Scientists said on Tuesday that they had discovered the world’s first hybrid sharks in Australian waters, a potential sign the predators were adapting to cope with climate change.
The mating of the local Australian black-tip shark with its global counterpart, the common black-tip, was an unprecedented discovery with implications for the entire shark world, said lead researcher Jess Morgan.
“It’s very surprising because no one’s ever seen shark hybrids before, this is not a common occurrence by any stretch of the imagination,” Morgan, from the University of Queensland, told AFP.
“This is evolution in action.”
Colin Simpfendorfer, a partner in Morgan’s research from James Cook University, said initial studies suggested the hybrid species was relatively robust, with a number of generations discovered across 57 specimens.
The find was made during cataloguing work off Australia’s east coast when Morgan said genetic testing showed certain sharks to be one species when physically they looked to be another.
The Australian black-tip is slightly smaller than its common cousin and can only live in tropical waters, but its hybrid offspring have been found 2,000 kilometres down the coast, in cooler seas.
It means the Australian black-tip could be adapting to ensure its survival as sea temperatures change because of global warming.
“If it hybridises with the common species it can effectively shift its range further south into cooler waters, so the effect of this hybridising is a range expansion,” Morgan said.
“It’s enabled a species restricted to the tropics to move into temperate waters.”
Climate change and human fishing are some of the potential triggers being investigated by the team, with further genetic mapping also planned to examine whether it was an ancient process just discovered or a more recent phenomenon.
If the hybrid was found to be stronger than its parent species — a literal survival of the fittest — Simpfendorfer said it may eventually outlast its so-called pure-bred predecessors.
“We don’t know whether that’s the case here, but certainly we know that they are viable, they reproduce and that there are multiple generations of hybrids now that we can see from the genetic roadmap that we’ve generated from these animals,” he said.
“Certainly it appears that they are fairly fit individuals.”
The hybrids were extraorindarily abundant, accounting for up to 20 percent of black-tip populations in some areas, but Morgan said that didn’t appear to be at the expense of their single-breed parents, adding to the mystery.
Simpfendorfer said the study, published late last month in Conservation Genetics, could challenge traditional ideas of how sharks had and were continuing to evolve.
“We thought we understood how species of sharks have separated, but what this is telling us is that in reality we probably don’t fully understand the mechanisms that keep species of shark separate,” he said.
“And in fact, this may be happening in more species than these two.”
Lynn Margulis, biologist and Distinguished Professor of Geosciences, composed a grand and powerful view of the living and the non-living. Integrating the work of obscure Russian scientists, DNA pulled from cell organelles, computer-generated daisies, and the hindguts of termites, her vision was wider in scope and more profound in depth than any other coherent scientific world view. At the time of her death on November 22nd, 2011, it is a vision that remains misunderstood and misconstrued by many scientists.
Much of this view came from her uncanny ability to first lean forward and see the smallest inhabitants of the Earth; to hover there, and then to leap back at the speed of thought to conceptualize the entire planet. Lean forward, then stand back. This inner movement, this seeing from soil to space, marked a unique scientific endeavor.
This perspective was earned only through walking through diverse areas of study — geology, genetics, biology, chemistry, literature, embryology, paleontology. Those fields, are sometimes separated by an untraversed distance at universities: they are housed in separate buildings which may as well be different worlds. In Margulis, they found agreement and discussion with each other; they were reconnected, just as they are intrinsically connected in nature.
This journey led her to emphasize in all her scientific work two phenomena — the fusing of distinct beings into a single being: symbiosis; and the interaction of organisms and their environments to create relational “loops” that led to regulation of many Earth systems: Gaia Theory.
Taken separately these concepts have the ability to redefine, respectively, how we understand organisms and the environment.
Taken together, they can redefine our consciousness.
* * *
After the Earth was born, give or take a few hundred million years, there were bacteria. Bacteria were here first and are with us still, comprising a major part of the biosphere. They are unseen with the naked eye, they lack nuclei (for this reason, they are called prokaryotes — “pro” = before, “karyon” = nucleus). Their forms were legion and their metabolisms were (and continue to be) strange.
