The Feral Dogs of Chernobyl Are Experiencing Rapid Evolution, Study Suggests Have the canines acquired strange mutations living near the power plant?

popular mechanics magazine ^ | Published: Nov 27, 2024 9:53 AM EST | By Darren Orf

[Red Badger]

GMTA!...................

[riverrunner]

Most likely wants some USAID money to study them more.

[NautiNurse]

And what a worthless article - says absolutely nothing of any significance.

Agree. Catchy title, vacuous words in the article.

[takebackaustin]

The practice of purposefully irradiating seeds in outer space to induce advantageous mutations, for example, is now a well-worn method for developing crops well-suited for a warming world.

I call BS on that. If you want to mutate seeds using radiation no need to go to space as a commercial method. More like USAID crony narrative supporting grant fodder. J school business and science competence, cliche’ ridden prose.

[PUGACHEV]

As the article points out, the Chernobyl wild dogs have been inbred to a significantly higher degree than usual. If I have it right, a more limited gene pool would increase the speed of beneficial adaptation through random mutation, while at the same time the higher background radiation might increase the overall rate of mutation.

[Empire_of_Liberty]

It sounds like the differences are just variations in DNA, like blots that don’t line up.

Of course, the fact that this is an “Exclusion Zone”, and the animals can’t really mix their genes easily with outsiders, might be the most likely explanation.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

What are the ‘strange mutations’ of the dogs.

See Post #10 and Post #19 for authentic photos of the "strange mutations."

[Yo-Yo]

[GMThrust]

That’s why they call it The Theory of Evolution. They know they can’t prove it.

[Fai Mao]

Quick call Peter Parker! There are spiders there he needs to look at!

[ProtectOurFreedom]

“A well-worn method for regurgitating unsubstantiated crap.”

Nice! Says it all.

[Dutch Boy]

I was hoping for flippers or horns. That would be something to talk about.

[Lazamataz]

Dogs stay dogs. Fruit flies stay fruit flies.

Fruit dogs?

[Robert DeLong]

You succinctly summed up the article.

[EnderWiggin1970]

The idea of radiation speeding up natural evolution isn’t a new one. The practice of purposefully irradiating seeds in outer space to induce advantageous mutations, for example, is now a well-worn method for developing crops well-suited for a warming world.

PM publishes a lot of anti-scientific gibberish like this. It was once naively thought that mutations could magically produce complex systems such as are ubiquitous in biology, but at best all we see are fluke cases where some kind of damage has a beneficial side effect in certain circumstances. (For example, antibiotic resistance arising because certain cellular pathways that the antibiotic uses are shut down by damage to regulatory switches. If there are alternate pathways the cell can use to survive this provides a benefit when the antibiotic is present, but the damage is just that, damage impairing a pre-existing functional system.)

[ansel12]

Still, nice qualities in a dog.

[alexander_busek]

According to the movie “A Boy and His Dog” part of the adaptation is telepathy with a human and the ability to locate human females.

Nope. In both the short story by Harlan Ellison, and the film adaptation, telepathic dogs had been specifically bred (or genetically engineered) to be used in police work - hence their near-equal (or superior?) intelligence and telepathy.

They were not portrayed as having evolved naturally, or due to radioactive mutation, to possess those traits.

Regards,

[alexander_busek]

The practice of purposefully irradiating seeds in outer space to induce advantageous mutations, for example, is now a well-worn method for developing crops well-suited for a warming world.

This reads like something written by an A.I. with a distinct penchant for 1950s sci-fi movies.

Regards,

[Alas Babylon!]

LOL!

One paragraph in the article says this:

“Do they have mutations that they’ve acquired that allow them to live and breed successfully in this region?” co-author Elaine Ostrander, a dog genomics expert at the National Human Genome Research Institute, told The New York Times. “What challenges do they face and how have they coped genetically?”

Well, gee, Darren Orf, isn’t that your job to explain in YOUR article?

[mikey_hates_everything]