Quote of the Day
Scientists have observed a once-in-a-billion-years evolutionary event as they’ve witnessed the phenomenon of primary endosymbiosis in progress. This event is when two lifeforms merge into one organism.
This remarkable discovery has led scientists to further their study of this phenomenon, which only rarely occurs.
Julia Melahko
April 23, 2024
Scientists Just Observed a Once-in-a-Billion Years Evolutionary Event (msn.com)
I read about this a couple days ago and would not have posted it but the comments here suggest it may be of interest to readers.
What I think should be the take away from the article is that not all changes in an organism over time are due to random mutation.
Unfortunately the article doesn’t say anything.
Is this the same sort of thing that gave us mitochondria? I wonder how to judge the statement about how rarely this occurs; the key question is how you would recognize previous occurrences. If they happen more often but usually aren’t detected, the statement that it’s rare would not actually be valid.
If you take “life” on Earth is roughly 3.7 billions years old .
Complex, more than single cell, organisms are believed to have formed this very process.
It would therefore appear this has happened more that 4 times before.
Only a science writer would put it at a once in a billion year occurrence.
Studied this as part of an Evolution course in 1975. I still have the textbook.
Evolution by Charlotte J. Avers
Wow, and that only took a billion years! (Wonder how many billions of years cows starved before growing four stomachs to digest cellulose?)
Natural selection cannot account for origin of species because life has to many things that are interdependent on each other. (Twice may be coincidence, three times is enemy action.) Action, being the operative word. Way to many coincidences to be random.
And as Vox Day proves beyond mathematical doubt. There just ain’t enough time for all the necessary mutations to take place.
Thank God science is around to prove our point for us. Wither they like it or not. Billion years indeed!
The “article” (and I use that term loosely in this instance) ends by saying the process in this particular strain of algae began at least 100 million years ago.
Since genetic mutation usually results in loss of function, not gain of function, mutation alone doesn’t explain much at all.
Natural selection doesn’t do much better; the environmental conditions changing, which then accentuate the normal variance within a given species — one end of the spectrum becomes more suited to survival and progenitation than the other — also does little to explain how new species happen. Since different species are genetically distinct enough that they cannot inter-breed and produce fertile offspring; a random mutation that “creates” a new species would have to happen at least twice within one generation, to produce at least one breeding pair.
The only explanation around that is inter-species variants — individuals that aren’t one or the other, but somewhere in between; also known as “missing links” — which supposedly exist long enough to establish the new species as distinct from the old, but somehow leave no anthropological trace of their existence.
That’s not to say that both hypotheses don’t have their merits; they do. But neither seems to fully explain the sheer variety of life on Earth — with wildly-different kingdoms and species both present and extinct — given that we all supposedly originated 3.7 billion years ago from the same lightning-animated pond scum.
(And echoing what Gerry said above, how did scientists determine that this is a “once-in-a-billion-years” event? Were they around studying things for the past 3.7 billion years and they’ve witnessed all four? Or is that a wild-@$$ guess written for click-bait propaganda headlines? “Natural selection” would support the latter.)
Thanks, I always liked that one for origins.
“Given that we all supposedly originated 3.7 billion years ago from the same lightning-animated pond scum.”
One may use mineralize pond scum and lighting to zap a double-helix of molecules into existence.
But when one reads what it takes to replicate that double-helix? As in reproductive DNA strands?
Not just light years apart from each other. It absolutely 100% didn’t happen.
Thanks again for bringing it up though. I always get a good laugh when thinking of how much time and money have gotten spent on that idea.
And how many “smart”, people still believe it.
Of course, once one accepts that all the matter in the seen/known universe and beyond was once compressed into the head of a pin before expanding outward?
It’s all downhill from there.
It’s no wonder we have so many chuckleheaded communists on campus.
Yep
Waiting for random mutations in one organism that reproduces itself asexually can take a while.
Bring in sexual reproduction, and everything goes wild, plus you have random mutations going on, plus all kinds of other random “oopsie”s like when 2 branches of a chromosome “switch places.” Which is not a mutation, but it certainly shuffles the deck even more.
And only the “good” (neutral or helpful) changes are actually propagated for any length of time—that part isn’t random, but everyone forgets (or fails to understand) that. So you are constantly stacking the deck, as it were, in favor of successful changes. Breeding and then culling.
“This event is when two lifeforms merge into one organism. “
This is very Old Hat; see: Transformation of Girlfriend 2.0 into Wife 1.0; that rarely occurs both cleanly and without substantial continuing overlap
How do we KNOW it’s a “once in a billion” occurrence? We don’t. Humans haven’t been around even a million years. And only “scientific” for a few millennia at most.
So we have no idea how likely such a thing is.