Where life could exist, it did exist in these tiny forms. One of these forms, thermoplasma, was an amorphous blob. It enjoyed heat and sulfur. The stuff we now associate with the devil, this bacterium was quite fond of. Another bacterium was the spirochete. Familiar to us now as the type of bacteria that cause syphilis and Lyme disease, the spirochete is a curl of an organism; a tremulous and crooked line with no front or back. Margulis studied these strange beings through literature and microscope. From some corner of her intellect, they called to her.
The thermoplasmid and spirochete of early Earth were neighbors and, in a sense, enemies. Each one would try, when it encountered the other, to consume it. This was a popular notion at the time: meet and consume. Soon enough, encounter after encounter between the two beings led to an unprecedented event: The beings came together to eat each other and decided on marriage instead. Just what changes happened to cause this friendly ingestion is still unknown. What is known is that the spirochete didn’t digest the thermoplasmid and the thermoplasmid did not digest the spirochete. As Margulis was fond of saying, “1 + 1 = 1.” There was a union of the two, resulting in an entirely new being. They were inseparable, literally. The thermoplasmid had a rotor now, and the spirochete had a “head”. A head and a tail: for the first time, beings haddirection. Cultural philosopher William Irwin Thompson examines this emergence in his book, Coming into Being.It isn’t that spirochetes couldn’t pursue a coordinate before — but the asymmetricality of the new, combined entity, resulted in a new way of being, completely without reference in the history of life: One end, distinct in form, ingested the food; the other end did the rowing. Both absorbed the nutrition. This was a giant step in the evolution of consciousness, and is echoed by all true evolutions in consciousness: the rise of a new way of being, inconceivable to the world that came before.
And soon, other mergers were taking place. Soon, oxygen-breathing bacteria were incorporated by endosymbiosis into this being. Where once oxygen was poison, now it flowed through without harm.
Cyanobacteria, green and photosynthetic, were incorporated in some of these cells as well. Both these symbioses remain visible today — as the mitochondria in all cells (the oxygen-breathing bacteria that became mitochondria) and chloroplasts in plant and some animal cells (the cyanobacteria that led to chloroplasts). These are ancient partnerships that have never dissolved, and which continue to pulse with rhythm, and our existence depends upon them. Human cells reflect these unions, and we breathe plant-respired oxygen.
Margulis, inspired by the work of little-known biologists, revealed and proved these mergers for us. At first, her worked was rejected and scoffed at. It did not fit the still-dominant neo-Darwinian paradigm that tells us all evolutionary novelty comes from natural selection acting on genes and the gradual accumulation of random genetic mutation. But eventually these symbioses were accepted because they could not be ignored. In a stunning display of reluctance, despite mounting evidence, the spirochetal origin of the undulipodium (sometimes incorrectly called or mistaken for the “flagellum” — though the undulipodium and flagellum are not similar either chemically or structurally) is still contested and sometimes dismissed.
What is unquestionable: bacteria make up the living architecture of our bodies.
They evolved into our cells, and also remain “free-living” in our digestive system. Their spiraling remnants are in our gums, our brains. This means our physical selves are universes composed of the movemenst, biological agreements, and interactions of these beings.
What can this mean for the individual? What happens when we are simultaneously songs and compositions of notes? “Identity is not an object; it is a process with addresses for all the different directions and dimensions in which it moves…” Margulis once stated, with her colleague Ricardo Guerrero.
And what happens when we are notes, songs, and the notes again? What happens when we shift our perspective and see that we are cells made out of cells?
Yellowstone Wolves Show How Animals Change With Nature
Jennifer Welsh, LiveScience Staff Writer
Date: 01 December 2011 Time: 02:00 PM ET
Sibling members of Yellowstone National Park’s Druid Peak Pack engaged in play.
CREDIT: Daniel Stahler/NPS
Environmental changes have a profound effect not only on animal populations but on traits of the animals themselves, in ways that are difficult to understand and predict, new research suggests.
By studying the wolves of Yellowstone National Park, a group of researchers has developed a new model for understanding how both ecological and evolutionary traits of an animal population change as the environment does.
