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RE: Is biological evolution a ball rolling up a hill all by itself?
To clarify, what's evolving in this example? The apple or the eater?
To clarify, what's evolving in this example? The apple or the eater?
Neither, it simply illustrates how open systems take in energy to perform work and can thereby become more complex and ordered.
Thanks for clarifying. Did you have an example of anything evolving?
An animal eating gets energy to spend (oxidases food). It spends in actions which ultimately leads in reproducing a mutated animal (it couples the free energy released by the oxidation to order processes that instead requires free energy). The new animal is a muted version in a resource limited environment, and all animals use the same resource. Therefore the bests survive on avarage.
This does not violates the first thermodynamic law: the animal gets energy from the apple, energy is not credited nor destroyed.
Also the second law is not violated: the processes that you can couple to your eating (leading to reproduction) require less free energy than you get from the apple. If you count the system apple plus you than the entropy always increases.
check out the discussion around drug resistant bacteria in the comments of this post... that's evolution you can watch since bacteria have such rapid reproduction cycles.
Very interesting. No links there though.
Can you recommend a specific example I can read up on please?
check out this demonstration.
Hope that was in a controlled environment.
Deliberately breeding superbugs like that seems really irresponsible.
Just wondering though; why didn't the improved bacteria flood backwards too and take over all 9 segments from their weaker ancestors?
They were only improved in one aspect, with regards to drug resistance but still essentially the same in most other respects to the wild type. It would take more mutations responding to more kinds of stresses for a broadly stronger variant to emerge.
To simulate that would be even more irresponsible because then we are moving into the realm of new bacterial species and the Pandoras box of potentially weaponized bacteria that the human genome has never seen before.
HIV aids virus when it first emerged was like that. Ebola mutations do similar things.
Animal and plant immune systems are in a constant evolutionary arm race against bacteria, viruses and the like.
What happens when the antibiotic is all gone?
Do the new mutants stay and thrive or do their ancestors sweep in and take over?
Credit: © Wilfred / Fotolia
If the evolution of superbugs is not enough the following article should help. The following quote identifies why this is an example of speciation.
"The offspring were also reproductively isolated because their song, which is used to attract mates, was unusual and failed to attract females from the resident species"
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171124084320.htm
Is speciation the same as evolution?
Seems like 'not being able to breed with x' isn't much of an upgrade?
Biologist's definition of species is just that. When the two cannot mate then they are different species. Speciation is the first step as the decedents of the new species become/evolve increasingly different from the original.