CharonY

Good point, but wouldn't it be under Skeptic's definition just count as zero change? Though of course polyploidy obviously does have effects, which in turn might be another argument against this as a metric. But just to get back on track, a common metric to clock evolutionary changes is based on phylogenetic analyzes of certain genes and/or proteins. The precise intention of the analyzes defines the choice of suitable sets (e.g. whether one uses more or less conserved ones that is). My personal opinion is that in the near to mid-future there will be a switch to using whole genome information. Though the feasibility has to established first. Nonetheless a complete phylogenomic approach would take e.g. synteny as well as gene duplications better into account than other approaches. Also horizontal gene transfer could have a lower effect on the results as their influence may be diminished due to the influence of the remaining markers. Downsides are, among others, computational costs as well as properly anchoring the sequence in less related organisms. I do have seen a few papers addressing these issues, though.

If you mean it as Dawkins described it, it would not change much, would it? Gene loss is gene loss. Or am I misunderstanding you?

While it may sound logical, it has several issues. One of them being that during evolution information can be gained as well as lost. As such it will be tricky to impossible to use that metric. Also, horizontal gene transfer is the single most effective way to gain large chunks of genetic information within and between species (and makes a big mess out of phylogenetic analyzes). This is incidentally also an argument against the assumption that higher multicellular eukaryotes may have a more efficient way of exchanging genetic information. Edit: shouldn't this be in speculations?

Framing the question correctly is important for proper discussion. Leaving parts open for interpretation results in people chiming in on something that may or may not relate to either the OP nor to any of the other posts. What iNow is most likely referring to is the fact that animals are also capable of communication. I assume that the question may be centered around human language abilities. In that case one could ask for instnace what elements are necessary and when did they first arise, even if they had functions in different contexts.

Either reverse osmosis or retarded ostriches.

Actually to get an industry R&D position a doctorate is often not strictly necessary. It is more applicable if you want a project leader position. Part time PhD is extremely hard, especially in life-science related fields.

That is what I was thinking. Airflows required to for larger amounts of fumes generally required a semi-closed system. Pumping systems or similar are simply not up to par for this. There are transportable fume hoods around, which are still kind of bulky. But other than that I am running out of ideas, sorry.

Or Dr. Strangelove. Actually precisely like that.

I have no hard data right now, but I would be surprised if cancer rates are indeed increasing significantly due to biological reasons (rather than due to enhanced detection rates). It will be tricky to separate that, though as obviously reporting cancer occurrences is dependent on the techniques of detection used. Why bother? Well obviously everyone is going to die of something, but good cancer prevention may enhance life span a bit as well as possibly increasing end of life quality. Also the value of going against cancer forms that are more common early in life have obvious advantages. Thing is, one should keep everything in perspective. Only because it is not increasing in frequency does not mean it won't affect you or your beloved. It is kind of a disease of modern times that only what is in the recent media will get any attention, and the sheer amount of available info makes it hard to separate crap from real important info. Edit: ok the last bit was a general rant without really being on-topic Edit2: actually certain cancer types, possible associated with diet may be increasing somewhat. Also skin cancer may increase in areas where ozone has worn off. Though of course it is tricky to define where to set the baseline from which one would calculate the increase.

Essentially you are on the right track. It depends a little bit on how you assert that cancer is on the rise as you implicitly proposed two different metrics. First is by tracking the proportion of the population that actually gets cancer. This is more correct if you want to directly measure the occurrence of cancer, though this includes lethal as well as non-lethal outcomes. In this case for instance improved diagnostics may be responsible for increased detection of cancer that may went unnoticed otherwise. It should be noted that depending on severity and kind of cancer people can die with instead of by cancer. An alternative way is to look at the proportions of deaths caused by cancer. For this metric both your hypotheses are reasonable assumptions. Other forms of death may have been more prevalent. One could test this by breaking down the cancer deaths. For instance taking a look at the age of with which cancer death occurs.

