https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/08/240813131928.htm

"A new study has rewritten the conventionally understood evolutionary history of certain ion channels -- proteins critical for electrical signaling in the nervous system. The study shows that the Shaker family of ion channels were present in microscopic single cell organisms well before the common ancestor of all animals and thus before the origin of the nervous system.

"A new study has rewritten the conventionally understood evolutionary history of certain proteins critical for electrical signaling in the nervous system. The study, led by Penn State researchers, shows that the well-studied family of proteins -- potassium ion channels in the Shaker family -- were present in microscopic single cell organisms well before the common ancestor of all animals. This suggests that, rather than evolving alongside the nervous system as previously thought, these ion channels were present before the origin of the nervous system.

***

"We have previously shown that the oldest living animals, those with simple nerve nets, have the highest ion channel diversity. This new finding adds to growing evidence that many of the building blocks for the nervous system were already in place in our protozoan ancestors -- before the nervous system even existed."

"Ion channels are located in the membranes of cells and regulate how charged particles called ions move in and out of the cell, a process that results in the electrical signals that are the foundation of communication in the nervous system. The Shaker family of ion channels is found in a large range of animals, from humans to mice and fruit flies, and specifically regulates how potassium ions flow out of the cell to terminate electrical signals called action potentials. These channels can open or close based on changes in the electric field, much like transistors in computer chips.

***

. "We previously thought that the Shaker family of voltage-gated potassium channels were only found in animals, but now we see that the genes that code for this family of ion channels were present in several species of the closest living relatives of animals, a group of single cell organisms called choanoflagellates."

***

"...this finding indicates that multiple subtypes were present at the base of the animal family tree, including Kv1, which are found in comb jellies, and the Kv2-4-like channels, which are found in choanoflagellates.

***

"This work also adds to growing evidence that many elements of the nervous system were present before the nervous system as a whole evolved, Jegla noted.

"'Most of the functionally important proteins that we use in electrical signaling, which underlie neuronal communication and neuromuscular movement, are all based on proteins that existed before animals," Jegla said. "It seems that animals were able to cobble together a functioning nervous system very early in their evolution simply because most of the necessary proteins were already there.'"

Comment: nerves are an advanced form of ion channel. This story of evolution of nerves is quite reasonable.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/07/240716122726.htm

"Researchers have discovered that a single-celled organism, a close relative of animals, harbors the remnants of ancient giant viruses woven into its own genetic code. This finding sheds light on how complex organisms may have acquired some of their genes and highlights the dynamic interplay between viruses and their hosts.

***

"The study focused on a microbe called Amoebidium, a unicellular parasite found in freshwater environments.

"By analysing Amoebidium's genome, the researchers led by Dr Alex de Mendoza Soler, Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary's School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences, found a surprising abundance of genetic material originating from giant viruses -- some of the largest viruses known to science.

"These viral sequences were heavily methylated, a chemical tag that often silences genes.

"'It's like finding Trojan horses hiding inside the Amoebidium's DNA," explains Dr de Mendoza Soler.

"'These viral insertions are potentially harmful, but Amoebidium seems to be keeping them in check by chemically silencing them."

"The researchers then investigated how widespread this phenomenon might be. They compared the genomes of several Amoebidium isolates and found significant variation in the viral content.

"This suggests that the process of viral integration and silencing is ongoing and dynamic.

"'These findings challenge our understanding of the relationship between viruses and their hosts," says Dr. de Mendoza Soler.

"'Traditionally, viruses are seen as invaders, but this study suggests a more complex story. Viral insertions may have played a role in the evolution of complex organisms by providing them with new genes. And this is allowed by the chemical taming of these intruders DNA."

"Furthermore, the findings in Amoebidium offer intriguing parallels to how our own genomes interact with viruses. Similar to Amoebidium, humans and other mammals have remnants of ancient viruses, called Endogenous Retroviruses, integrated into their DNA. While these remnants were previously thought to be inactive "junk DNA," some might now be beneficial. However, unlike the giant viruses found in Amoebidium, Endogenous Retroviruses are much smaller, and the human genome is significantly larger."

Comment: this subject has entered here before as a mechanism for evolution to occur. Viruses, which can be dangerous, have useful roles in evolution. If God is viewed as a designer, He introduced viruses as helpful design components for DNA evolution. dhw will complain about the trouble some of them cause. The answer is God's good works far outweigh the bad side effects.

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/06/fossil-friday-darwins-abominable-mystery-corroborated...

"...I reported about the “abominable mystery” of the sudden appearance of flowering plants in the Early Cretaceous period, which bothered Charles Darwin himself as a big problem for his theory. Last year, I discussed (Bechly 2023) a new study, which confirmed this discontinuity in the history of plants as “surely the greatest conundrum in the whole of paleontology” according to the lead author of this study, distinguished paleontologist Philip Donoghue.

"Now, another new seminal study by Zuntini et al. (2024), published on April 24 by 278 (!) co-authors in the prestigious journal Nature, provided further strong corroboration of the “abominable mystery”. Like several previous studies the scientists attempt to illuminate the origin of flowering plants with a combination of phylogenetic inferences and molecular clock data.

***

"Therefore they built “the tree of life for almost 8,000 (about 60%) angiosperm genera using a standardized set of 353 nuclear genes”, which represents a “15-fold increase in genus-level sampling relative to comparable nuclear studies”. They scaled this tree to time using 200 fossils as calibration points for the dating of the branching events. Their results showed “that early angiosperm evolution was characterized by high gene tree conflict and explosive diversification, giving rise to more than 80% of extant angiosperm orders.”

***

"Our dated tree corroborates the existence of a distinct early burst of diversification, associated with high levels of gene tree conflict, further increasing our confidence in this finding.

"More than 80% of extant angiosperm orders originated during the early burst of diversification.

***

"In the young tree, the early burst occurs during the Cretaceous, consistent with the hypothesis that a Cretaceous terrestrial revolution was triggered by the establishment of main angiosperm lineages. More controversially, the old tree places the early burst in the Triassic Period, which is dramatically at variance with the palaeobotanical record, highlighting that current molecular dating methods are unable to resolve the age of angiosperms.”

"Since this notorious discontinuity in the fossil record did not get any smaller with 160 years of paleobotanical research since Darwin, but instead became more and more acute and empirically corroborated, we can be very sure that the gap is not a gap of knowledge but a real gap in nature. This contradicts Darwin’s explicit dictum that nature does not make jumps. Nature clearly did make jumps in the history of life (Bechly 2024) and this cannot be explained with an unguided gradual accumulation of small changes over long periods of time, but requires a rapid burst of biological novelty that is best explained by intelligent design.

