cloud.

He might have made better use of those pages by giving his readers a clearer sense of the ways scientists link the small-scale changes he describes so well to evolution on its grandest scales. The shifting fates of genes from one generation to the next are not what make evolution so astonishing, or so difficult for some people to accept. The bone that really sticks in their craw is evolution's ability to build complex organs and bodies without relying on a blueprint. Life has been evolving for four billion years, and the processes that Palumbi describes have been acting on it since the beginning. By comparing the genes and fossils on different branches of the tree of life, scientists can reconstruct the history that produced the animals, plants and microbes that are still evolving today. ''The Evolution Explosion'' is a good introduction to the Darwinian change that is taking place all around us, but it's far from the whole story.

----------------------

Carl Zimmer is the author of ''Parasite Rex'' and ''At the Water's Edge.''



-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), May 27, 2001

Answers

Junk science!

Humans have never, not once, created evolution, or caused evolution to happen. Despite countless generations of drosophila breeding, never once was a new species produced. Despite millenia of dog breeding, we have yet to see a single new species of dog.

Sure, genetic traits have been recognized and selectively bred forever. But this is not Darwinism, it is not the evolution of species.

Bacteria mutating or evolving to develop resistance to antibiotics is also an untrue statement. Instead, what has happened is that the 'strains' (what we might call 'breeds,' or 'races,' or 'nationalities'- same species, same genotype, different phenotype) that could not resist those antibiotics have all but been eradicated. In their place, the strains that were unsuccesful in competing with the departed strains-- and just by chance resistant to penecillin (and others of that family), have flourished. In essence, weak, or otherwise recessive strains have now come into their own. The good news is that these strains are often not as virulent as their predecessors-- the bad news is that their resistance to antibiotics is often high, and given the opportunity, they just LOVE to infect.

But Evolution? Come ON!!! This is the kind of thing that should be embarassing to Darwinists.

-- ComeON!!! (Too.Silly@To.Believe), May 28, 2001.


"Humans have never, not once, created evolution, or caused evolution to happen."

Humans have never created gravity in the laboratory. Clearly there is no such thing.

-- The REAL Lay Down (on@the.couch), May 28, 2001.


Lars:

"Under a constant, intense pressure to evolve resistance, mutant insects will emerge that can't be stopped by the poison. "

Sorry to suggest that you aren't up to date in the field; it happed in the early 90's. That is when Bt resistant insects were first documented. Long before GMO's. It is those damned organic farmers.

Best Wishes,,,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), May 28, 2001.


I have 6 adult sons. I have measured the length of their little toes with laser instrumentation. Five out of six sons had little toes that were larger than mine.

Ergo, evolution is not a continuum from generation to generation.

-- (Paracelsus@Pb.Au), May 28, 2001.


>>>"Humans have never, not once, created evolution, or caused evolution to happen." Humans have never created gravity in the laboratory. Clearly there is no such thing. from Lay Down

Dear Lay Down: I did not make the leap, nor misleading association, that you did, since my response was directly to the excerpt, which I at least read before responding.

While noting that in the tradition of the Junk Science supporters of Darwinism you do not choose the path of defending Darwinism-- understandably-- you instead adopt the mask of scorn and mockery in addressing the opposition. Not very good science, or even good logic.

But to address your point, I'll extend my statement: Not only has man never produced a new species, asthe article alleges, he has never, not once, observed a new species 'evolve' from a different species. Take it to a unicellular level- never has one bacterium species switched to another. On the other hand, people experience and observe the results of gravity everyday. So your point is... what, exactly?

-- ComeON!!! (Too.Silly@To.Believe), May 29, 2001.



Z: It's unclear to me why you suggested that Lars [or even Palumbi] wasn't up-to-date in the field. I didn't see a time-line mentioned in the article.

Genetics [as usual] is a very interesting phenomenon. I enjoy having red-flowering plants and white-flowering plants, but I've learned to keep them separated lest I create two pink-flowering plants. When I had a garden, I failed to separate the watermelon plants from the cucumber plants, and the result was something that tasted somewhere "inbetween" on both.

Sometimes humans DO interfere with genetics, introducing new breeds [like the Doberman] from different previous breeds of the canine species. Wasn't it Donkeys and Horses mating that produced the new species of Mule [which is sterile?] Maybe it was a Horse mating with a mule that produced Donkeys. I can't remember which way it went without referencing a textbook.

My brother was here for the weekend, and his religious beliefs include creationism. We were sitting on my mom's front porch when I said, "I didn't realize these trees had little berries." Mom couldn't see the berries, so I pulled one off and handed it to her. She tried to pierce it with her fingernail, but then put it in her mouth to pierce it with her teeth. My brother, sister-in-law, and I gasped and all shouted at once, "Don't eat it!" My brother then said something about "Even the birds and animals seem to know which berries are poisonous to them and which aren't." I said, "The evolutionary theory would suggest that birds and animals that didn't know died off, leaving a sortof genetic coding in the surviving species that finds the berries offensive."

