Were cosmic rays responsible for evolution?
kwinn
Posts: 8,697
I found this article while searching for information on the Collins 8400 series computer. Combine it with Darwin's theory of evolution and it makes for a pretty reasonable answer.
http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/Cygnus_Cosmic_Rays_Evolution.htm
http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/Cygnus_Cosmic_Rays_Evolution.htm
Comments
My take is that evolution happens. Many things can have an effect on how it proceeds. Including perhaps cosmic rays.
Beer goggles.
My thoughts exactly. The aggregate number of causes to any effect are infinite.
You might want to look here for info on the 8400.
http://collinsbook.com/arthur-collins-radio-wizard-book-2/
Thanks for the link, really appreciate it. I'm surprised I didn't come across it in all the searching on the internet I did for Collins.
I would guess that cigarettes, seat belts, greenhouse gases, patent trolls, stiletto heels, computer games, and pheromone cologne have not been around long enough to have much if any effect on evolution. Volcanic eruptions, comet and asteroid impacts would have a large effect by wiping out some species and leaving niches for others to take over. Not sure what geomagnetic reversals would do other than confuse migratory birds, cosmic dust clouds may reduce sunlight and cause an ice age. That leaves solar flares, cosmic rays, and radioactive isotopes in the environment to cause mutations in the genome.
We are currently in a rather large period of rapid species extinctions. Which is no doubt having a profound effect on the future of evolution on this planet. Including the future of evolution for human beings. For the hundreds of species made extinct by mankind in recent years cosmic rays were the least of their worries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
C.W.
Responsiblity for evolution. That is another can of worms. If you believe in Gensis, the big G created evolution along is all and everthing else... just forgot to mention it in the fine print when divinely inspiring the authors of the big book.
How does one really claim responsiblity for something so chaotic and random? I wonder.
And responsiblity for extinctions are yet another big big can of worms. The world is just a big petri dish and as humans take over, other life forms suffer until there are too many of us and then we suffer. Humankind may be extinct long before any significant damage to life on earth is achieved. That's the way of evolution. Higher life forms just don't last as long as lower, more primative ones.
Maybe we will all be reborn as cockroaches and live forever.
Funny, when I went to school, evolution was explained as the ability of a living organism to change it's physical makeup (DNA) to become a more complex organism. It's still a pretty rock solid belief by many that we came from primates, since, well, at one time a monkey used a stone tool, so of course that was the beginning of evolution into man right? As I watch the crows drop walnuts on the road in front of my house to crack them open, I wonder what they are evolving into..........."crow-magnon" man?
If humans are causing a great extinction I still blame potassium 40. Bananas are rich in potassium and humans have been eating them for possibly 8,000 years! I suspect the radiation has warped our brains.
In terms of human populations, those that remained in Africa have been demonstrated to be more genetically evolved than those that migrated to other parts of globe. A lot of self-serving assumptions about evolution are still in play.
In other words, humans just love to think that they are superior and responsible for just about all and evey thing. Next someone will claim that there is a natural balance in the environment.
+++++++++++
And so, I guess it is really the pressures of natural selection that are 'responsible' for evolution. In other words, whatever is eating you is winning the gene pool race.
Yes. Evolution does not care about "more evolved", whatever that is supposed to mean. Evolution concerns itself with how reproducing populations change in their characteristics. "survival of the fittest" does not mean survival of the "better" or "more evolved", it means those that literally "fit" the environment such that they have more chance to grow and reproduce will do so an become more numerous.
If/when humans finally turn this planet into a dessert having consumed all the resources, or whatever, we will no longer be the fittest in that new environment. As you say it may then be up to the cockroaches.
References please. Never heard such a thing before.
But given what you said above it's contradictory that you then say some people somewhere may be "more genetically evolved". Humans have not been "out of Africa" very long, I suspect we have diverged a tiny bit. I would not use the the word "more" though.
My personal observation is that nature abhors an excess or a vacuum and seeks equilibrium.
My personal prediction is that in a few thousand years earth will belong to cockroaches and kudzu and something may or may not evolve from that.
“If/when humans finally turn this planet into a dessert” then we will all eat dessert ;-)
(sorry, couldn't resist)
I certainly didn't mean to imply that radiation was the only or major cause of genetic mutations, or that cosmic rays were the only source of radiation. There are many known causes, radiation, chemical, viral, bacterial, and probably a lot more that we are not presently aware of.
Here is one of many references about genetic diversity of human populations by continent. See Table 1 and the text around it.
If you think about it the people that migrated out of Africa had smaller, more isolated, and less diverse gene pools to evolve from. And so, Africa being the eldest, defaults to having the most time, the largest gene pool, and most integrated population to create genetic diversity.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1288178/
I suppose that may all change one day with air travel.
