Posted on 02/20/2003 2:30:45 PM PST by Junior
IT STARTED with a biologist sitting on a grassy river bank in York, eating a sandwich. It ended in the discovery of a scruffy little weed with no distinguishing features that is the first new species to have been naturally created in Britain for more than 50 years.
The discovery of the York groundsel shows that species are created as well as made extinct, and that Charles Darwin was right and the Creationists are wrong. But the fragile existence of the species could soon be ended by the weedkillers of York City Councils gardeners.
Richard Abbott, a plant evolutionary biologist from St Andrews University, has discovered evolution in action after noticing the lone, strange-looking and uncatalogued plant in wasteland next to the York railway station car park in 1979. He did not realise its significance and paid little attention. But in 1991 he returned to York, ate his sandwich and noticed that the plant had spread.
Yesterday, Dr Abbott published extensive research proving with DNA analysis that it is the first new species to have evolved naturally in Britain in the past 50 years.
Ive been a plant evolutionary biologist all my life, but you dont think youll come across the origin of a new species in your lifetime. Weve caught the species as it has originated it is very satisfying, he told the Times. At a time in Earths history when animal and plant species are becoming extinct at an alarming rate, the discovery of the origin of a new plant species in Britain calls for a celebration.
The creation of new species can takes thousands of years, making it too slow for science to detect. But the York groundsel is a natural hybrid between the common groundsel and the Oxford ragwort, which was introduced to Britain from Sicily 300 years ago. Hybrids are normally sterile, and cannot breed and die out.
But Dr Abbotts research, published in the journal of the Botanical Society of the British Isles, shows that the York Groundsel is a genetic mutant that can breed, but not with any other species, including its parent species. It thus fits the scientific definition of a separate species.
It is a very rare event it is only known to have happened five times in the last hundred years Dr Abbott said. It has happened twice before in the UK the Spartina anglica was discovered in Southampton 100 years ago, and the Welsh groundsel, discovered in 1948.
The weed sets seed three months after germinating and has little yellow flowers. The species, which came into existance about 30 years ago, has been called Senecio eboracensis, after Eboracum, the Roman name for York. According to the research, it has now spread to spread to several sites around York, but only ever as a weed on disturbed ground.
However, more than 90 per cent of species that have lived subsequently become extinct, and its future is by no means certain.
It is important for it to build up its numbers rapidly, or it could get rubbed out which would be sad. The biggest threat to the new species is the weedkillers from the council, Dr Abbott said.
However, he does not plan to start a planting programme to ensure his discovery lives on. The next few years will be critical as to whether it becomes an established part of the British flora or a temporary curiosity. But we will let nature take its course, he said.
Yeah, I'll go along with that. I suspect it'll probably hold up until just after the nuclear holocaust and the apes take over the planet. Unfortuantely, you has still failed to provide support your statement "Humans are not primates."
Great question! Heuristic, in and of itself, it---along with your other post on this matter--- provides also insight into your outlook. One conclusion I'm drawing is that your course at Berkeley was not focused on the life sciences, correct?
Just a guess, let me know if I'm wrong.
At any rate, this question is frequently asked of biologists, etc., etc., and many of them do succumb to an easier social grace by indulging public expectations by trying to ascribe an "advantage" of a particular fossilized feather. Such speculation is required for the job as a scientist, but the popularization of the pursuits of scientists has left some unexamined misperceptions. Speciation is not about a particular advantage, it is about reproductive success. The term, "advantage" was originally used, in evoution-discourse, to describe (pontificate,actually) to the media the "purpose" of, say homeothermia in Dinosaurs, any number of the daily scientific discoveries which caught the reporters' eyes.
I think you really want to see how all these "adaptive advantages" result in a rapidly evolving evolution.
"They don't." (Julian Huxley,1963)
The heart of speciation is akin to that of a new ship: will it float? The test is empirical in the extreme. Reproductive failure dooms the putative species. It is for this, that there is only one rigid definition of speciation: Reproductive isolation and success.
My question about advantage pertained to natural selection. If you don't have "advantage," you don't have natural selection.
That doesn't mean that you don't have evolution, nor does the absence of natural selection in the speciation of this weed mean that it never happens. I was just clarifying what the mechanism for this particular case of evolutionary speciation actually was, and wasn't.
What caught my attention was the dismay you indicated over the notion that hybrids might not be able to breed with their parental generation ("What's the advantage in that?" I think you said.)
Darwin's racism is the basis of evolutionary theory. The idea that some species are simpler, less fit and less worthy than others. You cannot take the racism out of evolution.
For someone so touchingly devoted to that assertion, you sure seem to have an inordinate amount of trouble supporting it.
Well, evolutionists have been looking for the missing link between men and apes and were forced to give it up because there was none. Now they say there is a link between man and primates and they have also not found any. In fact, they keep pushing the supposed link back further and further each year, we are back to 10 million years now and some even say 20 million years. It is he who makes the original claim that has to give evidence for it and you the evolutionists do not have any. How much time do you guys need to back up your assertions which you claim everyone is an idiot for not believing even though you do not have an ounce of evidence for them????????????
No, Darwin was showing joy at the destruction and obliteration of the Turkish race. Something similar to the feelings that Hitler must have had towards the destruction of the Jews.
Acutally there is no 'how' to evolution. They have been looking for it for 150 years and the best they have come up with is 'natural selection' and the 'struggle for life'. Problem is that natural selection destroys, it does not create and there is no Malthusian 'struggle for life'. Species are very adaptable and can make do quite well in different circumstances and with varied amounts of nutrition.
We know with a fair degree of certainty one thing about libraries that we do not know with any certainty at all about ecosystems - libraries are designed by intelligent agents. Different premises, different argument, different conclusions.
Perhaps they ought to borrow the methods of the botanists. Split the territory into managable sub-units - the "shelf" would seem to be a natural unit of division in a library - and assign an observer to each subunit. Each observer records the books currently on each shelf, and then records the appearance of every new book over a period of several years. Compare final lists, eliminate duplicates, and there's your master list.
Or perhaps - a thesis I tend to prefer - it's just a faulty analogy to begin with. In addition to intelligent agents designing and administering libraries, librarians have a host of external agents that they must deal with, who are constantly removing, replacing, destroying, and losing the books in their care, whether legitimately, as when they check them out and return them, or illegitimately, as when they steal them. This is not a set of influences that botanists have to worry about - the life cycles of wild plants are not subject to the whims of any known intelligent agent, unlike the life cycle of a book in a library.
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