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How did the first living thing on earth appear? -Valentina

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How did the first living thing on earth appear? -Valentina

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We do not know for sure exactly how life began on earth. This is a question that is still being researched However there are many theories that can help to explain it. One theory is that life started with chemistry
since life is powered by normal chemical reactions. It is thought that life came from nonliving chemistry through a process known as chemical evolution. the way that chemical evolution works is that the simplest forms of molecules interact with each other to make more complex molecules when they are left alone with some from of energy such as heat. Then chains of chemical reactions occur and they resemble very closely the pathways to form life.  Some people also think that a meteorite brought life into our planet since meteorites are known to have amino acids and sugars on them which are the building blocks for life. So they think that this meteorite brought these amino acids and sugars to our planet and that they existed on our old earth and eventually helped form life.

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0:00 / 7:10•Watch full video

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How can evolution be scientific if it can't be tested and none of the events can be observed of recreated?              - Shahrzad

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How can evolution be scientific if it can't be tested and none of the events can be observed of recreated?              - Shahrzad

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Like any other scientific theory, evolutionary science is built on observation and collection of evidence. Evolution is divided into two main areas:
- Micro-evolution: using lab tests and observing changes within species overtime (small scale)
organism --> more specialized species of the organism
- Macro-evolution: examining collected evidence provided by fossils and DNA to see how various organisms might be related
organism --> completely different kind of organism

So evolution CAN be observed. Evidence is not limited to seeing something happen before your eyes. Even though we have not observed an animal changing into a radically different one, we have collected evidence from fossils and DNA that prove evolution is true.

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Is there any evidence against evolution? - Marco

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Is there any evidence against evolution? - Marco

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There are arguments that try and disprove evolution, but every argument has a counterpoint that backs up Darwin's theory. For example, one argument is that evolution cannot be seen by anybody. However, as we know, evolution doesn't happen overnight and can take millions and sometimes billions of years. Another argument is that evolution is unable to explain the origins of life, and while this is true, it's not supposed to. Evolution is meant to explain life's development SINCE life forms came onto Earth. Here are two articles that discuss arguments against evolution along with their counterpoints: https://owlcation.com/stem/6-Stupid-Arguements-Against-Evolution-That-Just-Wont-Die

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I've often been asked, given my reputation as a sceptic, why I don't challenge the scientific case for evolution and against creation. If I look hard enough, they tell me, I'll find the theory of evolution to be full of holes. Well, I did, and I don't.

I have a reputation for scepticism about scientific findings. I do not believe that just because something appears in a peer-reviewed journal, it is a proven fact. I do not believe that only scientists are permitted to challenge other scientists, and then only if they're scientists of the same kind. I do not believe that "scientific consensus" is evidence, even when it exists. I am highly suspicious of scientists who become activists for this or that political policy.

For professional scientists, there is pressure to fall in line with the convictions of senior academics, either to obtain qualifications or gain career advancement. This tends to stifle original or dissident thought. As the philosopher Thomas Kuhn observed, "normal science" is bound within paradigms, and does not seek novelties of facts or theory. " Novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation," he wrote.
Anomalous discoveries are usually met with resistance and attempts to explain it within existing paradigms. They rarely lead to paradigm shifts. This is not entirely a bad thing, since, as Kuhn writes: "By ensuring that the paradigm will not be too easily surrendered, resistance guarantees that scientists will not be lightly distracted and that the anomalies that lead to paradigm change will penetrate existing knowledge to the core."
So whether the bias is personal, professional, or political, there is no reason to believe science to be immune from human frailty. Science is not a thing. "That's science!" is not a argument. Science does not preclude error. It doesn't confer perfect understanding upon us. It isn't some deity, to which we ought to bow in unquestioning faith.

Science is a process; a method that attempts to systematically improve our understanding through a process of testing hypotheses against real-world observation. It can be, and on several occasions has been, thoroughly undermined by bias or ideology.

Perhaps the most infamous case of science being influenced by ideology was the adoption of Lysenkoism during Stalin's totalitarian reign. The early 20 century's synthesis of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection with Gregor Mendel's theory of genetic inheritance was considered too closely associated with the "dog-eat-dog" world of capitalism, and was declared to be "bourgeois pseudoscience".

Soviet agrobiologist Trofim Lysenko rejected both genetics and natural selection in favour of the theory advanced by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, which says evolution occurs by inheritance of characteristics acquired during an organism's lifetime. For example, people who exercise much would pass strong muscles to their children, and plants which have their leaves plucked will produce leafless offspring. Lamarckism also held that organisms were driven to evolve towards greater complexity, so the adaptation that drives evolution is goal-oriented.

"Science cannot long remain unfettered in a social system which seeks to exercise control over the whole spiritual and intellectual life of a nation," wrote Charles A. Leone in a paper on Lysenko versus Mendel, in 1952. "The correctness of a scientific theory can never be adjudged by its readiness to give the answers desired by political leadership."

Mendelian genetics and selection resulted in similar crop and livestock improvements across agriculture, enabling a rapidly growing world population not only to feed itself, but to eat better consistently over time.

It is said complex organisms, or organs, could not possibly evolve by chance. But they don't. Many random mutations occur from one generation to the next, most of which do not become traits. Selection of those that do, however, is based on very real, non-random events, such as how useful those variations are or how geographically isolated sub-populations become. The "natural selection" part of evolution is not at all a random process.

The eye is often cited as an example of an organ that must have been created fully formed, since it wouldn't work without most of its constituent parts. Darwin himself singled out the eye as an organ that seems too complex to have evolved by natural selection. However, his view was that different stages of eye development, from the first photoreceptors to fully formed eyes in mammals, would have conferred some advantage to its possessor, which makes the evolutionary development of eyes plausible.

That he was correct has been borne out by later research, and we now know the very gene that is responsible for eye development in both insects and vertebrates. It is probable that the eye, in some form or another, evolved independently dozens of times. Octopus eyes, for example, are very similar to those of vertebrates, but show some peculiar differences: how the retina connects to the optic nerve, the lack of a cornea, and a lens that focuses by movement, rather than changing shape. Unlike vertebrate eyes, which developed as outgrowths of the brain, octopus eyes developed from an infolding pocket in the body surface. They are a great example of parallel evolution, or even convergent evolution.

Detractors of the theory of evolution sometimes accept evolution within species (micro-evolution) but say there aren't any "transitional fossils" which would show that animals could evolve from one species, genus, family, order, class or phylum into another (macro-evolution). The nature of the fossil record, which is sparse, and in which transitional forms couldn't have occupied much time, makes the discovery of transitional fossils unlikely. Despite this, many examples have been found.

is a fossil of a fish that developed traits of four-legged land animals, or tetrapods. Its is dated to a few million years before the first known tetrapod, which suggests that it is one of the much-caricatured fish that crept out of the water and started walking on land. Other fossils, occurring before and after in the transition, show different features in the evolution of tetrapods from fish, include

Evolving in the opposite direction, whales are descended

The animal for which we probably have the most transitional fossils is the horse, which evolved (along with rhinos and tapirs) from a common ancestor, a dog-sized creature that lived in forests.

Darwinian evolution predicted that transitional fossils must exist, and he said himself that their absence would undermine his theory. The first major transitional fossil to be discovered was in 1861. It shows how modern birds descended from reptilian dinosaurs. Other transitional "proto-birds", even older than , have since been found, such as . Later transitional forms are also known, such as

A flatfish is a weird, asymmetric animal, with both eyes on one side of its head. A fossil that shows the transition, having one eye near the top of the head, is

Perhaps the earliest known chordate is the , which resembles a vertebrate, but lacks some of their key characteristics. This makes it a probable transitional fossil.

In the plant kingdom, a well-known transitional fossil is the , which shows the evolution of seeds, and predates the earliest seed plants by about 20-million years.

An early candidate for the so-called "missing link" between the apes and humans turned out to be an infamous hoax concocted in 1908, known as the Piltdown Man. Subsequently, however, many examples of "missing links" have been discovered, perhaps the most prominent being Lucy, or . Other examples are , which had a brain the size of a chimpanzee's, but could walk upright and had an opposable toe, and , whose brain was 50% larger and who used tools. Many early hominids are extinct but are clearly related to human ancestors, which shows natural selection at work.

They'll say nobody has ever seen a new species evolve. The most common delineation between species is that different species cannot interbreed. The best experiment with speciation in the laboratory was conducted almost 30 years ago, by William Rice and George Salt, who separated fruit flies with different preferences, and found that after 35 generations, the separated populations stopped interbreeding. Since then, more research has been conducted into how speciation occurs. One notable discovery is that periods between species transition can be very long, but if and when a transition happens, it can be very quick. This explains the relative paucity of transitional forms in the fossil record.

Another argument used against evolution is that some parts of Darwinian theory have been overturned, and some problems in evolutionary theory remain unsolved. Or that "evolution is just a theory". This argument could be used to make a case against any scientific theory whatsoever. The theory of gravity is no longer how Newton first described it, and questions remain about how exactly gravity works. But in the words of Tim Minchin (if you haven't seen Storm, you must), the uncertainties about gravity ought not to influence your decision to leave your apartment by the front door, or by the window on the second floor.