The researchers recorded and studied data from Yellowstone for more than 15 years, including the body size and coat color of wolves as well as their sharply fluctuating population, which last year stood at 97.
“The conclusions that we have been able to draw is that biologists should stop treating population size independently of population characteristics. As changes, it invariably changes the ecology and evolution of species,” study researcher Tim Coulson, of Imperial College London, told LiveScience.
The study appears in the Dec. 2 issue of the journal Science.
Yellowstone wolves
An international group of wolf experts, geneticists and statisticians began collecting data from Yellowstone when, absent from the park for 70 years, wolves were reintroduced in 1995 and 1996. The reintroduced population of 40 grew to nearly 180 wolves within seven years. Then the population fluctuated before sharply declining starting in 2008.
Researchers put this data together with genetic information and other characteristics about the wolves.
“Biologists and people who study wild populations in animals have been noticing over the last decade or so [of studies] that when you change the environment around a species — climate change, introduction of new species, disease epidemics, etc. — you don’t just change the size of the population, the number of individuals living there, you often change the characteristics of the animals,” Coulson said.
“It’s a fairly general phenomenon, but they haven’t had an ability to understand how and why it’s occurred.”
The researchers used statistics to determine whether years were “good” and “bad” in terms of the wolves’ survival, growth and fertility rates. These were driven by environmental changes, including food availability, competition, disease and weather, Coulson said.
They used these survival rates to understand how these environmental conditions impact the various characteristics of the wolves. The researchers say they learned several big things, including that the population did worse when bad years came in series than when bad years were interspersed with good years.
“One bad year, yes, it has a short-term impact, but if you end up with a long string of harsh conditions, it’s worse for the population in the long run,” Coulson said. “We haven’t got enough data to work out exactly what it is that makes one good year or bad year,” he added, although availability of food and prominence of disease play roles.
The researchers also found that these changes can have varying, and even contradictory, effects on the life cycle of the wolves, or other animals being studied. “Survival, reproduction and individual growth are three key characteristics of a population, and they can all respond very differently to environmental change,” study researcher Daniel MacNulty, of Utah State University, told LiveScience. “Depending on how they respond to change, it will influence the dynamics of the population.”
“Environmental change doesn’t affect simply the ecology or the evolution of the population, it affects both of them simultaneously,” MacNulty said. “Both ecological and evolutionary changes can happen rapidly and in a population that’s subject to environmental change.”
For example, researchers could model rodents and other pests over time to determine how they might react to replacing a city green space with a parking lot. “You can’t just assume that environmental change is going to lead a decrease in a population; they can increase as well,” MacNulty said. “They may respond to a particular environmental change by leading to an overabundance of a particular pestspecies.”
Ancestor of All Living Things More Sophisticated than Thought
Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor
Date: 05 October 2011 Time: 12:49 PM ET
The last universal common ancestor, rather than a primitive blob of chemicals, likely was more complex, even having so-called organelles or miniature organs.
CREDIT: David Huntley | Shutterstock
The mysterious common ancestor of all life on Earth may have been more complex than before thought — a sophisticated organism with an intricate structure, scientists now suggest.
The last universal common ancestor, or LUCA, is what researchers call the forerunner of all living things. Much about LUCA remains enigmatic — many think it was little more than a primitive assemblage of molecular parts, a chemical soup from which evolution gradually built more complex forms. Some even debate whether it was even a cell.
Now, after years of research into a once-neglected feature of microbes, scientists suggest the last universal common ancestor was indeed complex, and recognizable as a cell.
Miniature organs
The researchers focused on a region of cells loaded with high concentrations of polyphosphates, molecules such as ATP used to transfer energy around the cell in chemical form. This storage site for polyphosphates may represent the first known universal organelle — compartments within cells that essentially act as miniature organs — the investigators suggest. Other kinds of organelles include the chloroplast, which gives plants the ability to use sunlight as energy, and the mitochondrion, which allows life to use oxygen for respiration.
Scientists had thought organelles were absent from bacteria and their distantly related microbial cousins, the archaea. Now these findings suggest this polyphosphate storage organelle is present in all three domains of life — bacteria, archaea and the eukaryotes, which include animals, plants and fungi.