Comment: another major gap in the fossil record, just like the Cambrian explosion.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/06/240603114245.htm

"Why do giraffes have such long necks? A study led by Penn State biologists explores how this trait might have evolved and lends new insight into this iconic question. The reigning hypothesis is that competition among males influenced neck length, but the research team found that female giraffes have proportionally longer necks than males -- suggesting that high nutritional needs of females may have driven the evolution of this trait.

"The study, which explored body proportions of both wild and captive giraffes, is described in a paper that appeared in the journal Mammalian Biology. The findings, the team said, indicate that neck length may be the result of females foraging deeply into trees for otherwise difficult-to-reach leaves.

***

"'The necks-for-sex hypothesis predicted that males would have longer necks than females," said Doug Cavener, Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Distinguished Chair in Evolutionary Genetics and professor of biology at Penn State and lead author of the study. "And technically they do have longer necks, but everything about males is longer; they are 30% to 40% bigger than females. In this study, we analyzed photos of hundreds of wild and captive Masai giraffes to investigate the relative body proportions of each species and how they might change as giraffes grow and mature."

'The researchers gathered thousands of photos of captive Masai giraffes from the publicly accessible photo repositories Flickr and SmugMug as well as photos of wild adult animals that they have taken over the past decade. Because absolute measurements like overall height are difficult to determine from a photograph without a point of reference of known length, the researchers instead focused on measurements relative to one another, or body proportions -- for example the length of the neck relative to the entire height of the animal. They restricted their analysis to images that met strict criteria, such as only using images of giraffes perpendicular to the camera, so they could consistently take a variety of measurements.

***

"At birth, male and female giraffes have the same body proportions. The researchers found that, although males generally grow faster in the first year, body proportions are not significantly different until they start to research sexual maturity around three years of age. Because body proportions change early in life, the team limited their study of wild animals -- whose ages are largely unknown -- to fully grown adults.

"In adult giraffes, the researchers found that females have proportionally longer necks and trunks -- or the main section of their body, which does not include legs or the neck and head. Adult males, on the other hand, have longer forelegs and wider necks. This pattern was the same in both captive and wild giraffes.

"'Rather than stretching out to eat leaves on the tallest branches, you often see giraffes -- especially females -- reaching deep into the trees," Cavener said. "Giraffes are picky eaters -- they eat the leaves of only a few tree species, and longer necks allow them to reach deeper into the trees to get the leaves no one else can. Once females reach four or five years of age, they are almost always pregnant and lactating, so we think the increased nutritional demands of females drove the evolution of giraffes' long necks."

"The researchers noted that sexual selection -- either competition among males or preference among females for larger mates -- was likely responsible for the overall size difference between males in females, as is the case in many other large, hoofed mammals that are polygynous -- where one male mates with many females. They suggest that, following the evolution of the long neck, sexual selection -- including male body pushing and neck sparring behaviors -- may have contributed to males' wider necks. Additionally, the longer forelegs of males may assist in mating, which the researchers said is a brief and challenging affair that is rarely observed."

Comment: straining to support a just-so story. OR God designed the females to get the best leaves.

https://phys.org/news/2024-05-vestiges-life-earth-saudi-arabia.html

"Stromatolites are the earliest geological record of life on Earth. These curious biotic structures are made of algae carpets growing toward the light and precipitating carbonates. After their first appearance 3.48 Ga ago, stromatolites dominated the planet as the sole living carbonate factory for almost three billion years.

"Stromatolites are also partially responsible for the Great Oxygenation Event, which drastically changed the composition of our atmosphere by introducing oxygen. That oxygen initially wiped out stromatolites' competition, enabling their prominence in the Archean and early Proterozoic environment. However, as more life forms adapted their metabolism to an oxygenated atmosphere, stromatolites started to decline, popping up in the geologic record only after mass extinctions or in difficult environments.

***

"In modern times, stromatolites are relegated to niche extreme environments, such as hypersaline marine settings (e.g., Shark Bay, Australia) and alkaline lakes. Until recently, the only known modern analogue to the biologically diverse, open shallow marine settings where most Proterozoic stromatolites developed was the Exuma Islands in the Bahamas.

"That is, until Vahrenkamp discovered living stromatolites on Sheybarah Island, on the northeastern shelf of the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. Vahrenkamp was studying tepee structures—salt crust domes that can be seen from space—when he happened upon the unassuming stromatolite field. The discovery was surprising, but luckily, Vahrenkamp is one of the few people to have previously seen stromatolites in the Bahamas.

***

"Sheybarah Island is an intertidal-to-shallow subtidal setting, with regularly alternating wetting and drying conditions, extreme temperature swings between 8 °C and >48 °C, and oligotrophic conditions—much like the Bahamas. Since similar environmental conditions are widespread across the Al Wajh carbonate platform, there might be other stromatolite fields nearby. Vahrenkamp and his team have started this exploration work, but stromatolites are small, about 15 cm across, and thus are difficult to spot until one gets very close.

"There are several hundred stromatolites in the Sheybarah Island field. Some are well-developed, perfect textbook examples. Others are more sheet-like, with a low relief. "Perhaps they could be juvenile," hypothesizes Vahrenkamp, "but we don't know what a baby stromatolite looks like. They must start small, but we don't know."

"Part of the issue is that we don't know how fast stromatolites grow. Dating them is very hard, because they contain two different carbonate components that are virtually impossible to separate: the newly microbe-precipitated one, which is of interest, and carbonate sand present in the environment, which is misleading. Currently, Vahrenkamp's team monitors the field monthly to record any visual changes. Soon, there might be an attempt to transfer some Sheybarah Island stromatolites to an aquarium and grow them there—an exciting experimental prospect.

"Vahrenkamp's discovery affords us the opportunity to better understand the formation and growth of stromatolites. This will provide insights into early life and ocean evolution on Earth and may even assist us in the search for life on other planets such as Mars."

Comment: I had thought stromatolites were all fossils. That there living ones as a remnant of the distant past shows how tough they are.

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-evolution-bacterial.html

"...if we could "rewind" the tape of life and let it run again. Would the major phylogenetic groups re-emerge, or would something entirely different happen?