It is true that certain of Darwin's beliefs have been disproven. Darwin did not understand genetic inheritance at all. His belief that all evolution occurs gradually is wrong. Mechanisms exist for sudden evolutionary jumps, including one-step speciation. The Darwinian notion of a "tree of life", with all species descended from a single ancestor, remains conceptually useful on a macro level. However, bacteria are able to exchange genes with each other, which makes nonsense of the notion of an evolutionary hierarchy. It has become clear that the Darwinian idea that all evolutionary traits are adaptive, enhancing reproductive success, is not true. Many heritable traits have nothing to do with the "survival of the fittest". Darwin also shared the belief that there is some sort of biological progress towards a goal or ideal state, or, in his words, a "progress to perfection". This is now also known to be false.

Modern evolutionary biology draws from numerous scientific fields, including new study areas such as molecular biology, microbiology and genomics. Much of the new research has corrected or supplanted older ideas, whether they are Darwinian, or part of the "modern synthesis" of the 20 th century. There isn't yet a single, over-arching new synthesis of evolutionist thought (although there are candidates), but this does not undermine evolution at all. If there were holes in it, what we're seeing now is how they're being filled. These advances are a sign that scientists are developing a better understanding of the mechanisms of evolution and how it shaped our modern world, not that they are rejecting evolution as a theory.

Some anti-evolutionists argue that the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy (commonly thought of as disorder) can only increase, which makes the spontaneous evolution of complex cells and structures such as proteins impossible. This is a misreading of the law, however. It says that entropy cannot decrease in a . If that meant no organisation can ever arise, then we would also not see the formation of crystals or other non-living structures. The Earth is not a closed system. It constantly receives energy from the sun. Organisms on Earth can increase their complexity simply by using this energy, without reducing the total entropy in the solar system. No breach of the laws of thermodynamics is necessary to explain evolution.

As we've seen, just because Darwin did not perfectly explain evolution does not mean that Lamarck was right. In the same way, the imperfections of Darwinian theory do not justify the acceptance of any other extravagant hypothesis, even one that explains observed consequences. Like all science, evolutionary biology progresses by means of hypotheses are tested against real-world observation in repeatable experiments. The better our ability to observe the real world, the better the science becomes.

Darwin was technically wrong on many aspects of evolution. It required Mendel's genetics to explain the mechanism by which evolution works, for example. But his theory, more than 150 years old, was a great step towards a better understanding of the biological world. Today's evolutionary biology is merely a better description of evolution. And it will get better still, in future. That's science!

While we have your attention...

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Arguments against evolution, and why they're wrong | Daily Maverick

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I've often been asked, given my reputation as a sceptic, why I don't challenge the scientific case for evolution and against creation. If I look hard enough, they tell me, I'll find the theory of evolution to be full of holes. Well, I did, and I don't.

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What ideas compete with evolution to explain population changes? - Rose

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What ideas compete with evolution to explain population changes? - Rose

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There are many theories that give multiple ideas such as natural selection, speciation and adaption and evolution regarding population change and although scientists support the idea of evolution, they do not accept that natural selection is the primary mechanism involved. A man named Charles Darwin thought otherwise, he believed that a mechanism for evolution was natural selection. Natural selection is a a function of the effect of inherited traits on the differential reproductive success of organisms interacting with their environment. Evolution is viewed and accepted as the main ideology behind population changes because the idea of biological evolution is that populations, species and organism change over time.https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/her/evolution-and-natural-selection/a/darwin-evolution-natural-selection

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Will humans ever go extinct due to a massive change in the environment? -Julian

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Will humans ever go extinct due to a massive change in the environment? -Julian

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Human extinction is the end of hypothetical end of humans. This may result in natural causes or in result of human action. Human extinction is unprecedented, speculation about the probability of different scenarios is highly subjective. Nick Bostrom argues that it would be "misguided" to assume that the probability of near-term extinction is less than 25% and that it will be "a tall order" for the human race to "get our precautions sufficiently right the first time", given that an existential risk provides no opportunity to learn from failure.

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What is the evidence of Human evolution? shivangi

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What is the evidence of Human evolution? shivangi

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Scientists have gathered many evidence of human evolution through fossils. Early human fossils have been found of more than 6,000 individuals. Researchers study the changes in physical human size compared to human structure now. Researchers have found that there has been a pattern of growth in brain size as well as reduction of face size. By studying these fossils scientists can also confirm that humans are a part of diverse human family tree. The evolution of human species is not with one after the next, but a big family tree with many deeper branches. Though now we are the only surviving species of this family tree. Research has shown that there were even periods in history when different human species lived together at the same time. Scientist have also studied an evolution in the behavior of humans over time. Through footprints, stone tools, shelter, art, clothing scientist are able to see the change of humans thought process. Over the last 100,000 years to the present, there have been markings on some of the stone technologies, bones, and many other different objects. These markings show that humans began a symbolic state using language and numbers to interact and benefit themselves. These artifacts show a physical and mental change over time, showing the evolution of the human species from the start to the present

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The Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program

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Scientists have discovered a wealth of evidence concerning human evolution, and this evidence comes in many forms. Thousands of human fossils enable researchers and students to study the changes that occurred in brain and body size, locomotion, diet, and other aspects regarding the way of life of early human species over the past 6 million years. Millions of stone tools, figurines and paintings, footprints, and other traces of human behavior in the prehistoric record tell about where and how early humans lived and when certain technological innovations were invented. Study of human genetics show how closely related we are to other primates - in fact, how connected we are with all other organisms - and can indicate the prehistoric migrations of our species, Homo sapiens, all over the world. Advances in the dating of fossils and artifacts help determine the age of those remains, which contributes to the big picture of when different milestones in becoming human evolved.

Exciting scientific discoveries continually add to the broader and deeper public knowledge of human evolution. Find out about the latest evidence in our What's Hot in Human Origins section.

Explore the evidence for human evolution in this interactive timeline - climate change, species, and milestones in becoming human.

Zoom in using the magnifier on the bottom for a closer look! This interactive is no longer in FLASH, it may take a moment to load.

The human family tree shows the various species that constitute the human evolutionary family.

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Scientists have discovered a wealth of evidence concerning human evolution, and this evidence comes in many forms. Thousands of human fossils enable researchers and students to study the changes that occurred in brain and body size, locomotion, diet, and other aspects regarding the way of life of early human species over the past 6 million years.

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Similarly, various gene groups that predispose people to asthma, coronary artery disease,  a high body mass index, and higher cholesterol seem to become more uncommon. Researchers believe that this might be because these predispositions impact the likelihood of having children earlier.  This is very subtle, and it is because the progress doesn't happen over a generation or two - it takes a very long time.  Another example of this evolution is the ability to digest milk. In theory, humans shouldn't be able to digest milk past infancy, and most adults today can't digest milk. As babies, our lactase gene is turned on , allowing us to digest milk, but as we grow, this gene is supposedly turned off. However, several thousands of years ago, the ability to digest milk came to be an advantage, due to its nutritional value. Some individuals happened to have a mutation that allowed the lactase gene to remain active,  and these people tended to have a better life with more children. Their children would get this genetic mutation, and so it spread. All of this evidence confirms the question of whether humans are still evolving. Humans are experiencing the slightest changes in their genetics, which over a long period of time results in their evolution.

https://www.popsci.com/humans-are-still-evolving#page-2

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Are humans still evolving? What proof is their to prove our evolution? Julia Vassallo 

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Are humans still evolving? What proof is their to prove our evolution? Julia Vassallo 

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Charles Darwin once said, "A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die.” It is this grain of salt whether it is an illness, blood disorder, physical abnormality or a single variant gene that can determine our survival. Humans have continued to evolve slowly over many years, giving us the ability to adapt to our environments. Evidence that proves our evolution include the recent emergence of different blood disorders, our ability to tolerate milk, and various physical differences which all contribute to our constant evolution. Recently, researchers have found people in Africa with blood types outside the more common ABO blood types, having three different types of alleles. We are noticing that the more common blood types in certain continents, I.E. type B blood in Asia, are becoming common in other countries where it wasn't many years ago. With this evolution of blood comes new blood disorders such as sickle cell anemia. Once a life threatening disease, now has lower death rates due to a gene mutation present throughout generations that helps fight malaria. Secondly, the ability to digest milk is also proof of evolution because the enzymes needed to break down the chemicals is usually only present in younger ages. Over time, some humans have built up a tolerance for milk since our DNA and the allele that controls lactase/LCT has been altered. It began in countries where people relied on constant dairy in order to survive showing humans adapt in order to withstand environmental changes. This ability to have lactase was then passed down generation to generation and improved with time. With constant environmental changes, humans have learned to adapt by evolving, and will only continue to grow with time.

https://www.the-scientist.com/features/humans-never-stopped-evolving-33115

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How did the world go from non-living to living things? -Veronica

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How did the world go from non-living to living things? -Veronica

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The study of how life on Earth originated as inanimate matter is called Abiogenesis. It involves the formation of the simplest forms of life from primordial chemicals. Single-celled micro-organisms, prokaryotes, were the first living things on Earth and had first appeared almost 4 billion years ago. This was just a few hundred million years after the formation of Earth itself occurred. Individualized fossils are found in rocks that are 3.4 billion years old, but multi-celled fossils have only been identified in rocks that are less than a billion years old. It is believed that over millions of years of evolution, prokaryotes evolved into self-replicating molecules through natural selection. Many aspects of the study of the origin of life on Earth are still not fully understood, leaving us with various theories on the subject. Some theories include: Theory of Special Creation (life created by a super natural power), Cosmozoic Theory (life came to Earth from heavenly bodies such as planets and stars), Theory of Spontaneous Generation (abiogenesis). Scientists have yet to succeed in synthesizing a protocell using the basic components that would have the necessary properties of life.

