As Neil so eloquently implies, it’s tough to believe that the Universe was created for our benefit when the vvvast majority of its environments would kill us instantly. Not to mention the fact that the size of the earth compared to the size of the Universe is far less than the size of a subatomic particle compared to the earth.
Category Archives: Science
Believe it or not, those white quills are for communication. The streaked tenrecs of Madagascar are the only known species of mammal to communicate by stridulation, or rubbing body parts together, something typically observed in insects. A BBC film crew recently filmed this behavior for the first time and it’s a weird one.
Tenrecs inhabited Madagascar with no competition from other mammals and thus evolved to fill a variety of niches in a process known as adaptive radiation, which produced around 30 distinct species. The most famous example of this are the finches of the Galapagos Islands that first inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Research published in the online edition of Nature last Wednesday (Feb. 9th) has found evidence for the “devolution” of marine worms. That is to say that the worms descended from a more complex ancestor. It was once thought that these two species, Xenoturbellida and Acoelomorpha, were an evolutionary link between simple creatures like jellyfish and the rest of the animal kingdom, but this work suggests otherwise. The joint University College London and Université de Montréal team compared hundreds of genes and concluded:
The results show that the two groups constitute a newly classified phylum (a major division of life), which the authors name the ‘Xenacoelomorpha’. The xenacoelomorph phylum joins the three known phyla of deuterostomes: vertebrates (including humans), echinoderms (e.g. starfish) and hemichordates (acorn worms).
HT: Science Daily
This is a major discovery because it opens a gap in our evolutionary understanding and provides evidence for an unexpected decrease in complexity. David Ringland of the Boston Examiner asks the question, “Could humans be moving in the same direction?”