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), May 29, 2001.


Too silly said: Not only has man never produced a new species, as the article alleges, he has never, not once, observed a new species 'evolve' from a different species. Take it to a unicellular level- never has one bacterium species switched to another.

That is a very interesting assertion about the bacterium. It6 leads me to wonder: since bacteria reproduce through splitting rather than through mating, and the ability to mate is a major determinant of species membership, how would you determine whether two bacteria were of the same "species"?

Please be as specific as possible in your answer.

I ask you this because I suspect you do not understand what you are talking about, but are simply stringing words together in an attempt to sound knowledgable. Your answer to my question will go a long way toward finding out whether you belong among the sheep or the goats.

In answer to your other argument, that no human has observed a new species evolve, whereas "people experience and observe the results of gravity everyday."

First, no one has ever observed gravity. We know that the theory of gravitation is 'correct' only because the theory makes predictions that can be falsified (those "results" you spoke of) and we observe that those predictions are consistantly true.

Darwin's theory of evolution (which he preferred to call "descent with modification") also made a fair number of predictions. Among other things, Darwin's theory predicted that a mechanism must exist that allows both the inheritance of traits and the random modification of those traits.

In his day, such a mechanism was suspected - it was vaguely called "blood", but no physical mechanism for inheritance was known or described. Yet, Darwin boldly made this ability to pass on traits the indispensible keystone of his theory. Modern genetics and the discovery of DNA have conclusively proved the existance of such a mechanism. DNA meets every requirement of Darwin's theory - yet it was only discovered a century later.

Further, Darwin's theory predicted that the fossil record would show the emergence of new species that shared many traits with earlier species, but with significant modifications. When Darwin wrote Origin of Species, fossils were known to exist, but collections were small, mostly random, and had not been systematically studied.

The intervening 150 years of fossil hunting and fossil study has only served to reinforce the truth of Darwin's theory. For all the claims of creationists, no fossils have ever falsified evolution.

Darwin's theory also harmonized completely with the most advanced biological science of his day: Linnean classification and embryology. His theory serves to explain the otherwise puzzling discoveries of embryology, such as the fact that human embryos develop gill slits that have no function and which disappear long before birth.

So, we have observed the results of evolution, in exactly the same sense as we observe the results of gravity.

Darwin went way out on a limb and the limb has only grown, strengthened and supported him more and more solidly as the years have passed and the findings have piled up.If you really want to undermine Darwin or evolution, you have only one course: find evidence that falsifies the theory, find a "result" that proves that Darwin cannot have been right. Prove that your "result" is real and verifiable. Do that and you will bring Darwin down for all time.

But if all you want to do is to sway the ignorant then you're playing politics, not doing the work of science.

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), May 29, 2001.


far from proving darwin, modern science proves just how wrong his line of thinking was. better qustion for evolutionists to answer is this:

where did it all start?

can't answer that, can you bigbrains!

-- (unbeliev@b.u.l.l), May 29, 2001.


far from proving darwin, modern science proves just how wrong his line of thinking was

Does so!

Does not!

Does so!

Does not!

Um, instead of indulging in this kind of sterling debate, how about you clearly explain how "modern science proves just how wrong his line of thinking was"? Then we'll all know!

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), May 29, 2001.


Back in the days of the y2k debate, one of the critical issues revolved around each of our views of the interconnectedness of the economy -- whether it was brittle,and small breakdowns would spread like dominoes, or whether it was redundant and flexible and could handle even large and ubiquitous breakdowns in stride.

Of course, the "organic" economic view proved out, and it's interesting to read this review and see that the ideas discussed are so completely economic in nature. We change the path of least resistance, and organic as well as economic entities switch paths. We provide incentives and disincentives, and get remarkably efficient adaptations in both arenas.

However, although I'm not an expert like Z, I don't think the idea of parallel unmodified fields of crops sounds stable. Real workable and useful stability must be dynamic in a more fundamental way, with the plants not just producing a single unchanging poison, but rather engaged in an arms race. BOTH sides must evolve in tandem. I don't know how to make this happen, but I'm sure Z can tell us.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), May 29, 2001.



Ah no answer from the bigbrain evolution believers!

Let me spell it out for you; evolution is something changing into something else....where the hell did the first something come from??? NOTHING??!?? HA!

NO WAY.

Answer the Q, buttheads.

-- (go@suck.an.egg), June 02, 2001.


Go suck an egg: "where the hell did the first something come from???"

I don't know. Neither do you. I notice the theory of gravitation doesn't explain where gravitation first came from, either.

Darwin certainly didn't address this issue, since it is a matter for cosmology, not biology. All the theory of the evolution of species was ever meant to address was how, given a sufficient length of time, a new species could arise from an older species. It does a fantastic job of explaining that procedure.

BTW, is it true that you are really John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith?

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), June 02, 2001.


You asked, better question for evolutionists to answer is this: where did it all start? can't answer that, can you bigbrains!

