Why darwinism is true

The evolutionary scientists who followed Darwin suggested that a subspecies represents an early stage of species formation. But that was difficult to prove. After all, evolution takes time. She used a tool Darwin never did. Van Holstein, however, had what those scientists didn't: Data modeling software. She wanted to show that the number of subspecies in a species is correlated to the number of species in a genus.

If she could prove that, she'd have more evidence to suggest that subspecies are the "raw material" for a new species, she said. She ran a few of the models: First, she devised a model using taxonomical information about different species to show that a genus with more species also has more subspecies to prove a relationship.

Then, she took it a step further than Darwin: She created models to show the relationship between species richness the number of species in a genus and subspecies richness is stronger in mammals that don't live on land -- namely bats and whales. One more model found that the number of subspecies in a genus is predicted by the size of a species' range -- and in land mammals, a bigger range was linked to a higher number of subspecies in a genus. Her findings show subspecies are early versions of species.

Not only did van Holstein prove one of Darwin's points, but she expanded on his findings: The more species in a genus typically means more subspecies are in that genus, and the relationship between species and subspecies depends on whether the species live on land. Lachman SP. One nation under God: religion in contemporary American society.

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Darwin was wrong — according to another creationist rumour, he'd recanted on his deathbed, anyway — and here, at last, is scientific evidence! Inevitably, those of us who aren't professional scientists have to take a lot of science on trust.

And one of the things that makes it so easy to trust the standard view of evolution, in particular, is amply illustrated by the legend of the Nasa astronomers: the doubters are so deluded or dishonest that one needn't waste time with them. Unfortunately, that also makes it embarrassingly awkward to ask a question that seems, in the light of recent studies and several popular books, to be growing ever more pertinent. What if Darwin's theory of evolution — or, at least, Darwin's theory of evolution as most of us learned it at school and believe we understand it — is, in crucial respects, not entirely accurate?

Such talk, naturally, is liable to drive evolutionary biologists into a rage, or, in the case of Richard Dawkins, into even more of a rage than usual. They have a point: nobody wants to provide ammunition to the proponents of creationism or "intelligent design", and it's true that few of the studies now coming to public prominence are all that revolutionary to the experts.

But in the culture at large, we may be on the brink of a major shift in perspective, with enormous implications for how most of us think about how life came to be the way it is. As the science writer David Shenk puts it in his new book, The Genius in All of Us, "This is big, big stuff — perhaps the most important [discoveries] in the science of heredity since the gene.

Take, to begin with, the Swedish chickens. The lighting was manipulated to make the rhythms of night and day unpredictable, so the chickens lost track of when to eat or roost. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they showed a significant decrease in their ability to learn how to find food hidden in a maze. The surprising part is what happened next: the chickens were moved back to a non-stressful environment, where they conceived and hatched chicks who were raised without stress — and yet these chicks, too, demonstrated unexpectedly poor skills at finding food in a maze.

They appeared to have inherited a problem that had been induced in their mothers through the environment. Further research established that the inherited change had altered the chicks' "gene expression" — the way certain genes are turned "on" or "off", bestowing any given animal with specific traits.

The stress had affected the mother hens on a genetic level, and they had passed it on to their offspring. The Swedish chicken study was one of several recent breakthroughs in the youthful field of epigenetics, which primarily studies the epigenome, the protective package of proteins around which genetic material — strands of DNA — is wrapped. The epigenome plays a crucial role in determining which genes actually express themselves in a creature's traits: in effect, it switches certain genes on or off, or turns them up or down in intensity.

It isn't news that the environment can alter the epigenome; what's news is that those changes can be inherited. And this doesn't, of course, apply only to chickens: some of the most striking findings come from research involving humans. One study, again from Sweden, looked at lifespans in Norrbotten, the country's northernmost province, where harvests are usually sparse but occasionally overflowing, meaning that, historically, children sometimes grew up with wildly varying food intake from one year to the next.

A single period of extreme overeating in the midst of the usual short supply, researchers found, could cause a man's grandsons to die an average of 32 years earlier than if his childhood food intake had been steadier. Your own eating patterns, this implies, may affect your grandchildren's lifespans, years before your grandchildren — or even your children — are a twinkle in anybody's eye. It might not be immediately obvious why this has such profound implications for evolution.

In the way it's generally understood, the whole point of natural selection — the so-called "modern synthesis" of Darwin's theories with subsequent discoveries about genes — is its beautiful, breathtaking, devastating simplicity. In each generation, genes undergo random mutations, making offspring subtly different from their parents; those mutations that enhance an organism's abilities to thrive and reproduce in its own particular environment will tend to spread through populations, while those that make successful breeding less likely will eventually peter out.

As years of bestselling books by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others have seeped into the culture, we've come to understand that the awesome power of natural selection — frequently referred to as the best idea in the history of science — lies in the sheer elegance of the way such simple principles have generated the unbelievable complexities of life.

From two elementary notions — random mutation, and the filtering power of the environment — have emerged, over millennia, such marvels as eyes, the wings of birds and the human brain. Yet epigenetics suggests this isn't the whole story. If what happens to you during your lifetime — living in a stress-inducing henhouse, say, or overeating in northern Sweden — can affect how your genes express themselves in future generations, the absolutely simple version of natural selection begins to look questionable.

Rather than genes simply "offering up" a random smorgasbord of traits in each new generation, which then either prove suited or unsuited to the environment, it seems that the environment plays a role in creating those traits in future generations, if only in a short-term and reversible way.

You begin to feel slightly sorry for the much-mocked pre-Darwinian zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose own version of evolution held, most famously, that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors were "obliged to browse on the leaves of trees and to make constant efforts to reach them". As a matter of natural history, he probably wasn't right about how giraffes' necks came to be so long.

But Lamarck was scorned for a much more general apparent mistake: the idea that lifestyle might be able to influence heredity. Lifestyle cannot alter heredity. Except now it turns out that it can. Epigenetics is the most vivid reason why the popular understanding of evolution might need revising, but it's not the only one. We've learned that huge proportions of the human genome consist of viruses, or virus-like materials, raising the notion that they got there through infection — meaning that natural selection acts not just on random mutations, but on new stuff that's introduced from elsewhere.

Relatedly, there is growing evidence, at the level of microbes, of genes being transferred not just vertically, from ancestors to parents to offspring, but also horizontally, between organisms. To an outsider, this is mind-blowing: since most of the history of life on earth has been the history of micro-organisms, the evidence for horizontal transfer suggests that a mainly Darwinian account of evolution may be only the latest version, applicable to the most recent, much more complex forms of life.

Perhaps, before that, most evolution was based on horizontal exchange. Which gives rise to a compelling philosophical puzzle: if a genome is what defines an organism, yet those organisms can swap genes freely, what does it even mean to draw a clear line between one organism and another?