Problem is that in the proposed example the cells is already fixed. At this point dynamic observation are out of the question already. Even if this was not a problem, the question appears to be aimed at identifying recycled proteins. Individual GFP constructs are hard to follow for a longer time (i.e. a full cycle). And presence of a protein in both cytosol as well as membrane is still not an indicator of recycling. Of course, this is how I understood the question, which may be wrong.

I see. Well, I just wanted to make the point that adaptation can equally mean the loss of traits rather than addition of new ones. In many threads (or in real life) often associate differences with additional abilities, novel mutations, etc. and neglect the fact that the reverse can also occur. But from your other posts I should have known that quite clearly this was not the case here. My bad.

This clearly cannot compete with threads about melons, but for those involved or interested in science careers this is a nice viewpoint regarding funding situations. The interesting thing is that it is almost universally valid. http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000197 One of the many nice quotes in the text: Edit: shoot. I meant science careers in the title, of course.

Actually sexual reproduction is quite controversial in this aspect. The reshuffling can actually reduce the chance that a novel mutation gets fixated, for instance. In fact one hypothesis explicitly states that sex may purge detrimental mutations (and thus reduce variation). In addition, the often assumed benefits of sex to fitness are, as I have already mentioned in a number of posts, largely unproven. Though I have seen a recent paper in which a possible scenario was shown. Nonetheless the two-fold cost of sex appears to overcome the theoretical fitness advantage by increasing variation in most scenarios. Hence from the genomic side a number of more mechanistic notions have been put forward, including one in which genomic parasitism (by mobile genetic elements) plays a major role. Edit to add: this is a comment to post 36.

This may be true but it does not equal an increase in genetic information, though (if that is what is implied). Adaptation to a new environment can also result in the loss of now unnecessary genes. A prime example are certain parasitic organisms (especially bacteria) that generally have a smaller genome than their free-living cousins.

Problem is that a hypothesis alone is in most cases not sufficient for scientific publication. There are certain viewpoint articles, but usually they are reserved for people with a track record on the field and at the very least preliminary evidence has to be supplied. Unfortunately it is quite common that even if you thought of something first, credit goes the the one who actually provides the evidence. That is why conferences always reminds me of a slippery dance floor.

First of all speciation does not equal evolution. It is but a consequence of it. This may sound trivial, but unfortunately it isn't. Second problem is that of the species concept itself. The most common one is that of reproductive isolation, but it is hardly an universal concept. For one, it is not really applicable to asexually reproducing species and second it is not necessarily based on the amount of genetic differences. For instance, a Chihuahua cannot reproduce with an Irish Wolfhound. Likewise behavioral traits can also contribute to reproductive isolation. For instance if a part of a population becomes strictly nocturnal and does not copulate with the diurnal population anymore. In both cases the genetic changes are minor, though both lead to reproductive isolation. If we take this as the foundation one can assume that species with a behavior and/or anatomy to speak of have a higher chance of reproductive isolation and thus may have a higher speciation frequency. But this is not a continuous process. After a given complexity of e.g. anatomy has been reached one would not expect a further increase in speciation events (if at all). As already mentioned earlier, fluctuations in evolutionary rates are more often associated with environmental effects. Catastrophic events that destroys large populations, for instance can accelerate evolution as well as speciation due to genetic drift (especially if the initial population had a low diversity), or by freeing up ecological niches. If dinosaurs weren't dying out, mammals would have a hard time competing with them. In the end evolutionary rates (as based on genetic changes) fluctuate but are not constantly accelerating. Likewise for speciation events with the caveat of problems defining what a species is. I would rather say "surreal". At least part of it is ripe for pseudoscience. Trouble is that everyone thinks biology is easy. Well I thought physics was better in that regard until I accidentally stumbled into the pseudoscience threads. Though I still maintain (until proven otherwise) that in lecture halls it is harder to remove bad bio than bad physics, /rant end

