Posted on 03/27/2011 12:09:25 PM PDT by decimon
Darwin's notion that only the fittest survive has been called into question by new research published today (27 March 2011) in Nature.
A collaboration between the Universities of Exeter and Bath in the UK, with a group from San Diego State University in the US, challenges our current understanding of evolution by showing that biodiversity may evolve where previously thought impossible.
The work represents a new approach to studying evolution that may eventually lead to a better understanding of the diversity of bacteria that cause human diseases.
Conventional wisdom has it that for any given niche there should be a best species, the fittest, that will eventually dominate to exclude all others.
This is the principle of survival of the fittest. Ecologists often call this idea the `competitive exclusion principle' and it predicts that complex environments are needed to support complex, diverse populations.
Professor Robert Beardmore, from the University of Exeter, said: "Microbiologists have tested this principle by constructing very simple environments in the lab to see what happens after hundreds of generations of bacterial evolution, about 3,000 years in human terms. It had been believed that the genome of only the fittest bacteria would be left, but that wasn't their finding. The experiments generated lots of unexpected genetic diversity."
This test tube biodiversity proved controversial when first observed and had been explained away with claims that insufficient time had been allowed to pass for a clear winner to emerge.
The new research shows the experiments were not anomalies.
Professor Laurence Hurst, of the University of Bath, said: "Key to the new understanding is the realisation that the amount of energy organisms squeeze out of their food depends on how much food they have. Give them abundant food and they use it inefficiently. When we combine this with the notion that organisms with different food-utilising strategies are also affected in different ways by genetic mutations, then we discover a new principle, one in which both the fit and the unfit coexist indefinitely."
Dr Ivana Gudelj, also from the University of Exeter, said: "The fit use food well but they aren't resilient to mutations, whereas the less efficient, unfit consumers are maintained by their resilience to mutation. If there's a low mutation rate, survival of the fittest rules, but if not, lots of diversity can be maintained.
"Rather nicely, the numbers needed for the principle to work accord with those enigmatic experiments on bacteria. Their mutation rate seems to be high enough for both fit and unfit to be maintained."
Dr. David Lipson of San Diego State University, concluded: "Earlier work showed that opposing food utilisation strategies could coexist in complex environments, but this is the first explanation of how trade-offs, like the one we studied between growth rate and efficiency, can lead to stable diversity in the simplest possible of environments."
Thanks for the link
You’re welcome.
That's basically all that's really left of evolution any more, i.e. echoes in the echo chamber of dead and dying ideological doctrines masquerading as science theories.
The Athenians might have exposed “imperfect” babies but they exposed unwanted females too...
Which is why that perderasty was so popular in ancient Athens: they lacked enough girls to go around.
Wow, thanks, interesting.
And for this, thanks, plain text much clearer, and
Qx. ping.
Have you participated in the Nat Geo DNA study?
I’ve been somewhat disappointed in the results—always more money for not that much more info, imho.
Still it’s interesting.
ALL classical peoples practiced infanticide, with the sole exception of the Jews.
It was routinely cited by Greek/Roman writers as an example of how weird the Jews were. Why, they raise all their children, even the girls!
In almost all cultures, the decision whether the baby would live or die was left up to the male head of household. AFAIK, only the Spartans involved the state directly in these decisions.
BTW, these children were usually exposed, not killed directly. Childless couples would go “shopping” in the known exposure areas, and many would pick up a likely child and raise him as their own son. In certain times and places there was a cottage industry of people who would rescue these babies, raise them to a salable age and sell them on the slave market. So by no means did these children always die.
Pederasty was so popular in ancient Greece for many of the same reasons it is in Islam. Women were kept indoors and behind veils. Men did not have relationships with a woman except as a breeder or a courtesan. While romantic love no doubt often happened between a husband and wife, the ideal beauty and love object of their culture was the pubescent/adolescent boy.
Oddly enough, Sparta was the big exception to this. Their women were infinitely freer than those in the rest of Greece.
While more girl babies might have been exposed than boys, this was largely compensated for by the enormous death rate among males in war and civil strife.
You have no idea what “fit” and “unfit” mean in Darwinian terms, or do you?
Regarding chromosomes and persistance of traits. My late husband and I visited ancestral property in southern Illinois a few years before he died in 2005. We found a distant relative on adjacent land. It turned out they had a common ancestor in the late 1700’s. There were certain physical similarities, around the eyes, and they both had similar long fleshy ears. In my husband’s case it was the great grandfather. For the other man it was the great, great grandfather. His line married at a younger age.
Regarding fitness, I think it is survival of the more fit, but as conditions often change, what fit is also tends to change. Vive la diferance.
I saw this today, and thought that it might be of interest, to you.
You beat me to the Idiocracy Reference, well done!
Thanks JDW.... I always try to keep up with this stuff.
[snip]
In mere impressionism we take our stand. We have no positive tests nor standards. Realism in art: realism in science—they pass away. In 1859, the thing to do was to accept Darwinism; now many biologists are revolting and trying to conceive of something else. The thing to do was to accept it in its day, but Darwinism of course was never proved:
The fittest survive.
What is meant by the fittest?
Not the strongest; not the cleverest—
Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.
There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive.
“Fitness,” then, is only another name for “survival.”
Darwinism:
That survivors survive.
(Charles Fort, “Book of the Damned”, pp. 23-24)
I haven’t, as I told blam, I was worried that, after swabbing out my cheek and mailing it with the check, then waiting for weeks, I’d find out I was related to the corned beef I had for lunch.
LOL.
I didn’t really want my DNA in the system . . . however, I figure they have plenty of ways to achieve that anyway. LOL.
Sometime “survival of the fittest” challenges our notion of “fit”.
Shades of Euroweenie pedophile rings, to my thinking.
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