Useful Link for More Info About Abiogenesis:
https://www.britannica.com/science/abiogenesis

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Which came first...the chicken or the egg? - Emily

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Which came first...the chicken or the egg? - Emily

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The first chicken to ever exist was the result of a mutation in the zygote created by 2 creatures that were almost genetically identical to chickens (a proto-chicken). The mutation that occurred in the egg of the proto-chicken combined both of their DNA to form the first true chicken. However, it is not likely that a chicken was formed right away from just one genetic mutation, just like how giraffes did not all of a sudden have long necks because of one genetic mutation. It was a gradual process, where slight genetic mutations over many generations and many years eventually led to the chicken that exists in our world today, just as giraffes slowly started being born with slightly longer necks leading to long-necked giraffes after millions of years. Either way, whether the chicken was created from 2 proto-chickens after 1 genetic mutation, or several mutations over many many years, the egg would have had to existed before the chicken no matter what.

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Which Came First - The Chicken or the Egg?

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The simple answer would be yes. Our current evolution can be due to genetic mutations and the environment around us. For instance, 11,000 years ago adult bodies had no way of digesting lactose that is found in milk. However, farmers had to rely on milk as their source of nutrients and their bodies adjusted to it; and that is why most adults are able to drink milk nowadays. For the next example, we are going to look at the height of Dutch people. These people are tallest population in the world. How they became so tall you ask? Evolution. In the 18th century, they were of average height (165cm) but now they have an average height of 183cm. This is due to the fact that Dutch women favour taller men and had many children with them, leaving the shorter men to dust- thus resulting in taller children that only get taller with each generation.These examples are only few of how much humans continue to evolve and with new genetic mutations, we will grow.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321942.php

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Can Evolution occur in a short period of time? - Nicholas Knezeh

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Can Evolution occur in a short period of time? - Nicholas Knezeh

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No, evolution is a process of changing and adapting to ones environment and surroundings. Many scientists and researchers found that lasting evolutionary change is a very lengthy process that can take up to or more than one million years. Small forms of evolution have taken place in the last few hundred years. For example, humans are now 2-3 inches taller than they were 300 years ago, and many scientists may use this data to predict what will happen next, but this is very difficult as just because humans are 2 inches taller than they were 300 years ago does not mean that we will be 2-3 feet taller in 3000 years. Evolution is usually thought to be a slow process, something that happens over generations, thanks to adaptive mutations. But nowadays environmental change is happening at a very rapid pace that we are evolving a little quicker than before. But in the end evolution that incorporates noticeable and large changes takes a long period of time. Not in just one or two generations.

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Was Charles Darwin's theory correct?- J.R.

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Was Charles Darwin's theory correct?- J.R.

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Charles Darwin’s theory is correct for the most part, like how natural selection works within and creates new species, and how he has evidence to support the theory. However, there are some where things are wrong, for example, he proposed that Earth’s age was about 100 million years old. Also, he proposed a theory about the mechanisms of variation among individuals like how a child bore a stronger resemblance to one parent than to the other because the gemmules coming from one parent may be stronger, better adapted, or more numerous than those coming from the other parent. However, this was removed from his theory because during an experiment his cousin used rabbit blood to test if it was true, but it failed to find the gemmules.
https://www.britannica.com/list/what-darwin-got-right-and-wrong-about-evolution

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What is the difference between Natural Selection and Artificial Selection? -Meline

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What is the difference between Natural Selection and Artificial Selection? -Meline

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First of all, evolutionary selection is the process where traits are selected for or against and become more or less abundant in the population. To start off with basic definition in my own words, natural selection is what natures chooses at its best, while the artificial selection is what humans choose on the basis of its requirements.                  NATURAL SELECTION:  An organism is selected naturally, which is able to cope up and is adaptable to all kind of situations like variations in weather, temperature, shelter, gaining of nutrition, genetic drift, etc.
However, there must be variation in the population for example; brown beetles vs green beetles of the same species.
IT'S NATURE THAT SELECTS
ARTIFICIAL SELECTION: involves unnatural selection or selective breeding, with the interference of human activity. An organisms with the desired traits are been selected and further, they are been genetically modified with the advancing technologies evolving in biology.
IT'S HUMANS THAT SELECT

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Natural Selection vs Artificial Selection | Mechanisms of Evolution

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How did life form after dinosaurs became extinct? -Noelle

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How did life form after dinosaurs became extinct? -Noelle

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When an asteroid crashed into the Earth 66 million years ago, it killed almost 90% of the species living on it. The small percent of the population that survived this mass extinction were mainly small mammals, marine life, and insects. It took nearly 30, 000 years for life on the planet to bounce back. First small insects began to adapt to living on land. Then marine life slowly adapted and began to mate. Evolution occurred over long periods of time and many of the marine life adapted to be able to live on land as well as the sea. An example for this is the alligator, who can live in swamps and marshes and large bodies of water, but can also hunt on land. Scientists also discovered nannoplankton deep beneath the Earth's crust and it is believed that these small bacteria managed to stay alive even 5 million years after the meteor hit the Earth and started reproducing again when conditions were better. After the nannoplankton began to mate, other organisms that survived the asteroid that wiped out much of the dinosaurs began to do the same. Since there was very little species of organisms, many of these organisms had to evolve and change to adapt and survive to the harsh new environment. Eventually after millions of years of evolution, a majority of the species that survived have changed and grown into many of the mammals we are familiar with today.

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What is difference between natural selection and artificial selection? -Meline

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What is difference between natural selection and artificial selection? -Meline

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First of all, evolutionary selection is the process where traits are selected for or against and become more or less abundant
....not done

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Natural Selection vs Artificial Selection | Mechanisms of Evolution

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Can evolution occur in a short period of time? Nicholas Knezeh

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Can evolution occur in a short period of time? Nicholas Knezeh

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No, evolution is a process of changing and adapting to ones environment and surroundings. Many scientists and researchers found that lasting evolutionary change is a very lengthy process that can take up to or more than one million years. Small forms of evolution have taken place in the last few hundred years. For example, humans are now 2-3 inches taller than they were 300 years ago, and many scientists may use this data to predict what will happen next, but this is very difficult as just because humans are 2 inches taller than they were 300 years ago does not mean that we will be 2-3 feet taller in 3000 years.

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How did life begin on earth and what was the first living thing on our planet?

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How did life begin on earth and what was the first living thing on our planet?

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Yes, we are still evolving and this can be seen through

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What is the evidence of human evolution? - shivangi

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What is the evidence of human evolution? - shivangi

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If humans evolved from monkeys, why do they still exist? -Kiana

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If humans evolved from monkeys, why do they still exist? -Kiana

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According to an article by Dr. Paul Willis, entitled "If Evolution Is Real Why Are There Still Monkeys?" Humans did not actually evolve from monkeys. Instead, they both share a common ancestor from which evolved about 25 million years ago. Based on the similarities and differences between the two types of DNA, scientists have estimated that humans and monkeys diverged from their common ancestor 25 million years ago. Which explains why monkeys continue to exist.

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Was Charles Darwin's theory right?- J.R.

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Was Charles Darwin's theory right?- J.R.

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His theory states that all species of organisms develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increases the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce.

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Which came first...the chicken or the egg? - Emily

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Which came first...the chicken or the egg? - Emily

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The first chicken to ever exist was a result of a mutation in the zygote created by 2 creatures that were almost genetically identical to chickens (a proto-chicken). The mutation that occurred in the egg of the proto-chicken combined the DNA of both proto-chickens to form the first true chicken.

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What is an example of artificial selection?             -Marcus 

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What is an example of artificial selection?             -Marcus 

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Artificial selection is the process in which desired traits are produced. Animals such as dogs who are cross-bred, or cows that produce more milk, as well as plants that have a desired taste or smell, are all examples of artificial selection. Humans are the ones to decide what is created in artificial selection, rather than nature deciding.

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Natural Selection vs Artificial Selection | Mechanisms of Evolution

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How can the evolution of one species affect the evolution of another?	-

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How can the evolution of one species affect the evolution of another?	-

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No species exist every form of life on Earth interacts over time with other organisms. As well as with its physical environment. For that reason, the evolution of one species influences the evolution of species with which it coexists by changing the natural selection. The classic examples of this sort of evolution, called , are predator-prey and host-parasite relationships.

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Will humans ever go extinct due to a massive change in the environment? -Julian

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Will humans ever go extinct due to a massive change in the environment? -Julian

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Human extinction is the end of hypothetical end of humans. This may result in natural causes or in result of human action

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How did the world go from non-living to living things? -Veronica

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How did the world go from non-living to living things? -Veronica

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The study of how life on Earth originated as inanimate matter is called Abiogenesis. It involves the formation of the simplest forms of life from primordial chemicals.

