Posted on 02/20/2005 10:36:58 AM PST by furball4paws
An article purporting to show simple mathematical relationships in Biology and Ecology.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
Why do the fossil record and genetic data often give different times for when dprcies emerged?
For example, genetics evidense suggests that rats and mice split 41 million years ago. The fossil evidence suggests 12.5 million years.
The suthors developed a master equation that corrects for size and temperature on mutations. That correction puts the genetic and fossil divergence of species, including rats and mice in the same time frame.
PH - this is hardly an evolution paper, but it does have evolutionary implications. It seems to be a slow day, so.....
AG - I know you math and biology.
Yes indeed, you've got my "number" LOLOL! Thank you so much for the ping!
Someday, maybe I'll learn to type or at least catch typos.
Whoa! Your link didn't work. Help!!!
Damn! try this:
http://sciencenews.org/articles/20050212/bob9.asp
I remember the 2/3 law well; a prominent Anthropologist, R. Carneiro, made an interesting argument/analysis regarding its relevance for social organization in the 1970s.
Great! Thank you!!! Hugs!
Thanks bunny. I must have mistyped it in the original post.
Just how big are you finger tips? (sd; re)
I am always hitting two keys at once myself, and the wrong letter always come up or they arrive in pairs. :)
Why assume one split? A split 41 million years exists in the genome, and one 12.5 mil is captured in fossils.
One reason may be that dogs are the same species, and what you have are faults off a form. The correlation between size and age does seem to hold up well for species. it seems to be somewhat inverted within species...probably due to things like heart problems, and structural breakdowns.
The really big exception is human life-span. As I recall, we should only live to be about 40, based on our size.
Hmm. I read that another explanation was proposed beyond what I suggested.
"The DNA of small, hot organisms should mutate faster than that of large, cold organisms, the researchers argue. An organism with a revved-up metabolism generates more mutation-causing free radicals, they observe, and it also produces offspring faster, so a mutation becomes lodged in the population more quickly.And I suspect there’s a lot more involved.When the researchers use their master equation to correct for the effects of size and temperature, the genetic estimates of divergence times—including those of rats and mice—line up well with the fossil record, says Allen, one of the paper's coauthors."
What's it going to look like in the intervening 30 million years?
What do you think the average life span of an ancient Eqyptian was? Even in the Middle Ages, I don't think the average man lived past 45 years.
I don’t know much about this. Perhaps it’s like a three pronged fork rather than two, with the parent species (center prong) existing until incomplete fossil records identified its disappearance as a split? Maybe there are many “short” lived splits along the way which records have not been found.
If we didn’t build so much stuff that will survive in some form for millennia, perhaps our short existence would go unnoticed.
Excellent article. I just gave my copy of SN to my brother to read this article.
GGG Ping.(?)
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