***

"The research sheds light on this classic question by analyzing the evolutionary behavior of experimental populations of bacteria and leveraging the analytical capabilities provided by large-scale, cutting-edge genetic tools. The results reveal that the evolution of bacteria can be predictable in the short term, opening doors to efforts to anticipate the evolution of pathogens and pests, as well as potential biotechnological applications for their control.

***

"To deploy this ambitious study, researchers employed recent massive genetic engineering technology that allows the introduction of hundreds of thousands of mutations into bacteria, studying the individual effect of each one individually. "This technology allows exploring the effect, whether good or bad, of all possible mutations along the >4,000 genes of the bacterial genome," adds Couce.

"In their work, researchers applied these techniques to the ancestor and different evolutionary stages of the famous Long-Term Evolution Experiment, which has been evolving 12 populations of the same bacteria under constant laboratory conditions for more than 35 years. In total, these populations founded from the same ancestor have experienced >70,000 generations, approximately five times more than Homo sapiens have lived on Earth.

"The first significant surprise of this new study is that the overall proportion of lethal, harmful, and neutral mutations remains virtually constant throughout the evolution of these 12 lineages, despite the specific identity of the mutations showing great volatility. (my bold)

"For researchers, a case of particular relevance is lethal mutations: Mutations that, as the name implies, lead to the death of the organism, revealing which genes and systems are essential for life. The results show that many lethal genes in the ancestor cease to be lethal in evolved strains, but a similar fraction of non-lethal mutations in the ancestor becomes lethal later. The result, as Couce explains, is that "the fraction of lethal mutations has enigmatically remained constant during evolution." (my bold)

***

"'We started with an almost philosophical approach: if we could know all possible beneficial mutations for an organism at a given time, could we predict adaptation?" says the UPM researcher. "It can be seen as a biological version of Laplace's Demon, the thought experiment in which the famous French physicist wondered if for a superhuman intelligence capable of knowing the position and movement of every atom in the universe, it would not be trivial to reconstruct the past and predict the future."

"'Our results show that major initial adaptations are predictable, and as evolution progresses, this ability is lost," he explains. "In other words, the demon exists but is terribly shortsighted.'"

Comment. Since major evolutionary advances have stopped, their conclusions fit that current statis. The need for immediate adaptation is usually obvious within species. So, if we are not seeing new speciation, how can we learn how to predict? My bolds about lethal mutations fits into our discussion about 99.9% of all ancestors are lost to produce 0.1% surviving.

https://www.sciencealert.com/in-a-first-bacteria-seen-storing-memories-and-passing-them...

"A single-celled organism with no brain or nervous system to speak of may still form memories and pass those memories on to future generations, according to new research.

"The ubiquitous bacterium, Escherichia coli, is one of the most well-studied life forms on Earth, and yet scientists are still discovering unexpected ways that it survives and spreads.

"Researchers at the University of Texas and the University of Delaware have now uncovered a potential memory system that allows E. coli to 'remember' past experiences for several hours and generations thereafter.

"The team says that, to their knowledge, this kind of bacterial memory has not been unearthed before.

"Obviously, the memory that scientists are discussing in this case is not the same as conscious human memory.

***

"Bhattacharyya and their team's findings are based on strong associations from more than 10,000 bacterial 'swarming' assays.

"These experiments were testing to see if E. coli cells on a single plate would swarm together into one migrating mass that moves with the same motor. Such behavior generally indicates that cells are joining up to efficiently search for a suitable environment.

"On the other hand, when E. coli cells clump together into a sticky biofilm, it's their way of colonizing a nutritious surface.

"In initial experiments, researchers exposed E. coli cells to several different environmental factors to see which conditions triggered swarming the fastest.

"Ultimately, the team found that intracellular iron was the strongest predictor of whether the bacteria moved or stayed.

"Low levels of iron were associated with faster and more efficient swarming, whereas higher levels led to a more settled lifestyle.

"Among first-generation E. coli cells, this seemed to be an intuitive response. But after experiencing just one swarming event, cells that experienced low iron levels later in life were even faster and more efficient at swarming than before. (my bold)

"What's more, this 'iron' memory was passed on to at least four successive generations of daughter cells, which are formed from the mother cell splitting into two new cells.

"By the seventh generation of daughter cells, that iron memory was naturally lost – although it could be regained if scientists artificially reinforced it.

"The authors behind the study have yet to identify a molecular mechanism behind the potential memory system or its inheritability, but the strong association between intracellular iron and intergenerational swarming behavior suggests there is a level of persistent conditioning at play.

"While epigenetics is known to play a role in passing 'remembered' biological settings through generations of E. coli by regulating 'on' and 'off' settings of specific genes, the researchers believe the short duration of heritability means this is not the primary mechanism here.

"Iron is connected to multiple stress responses in bacteria. For an intergenerational memory system to form around it makes a lot of evolutionary sense.

"An iron-based memory system might help E. coli adapt to poor environmental conditions or antibiotics.

"A single E. coli cell can double within half an hour, so the ability to pass on such a memory to daughter cells is probably also beneficial in slow-changing environments.

"'Before there was oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere, early cellular life was utilizing iron for a lot of cellular processes," says Bhattacharyya."

"Iron is not only critical in the origin of life on Earth, but also in the evolution of life. It makes sense that cells would utilize it in this way."

"Ultimately," Bhattacharyya concludes, "the more we know about bacterial behavior, the easier it is to combat them."

Comment: I wonder how this study fits into Shapiro's work on bacterial editing of DNA. The authors reject epigenetics, but simply expressing genes for brief periods might be the mechanism at work.

https://ecoevocommunity.nature.com/posts/small-genomes-big-appetites-amino-acid-auxotro...

"In the microbial world, there is a divide between those that can produce all amino acids, and those that (like us) rely on their diet to obtain them. In certain environments, resources are so scarce or variable that microbes cannot rely on obtaining amino acids directly from their surroundings – they need to produce all amino acids on their own. Other environments are so rich that some microbes can afford not to produce amino acids (so-called amino acid auxotrophs), because these can be readily obtained from their surroundings. Synthesizing amino acids comes at a metabolic cost so if that cost can be avoided, we would expect microbes to lose the ability to synthesize certain amino acids over time. Why pay for something that you can get for free?

***

"We wanted to know how common auxotrophy is across bacteria, which bacteria are auxotrophic, where auxotrophic bacteria are most likely to be found, and what other bacterial traits are associated with amino acid auxotrophy (see our paper - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43435-4). Solving these mysteries would provide important insights into the most fundamental aspects of microbial adaptation that make them so successful across Earth’s ecosystems.