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How do we have such a diverse wildlife even though we all evolved from the exact same primordial soup? -Jayson 

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How do we have such a diverse wildlife even though we all evolved from the exact same primordial soup? -Jayson 

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The theory on primordial soup is a more or less recent discovery that is not fully known to this day having many doubts upon its legitimacy. It is said to have started over 14 million years ago

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About 4 billion years ago, molecules began to make copies of themselves, an event that marked the beginning of life on Earth. A few hundred million years later, primitive organisms began to split into the different branches that make up the tree of life. In between those two seminal events, some of the greatest innovations in existence emerged: the cell, the genetic code and an energy system to fuel it all. All three of these are essential to life as we know it, yet scientists know disappointingly little about how any of these remarkable biological innovations came about.

"It's very hard to infer even the relative ordering of evolutionary events before the last common ancestor," said Greg Fournier, a geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cells may have appeared before energy metabolism, or perhaps it was the other way around. Without fossils or DNA preserved from organisms living during this period, scientists have had little data to work from.

Fournier is leading an attempt to reconstruct the history of life in those evolutionary dark ages - the hundreds of millions of years between the time when life first emerged and when it split into what would become the endless tangle of existence.

He is using genomic data from living organisms to infer the DNA sequence of ancient genes as part of a growing field known as paleogenomics. In research published online in March in the Journal of Molecular Evolution, Fournier showed that the last chemical letter added to the code was a molecule called tryptophan-an amino acid most famous for its presence in turkey dinners. The work supports the idea that the genetic code evolved gradually.

Using similar methods, he hopes to decipher the temporal order of more of the code-determining when each letter was added to the genetic alphabet-and to date key events in the origins of life, such as the emergence of cells.

Dark origins
Life emerged so long ago that even the rock formations covering the planet at that time have been destroyed-and with them, most chemical and geological clues to early evolution. "There's a huge chasm between the origins of life and the last common ancestor," said Eric Gaucher, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Scientists do know that at some point in that time span, living creatures began using a genetic code, a blueprint for making complex proteins. It is those proteins that carry out the vital functions of the cell. (The structure of DNA and RNA also enables genetic information to be replicated and passed on from generation to generation, but that's a separate process from the creation of proteins.) The components of the code and the molecular machinery that assembles them "are some of the oldest and most universal aspects of cells, and biologists are very interested in understanding the mechanisms by which they evolved," said Paul Higgs, a biophysicist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

How the code came into being presents a chicken-and-egg problem. The key players in the code-DNA, RNA, amino acids, and proteins-are chemically complicated structures that work together to make proteins. But in modern cells, proteins are used to make the components of the code. So how did a highly structured code emerge?

Most researchers believe that the code began simply with basic proteins made from a limited alphabet of amino acids. It then grew in complexity over time, as these proteins learned to make more sophisticated molecules. Eventually, it developed into a code capable of creating all the diversity we see today. "It's long been hypothesized that life's 'standard alphabet' of 20 amino acids evolved from a simpler, earlier alphabet, much as the English alphabet has accumulated extra letters over its history," said Stephen Freeland, a biologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

The earliest amino acid letters in the code were likely the simplest in structure, those that can be made from purely chemical means, without the assistance of a protein helper. (For example, the amino acids glycine, alanine and glutamic acid have been found on meteorites, suggesting they can form spontaneously in a variety of environments.) These are like the letters A, E and S -primordial units that served as the foundation for what came later.

Tryptophan, in comparison, has a complex structure and is comparatively rare in the protein code, like a Y or Z, leading scientists to theorize that it was one of the latest additions to the code.

That chemical evidence is compelling, but circumstantial. Enter Fournier. He suspected that by extending his work on paleogenomics, he would be able to prove tryptophan's status as the last letter added to the code.

The last letter
Scientists have been reconstructing ancient proteins for more than a decade, primarily to figure out how ancient proteins differed from modern ones-what they looked like and how they functioned. But these efforts have focused on the period of evolution after the last universal common ancestor (or LUCA, as researchers call it). Fournier's work delves further back than any other previous efforts. To do so, he had to move beyond the standard application of comparative genomics, which analyzes the differences between branches on the tree of life. "By definition, anything pre-LUCA lies beyond the deepest split in the tree," he said.

Fournier started with two related proteins, TrpRS (tryptophanyl tRNA synthetase) and TyrRS (tyrosyl tRNA synthetase), which help decode RNA letters into the amino acids tryptophan and tyrosine. TrpRS and TyrRS are more closely related to each other than to any other protein, indicating that they evolved from the same ancestor protein. Sometime before LUCA, that parent protein mutated slightly to produce these two new proteins with distinct functions. Fournier used computational techniques to decipher what that ancestral protein must look like.

He found that the ancestral protein has all the amino acids but tryptophan, suggesting that its addition was the finishing touch to the genetic code. "It shows convincingly that tryptophan was the last amino acid added, as has been speculated before but not really nailed as has been done here," said Nigel Goldenfeld, a physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who was not involved in the study.

Fournier now plans to use tryptophan as a marker to date other major pre-LUCA events such as the evolution of metabolism, cells and cell division, and the mechanisms of inheritance. These three processes form a sort of biological triumvirate that laid the foundation for life as we know it today. But we know little about how they came into existence. "If we understand the order of those basic steps, it creates an arrow pointing to possible scenarios for the origins of life," Fournier said.

For example, if the ancestral proteins involved in metabolism lack tryptophan, some form of metabolism probably evolved early. If proteins that direct cell division are studded with tryptophan, it suggests those proteins evolved comparatively late.

Different models for the origins of life make different predictions for which of these three processes came first. Fournier hopes his approach will provide a way to rule out some of these models. However, he cautions that it won't definitively sort out the timing of these events.

Fournier plans to use the same techniques to figure out the order in which other amino acids were added to the code. "It really reinforces the idea that evolution of the code itself was a progressive process," said Paul Schimmel, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the Scripps Research Institute, who was not involved in the study. "It speaks to the refinement and subtlety that nature was using to perfect these proteins and the diversity it needed to form this vast tree of life."

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent division of SimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

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How Structure Arose in the Primordial Soup

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About 4 billion years ago, molecules began to make copies of themselves, an event that marked the beginning of life on Earth. A few hundred million years later, primitive organisms began to split into the different branches that make up the tree of life.

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Will humans continue to evolve and is there any evidence against evolution? - Marco

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Will humans continue to evolve and is there any evidence against evolution? - Marco

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Humans are still evolving, and it's arguably happening faster than ever. Researchers have found evidence of natural selection in humans, including our ability to  withstand ultraviolet light form the sun, our ability to function in regions with low oxygen levels, and our protection from infectious changes. Additional proof of evolution is the fact that humans were unable to digest milk around 11,000 years ago. Today, there is a much smaller part of the population who are lactose intolerant.

The second part of the question is whether or not there is any evidence against evolution.

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In this Spotlight, we ask whether modern humans are still evolving or whether we have stepped out of the path of natural selection.

Does Charles Darwin's theory of evolution still apply to modern humans?

Charles Darwin published his totemic work on evolution - On the Origin of Species - in 1859.

Based on the concept of natural selection, Darwin's book provided scientists with a new toolkit for understanding the place that humans and animals occupy in the natural world.

The tome also gave clues as to where their earthly origins may lie.

According to Darwin's thesis, evolution is slow and incremental with tiny genetic changes spread tens of thousands of years apart gently pushing forward changes in species.

In 2000, the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould famously declared that "there's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years," suggesting that evolution in humans is imperceptibly slow or has perhaps stopped altogether.

The British naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough concurred, even arguing that birth control and abortion have contributed to a halt in physical evolution among humans.

"We stopped natural selection as soon as we started being able to rear 90-95 percent of our babies that are born. We are the only species to have put a halt to natural selection, of its own free will, as it were," he told the British magazine The Radio Times in 2013, adding that our species has instead ensured our continued survival through accelerating cultural evolution:
"Stopping natural selection is not as important, or depressing, as it might sound - because our evolution is now cultural [...] We can inherit a knowledge of computers or television, electronics, airplanes, and so on."
Natural selection requires variation

Both positions have been hotly contested. For instance, Dr. Ian Rickard - from Durham University in the United Kingdom - responded to Attenborough's claims by pointing out that while abortion and birth control may mean that some people are having children while others are not, natural selection does not end here.

Rather, it places a renewed focus on the genetic material that is being passed along by those who are having children. Writing in The Guardian, Dr. Rickard explains, "Natural selection requires variation. It needs some individuals to thrive more than others."

"So the improved survival prospects around the world over recent decades and centuries drastically decreases the potential for natural selection to work in those populations. But that is not the end of the argument. Even if everyone survives to the same age, there is still variation for natural selection to work with. Natural selection doesn't really care about survival."

