2. As for the chicken and egg question, I always vote egg! An animal cannot spontaneously turn into something else (think dinosaur --> chicken), and, ruling out divine intervention, there is no other way for the chicken to be first.
Monday, June 30, 2014
Biology Week 5 - The Complexity of Life
1. I, personally, believe that the emergence of new species is happening all the time (how exciting!), and that this can occur in many ways. Of course, the easiest way to imagine divergence is in the case of geographic isolation (like in the Galapagos), where an isolated population adapts to its surroundings in a different way than its closest relatives who have different environmental pressures. Evolution and divergence of macroscopic beings without this isolation is hard to conceptualize because of the fairly long length of generations, but I bet that if we knew more about microscopic life forms we could watch species emerge every day without geographic isolation. I imagine this happening through some sort of selective reproduction or spontaneous mutations. Also, it's also worth considering that an existing species may evolve into a new species without any divergence, and where do you draw the line between new and old?
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Hillary, I think you're forgetting about werewolves. Perhaps it actually is possible for a spontaneous transformation with a little assistance from the Lunar cycle. In fact, there is the amazing and wondrous metamorphosis of a butterfly. It once was something else, and becomes something entirely different... so I ask you, why not the chicken first? Check this out... http://www.radiolab.org/story/black-box/ or if you prefer the written word ... http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/08/01/157718428/are-butterflies-two-different-animals-in-one-the-death-and-resurrection-theory
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