"The capacities for producing amino acids and other essential compounds are imprinted in the genome of any organism. If we know the genes involved in the production of amino acids, we can infer the capacity to produce these amino acids based on the presence of these genes in any given genome.

***

"We found that most bacteria (78%) are likely able to produce all the amino acids they need to grow, although amino acid auxotrophy can be observed across members of most bacterial families. Consistent with evolutionary theory, we found that environments where we expect to see a higher availability of amino acids favor bacteria that cannot synthesize amino acids on their own. For example, fermented foods and the human gut are environments rich in amino acids, and these environments typically harbor many auxotrophic bacteria. The reason is simple – if a microbe has ready access to an ‘all-you-can-eat’ buffet that is open 24/7, where food is plentiful and never runs out, there is no advantage for a microbe to produce the amino acids it can easily get from its surroundings.

"Being unable to produce amino acids was not an exclusive feature of those microbes living in fermented food products or our guts. Mycoplasmas that parasitize our cells and cause important diseases are also often auxotrophic as they can obtain amino acids directly from the intracellular environment. We also observed that bacteria which are adapted to predate on other bacteria lacked many genes for amino acid production, including members of the Bdellovibrionaceae. Again, they can obtain these essential compounds from their victims, so they have evolved to avoid the energetic burden of synthesizing amino acids on their own.

"Being unable to produce amino acids was not an exclusive feature of those microbes living in fermented food products or our guts. Mycoplasmas that parasitize our cells and cause important diseases are also often auxotrophic as they can obtain amino acids directly from the intracellular environment. We also observed that bacteria which are adapted to predate on other bacteria lacked many genes for amino acid production, including members of the Bdellovibrionaceae. Again, they can obtain these essential compounds from their victims, so they have evolved to avoid the energetic burden of synthesizing amino acids on their own."

Comment: Bacteria play such an important role in our lives, it is critical to perform studies of this sort. Bacteria were at the start of life and are still here helping. We need to learn everything about them that we can.

https://knowablemagazine.org/article/living-world/2023/how-endomembrane-system-of-eukar...

"More than 1.5 billion years ago, a momentous thing happened: Two small, primitive cells became one. Perhaps more than any event — barring the origin of life itself — this merger radically changed the course of evolution on our planet.

:One cell ended up inside the other and evolved into a structure that schoolkids learn to refer to as the “powerhouse of the cell”: the mitochondrion. This new structure provided a tremendous energetic advantage to its host — a precondition for the later evolution of complex, multicellular life.

"But that’s only part of the story. The mitochondrion is not the only important structure within complex, eukaryotic cells. There’s the membrane-bound nucleus, safekeeper of the genome. There’s a whole system of internal membranes: the endoplasmic reticulum, the Golgi apparatus, lysosomes, peroxisomes and vacuoles — essential for making, transporting and recycling proteins and other cargo in and around the cell.

"Where did all these structures come from? With events lost in the deep past and few traces to serve as evolutionary clues, it’s a very tough question to tackle. Researchers have proposed various hypotheses, but it is only recently, with some new tools and techniques, that cell biologists have been able to investigate the beginnings of this intricate architecture and shed some light on its possible origins.

***

"Scientists proposed that it already was fairly complicated, with a variety of membrane structures inside it. Such a cell would have been capable of engulfing and ingesting things — a complicated and energetically expensive eukaryotic feature called phagocytosis. That might be how the mitochondrion first got into the host.

"But this idea, called the “mitochondria late” hypothesis, doesn’t explain how or why the host cell had become complex to begin with.

***

"In short, Gould, Garg and Martin’s hypothesis explains why endomembrane compartments evolved: to solve problems created by the new guest. But it doesn’t fully explain how the alphaproteobacterium got inside the host to begin with, says cell biologist Gautam Dey at EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany; it assumes the endosymbiont is already inside. “This is a massive problem,” Dey says.

"In short, Gould, Garg and Martin’s hypothesis explains why endomembrane compartments evolved: to solve problems created by the new guest. But it doesn’t fully explain how the alphaproteobacterium got inside the host to begin with, says cell biologist Gautam Dey at EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany; it assumes the endosymbiont is already inside. “This is a massive problem,” Dey says.

***

"Martin’s main objection is that the inside-out model does not provide an evolutionary pressure that would have caused the nucleus or other membrane-bound compartments to arise in the first place. The inside-out model “is upside-down and backwards,” Martin says.

***

"In 2017, cell biologist Heidi McBride of McGill University in Montreal reported that cells lacking peroxisomes could generate them from scratch. Working with mutant human fibroblast cells without peroxisomes, her team found that these cells put proteins that are essential for peroxisome function into mitochondria instead. Then the mitochondrial membrane released them as little bubbles, or vesicles.

***

"...a 2021 report from the lab of biochemist Adam Hughes at the University of Utah found that when yeast cells are fed toxic amounts of amino acids, their mitochondria will shed vesicles that are loaded with transporter molecules. The transporters move amino acids into the vesicles, where they won’t poison the mitochondria.

"Hughes also discovered that the vesicles shed by the mitochondria can form long, tubule-like extensions with multiple layers, reminiscent of the layered stacks of the endoplasmic reticulum and the Golgi body. The structures persist in the cell for a long time. “They’re definitely their own unique structure,” Hughes says.

***

"It may never be possible to know for sure what happened such a very long time ago. But by exploring what can happen in today’s living bacterial, archaeal and eukaryotic cells, scientists can get more clarity on what was possible — and even probable. A cell moves into another cell, bringing benefits but also problems, setting off a complex cascade. And then, McBride says, “all this stuff blooms and blossoms.'”

Comment: all of this complexity is best explained by a designer at work. Please see the beautiful diagram of a cell with all of its many parts identified.

https://twitter.com/RJABuggs/status/1699369829424054284?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5E...

