Now, if we can just get these Italian LOUNGE LIZARDS to adapt to society........
Evolution? Adaptation. Survival of the fittest..........
The Theory of Evolution is --- well, evolving!
Now, if we can just get these Italian LOUNGE LIZARDS to adapt to society........
But....but... I thought evolution was a dirty atheist lie!!! [/sarc]
In the Chesapeake Bay, crabbers have been forced to use “cull rings” in their traps - small plastic rings that let baby crabs escape and grow up. Wouldn’t you know, smaller adults are escaping too, and are now creating a population of adult crabs that get no larger than about 4 inches across.
Oddly enough, the guy who pointed this out to me also doesn’t believe in evolution.
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.
Completely unscientific statement. They have no reason to say that it would "normally take millions of years" to adapt in this way. There is absolutely no way of addressing that statement empirically, hence it's just idle speculation. Since it has obviously happened in 37 years, there is no need to pull a "millions of years" explanation out of thin air.
Genetic drift...look into it.
A base population of only 10 individuals helped I’m sure. Had there been thousands there may have been no changes at all.
Little bastards are showing up everywhere.
I’m not an anti-evolutionary, but this article very succinctly points out the largest flaw; that there are simply things we don’t understand. But even saying that puts you in the fundamentalist camp to some.
Not possible.
Accomplished evolutionary biologist Ben Stein said so. /sarcasm
Italian wall lizards evolve.
Italian lounge lizards devolve.
Is anyone claiming that the genomic diversity of the new lizards was all present in the 10 founder lizards? All the genes for the modifications to their new lifestyle, were they all present in the 10 founders? Or was this (yet another) example of the biological innovation that some claim is impossible?
Let us know when they evolve into mammals.
A lizard evolved into........ A LIZARD!!!!!!!
A new gut structure, harder bite??? Gee these are very quantitative descriptions...no doubt a “scientist” with at least a high school education came up with them.
In 1971, scientists transplanted five adult pairs of the reptiles from their original island home in Pod Kopiste to the tiny neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru, both in the south Adriatic Sea.
Genetic testing on the Pod Mrcaru lizards confirmed that the modern population of more than 5,000 Italian wall lizards are all descendants of the original ten lizards left behind in the 1970s.]
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LOL, Hmmm:
A new gut structure, and a harder bite. How do you determine they had a new gut structure — opening them up? If so, there probably would be a real tendency on the lizards’ part to bite harder.
Of course, thanks really ought to go out to the guy/gal who, in 1971, developed the bite test methodology, then measured, and recorded their bite strength. Talk about foresight!
Genetic testing on 5000 lizards. Sounds like it's a good thing the tiny neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru, is tiny.
Wonder how long it took to catch each of the 5000.
Wonder what type of tagging/marking process they used to ensure they weren't catching the same ones again.
Wonder how many of the 5000 survived the “new gut structure” test.
Wonder what the state of genetic testing was in 1971, when the baseline for the lizards was measured and recorded.
10 lizards to 5000 lizards since 1971. They were of course, Italian lizards, so maybe some Italian FReeper can provide some insight into whether that's a realistic expectation, or instead, a sadly lacking reproduction count.
If it's sadly lacking in quantity, it was probably caused by Globull warming.
If it's a realistic and/or exceedingly good quantity, maybe these lizards are on their way to evolving into ...... rabbits?
Did they become birds? Or fish? Or, were the changes all within the baramin they currently belong to?