Category: Uncategorised

  • Key evolutionary innovation lost 1000 times! The ability of flight lost repeatedly in the vast majority of insect orders

    Let me repeat that: Evolutionary biologists claim, that after insect-species evolved the key evolutionary innovation – the ability of flight – then the ability got lost, and this happened independently, more than 1000 times in vast majority of insect orders … Here is an older article from 1996: WHY WOULD FLIGHTLESSNESS EVOLVE? Why would natural […]

  • Repeated evolution: air bladders or lungs in different groups of fishes evolved multiple times

    Stuff happens …. Several times throughout their radiation fish have evolved either lungs or swim bladders as gas-holding structures. Lungs and swim bladders have different ontogenetic origins and can be used either for buoyancy or as an accessory respiratory organ. Therefore, the presence of air-filled bladders or lungs in different groups of fishes is an […]

  • Repeated evolution: Appendix evolved more than 30 times!

    The appendix may not be useless after all. The worm-shaped structure found near the junction of the small and large intestines evolved 32 times among mammals, according to a new study. The finding adds weight to the idea that the appendix helps protect our beneficial gut bacteria when a serious infection strikes. Now get ready […]

  • Repeated evolution: Sex chromosomes evolved independently, many times, in various species

    Sex chromosomes evolved not once, but many times, independently … stuff happens … Sex chromosomes are derived from autosomes and have evolved independently many times in different lineages. For example, the human X and Y chromosomes originated about 200-300 million years ago in eutherian mammals after the split of monotremes, and sex chromosomes evolved independently […]

  • Repeated evolution: Penis-baculum evolved multiple times and have been lost multiple times

    Several hypotheses for the function of the baculum have been proposed which lead to testable predictions in a comparative framework. Unfortunately, comparative studies have failed to yield general and consistent results  Here, we specifically test this hypothesis by modeling the presence/absence of bacula of 954 mammalian species across a well-established phylogeny and show that the […]

  • Repeated evolution of blood types

    interesting stuff happened here … or perhaps not ? The ABO histo-blood group, the critical determinant of transfusion incompatibility, was the first genetic polymorphism discovered in humans. Remarkably, ABO antigens are also polymorphic in many other primates, with the same two amino acid changes responsible for A and B specificity in all species sequenced to […]

  • Evolution does repeat itself after all: How evolution lets stripes come and go

    same stuff happened multiple times, independently in various lakes, and at a record speed … Evolution does repeat itself after all: How evolution lets stripes come and go A team of evolutionary biologists discovers the genetic basis for the repeated evolution of color patterns. The findings about the stripes of the especially diverse species of […]

  • Repeated evolution: Lactose tolerance arose independently in Africans and Europeans

    In January 2007, an international team of researchers led by geneticist Sarah Tishkoff announced that they had uncovered the genetic roots of Africans’ lactose tolerance. Just as in Europe, on this continent, mutations (in this case, probably three) randomly arose, and these happened to have the effect of keeping the lactase gene switched on. https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/070401_lactose