And, a 2010 paper by Alan R. Templeton preemptively discarded Attenborough's theory that physical evolution has been replaced by cultural evolution, arguing instead that "all organisms adapt to their environment, and humans are no exception. Culture defines much of the human environment, so cultural evolution has actually led to adaptive evolution in humans."
Templeton gives the example of how technological advances in transportation have facilitated a rapid mixing of the human gene pool across the globe, resulting in the waning of differences between different populations with overall beneficial effects to human health.
Human evolution is now '100 times faster'

In their 2009 book The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending calculate that - rather than there having been no biological change in humans over the past 50,000 years - human evolution has accelerated in the past 10,000 years.
Rather than slowing or stopping, the authors argue that evolution is now happening approximately "100 times faster than its long-term average over the 6 million years of our existence."
Modern technology also presents us with opportunities to observe changes in humans at a molecular level. Scott Solomon, a biologist from the University of Texas in Austin, highlights in his book Future Humans: Inside the Science of Our Continuing Evolution that since 2000 - when Gould declared human evolution to have slowed or stopped - it has been possible to sequence the human genome.

In the 18 years since then, it has become much faster and cheaper to do so, providing scientists with an unprecedented insight into our recent evolutionary past.

From these data, Solomon explains, researchers have found evidence of natural selection altering genes responsible for our:

tolerance of dietary changes

protection from infectious changes

ability to withstand ultraviolet radiation from sunlight

ability to thrive in mountainous regions with decreased oxygen

The milk revolution

One easy-to-understand example of how humans have evolved over recent centuries is how, on some continents, our bodies have adapted to tolerate the most abundant food sources common to that region.

Evolution drove humanity's tolerance of milk.

Around 11,000 years ago, for instance, adult humans were unable to digest lactose - the sugar in milk.

As humans in some regions began to rely on dairy farming as a source of nourishment, our bodies adjusted over time to be more able to digest this food, which, previously, was only tolerated by infants and toddlers.

We can see evidence of this evolution today because humans in areas with a long tradition of dairy farming - such as Europe - are much more tolerant of lactose in their diet than people in regions that do not have a heritage of dairy farming - such as Asia. Around 5 percent of people descended from Northern Europeans are lactose intolerant, compared with more than 90 percent of people of East Asian descent.

The Framingham Heart Study

Another source of evidence for recent human evolution cited by biologists is the Framingham Heart Study - the longest-running multigenerational medical study in the world.

Framingham is a small town in Massachusetts, and in 1948, a study of the town's female population began; scientists wanted to understand what causes heart disease. The Framingham Heart Study is ongoing, and it has become an important repository for scientific data, not only relating to heart disease but also on changing trends in human health overall.

Scientists say that the Framingham data demonstrate that natural selection influenced the Framingham population - reducing height, increasing weight, lowering cholesterol levels, and lowering systolic blood pressures.

Importantly, the data do not show that average weight is increasing in Framingham because the women in the study are eating more. Instead, people with genes that affect these traits tend to have more children, meaning that these traits will become more common with subsequent generations.

"We see rapid evolution when there's rapid environmental change, and the biggest part of our environment is culture, and culture is exploding," Dr. Pardis Sabeti, a geneticist at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, told the BBC.

"That's [...] the take-home message of the Framingham study, that we are continuing to evolve, that biology is going to change with the culture, and it's just a matter of not being able to see it because we're stuck right in the middle of the process right now."

Dr. Pardis Sabeti

Why are the Dutch so tall?

A 2015 study published in Proceedings of The Royal Society B asked the question, "Does natural selection favor taller stature among the tallest people on Earth?" The researchers behind the study tested this by looking at the tallest people on Earth: the Dutch.

Why are men from the Netherlands so tall?

But the Dutch were not always the tallest people on Earth. The researchers observe that in the mid-18th century, the average height of Dutch soldiers was 165 centimeters, which was well below the average of soldiers from other European countries and tiny compared with American soldiers, who were 5-8 centimeters taller than the average Dutch soldier.

But Dutch men have experienced a relatively sudden growth spurt, adding an extra 20 centimeters to their average height over the past 150 years.

During the same period, American men have only added 6 centimeters to their average height, and men from other European countries have struggled to keep pace with their neighbors from the Netherlands.
But why? The authors took into account disparities between the Netherlands and the United States in diet, social inequality, and the availability and quality of healthcare, but they concluded that it was natural selection that was driving up the height of the Dutch.
Put simply, Dutch women were more likely to find tall men attractive and were therefore more likely to have children with them. Tall Dutch men, the study confirmed, have more children than shorter Dutch men.

And, although the study found that tall Dutch women were less likely to have children than middling-height Dutch women, the tall women who did have children had more children than their shorter countryfolk.

In combination, these preferences exert a powerful natural selection effect on the average height of people in the Netherlands.

While this might not exactly be Marvel Cinematic Universe levels of genetic mutation - we are sad to report that we did not find any studies suggesting that the human race is about to acquire a telepathy gene - these examples illustrate how evolution works in terms of modern humans.

Evolution is persistent, everywhere, pushing our species forward in tiny increments. It might even be occurring with an accelerated regularity.

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Is there any evidence that humans are still evolving?

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In this Spotlight, we ask whether modern humans are still evolving or whether we have stepped out of the path of natural selection. Does Charles Darwin's theory of evolution still apply to modern humans? Charles Darwin published his totemic work on evolution - On the Origin of Species - in 1859.

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Will the concept of natural selection eventually die out? -Kate

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Will the concept of natural selection eventually die out? -Kate

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Darwin's theory of evolution and natural selection was the building block of how all life forms on earth came to be. Although that is true, recent evidence from the past 20 years shows that the concept of natural selection has some holes and misunderstandings. Natural selection could be dying out and its because of human innovation. Humans are evolving and expanding in their own ways with technology to decrease death rates and improve quality of life. Mutations with animals, experiments with medicine, and other inventions by innovation can change the course of mankind without natural selection so that future generations may not even evolve 100% from humans.

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Darwin's framework for how animals adapt relied on nature preventing the weak from reproducing. The sickly die young before they can have children and their genes vanish from the earth. Meanwhile...

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Are humans still evolving? Will we ever stop? Julia Vassallo

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Are humans still evolving? Will we ever stop? Julia Vassallo

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Charles Darwin once said, "A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die.” It is this grain of salt whether it is an illness, blood disorder, physical abnormality or a single variant gene that can determine our survival. Humans have continued to evolve slowly over many years, giving us the ability to adapt to our environments. Evidence that proves our evolution include the recent emergence of different blood disorders, our ability to tolerate milk, and various physical differences all contribute to our constant evolution. Recently, researchers have found people in Africa with blood types outside the more common ABO blood types, having three different types of alleles. We are noticing that the more common bloodtypes in certain continents, I.E. type B blood in Asia, are becoming common in countries where it wasn't many years ago. With this evolution of our blood comes new blood disorders such as sickle cell anemia. Once a life threatening disease

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© ISTOCK.COM/LEONARDO PATRIZI

Natural selection is tricky to catch in action. As Darwin put it, "A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die." The grain in the balance-the slightly increased chance that organisms carrying one gene variant will fail in the struggle for existence-is the cost of selection. It is almost invisible, only becoming statistically evident when viewed across thousands of individuals, who may display only subtle differences in the affected character.

In the human population, the toll of natural selection is hidden within millions of deaths and births around the world every year. Everyone dies, many tragically young. And while obvious patterns sometimes emerge from early deaths-certain diseases, traffic accidents, drug overdoses-these are often challenging to connect to the action of genes. Likewise, only by comparing the genes of parents with those of childless people, and the genes of large families with those of small families, can we begin to understand how natural selection is acting on births.

Six years ago, Yale University's Stephen Stearns and colleagues took advantage of a long-running study in Framingham, Massachusetts, to assess whether the effects of natural selection could be discerned among the people in the multigenerational study population. Over the last seven decades, public-health researchers have been monitoring the residents of Framingham, noting their vital statistics as well as blood sugar and cholesterol levels to understand the factors that lead to heart disease. As the initial group of research subjects got older, the study started to include their children, and then their grandchildren. The records provide a unique view of the health of a segment of the American population since 1948.

When Stearns and his coworkers analyzed the data, they found lots of evidence that selection was occurring, albeit with many curious patterns. Shorter women had more children than taller women, and heavier women had more children than lighter women. For men, height and weight weren't as correlated with fecundity. High or low blood-sugar readings in both men and women were associated with fewer offspring, and the age at which individuals had their first child also seemed to influence lifetime reproduction-people who had their first child younger ended up with larger families.¹

The advantage of lactase persistence was enormous, perhaps the strongest known for any RECENT human trait.

The results left scientists frustrated. To what extent are these traits-stature and age at first birth, for example-heritable? What other factors are shaping the population? Age at first birth is surely influenced by cultural factors that can confound the attempt to tease out the contribution of genes.

To get at those kinds of details, we need to combine records of traits with a look at the genes themselves. That kind of research is just now becoming possible.