Interesting. That paper makes some kind of intuitive sense. Given the spread of humanity from Africa and the relative isolation in which many resulting communities lived. The paper makes a mention of northern Europe and Finland for example as being less genetically diverse, which is what one might guess.
It talks about "genetic diversity" though not "more evolved". It's not clear to me that you can equate these two. Even if we did have an idea what "more evolved" was supposed to mean.
I don't buy that argument. A group could well be the eldest but if it had subsequently been isolated when it wandering descendents were more intermixed then we would expect the genetic diversity to be greater outside of that original group.
I never got that bit about vacuum. If nature abhors a vacuum, how come most of space is vacuum?
More accurate might be : nature abhors a clear desktop.
An entropy: if everything tends to cool off, how come stars ignite? I suspect there might be more going on someplace than we are aware.
but occasionally mutations are key steps in some change. But there's no shortage of mutations in a large population,
no excess radiation is needed (in fact its a hinderance, hence all the complex machinery of DNA repair that prevents
mutations).
Evolution works through differential survival rates of competing organisms, you need genetic differences between organisms
and natural selection pressure - the speed of evolution is strongly controlled by this.
Sexual reproduction includes a step where the parental genes are interspliced at random to produce a new and unique
combination that is passed on to the offspring - each individual has many unique combinations of genes that may not have
been seen before - any combination with a big advantage will be selected for strongly, yet no transcription errors are
involved. Neighbouring genes can be coupled in complex ways by the machinery that switches genes on and off too, so
the results of this shuffling could have complex and profound effects.
Sexual reproduction also means having duplicate sets of nearly all genes, which allows broken, mutated genes to
be passed around in significant numbers in the population without causing death to the inviduals (the good copy
does the work), so there is a pool of "mutations" already sitting there all the time ready to be pressed into service
if useful in new situations.
This readily available storehouse of gene variants is why sexual reproduction is so powerful - it allows evolution to shift it
at a fast pace when required - its a bank of pre-gathered genetic variation. Look how fast we have bred wolves into
hundreds of dog varieties - still same species, but with the hidden variety brought out.
Bacteria are even more able to evolve without mutations, since they can exchange portions of DNA between individuals,
effectively gene-splicing between species - this is why anti-biotic resistance can spread in the wild between many types
of organism.
These foxes are very different from their origins, nevertheless no mutations are involved as far as anyone can tell.
-Tor
Didn't Darwin see evidence of evolutionary pressure after one period of drought? The bills on the flinches ended up longer or shorter, as these were the only ones that could penetrate theseeds on the drought resistnat plants, and the others starved?
I would guess LACK of seat belts would be an increased evolutionary pressure.
Because gravity sucks?
C.W.
el Nino and el Nina events is plain in the data - weather affects which foods are plentiful which
affects which beak shapes are best which affects the proportions of individuals with that bill
shape in the population. There's a husband and wife team been doing this for years on a few
of the outlying isolated islands of the Galapagas IIRC.
Happy to help.
Art Collins is a legend in ham radio.
His life reminds me of Thomas Edison..right place, right time..and hard work...and technology moved forward.
My understanding is that if he had been successful with the 8400, the Collins Radio Company would have been the IBM of the 70's.
His failure was right place, wrong time..resulting in no cash flow...and the Rockwell International corporation was there to pick up the pieces.
I have read a number of reports now that show climate change is forcing species normally in southern United States to the north...very interesting.
Diversity is not evolution.
Diversity or lack of is just a measurable unit of genetic differences...some by mutations and some by interbreeding with differing gene pools.
What about the asexual side of life? The first amoeba is still alive today in all the amoebas in the world, except for mutant amoebas. Right.
And then there are plants that just propagate by shedding off new plants, or clones. Bamboo clones for about 60 years to propagate, then it reproduces sexually by flowering, goes to seed and dies. The result is a very slow genetic shuffle. But virus infections might cause a mutant bamboo to arise at any time.
And do viruses mutate? They at least do something similar to mutation as we are all worried about bird flu jumping to humans and pandemically killing off a big chunk of us.
Nothing is a scary as an intellectual with a good hypothesis on how the world is going to suddenly end.
We may have had bursts of cosmic rays in the past that did a wild crazy upset of the global gene pools. And we may have more in the future. Just chalk it up as all an interesting adventure.
I think you said it yourself.
The emergence of sex on the scene greatly accelerates the rate at which different permutations of genes can come into existence and try their luck at survival.
Seems to me that with mutation, via cosmic rays or whatever random error, you are changing something that works into something that probably does not.
With sexual "stirring" you are mixing up things that do work.
I totally agree. Those are probably not intellectuals but fringe nut heads. I lean that way myself some times:)