“It was a dogma of microbiology that organelles weren’t present in bacteria,” said researcher Manfredo Seufferheld, a stress physiologist and cell biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Still, earlier research of his and his colleagues’ showed that the polyphosphate storage structure in at least two bacterial species was physically, chemically and functionally the same as an organelle called an acidocalcisome found in many single-celled eukaryotes.
To look for this storage unit, in their latest research the team analyzed the evolutionary history an enzyme known as a vacuolar proton pyrophosphatase (V-H+PPase), which is common in the acidocalcisomes of eukaryotic and bacterial cells. The results showed archaea also have the enzyme and a structure with the same physical and chemical properties as an acidocalcisome.
“This organelle appears to be universal,” Seufferheld told LiveScience. “This suggests the last universal common ancestors had a lot more cellular structure than others had thought.”
Describing a common ancestor
By comparing the sequences of the genes for this enzyme from hundreds of organisms representing the three domains of life, the researchers constructed a family tree showing how different versions of the enzyme in different species were related. The more similar sequences were, the more closely they were related, and the less similar they were, the more distantly they were related.
Science and Spirituality Can Transform Our World .. Together
For hundreds of years, science has illuminated the mysteries of our universe, allowing us to conquer diseases, manipulate genomes, visit other planets and explore the wonders of space and time. But as a result of these profound and inarguable successes, science has also become the de facto cultural filter through which our broader societal norms, behaviors and institutions have developed and evolved. Newtonian physics established a physical reality composed of discrete and separate objects, operating according to predictable laws of time and space — the universe as a giant billiard table. And Darwinian evolution established the biological world as a tooth-and-claw realm of scarcity, competition and “survival of the fittest.” The end conclusions of this centuries-old scientific story is that we are accidents of the cosmos, living on a lonely planet in the cold depths of space, vying for limited resources in a frequently violent and tumultuous competition for supremacy. The implicit notion that we are walking husks for “selfish genes” pervades everything, from our economic and business institutions to our day-to-day interactions.
But an increasing number of scientific, philosophical and spiritual thinkers are arriving at the conclusion that this mechanistic take on the human story is fundamentally incomplete. Darwinian narratives of “survival of the fittest,” and mechanistic Newtonian physics are increasingly being seen as elements of a far greater and richer tapestry. Quantum entanglement, or Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance,” demonstrates that our universe is interconnected in ways we might never have imagined, down to the most basic particle level. And the discovery of “mirror neurons”in humans and other primates demonstrates that simply seeing something happen to another creature lights up the same neurons as if it were happening to us. In a very real sense, we don’t entirely distinguish between “the self” and others. And this is particularly true when witnessing suffering. Compassion and empathy seem to be hard-wired into us.
While inter-species and intra-species competition is an inarguable biological fact, we are discovering compelling new examples of connection, cooperation and community. In reality, we may have even misinterpreted Darwin. In his “The Descent of Man,”published in 1871, Darwin only mentions the phrase “survival of the fittest” twice, while he mentions the word “love” 95 times. Dig beneath the surface of the natural world, and a tooth-and-claw narrative is clearly not the only one to be found. Bonobo apes, with which humans share more than 98 percent of their DNA, live in highly cooperative societies based on matriarchal structures. These and other recent scientific discoveries may prove pivotal in creating newer and more accurate cultural narratives. The Human Genome Project has revealed amazing commonalities among all living organisms, and the project has also found that there is greater genetic variability within a given race than between them. In short, in spite of superficial appearances, we are far more alike, at a fundamental genetic level, than we are different.
Even so, we retain hard-wiring from a primitive past that was directed toward survival-based judgments and assessments of others. Studies find that this programming leaves us constantly primed to gauge others as “in-group” or “out-group,” based upon such criteria as race, gender, age and perceived cultural and socio-economic status — and that such analyses occur within milliseconds. This tribalism can be surprisingly fluid and dynamic. In one study, teen boys were exposed to the art of either Kandinsky or Klee. Even though the boys were previously unfamiliar with either and had been randomly assigned to view the works of only one artist, the Kandinsky “gang” quickly showed a greater willingness to loan money to other Kandinsky in-group members. And the same proved true of the experimental Klee “gang.”