Last month, for example, Harvard University's Jonathan Beauchamp published a study in which he compared known gene variants with relative lifetime reproductive success (rLRS)-a proxy for the number of biological offspring an individual has-in people of European descent living in the U.S. and enrolled in the Health and Retirement Study. In this cohort, Beauchamp found evidence that evolution may have selected against educational attainment, while favoring a higher age at menarche for women. Although he notes that cultural and environmental factors may have overridden the effects of natural selection, he makes the case that humans do continue to evolve.²

In the blood

ED UTHMAN/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS NEPHRON/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS The first solid evidence of natural selection in recent human populations was found in blood. Type B blood is common across central Asia, but much rarer in other places. Newly identified blood types outside the ABO system have also been found, and each has a distinctive geographical distribution. One of the most extreme is the Duffy blood type, which has three different versions, or alleles, just like the ABO system. One of these types, Duffy "null," occurs in up to 95 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa, but is very rare among people whose ancestry comes from other parts of the world.

In addition to blood type, researchers have investigated the evolution of blood disorders and abnormalities. One of the most interesting is a deficiency of the enzyme glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD), which helps maintain red blood cells. An insufficient level of this enzyme occasionally causes extreme, even lethal health problems, but is better known for causing a reaction to fava beans in people suffering from the deficiency. Other blood peculiarities include the sickle cell trait, reduced production of hemoglobin (alpha thalassemia), hemolytic anemia (ovalocytosis), and abnormal hemoglobin types (hemo-globin C and hemoglobin E). By examining the frequencies of these conditions, researchers have found that these blood variations coincide with regions where malaria has been common throughout history. Further work revealed how small changes to hemoglobin can impede the malaria parasite's ability to break into red blood cells. The Duffy null allele, too, helped carriers to resist malaria.³ The FYA and FYB versions of the gene both result in molecules on the surfaces of red blood cells that function in inflammatory reactions but also provide an avenue of attack for the malaria species Plasmodium vivax. ⁴ People who lack these molecules may avoid P. vivax infection.

These variations were not without consequences, however. While one sickle cell allele is protective against malaria, most people who carry two copies die young, usually without reproducing. It's no surprise, then, that malaria-free areas have extremely low rates of the sickle cell trait and other red blood cell variations.

Milk digestion

© ZACCHIO/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM While the distribution of blood types and abnormalities was the first evolutionary pattern identified among recent human populations, perhaps the most famous is people's ability to digest milk beyond infancy. Around 30 percent of the calories in milk from humans and all other mammals come from a sugar called lactose, and to make use of the energy stored in lactose, the digestive system must be able to break it down into its two chemical subunits, galactose and glucose. This chemical reaction is catalyzed by the enzyme lactase, the gene for which is shared across all mammals. In most species, however, lactase is only expressed in young prior to weaning, leaving adults unable to digest lactose.

Pre-agricultural humans followed, and many modern humans still follow, this same pattern of lactase expression in infancy only. Regular consumption of milk by an adult can sometimes spur a minimal amount of lactase production, but drinking a large amount of milk or other lactose-containing dairy products can cause severe digestive distress. People from China often have trouble digesting milk, as do many people from southern Europe. Yet in northern Europe and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, more than 95 percent of people produce the lactase enzyme throughout their lives and can thus digest milk as adults without difficulty. A smaller fraction of adults in other populations, such as those in the western half of Eurasia and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, also have this persistence of lactase.

The persistence is not due to any change to the enzyme itself, but to the short patches of DNA outside the gene that regulate its activity. People from Ireland to India share one mutational change that prompts lactase persistence. In Arabia and sub-Saharan Africa there are four others. At least five times, ancient humans had a chance mutation that spurred lactase activity in adults and began to spread through the population. Not surprisingly, these populations live in precisely the areas where people domesticated cattle, sheep, goats, and camels for the purpose of consistent milk production. That domestication happened only within the last 10,000 years, and cattle became common in sub-Saharan Africa and northern Europe much later than this, placing an upper time limit on these genetic changes.

Lactase persistence is one of the most profound changes in recent human populations, and was one of the first to be investigated by scientists working with DNA directly from ancient skeletal remains, first by Joachim Burger of Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany and colleagues, and later by many others. Before 7,000 years ago, the ancient peoples of Europe lived only by hunting, fishing, and gathering; they did not farm or keep domesticated animals. Gene sequences from the remains of these people have never produced any evidence of lactase persistence. Only well after people began to keep cattle-as evidenced by milk residues found in pottery from early farming and herding contexts in Europe and west Asia-did mutations promoting lactase persistence arise. (See " What's Old Is New Again," The Scientist, June 2015.)

Once it appeared within these ancient populations, the numbers of people with lactase persistence grew by up to 10 percent per generation. Its advantage was enormous, perhaps the strongest known for any recent human trait. This kind of evolutionary advantage likely resulted from increases in fertility. Women on calorie-restricted diets have lower fertility, and they take longer after the birth of a child to conceive again. If lactase-persistent women could use the extra energy from milk to begin their reproductive lives a couple of years earlier, or could space their children a few months closer together, it would create a huge reproductive advantage.

Indeed, the frequency of lactase persistence has continued to climb substantially in some places even within the past 2,000 years. Just this spring, Stanford University's Yair Field and colleagues reported on a new study that sampled more than 3,000 human genomes from the United Kingdom to look at the effects of selection on genes. They found that lactase persistence is the largest single change within the British population since Roman times, increasing in frequency more than any other allele across the genome.⁵

Not so simple

The lactase example connects human populations and their cultural innovations. But in one important respect it is misleading: it is much too easy to understand. Unlike lactase persistence, most human traits are not the product of a single gene. Rather, they are influenced by many genes, and studying selection on such traits has proven very difficult.

Skin color is a classic example. One of the largest and most obvious physiological differences between populations, skin color is influenced by more than two dozen genes in a pathway that produces the pigment melanin and regulates the amount of this pigment in different tissues. Changes to these genes interrupt the generation of the dark pigment eumelanin, leaving skin with larger amounts of the reddish pigment pheomelanin, leading to various skin tones and patterns of coloration, such as freckles. Despite its complex genetics, skin color shows consistent patterns of evolution across the globe. People whose ancestors lived in the tropics tend to be dark-skinned, while those who lived further north and south tend to be lighter. One of the revelations of the last 15 years is just how recent this pattern really is. According to analyses of ancient DNA, people who lived in northern Europe only 10,000 years ago would not have had the extremely light skin of today's people in that region.

Other types of human coloration are also evolving. In their recent study, Field and colleagues found several genes related to hair and eye pigmentation that had markedly increased in the ancestors of modern Brits. These traits include one associated with blue eyes and two that are found in people with blond hair. Britain has experienced extensive immigration since Roman times, including the arrivals of Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, and Normans, but the genetic changes seen in this population are not due merely to migration; they mark the increase of particular genes above and beyond the contributions of immigrants. The British have become blonder over recent millennia.

Stature is another complex trait that has continued to evolve in recent years. Northern Europeans are a bit taller than southern Europeans, and looking at the genes that differ between them, Field and his colleagues found that the height differences were driven by natural selection for taller stature in the north over the last 2,000 years. This trend is not seen worldwide, however. The Framingham population and other studies in the U.S. have found that shorter women have had a reproductive advantage during the last few decades. On the other hand, a study from one sub-Saharan African nation, Gambia, showed a pattern more in line with the changes seen in Britain's population: taller women had more children.⁶ For men the story is even more mixed. Dutch and Polish men have been under weak selection for taller height over the last several decades, but in other countries a man's stature seems to make no difference to his lifetime reproduction.⁷

Humans across the globe have been living under very different selective pressures since our sub-Saharan roots, and the cultural differences that have emerged appear to have accelerated some kinds of evolutionary changes.

The skeletons of ancient people likewise show physical changes over the past several thousand years. Heads changed shape, becoming broader and a bit smaller over time in many parts of the world. We do not yet know which genes might be connected to such changes, just as we do not know many of the genes that might drive earlier reproduction. As we learn more about the genetics of human biology, studying the pattern of natural selection in genes may help us to uncover the biology of such traits.

Only a few of the recent evolutionary changes are obvious to us. Most are well-hidden, driven by genetic pathways we are still discovering. The record of ancient DNA from Europe is at the moment far more detailed than elsewhere in the world, but this is changing rapidly as ancient DNA samples from the Americas, Ethiopia, India, China, and other areas are coming online. We are already learning about the ancestry of these peoples from single genomes. Soon we will be able to look at past gene frequencies to map the history of adaptations that shaped their recent evolutionary history.

Evolving into the future

If there is one common theme in all this recent selection, it is that much of the human diversity we see around us today arose very recently. More than 90 percent of the heritage of every living human comes from sub-Saharan Africa sometime around 100,000 years ago. Fifteen years ago, many geneticists saw this recent common ancestry as evidence that human evolution had mostly drawn to a close. After diverging from our common chimpanzee and bonobo ancestors some 7 million years ago, hominins underwent massive changes in body size, diet, behavior, and brain size. Huge evolutionary innovations marked the beginning of upright walking, tool use, culture, and language. And those changes all happened before 100,000 years ago. (See "Uniquely Human" here.)

With such a dramatic picture from the fossil record, it is understandable that many scientists assumed that the final phases of human prehistory were fairly boring, at least from the Darwinian point of view. Across most of the genome, humans everywhere in the world are very similar to one another, much more so than to chimpanzees or most other kinds of primates. Modern humans vary profoundly in cultures and languages, but those differences are mostly learned, not coded in our genes.