"This @NaturePlants n paper deserves to be widely known, but is not an easy read. Here is my lay interpretation of the abstract:

"There are several major types of plants, with different body plans. Some are single celled, others are much more complex. We don’t know how this diversity evolved. Here we use a big dataset to provide new evidence that the different types are very different (even when fossils are included). This is especially true of the structures that they use to reproduce. Assuming that the types evolved from each other, we build a model that shows that intermediates forms once existed; these must have disappeared without trace and we can't be specific about what they were. The major plant types have evolved in unique ways. Types with simple body plans can have lots of diversity in them, so it is not necessary to be complex to be diverse. More complex types tend to have larger gene families within them, so genome duplications are important for plant evolution. The different types of plants don’t appear all at once: each one appears suddenly and in diversity at a different time point (we also completely disprove the idea that the major types all appeared at once). The pattern we find in plants is a similar pattern to that shown by the major types of animals and fungi." (my bold)

Comment: another major gap. Note my bold. The Darwinian plea is there must be intermediates. Tell that to those who cry about the Cambrian gap. How about God, the designer who creates gaps?

https://theconversation.com/how-did-plants-first-evolve-into-all-different-shapes-and-s...

"How did plants first evolve into all different shapes and sizes? We mapped a billion years of plant history to find out

"Plants range from simple seaweeds and single-celled pond scum, through to mosses, ferns and huge trees. Palaeontologists like us have long debated exactly how this diverse range of shapes and sizes emerged, and whether plants emerged from algae into multicellular and three-dimensional forms in a gradual flowering or one big bang.

"To answer this question, scientists turned to the fossil record. From those best-preserved examples, like trilobites, ammonites and sea urchins, they have invariably concluded that a group’s range of biological designs is achieved during the earliest periods in its evolutionary history. In turn, this has led to hypotheses that evolutionary lineages have a higher capacity for innovation early on and, after this first phase of exuberance, they stick with what they know. This even applies to us: all the different placental mammals evolved from a common ancestor surprisingly quickly. Is the same true of the plant kingdom?

***

"We then analysed all this data, grouping plants based on their overall similarities and differences, all plotted within what can be thought of as a “design space”. Since we know the evolutionary relationships between the species, we can also predict the traits of their extinct shared ancestors and include these hypothetical ancestors within the design space, too.

"For example, we will never find fossils of the ancestral flowering plant, but we know from its closest living descendants that it was bisexual, radially symmetric, with more than five spirally arranged carpels (the ovule-bearing female reproductive part of a flower). Together, data points from living species, fossils and predicted ancestors reveal how plant life has navigated design space through evolutionary history and over geological time.

"We expected flowering plants to dominate the design space since they make up more than 80% of plant species, but they don’t. In fact, the living bryophytes – mosses, liverworts and hornworts – achieve almost as much variety in their body forms.

"This may not be entirely surprising since the three lineages of bryophytes have been doing their own thing for more than three times as long as flowering plants. And despite their diminutive nature, even the humble mosses are extraordinarily complex and diverse when viewed through a microscope.

***

"...some of the distinctiveness of the different groupings in design space is clearly the result of extinction. This is clear if we consider the distribution of the fossil species (black dots in the above figure) that often occur between the clusters of living species (coloured dots in the figure). (my bold)

***

"So does that make plants different from animals, studies of which are the basis for the expectation of early evolutionary innovation and exhaustion? Not at all. Comparable studies that we have done on animals and fungi show that, when you study these multicellular kingdoms in their entirety, they all exhibit a pattern of episodically increasing anatomically variety. Individual lineages may soon exhaust themselves but, overall, the kingdoms keep on innovating.

"This suggests a general pattern for evolutionary innovation in multicellular kingdoms and also that animals, fungi and plants still have plenty of evolutionary juice in their tanks.

Comment: All the plant groups have no known predecessors. Note my bold. The authors simply invent missing fossils! (see their illustration). The author's conclusion that evolution is a drive toward complexity is exactly my thinking. The full article is analyzed in Evolution News:

https://evolutionnews.org/2023/10/plant-evolution-all-gaps-and-miracles/

130,000 observations. 548 traits. 400 species of living and fossil plants. This is what a team of 10 evolutionary biologists investigated in a major project to look for patterns of evolution in the plant kingdom. Publishing in Nature Plants, they reproduced their morphospace map of the major groups of plants. If described in words, it would go:

Bang! Algae
Bang! Bryophytes (mosses, liverworts, and hornworts)
Bang! Lycophytes (vascular plants including clubmosses)
Bang! Ferns (spore-bearing vascular plants)
Bang! Gymnosperms (seed-bearing cycads, ginkgoes, and conifers)
Bang! Angiosperms (flowering plants)

Subsequent to each bang, there were rapid variations, like the sparkly after-effects of complex fireworks. But the disparity between each bang is huge.

Comment: there follows a point by point analysis:

"Forcing the uncooperative data into an “evolutionary pattern” of ancestors and descendants branching into a treelike pattern of universal common ancestry required some imagination. This was easily accomplished using miracle words. Plants emerged. They expanded. They occupied design space. And sometimes, they reversed direction and converged."

The whole article is shown to be a series of magical conjectures.

https://phys.org/news/2023-10-tiny-solar-powered-animals.html

"Animals and plants need energy. Some animals get energy by eating other animals, and many plants harvest the energy in sunlight through photosynthesis. However, in the ocean, there exists a remarkable group of small, worm-like animals called acoels that do both; some acoels form relationships (symbiosis) with single-celled, photosynthetic microalgae.

"A study by Assistant Professor Kevin Wakeman and his undergraduate student, Siratee Riewluang, at Hokkaido University, Japan, has shed some light on the biodiversity underpinning symbiotic relationships between acoels and microalgae.

"Acoels are superficially simple. However, this simplicity is misleading. Due to their regenerative ability and position as one of the first animal groups on the planet, acoels interest biologists in the fields of evolutionary biology, regenerative biology, and neurobiology. Some acoels also form symbiotic relationships with microalgae. This includes green algae and other types of microalgae that also associate with coral reefs called dinoflagellates.

"'These acoels engulf microalgae seemingly as 'food,' but they do not digest them. Instead, they store them below their outer surface. They create energy using sunlight—much like adding solar panels to your house," explained Siratee.

***

"Unexpectedly, Wakeman and Siratee came across what might turn out to be a whole new group of acoels harboring symbionts (only one group is currently known).

"'We found that there was more diversity of acoels and their symbionts than we really expected," said Wakeman. "Even in this present dataset, which focuses on Japan, it's clear that there are fascinating interactions between acoels and microalgae. These results will lay the groundwork for future studies that can tease apart what are probably some interesting ecological mechanisms. I really am excited to see where this ends up."

"Wakeman and Siratee will continue work on photosynthetic acoels for Siratee's Master's degree.