Evolution doesn't deal with first causes. That's cosmology. Evolution studies what has happened SINCE the beginning (whatever that may be), and especially... the mechanisms by which this happens.

"Bigbrains" ? Interesting how the appearance of this term correlates with the end of the school semester.

-- Debbie (dbspence@usa.net), June 02, 2001.


LN - we posted in lockstep. ;-)

-- Debbie (dbspence@usa.net), June 02, 2001.

Semester? I didn't know that fundie homeschoolers had semesters.

-- You're Not Getting My Wallet (xtians.are@full.of.it.com), June 02, 2001.


I LUUUUV how the 'faithful' ignore the question and redirect--oh gee sorry, we don't deal in 'beginnings' only in the fantasy of what happened after beginnings-- HA!

I knew you couldn't do it... funny thing is, YOU know it too!

-- (gott@luv.dabrainless.followers.of.evolution.religion!), June 05, 2001.


Ah! But I did answer the question. The answer was: "I don't know."

If you were honest, you would realize that that is the only possible answer to that question. If you prefer, you can say "God". But that is the same thing as saying "I don't know."

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), June 05, 2001.


Nipper:

No, it's not the same thing. You know and I know it's the same thing, but those who use God when they don't know, *think* they know.

I'm reminded of the joke of the psychiatrist who tells the patient "You have nameless fears? No problem! We have a name for everything!" Names make us think we have understanding.

So what we're seeing here is what's been termed the "god of the gaps", i.e. an "explanation" for everything we don't understand. And the problem with this approach is that as our understanding increases, god is getting squeezed out.

There are two solutions to this problem. The first is to keep believing in the god of the gaps, and the second is to widen the gaps by denying that our knowledge really exists. The problem with THIS strategy is that our knowledge really DOES exist, so those who adopt it marginalize themselves and look foolish. As we see here.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), June 05, 2001.


"marginalize themselves and look foolish. As we see here. "

heh heh heh. good work flintboy. man, you turkeys are way to easy. like shootin fish in a barrel. cept easier. hah.

flintboy, your buttons are way to easy to push. maybe you should start smokin again. then watch as "evolution" takes its toll on your "madecompletelybyrandomchance" body. heh heh heh.

-- (U@fools.make.me.laugh), June 06, 2001.


fools:

The essence of evolution is that it is totally NONrandom. You might not approve of the theory, but unless you criticize what the theory actually SAYS, nobody will listen to you. All you do is illustrate perfectly what I just wrote -- that your beliefs rely on denying or ignoring our actual knowledge. I don't know how many converts you can make to a religion that *requires* ignorance, but hey, you're welcome to as many of such people as you can find.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), June 06, 2001.


" I don't know how many converts you can make to a religion that *requires* ignorance, but hey, you're welcome to as many of such people as you can find. "

Depends on how many people are currently involved in blindly following the evolution cult. I can assure you, the number is very large.

(you still haven't addressed the question, "where/how did it all start? I know, I know...you can't. BFCG! [-:} )

*snicker*!

-- (U@fools.makemelaugh!), June 07, 2001.


PS, just so I make it clear the dense flint-boy; I already critisized what the theory says...by exposing the root problem. In order to have evolution, you must have something which can evolve...

THINK about that before you give anymore blindfaith/cultic non-answers, flintboy.

-- (U@fools.makemelaugh!), June 07, 2001.


"by exposing the root problem. In order to have evolution, you must have something which can evolve..."

Are you asserting that nothing can evolve because nothing exists?

If you aren't asserting that, then where's this "root problem"? There is something to evolve, therefore you can have evolution.

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), June 07, 2001.


DENSE STUPID SHIT FOR BRAINS-

WHERE IN THE F*&K DID THE 1ST "SOMETHING" COME FROM??!!!???

-- (U@re.extra.STOOPID), June 07, 2001.


"WHERE IN THE F*&K DID THE 1ST "SOMETHING" COME FROM??!!!??? "

I don't know. Is God a "SOMETHING" or not a "SOMETHING"?

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), June 07, 2001.


So you FINALLY admit it is GOD who created something from nothing! GOOD JOB! BUT...that ain't "evolution".

Careful little nipple, you will get your arse kicked out of the evolution true believers klub!

-- (LOL@LOL.LOL!), June 11, 2001.


Let me ask again, in case you missed it: Is God a "SOMETHING" or not a "SOMETHING"?

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), June 11, 2001.

Careful little nipple, you will get your arse kicked out of the evolution true believers klub!

Suppose evolutionary theory DID either include a creator or exclude a creator (which it doesn't) ... by what criteria would you judge whether or not such statement is "valid"?

You keep saying - with scorn - that evolutionary theory is "just" a "belief system".... What's this disdain you have for belief systems? (Would that be ALL belief systems, or just certain ones (those that aren't yours) ? ;-) )

Bonus question:

What's the difference between a premise and a conclusion?

-- Debbie (dbspence@usa.net), June 11, 2001.


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