Nevertheless, humans across the globe have been living under very different selective pressures since our sub-Saharan roots. And, in fact, the cultural differences that have emerged appear to have accelerated some kinds of evolutionary changes. The domestication of animals led to the invention of dairying, for example, a new dietary niche in which lactase persistence provided a huge advantage. Clearing tropical lands for planting domesticated crops and keeping water in pots changed human ecology in more-disturbing ways, making new habitats for mosquito species that afflict human populations with yellow fever and malaria and spurring protective changes in red blood cell morphology. Moving into new ecosystems also demanded new adaptations from the growing human population, from lighter pigmentation at high latitudes to maintain vitamin D production to improved oxygen metabolism in peoples living at high altitude.

Natural selection is fickle. Behavior that ensured survival in our ancestors' environment may not be as advantageous under modern conditions. (See "Our Inner Caveman" here.) New evidence of how the human genome has changed over the last several thousand years points to a series of massive critical evolutionary changes, setting some aspects of our biology clearly apart from that of our forebears. And we are no doubt continuing to evolve today.

John Hawks is a paleoanthropologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

1. S.G. Byars et al., "Natural selection in a contemporary human population," PNAS, 107:1787-92, 2010.

2. J.P. Beauchamp, "Genetic evidence for natural selection in humans in the contemporary United States," PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.1600398113, 2016.

3. L.H. Miller et al., "The resistance factor to Plasmodium vivax in blacks: The Duffy-blood-group genotype, FyFy," N Engl J Med, 295:302-04, 1976.

4. J.D. Batchelor et al., "Red blood cell invasion by Plasmodium vivax: Structural basis for DBP engagement of DARC," PLOS Pathog, 10:e1003869, 2014.

5. Y. Field et al., "Detection of human adaptation during the past 2,000 years," BioRxiv, doi:10.1101/052084, 2016.

6. A. Courtiol et al., "The Demographic transition influences variance in fitness and selection on height and BMI in rural Gambia," Curr Biol, 23:884-89, 2013.

7. G. Stulp, L. Barrett, "Evolutionary perspectives on human height variation," Biol Rev, 91:206-34, 2016.

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© ISTOCK.COM/LEONARDO PATRIZI Natural selection is tricky to catch in action. As Darwin put it, "A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die." The grain in the balance-the slightly increased chance that organisms carrying one gene variant will fail in the struggle for existence-is the cost of selection.

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Humans are still evolving, and there is more and more evidence to support this claim. However, because humans do not reproduce fast, like for example, bacteria, this change is difficult to see. Researchers did a massive genetic study with 215,000 individuals, and the results showed that a number of genes that makes you predisposed to Alzheimer's disease are becoming more uncommon.

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If humans evolved from animals with tails then why do we still have a tailbone if we don't have/need a tail anymore? - Lorriane

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If humans evolved from animals with tails then why do we still have a tailbone if we don't have/need a tail anymore? - Lorriane

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The "Tail bone" is a fully functional part of the system of bones, ligaments and muscles of the pelvis. The "tailbone" is actually called a coccyx. It protects and supports the pelvic organs, and contributes to our upright stance and walking. The nickname "tail bone" comes from Charles Darwin who believed it was a useless bone that remained in our bodies from our monkey-like evolutionary ancestors.

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Ask John Mackay | Creation Questions & Answers

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The "tail bone" is the small triangular bone at the lower end of your back bone or vertebral column. Early anatomists thought it was shaped "like a cuckoo's beak" they gave it the name coccyx (from the Latin for Cuckoo). They didn't call it a tail because it doesn't look like one.

It's nickname of "tail bone" came from Darwin and his followers who believed it was the useless or vestigial remains of a tail, left over from monkey-like evolutionary ancestors. However, this bone is no more useless than any other bone in the body. So what does it do?

One of our editors found the answer the hard way when he tore the ligaments attached to his' tail bone' whilst doing sports training. He writes about the experience: " I knew something was badly wrong when I could only walk by shuffling each leg forward using my upper body strength. If I was standing up, that's where I preferred to stay. It was too painful to try and sit down. If I was sitting down, I didn't want to get up - shifting position was exquisite agony."

Medical research has shown that the muscles which help us sit or stand, all gain their ability to move us only because they are attached to our fully functional and necessary so called 'tail bone' which of course means that human beings do not actually have a useless or even vestigial "tail bone"! The coccyx is fully functional part of the system of bones, ligaments and muscles of the pelvis, that protects and supports the pelvic organs, and contributes to our upright stance and walking. It provides stable anchorage points for ligaments and muscles which is an essential function of all bones. Without this - we don't move. Bones must never be considered in isolation, since they are part of an integrated musculoskeletal system that supports and protects body organs, and enables us to move.

The claim that the tail bone or coccyx is useless, and therefore must be evidence for evolution, as well as evidence against creation, (because no intelligent Creator would make useless organs) is claim made out of ignorance. The human musculo-skeletal system shows all the evidence of brilliant creation. Consider how much clever engineering has already gone into attempts to make a robot that can walk like a human. When robot scientists do manage this it will be because of intelligent, creative design and engineering, not because of chance random processes.

To find more information on vestigial organs read the article Vestigial Organs. PDF here.

Were you helped by this answer? If so, consider making a donation so we can keep adding more answers. For USA tax deductible donations click here. For UK tax deductible donations click here. For Australia and rest of world click here.

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TAIL BONE? Why do we have a tail bone if we don't come from apes?

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The "tail bone" is the small triangular bone at the lower end of your back bone or vertebral column. Early anatomists thought it was shaped "like a cuckoo's beak" they gave it the name coccyx (from the Latin for Cuckoo). They didn't call it a tail because it doesn't look like one.

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Will humans evolve any further? -Mikaila

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Will humans evolve any further? -Mikaila

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The article I found says that every single living thing on Earth is constantly evolving, to some extent. The progress for humans is just very slow, which is why some changes may not be evident right away.
An example of this is drinking milk. We shouldn't be able to drink milk past infancy because the lactase/LCT gene (which helps us digest lactose) is supposed to "turn off" after infancy. Years ago, a mutation caused some people to be able to digest lactose even after infancy and now the trait has passed on to more people. Some people still can't digest lactose, but it is becoming more popular than before.
The article also talks about how tall the men in the Netherlands are-- simply because the women prefer taller men, so they produce more babies with taller men, to make more tall men. Height has also increased in other countries, but is very significant in the Netherlands.
The article ends with the line, "Over time, almost everything changes a little. We just have to pay attention."
Therefore, humans are still evolving, constantly, with very small changes happening. Maybe more people will be able to digest milk, and people will get even taller. Only time can tell what exactly is going to change, but change is happening.

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The nice thing about bacteria is that they multiply really fast. This is inconvenient if they happen to infect, but useful if you want to see how evolution works. Put antibiotics on a Petri dish with enough bacteria, and a few days later you'll find that a lone bacterium-one that happened to be resistant to the drug's effects -is now recolonizing the plate. It's natural selection in action.

The reality is that every single living thing on Earth is constantly evolving, at least to some extent. But in species that don't live and die as rapidly as bacteria, it's hard to see the process in action.

A massive genetic study in PLOS Biology highlighted that earlier this week. Researchers looked at DNA from 215,000 people, tracking 8 million mutations to see which genetic changes were changing in frequency. They found that a number of genes-one of the gene variants that predisposes you to Alzheimer's disease, for example-are becoming uncommon in older people, even though the genes don't seem to directly affect childbearing. If a mutation keeps you from successfully reproducing, it follows that such a genetic change would have difficulty gaining a foothold in the larger population. Since Alzheimer's patients generally don't start having symptoms until after their reproductive years, the mutation shouldn't be selected against. Similarly, groups of genes that predispose you to asthma, high cholesterol, high body mass index, and coronary artery disease seem to be becoming less common.

The authors think this might be because those predispositions somehow affect your likelihood of having children earlier-in very subtle ways. You'd need a huge sample of people to detect such a small effect, so even this large study can't answer that question. It's also possible that something called the grandmother hypothesis, which says that living long enough to help take care of your grandchildren makes them more likely to survive, and therefore makes your own genes more likely to be passed on, is involved. If the grandmother hypothesis is influencing our species' evolution, it makes sense that genes causing disease late in life would become less common over time.

This is all crucial evidence that we're continuing to evolve as a species, and it's easy to see why we don't notice it happening. Evolution doesn't look like a generation of humans suddenly including a few X-Men. It looks like the ever so slight reduction in mutations that lead to Alzheimer's disease. The progress is slow.

We should all be lactose intolerant

To really see evolution's effects, you have to find traits that are already common in humans and look back at how they came to be that way. The ability to drink milk is a classic case.

Humans mostly shouldn't be able to drink milk past infancy- the majority of adults today can't really digest it. When we're babies, the gene that encodes an enzyme called lactase is turned on, so lactase is around to digest lactose (one of the principal components in milk). As we get older, the lactase gene is supposed to turn off. But several thousand years ago, being able to drink milk without getting sick became an advantage in some parts of the world. We're not exactly sure why, though it probably has something to do with its nutritional value and wide availability on farms. Some evidence suggests that Europeans made cheese for some 4,000 years before any of them developed the ability to properly digest lactose. A few lucky individuals happened to acquire a mutation in the lactase gene that allowed it to stay turned on, even after infancy, and therefore allowed them to rely more heavily on dairy later in life. Those people tended to do a better job of living and having a bunch of children, and so did the offspring who got the same mutation, and so the genetic change spread.