"'It would be cool to figure out if they really are a new group of acoels with symbionts, but we need more genetic data and unambiguous morphological data to confidently assign a new name," said Siratee."

Comment: so, it is not a fully a dog-eat-dog world. Photosynthesis mitigates the problem for dhw.

https://phys.org/news/2023-10-theory-physics-biology-evolution-complexity.html

"An international team of researchers has developed a new theoretical framework that bridges physics and biology to provide a unified approach for understanding how complexity and evolution emerge in nature.

"This new work on "assembly theory," published today in Nature, represents a major advance in our fundamental comprehension of biological evolution and how it is governed by the physical laws of the universe. The paper is titled "Assembly Theory Explains and Quantifies Selection and Evolution."

***

"In prior work, the team assigned a complexity score to molecules called the molecular assembly index, based on the minimal number of bond-forming steps required to build a molecule. They showed how this index is experimentally measurable and how high values correlate with life-derived molecules.

"The new study introduces mathematical formalism around a physical quantity called "assembly" that captures how much selection is required to produce a given set of complex objects, based on their abundance and assembly indices.

"'Assembly theory provides a completely new lens for looking at physics, chemistry and biology as different perspectives of the same underlying reality," explained lead author Professor Sara Walker, a theoretical physicist and origin of life researcher from Arizona State University.

"'With this theory, we can start to close the gap between reductionist physics and Darwinian evolution—it's a major step toward a fundamental theory unifying inert and living matter." (my bold)

"The researchers demonstrated how assembly theory can be applied to quantify selection and evolution in systems ranging from simple molecules to complex polymers and cellular structures.

"It explains both the discovery of new objects and the selection of existing ones, allowing open-ended increases in complexity characteristic of life and technology.

"'Assembly theory provides an entirely new way to look at the matter that makes up our world, as defined not just by immutable particles but by the memory needed to build objects through selection over time," said Professor Lee Cronin, a chemist from the University of Glasgow and co-lead author. (my bold)

***

"The researchers aim to further refine assembly theory and explore its applications for characterizing known and unknown life, and testing hypotheses about how life emerges from non-living matter.

"'A key feature of the theory is that it is experimentally testable," says Cronin. "This opens up the exciting possibility of using assembly theory to design new experiments that could solve the origin of life by creating living systems from scratch in the laboratory."

"The theory opens up many new questions and research directions at the boundary of the physical and life sciences. Overall, assembly theory promises to provide profound new insights into the physics underlying biological complexity and evolutionary innovation."

Comment: I really don't know what these authors are thinking that they can describe the origin of life from non-life by defining the physical force that can create biochemical molecules. Questions: what created the forces? what handles the required memory bolded above?
How can living and non-living matter be unified? Currently the only way we can experiment with life is to use living matter to manipulate. The gap between life and non-life is just like the Cambrian gap. Fixed forever.

https://phys.org/news/2022-12-rapid-genome-evolution-hybrid-ant.html

"Over the past ten years, the DNA sequencing revolution has revealed that mating between two different species, i.e., hybridization, once considered rare, is actually widespread across the tree of life. This came as a surprise—hybridization was considered mostly detrimental since offspring are not always viable and can be infertile, like mules. However, many studies showed that hybridization could have beneficial consequences and help populations adapt to new environments.

"For instance, in humans, Tibetan populations are adapted to low oxygen concentrations found under high altitudes thanks to genetic material acquired through hybridization, 50,000 years ago, between modern and archaic humans, now extinct populations (such as Neanderthals). This year, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Svante Pääbo (Max Planck Institute) for his work on human evolution, including gene exchange between modern and archaic humans.

"Researchers at the University of Helsinki took advantage of distinct hybrid wood ant populations identified in Southern Finland to study whether hybridization was predictable. They found that after multiple hybridization events between two wood ant species, distinct hybrid populations evolved independently in the same direction. They are nowadays highly similar to one another in terms of genetic composition, suggesting that the outcome of hybridization is predictable. Researchers also determined that hybridization occurred less than 50 ant generations ago, approximately 125 years ago, making it a fairly rapid case of evolution in the wild.

***

"Finnish wood ants give the opportunity to observe multiple, very recent hybridization events, and the amount of predictability we found despite this recency is remarkably high, which is quite novel," explains researcher Pierre Nouhaud, from the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Helsinki.

"'In the meantime, our study also confirms previous results obtained in a handful of species, including humans, suggesting the patterns we see in wood ants are quite general."

***

"'On an evolutionary timescale, we are dealing with recent events, less than 50 ant generations, which had very little time to leave footprints in DNA sequences. This means it can be hard to distinguish between competing hypotheses. In our study we performed computer simulations considering different evolutionary scenarios to take this uncertainty into account and ensure our results are robust," says Nouhaud."
'
Comment: this study shows that hybridization offers survival benefits. Note second paragraph discusses human benefits. This process does not advance evolution but creates variations on specific species. No intervention by God necessary.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/12/221215130916.htm

"An international team led by researchers at Dartmouth College and the Max Delbrück Center (MDC) in Germany report in the journal Science Advancesthat octopuses are the first known invertebrates -- creatures that lack a backbone and constitute roughly 95% of animal species -- to contain a high number of gene-regulating molecules known as microRNAs. The genes of two octopus species show an increase in microRNAs -- which are linked to the development of advanced cells with specific functions -- over evolutionary time that has so far only been found in humans, mammals and other vertebrates.

"When combined with the known intelligence of octopuses, the findings provide crucial support for the theory that microRNAs are key to the evolution of intelligent life, said co-corresponding author Kevin Peterson, a Dartmouth professor of biological sciences. The nervous systems of octopuses and squids -- which both belong to a type of mollusk known as cephalopods -- evolved independently of vertebrates. Yet, the prevalence of microRNAs in both octopuses and vertebrates suggest a common role for the molecules in advanced cognition.

"'MicroRNAs are known as the 'dark matter' of the animal genome -- they don't make protein, but they regulate the expression of proteins," Peterson said, referring to the hypothetical form of matter thought to constitute most of the universe.

***

"Peterson's research has shown that creatures such as placental mammals whose genes have increased in number and complexity over evolutionary time also exhibit increasing concentrations of microRNAs. On the other hand, organisms such as parasites have lost ancestral genes -- and microRNAs -- as they have become less complex.

"'In order to have new cognitive abilities and behaviors requires new cell types," Peterson said. "The two places you get this -- in placental mammals and cephalopods -- is also where we see these microRNA-expressed genes. Animals that don't seem to have changed very much in the past 500 million years don't have very many microRNAs.