Well actually prokaryotes developed all metabolic activities that we can think of and are still doing it. The mere fact that they are a single cell does not mean that they have not changed. The adaptation to oxygen is probably one of the most defining events. This is correct. This is harder to assess. The thing is that while looking at an organism we are only able to perceive a tiny fraction of everything the organism consists of. Also, some phenotypic changes may appear to be enormous (as e.g. limb development) but on the genetic level they only consist of the deregulation of few genes. For all I know (maybe Mokele can shed more light into it) extant crocodiles may look similar to their ancestor but have significant changes in parts of their metabolism. But the part about fixation is also important. Taking your example, it is possible that the seemingly unchanged group does not accumulate changes as fast as the other group despite having the same mutation rate. The reason is that new mutations vanish because the given environmental situation (including selective pressure) do not favor keeping the new alleles, whereas in the other they may. This, however, is dependent on the interaction of any given population with its environment and cannot be an intrinsic effect. As usual, there are exceptions to it, but I do not want to delve into it too much just by relying on my shaky memory.

Well, most fume food work on the principle of having a constant air flow in a partially closed comparment (to ensure said flow). Obviously that setup won't work properly in a open setting. Often coal filters are used, depending on what things you expect. In addition to fume hoods there are also fume extractors, for low levels of fumes. I can check for some manufacturers, to give you some ideas, a bit later. Well, here is an example http://www.sentryair.com/floor-sentry.htm Usually the systems do not work well outside as wind usually disrupts proper air flow.

Thanks for letting us know how it worked out.

Ophiolite does an excellent job to put my points succinctly. With the danger of fanning the fire, I feel compelled to address some of dr. Syntax' assertions regarding my person. First of all, I feel no need to assert superiority over anyone. Especially not some random poster on the internet. The only thing I do is point out inaccuracies in posts here that may be misleading, nothing more. If I wanted to address your knowledge I would have said something in the line of "get a frakking clue what evolution is before posting some random shit about it." But hey, I did not. What I equally won't do however, is to stroke the ego of some random poster so that they feel good about their ignorance. In fact, I even gave an example why the mentioned timeline of events is at best a superficial way for timing evolution. I even disproved the notion that disasters are setbacks to evolution. Both arguments just proof that the way you imagine evolution does not conform to what evolution actually is and hence, what means of timing may be appropriate. As Ophiolite mentions mutation rates are a factor and the second is whether those mutations get fixed within a population (or just vanish). Instead of addressing those points, however you go ahead and use circular reasoning to try to prove your initial points correct without aiming for understanding. The question is: why? If you do not want to be corrected then you can only do two things: first, never engage in discussions or second, research your data so well that your reasoning is water proof. Back to Physman's question. The question still remains on what level you are interested in timing of evolution. The easiest way to look at it is using molecular clocks (essentially the rate in which mutations accumulate). Generally there are varying speeds (e.g. associated with different selective pressures), yet no general trend of constant acceleration.

A timeline such as this has only a limited, if any use alone as it does incorporate the amount of change needed for a) the first occurence of each of this (more or less) arbitrary events and b) the time required before fixation of a given trait. Again, there is no frame of reference with which changes can be timed and hence just give the time between those events is meaningless. Imagine this, how many changes, do you think, does it take from, say first reptile to first mammal. And how many changes from the first prokaryote to the first eukaryote.

I recall that the shower was essentially the toilet area. You closed off the toilet, closed the door and start showering. There were some clever drain and ventilation designs. To avoid humidity being an issue in the rest of the container.

Actually there was something like that around for German students. It was more a novelty thing than anything else, I think. One difference was that there was a tiny shower/toilet area apart from the rest of the single room (mostly to avoid moisture getting into the main area). The rest essentially moves out of walls as you need them (e.g. table, bed etc.). Combining the wet area with the rest is generally a bad idea, though.

Actually the timeline itself is no indication of the speed of evolution as there is no measure in the amount of changes required. Moreover catastrophic events can actually accelerate evolution (founder effects and genetic drift). And finally what is considered speed of evolution? There are different frames of references out there and without a careful definition discussions usually end up to be meaningless.