The Netherlands is vertically gifted

A more modern example: Dutch men are very tall. So is most of Scandinavia, really, but the Dutch in particular. The average Dutchman is 6 feet tall, which is 7.9 inches higher than the typical height 200 years ago. Virtually every country has increased their average height because we have much better nutrition, but the Dutch have rocketed skyward at a much faster rate. Americans, for example, have only grown by 2.4 inches during that span. Why? Because that's what Dutch women prefer.

Tall men in the Netherlands have more children than their short buddies, so they tend to produce more tall men, who go on to have generally tall babies. Dutch women of medium height are more likely to have a partner than their long-legged counterparts, and so (on average) have the most children. Being a lady of middling height means that plenty of men are taller than you, which Dutch women find desirable in a partner (again, on average-no offense to the women of the Netherlands who've got a thing for short men, or tall women, or, you know, whoever). If you're a tall woman, it's harder to find a man who can tower over you. But those tall women who do partner up actually end up having the most children of all, so the country's reproductive habits are basically geared to produce increasingly giant babies.

These examples are obvious now, because they're traits we can see evidence of with our own eyes (or noses, in the case of lactose intolerance). Someday, we might be able to look back with the same clarity on the genes that are only just starting to shift today. The only constant in nature is change. Genes will always mutate, and some of those mutations will be advantageous. Over time, almost everything changes a little. We just have to pay attention.

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Yes, humans are still evolving. Here's how you can tell.

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The nice thing about bacteria is that they multiply really fast. This is inconvenient if they happen to infect, but useful if you want to see how evolution works. Put antibiotics on a Petri dish with enough bacteria, and a few days later you'll find that a lone bacterium-one that happened to be resistant to the drug's effects -is now recolonizing the plate.

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“Happy birthday to you…..you smell like a monkey and you look like one too!” this playful happy birthday song reminds us that humans have evolved physically from apes, but the question is have our brain evolved?

Humans are known to have “mega minds”, but how did our mega minds develop? For mammals our size, we are said to have double the expected brain size! Across nearly seven million years, the human brain has tripled in size, with most of this growth occurring in the past two million years. Scientists look at ancient skulls in order to get evidence about the volumes of the ancient brains and some details about the relative sizes of major cerebral areas. For the first two thirds the size of our ancestors, brains were the size of apes brains today. The last third of our evolution is where the brain size changed drastically. 🤬 habilis, the first of our genus 🤬 who appeared 1.9 million years ago, saw a modest jump in brain size.Early 🤬 sapiens had brains within the range of people today,As our cultural and linguistic complexity, dietary needs and technological prowess took a significant leap forward at this stage, our brains grew to accommodate the changes. The shape changes we see accentuate the regions related to depth of planning, communication, problem solving and other more advanced cognitive functions. So use your big brains kids! We have don't have big heads for peanut brains:)

link:https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-has-human-brain-evolved/

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How can the evolution of one species affect the evolution of another?	Ashley

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How can the evolution of one species affect the evolution of another?	Ashley

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No species exist every form of life on Earth interacts over time with other organisms. As well as with its physical environment. For that reason, the evolution of one species influences the evolution of species with which it coexists by changing the natural selection. The classic examples of this sort of evolution, called , are predator-prey and host-parasite relationships.

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What is Charles Darwin's theory? -Taya Zorbas

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What is Charles Darwin's theory? -Taya Zorbas

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Charles Darwin's theory (Social Darwinism) states that over billions of years all living things evolved from one common ancestor and humans are all connected and related to each other. He also proposed a theory of evolution by natural selection, where weaker species do not survive. This is known as survival of the fittest. This theory demonstrated that species can change over time, based on their ability to adapt to changes in their environment over time.

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Darwin, evolution, & natural selection (article) | Khan Academy

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Charles Darwin’s voyage on the HMS Beagle and his ideas about evolution and natural selection.

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How did life emerge from non living things? - Julia Marinelli

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How did life emerge from non living things? - Julia Marinelli

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The origins of life on Earth is what is known today as abiogenesis. Abiogenesis is the gradual process of life evolving from non-living things. Although there are many theories that involve the beginning of this process, none of which are able to be scientifically supported due to the lack of evidence. Stanley Miller’s theory regarding the creation of living things is one of the most agreed upon. It states that over billions of years, with an input of energy, molecules had the ability to self replicate into molecular structures of cells.

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Abiogenesis Definition

Abiogenesis is the creation of organic molecules by forces other than living organisms. While organisms can create carbon-carbon bonds relatively easily thanks to enzymes, to do so otherwise requires large inputs of energy. Early in the history of science, this fact was used to dispute evolution, as it could not be conceived how organic molecules could be produced from non-organic sources. The theory of abiogenesis as an evolutionary theory was given much credit when Stanley Miller conducted his famous experiment trying to prove the inorganic beginning of life.

Miller combined various gases that were though to exist in the earliest stages of Earth. These gases were combined in a chamber, and shocked with large amount of electricity for weeks at a time. After the trial, Miller would analyze the samples. He found that the molecules had begun the process of combining into more advanced molecules. Miller theorized that over billions of years, these molecules could combine into self-replicating versions, such as RNA and DNA. Further laboratory experiments confirmed these findings in later decades. Several very precise experiments have provided sufficient evidence that many of the molecular structures of cells could be created from inorganic solutions with an input of energy. Polypeptides (proteins) and RNA have both been synthesized in this way.

The synthesis of both proteins and RNA in the laboratory is a crucial piece of evidence for abiogenesis theory. It is though that the abiogenesis of these molecules could lead to self-replicating RNA molecules. Both proteins and RNA molecules are known to act as catalysts. These molecules, produced by abiogenesis, could catalyze important reactions that could lead to the replication of RNA and the production of complexes such as , which translate proteins from RNA messages. The formation of these two molecules through abiogenesis proves that the first steps in abiogenesis theory could have taken place. Due to the large amount of energy used, some scientists argue that abiogenesis theory does not consider the amount of lightning and other energy sources in the early atmosphere.

Abiogenesis Theory

Abiogenesis theory is the theory that all life started from inorganic molecules, which recombined in different ways due to energy input. These different forms eventually formed a self-replicating molecule, which may have used the other molecules produced by abiogenesis to start creating the basic structures of life, such as the cell.

Just as populations change over time in the evolution of organisms, the evolution of molecules involves the changing of molecules over time. Scientist speculate that the first self-replicating molecules were probably RNA molecules. Some RNA molecules have a known ability to catalyze the formation of new RNA molecules, as seen in the ribosomes of nearly all creatures on Earth. One of these early RNA molecules formed just right, so that it produced an RNA molecule that was identical to it. The concentration of this molecule in the prebiotic soup increased drastically, and the molecule further interacted with itself and some proteins formed around it, also through abiogenesis.

Eventually, the RNA molecule acquired mutations that allowed it to synthesize a protein that would produce more RNA. Other mutations caused proteins to be created that synthesized strands of DNA from RNA. Thus, the genome of the modern organism was born. Over millions of years of evolutionary history, changes slowly accumulated in these molecules, giving rise to the complexity of life we see today. Various scientist that study abiogenesis theory argue over the exact point that abiogenesis switches to biogenesis. Similar arguments can be seen in the case of whether or not viruses constitute living organisms. Abiogenesis, by definition, is simply the creation of organic molecules from inorganic sources. It does not necessarily imply where life begins.

Evolution - The process that changes populations of organisms over time, adapting them to the environment.

Inorganic - Molecules containing little carbon, not made in living organisms.

Organic - Molecules synthesized in living organisms that contain many carbon-carbon bonds.

Ribosome - One of the first cellular machines, capable of producing proteins from RNA molecules and amino acids.

Quiz

1. A virus attached to a cell, and injects it DNA into a cell. The cell's proteins and structures create proteins from the DNA, which create more viral DNA and protein cases. Currently, viruses are not considered to be "living". Is this abiogenesis?
A. Yes, because the virus is not a living organisms but it is creating proteins.
B. No, because the cell is still responsible for the new materials.
C. Yes, but only if there is no carbon in the new material.

2. Which of the following is a valid criticism of abiogenesis theory?
A. The levels of energy needed to produce self-replicating molecules isn't possible outside the lab.
B. We cannot known what the atmosphere of pre-Earth looked like.
C. If RNA formed first, there would be no reason for DNA.

3. Why would molecules naturally combine in nature?
A. They are naturally attracted to each other.
B. The products of their reactions are more stable.
C. All of the above.

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Abiogenesis - Definition and Theory | Biology Dictionary

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Abiogenesis is the creation of organic molecules by forces other than living organisms. While organisms can create carbon-carbon bonds relatively easily thanks to enzymes, to do so otherwise requires large inputs of energy. Early in the history of science, this fact was used to dispute evolution, as it could not be conceived how organic molecules could be produced from non-organic sources.

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Can we see evolution in a short span of time?

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Can we see evolution in a short span of time?