***

"This kind of intelligence potentially stems from microRNAs' role in diversifying cell function, said study co-author Bastian Fromm, a research group at the University of Tromsø in Norway who collaborates with the Peterson lab on its research and building the online microRNA database, MirGeneDB.

"Cells in complex organisms perform specialized tasks, which means surrounding cells need to be calibrated to carry out additional functions, Fromm said.

"'MicroRNAs are like light switches or dimmers that can turn on and regulate the expression of thousands of proteins in a cell and specify what the cell can do," Fromm said. "This is a numbers game. Oysters and slugs have microRNAs, but in cephalopods -- and especially the octopus -- there is an explosion of them that correlates with their intelligence.'"

Comment: MicroRNA's are 'control' switches as the article shows, Easy for God to dabble with that arrangement.

https://phys.org/news/2022-12-fossil-site-reveals-giant-arthropods.html

"Discoveries at a major new fossil site in Morocco suggest giant arthropods—relatives of modern creatures including shrimps, insects and spiders—dominated the seas 470 million years ago.

"Early evidence from the site at Taichoute, once undersea but now a desert, records numerous large "free-swimming" arthropods.

"More research is needed to analyse these fragments, but based on previously described specimens, the giant arthropods could be up to 2m long.

***

"Dr. Xiaoya Ma, from the University of Exeter and Yunnan University, added: "While the giant arthropods we discovered have not yet been fully identified, some may belong to previously described species of the Fezouata Biota, and some will certainly be new species.

***

"Fossils discovered in these rocks include mineralised elements (eg shells), but some also show exceptional preservation of soft parts such as internal organs, allowing scientists to investigate the anatomy of early animal life on Earth.

"Animals of the Fezouata Shale, in Morocco's Zagora region, lived in a shallow sea that experienced repeated storm and wave activities, which buried the animal communities and preserved them in place as exceptional fossils.

"However, nektonic (or free-swimming) animals remain a relatively minor component overall in the Fezouata Biota.

***

"'Even when it comes to trilobites, new species so far unknown from the Fezouata Biota are found in Taichoute.'"

Comment: this new find fits dhw's theory that there is much new that we will find. I agree. The Cambrian gap is here to stay, I believe

https://www.livescience.com/oldest-stromatolites-australia?utm_campaign=368B3745-DDE0-4...

"Layered rocks in Western Australia are some of Earth's earliest known life, according to a new study.

"The fossils in question are stromatolites, layered rocks that are formed by the excretions of photosynthetic microbes. The oldest stromatolites that scientists agree were made by living organisms date back 3.43 billion years, but there are older specimens, too. In the Dresser Formation of Western Australia, stromatolites dating back 3.48 billion years have been found.

"However, billions of years have wiped away traces of organic matter in these older stromatolites, raising questions about whether they were really formed by microbes or whether they might have been made by other geological processes.

"'We were able to find certain specific microstructures within particular layers of these rocks that are strongly indicative of biological processes," said Keyron Hickman-Lewis(opens in new tab), a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, who led the research.

***

"Hickman-Lewis and his team examined Western Australian stromatolites first discovered in 2000 by study co-author Frances Westall(opens in new tab) at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France. They used a variety of high-resolution 2D and 3D imaging techniques in order to peer into the layers of the stromatolite at a fine scale.

:What they saw hinted at biological growth in all its messy glory. The researchers observed uneven layers, including little dome shapes that are indicative of photosynthesis, since microbes with the most access to the sun will grow more vigorously than those not as high in the structure. They also saw columnar structures that are typical in modern stromatolites, which are still found in a few locations around the globe.

"Microbial mats give you layers that are uneven in their thickness and tend to be wrinkly or crinkly or go up and down on very small spatial scales," said Linda Kah(opens in new tab), a sedimentologist and geochemist at the University of Tennessee who was not involved in the new study. Putting all the structural clues together, she told Live Science, "you end up with what looks like the characteristics of a microbial mat."

***

"The evidence that the Dresser Formation stromatolites are signs of ancient life doesn't make them the oldest life on the planet. That (possible) honor may go to stromatolites found in 3.7 billion-year-old rock in Greenland, or possibly to microfossils from Canada that might be as old as 4.29 billion years. It's very difficult to distinguish biological life from non-organic processes in these very old rocks, however, so these finds and others from a similar timeframe are controversial.

"Based on the minerals in the stromatolites, the Western Australia microbial mats probably formed in a shallow lagoon fed by hydrothermal vents that was also connected to the ocean, the researchers reported Nov. 4 .

Comment: We've been here before. If any of these fossil spots are real life, it makes the point that life did not take long to appear after the Earth formed and was going through constant bombardment in what is called Earth's 'Hadean period'. It looks as if life was pre-ordained to appear. Not by chance.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/by-losing-genes-life-often-evolved-more-complexity-20200...

“'And that was the start of my frustration,” said Cañestro,... His team was unable to find certain genes within Oikopleura’s genome that should have been there because they are very conserved across animals. In particular, none of the genes involved in the synthesis, modification or degradation of retinoic acid were present. Nor was the receptor for retinoic acid. Yet retinoic acid signaling was thought to be essential for making a brain, nerve cord and other vital features. Furthermore, Oikopleura also lacks a gene that seemed critical for triggering the development of heart tissue.

"'We found a situation in which the things we thought were essential are not there, even though the structure [they make] is still there. And that makes you rethink the essentiality of some of the genes.”

"Two surprising analyses that appeared in Nature Ecology & Evolution early this year have hammered home just how inessential genes can be, and how creatively evolution can deal with losing them. By analyzing hundreds of genomes from across the animal kingdom, researchers in Spain and the United Kingdom showed that a startling degree of gene loss pervades the tree of life.

"Their results suggest that even early animals had relatively complex genomes because of an unprecedented spurt of gene duplication early in life’s history. Later, as lineages of animals evolved into different phyla with distinct body plans, many of their genes began to disappear, and gene loss continued to be a major factor in evolution thereafter. In fact, the loss of genes seems to have helped many groups of organisms split away from their ancestors and triumph over new environmental challenges.

***

"But in reality, the majority of gene losses during evolution are likely to be neutral, with no fitness consequences for the organism, says Michael Hiller, an evolutionary genomicist at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany.

"The reason is that evolutionary gene losses often occur after some change in the environment or behaviors makes a gene less necessary.

