Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island

National Geographic ^ | 21 April 2008 | Kimberly Johnson

[LiteKeeper]

Did they become birds? Or fish? Or, were the changes all within the baramin they currently belong to?

[aruanan]

Italian wall lizards introduced to a tiny island off the coast of Croatia are evolving in ways that would normally take millions of years to play out, new research shows.

Or, in ways that some folks believe took millions of years to play out.

[philetus]

It was introduced to explain the fossil record”

Henry Gee, the chief science writer on nature, was quite candid in talking about the fossil record in 1999. Gee wrote the intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.
He called each fossil an isolated point with no knowable connection to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps. In fact, he said that all fossil evidence for human evolution, between 10 and 5 million years ago —several thousand generations of living creatures
can be fitted into a small box.
Consequently, he concluded that the conventional picture of human evolution is a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices. To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bed time story, amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.

[traviskicks]

yea, evolution is quite fascinating, it will be interesting to see what theories gain credence in the future.

[SunkenCiv]

Evolution in Your Face
by Patrick Huyghe
Omni

Lake Victoria, Africa's largest lake, is home to more than 300 species of cichlids. These fish, which are popular in aquariums, are deep-bodied and have one nostril, rather than the usual two, on each side of the head. Seismic profiles and cores of the lake taken by a team headed by Thomas C. Johnson of the University of Minnesota, reveal that the lake dried up completely about 12,400 years ago. This means that the rate of speciation of cichlid fishes has been extremely rapid: something on average of one new species every 40 years!

[SunkenCiv]

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[philetus]

yea, evolution is quite fascinating, it will be interesting to see what theories gain credence in the future.”

“my conclusion is that the case for Darwinian evolution is bankrupt. The evidence for Darwinism is not only grossly inadequate, it’s systematically distorted.”

Jonathan Wells,PHD,PHD

[grey_whiskers]

Like, *PING*, dude.

For TOS. Be interesting to find out what happened, i.e. greater mutation rate, or much stronger selection, to drive the differentiation.

And, does this have any implications for genetic clocks and estimated times at which species branch off of larger groups?

...and lots, lots, more.

Cheers!