***

"One of the best examples of adaptive gene loss in animals can be seen in cetaceans (the order of aquatic mammals including whales and dolphins), which have lost 85 protein-coding genes seen in other mammals, as Hiller reported last year. Many of these losses are probably neutral, but some seem linked to diving-related adaptations, like the narrowing of blood vessels during diving. One of the lost genes, KLK8, is interesting because it is involved in the development both of sweat glands in the skin and of the hippocampus in the brain; cetaceans lost it during their transition from land back to water. The loss of this gene is linked to the development of a thicker epidermis and the loss of hair (hair is not adaptive in aquatic environments, where it creates drag and does not preserve body heat as it does in terrestrial animals). (my Bold)

***

"Dolphins and whales, Old World fruit bats, and elephants — three lineages with relatively big brains — have all lost a gene, HMGCS2, required for ketogenesis, a metabolic process that scientists had thought was required to support the activity and growth of large, energy-hungry brains. Brain cells consume glucose, but when that is unavailable, they fuel themselves with ketone bodies from fatty acids. HGMCS2, the enzyme that converts fatty acids into ketone bodies, becomes especially important during fasting.

***

"More generally, the pervasiveness of gene loss in the tree of life points to an inversion of a classic theme in evolutionary developmental biology. In the 1970s and ’80s, “the big shock was to find that flies and humans use the same genes,” Cañestro said. Replace the fly Pax6 gene with the human version, and the fly can still make an eye. “Now we are finding that sometimes the structures [that grow] are the same, but the genes responsible for making the structures have many differences,” he said. “How is it possible that there are so many different genes, and still the structures are the same? That’s the inverse paradox of evo-devo.'”

Comment: we here know all this about trait loss. They didn't note Behe's articles and book. Maybe Behe is persona non grata as a renowned ID'er. And note the 85 gene loss to go aquatic

https://phys.org/news/2022-08-genes-lost-woolly-mammoth-evolution.html

"A new study shows that 87 genes have been affected by deletions or short insertions during the course of the mammoth's evolution. The researchers note that their findings have implications for international efforts to resurrect extinct species, including the woolly mammoth.

***

"The researchers behind the study have sequenced two new Siberian mammoth genomes from the last ice age, and compared these with a total of 33 previously published genomes from mammoths, Asian elephants and African elephants.

"Losing part of a gene, a gene deletion, will affect its function. Similarly, short insertions lead to frame-shift mutations that can make the genes unreadable. The results show that there are many thousands of deletions and short insertions across the mammoth's genome, comprising more than three million letters in the genetic code. Overall, the researchers found that most of these did not occur within genes, indicating they generally have had a negative impact on mammoth viability.

"'However, we did also find 84 genes that have been affected by genomic deletions and three that have been affected by short insertions. These structural changes likely had a significant impact on the function of these genes and might have contributed to some of the unique adaptations of the woolly mammoth," says Tom van der Valk, a researcher at the Centre for Palaeogenetics.

***

"The change in functionality in these 87 genes may have been important for mammoths as they evolved adaptations to the cold environment in the far north. Many adaptive traits, such as body size and cold tolerance, are regulated by several different genes. Losses of some of these genes can therefore affect the functional pathways that shape the development of these adaptive traits.

"'Several of the genes that have been affected are related to classic woolly mammoth traits such as fur growth and hair shape, fat deposition, as well as skeletal morphology and ear shape," says Marianne Dehasque, a Ph.D. student on mammoth genomics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics."

Comment: once again seen as part of a species adaptations, and not speciaton

https://www.quantamagazine.org/geometric-analysis-reveals-how-birds-mastered-flight-202...

“Evolution has created a far more complicated flying device than we have ever been able to engineer,” said Samik Bhattacharya, an assistant professor in the experimental fluid mechanics lab at the University of Central Florida. The reasons why today’s aircraft can’t match avian maneuverability aren’t simply a matter of engineering. Although birds have been meticulously observed throughout history and have inspired designs for flying machines by Leonardo da Vinci and others through the centuries, the biomechanics that make birds’ maneuverability possible have largely been a mystery.

A landmark study published last March in Nature, however, has started to change that. For her doctoral research at the University of Michigan, Christina Harvey and her colleagues found that most birds can morph their wings mid-flight to flip back and forth between flying smoothly like a passenger plane and flying acrobatically like a fighter jet. Their work makes it clear that birds can completely alter both the aerodynamic characteristics that govern how air moves over their wings and the inertial characteristics of their bodies that determine how they tumble through the air to complete fast maneuvers.

***

The 2001 research showed that inherent stability played a bigger part in the flight of birds than was generally believed.

***

They wrote a novel modeling program that represented different types of wings, bones, muscles, skin and feathers as combinations of hundreds of geometric shapes. The software allowed them to calculate relevant characteristics such as the center of gravity and the “neutral point” that is the aerodynamic center of the bird in flight. They then determined those properties for each bird with its wings configured in a variety of shapes.

To quantify each bird’s stability and maneuverability, they calculated an aerodynamic factor called the static margin, the distance between its center of gravity and its neutral point relative to the dimensions of the wing. If a bird’s neutral point was behind its center of gravity, they considered the bird to be inherently stable, meaning that the flying bird would naturally return to its original flight path if pushed off balance. If the neutral point was in front of the center of gravity, then the bird was unstable and would be pushed further from the position it was in — which is exactly what must happen for a bird to be able to do a breathtaking maneuver.

***

birds, unlike airplanes, can move their wings and shift their body postures, thereby altering their static margins. Harvey and her team therefore also evaluated how each birds’ inherent stability changed in different wing configurations.

***

Four species were completely stable, and 17 species — including swifts and pigeons — could switch between stable and unstable flight by morphing their wings. “Really, what we’re seeing is these birds being able to shift between that kind of more fighter-jet-like style and a more passenger-jet-like style,” Harvey said.

Further mathematical modeling by her team suggested that rather than enhancing birds’ instability, evolution has been preserving their potential for both stability and instability. In all the studied birds, Harvey’s team found evidence that selection pressures were simultaneously maintaining static margins that enabled both. As a result, birds have the ability to shift from a stable mode to an unstable one and back, changing their flight properties as needed.

Comment: birds come with very specialized wing shape morphing abilities. When a young bird fledges, it is learning to use these provided abilities. Such complexity requires a knowledgeable designer. Current bird Flight is not just jumping into the air and a stepwise evolutionary development is not possible.