Because such tribal-bonding is so dynamic and shifting, however, it is also highly malleable. Once recognized and understood, this hard-wiring can be consciously subverted. A measurable aversion to the image of a homeless person or drug addict can be rapidly transformed by an assignment to participate in a soup kitchen and choose appropriate menu items for people in need. In this way, out-group members almost instantaneously become fellow in-group members as part of a joint undertaking. The key to such subversion of tribalistic tendencies is that cross-group members must share a larger common goal, and have the support of recognized authority figures.
While competition and tribalistic bonding are inarguable aspects of our world, science increasingly makes clear that this is only one part of an expanding conceptual landscape. Our entire universe is profoundly interconnected, in ways that we are only beginning to decipher. This is true at the elementary particle level, at the genetic level, at the organism level and at a global level via the Internet. Ultimately, the same scientific milieu that helped form our current conflict-ridden cultural narratives may now be instrumental in defining not only a more productive world view, but a more accurate one.
Steven and Michael Meloan are authors of “The Shroud,” a science-adventure novel exploring the spiritual impulse, tribalism and its manifestations in human behavior, and the intersection between science and spirituality:
Professor of Neuroscience and Novelist, Princeton University
Is Spirituality a Byproduct of Evolution?
Posted: 8/5/11 08:16 AM ET
Homo sapiens evolved to be socially intelligent. Over millions of years, perhaps more, the primate brain evolved special machinery to allow us to think socially, to build abstract concepts of each other’s minds and to react emotionally to each other in a way that more or less maintains the social web. In one theory that is gaining greater acceptance, the social machinery in the human brain is the direct cause of spirituality. Spirituality is the human brain doing exactly what it is exquisitely well evolved to do. It is the functioning of our social intelligence.
If spiders could ever become super intelligent, they might see the world through the metaphor of a web. They might talk about sticky strands of thought. They might envision a universe pulled out of a spinneret. They might judge beauty by radial symmetry. Looking at the moon, they might see a web-in-the-moon instead of a man-in-the-moon. The natural talent of humans is to spin metaphors of minds and intentions, and that is how we evaluate almost everything around us. We understand and react to the world through our social capability. It defines us more than any other trait. Even language is a refinement of social communication. We are truly Homo socialis.
Insect “Frankensteins” have been discovered among fossils from a deposit in Brazil. The prehistoric creatures had the wings and middle-body segments of a dragonfly’s, wing veins arranged like a mayfly and a praying mantis’s forelegs.
“It is a very strange mix of characteristics that are otherwise only known for the unrelated insect groups,” said one of the researchers to discover this new group of insects, Günter Bechly, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany.
The following is excerpted from Power Up Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Enlightenment, by David Perlmutter, FACN, and Alberto Villoldo, PhD, published byHay House.
Thousands of years ago, our ancestors faced a neurological opportunity similar to the one we face today, an opportunity that facilitated an evolutionary leap forward. With the awakening of the neocortex, our forebears acquired a new brain structure that nature had wired for joy, creativity, and innovation.
To access that potential, our ancestors required specific nutrients to provide fuel to run their neurocomputer. Once they added brain-enriching foods to their diet, the faculties of certain individuals, the visionaries of their day, came online and began to create great works of art, devise written language, establish civilizations, and lay the foundations for our modern human experience.
During this time, ancestral shamans described Creation as a web of life in which we are all interconnected. This was a kind of Indra’s Net, which the mythology of ancient India describes as a web with an infinite number of intersecting strands and a precious jewel at the intersection of every strand. Each of the infinite number of jewels reflects every other jewel perfectly. Within this mythical net, all beings are interrelated, and all of our actions, no matter how slight, affect everyone else. Within this net, prophets converse with God and interpret His will, while mystics search for the elixir of immortality and alchemists attempt to transform lead into gold. These sages, mystics, and alchemists shared the same preoccupations as seers of today. They asked, as we do now: How can we live long and healthy lives, unaffected by debilitating illness and degenerative brain disease? How can we turn the dense lead of human suffering into the gold of enlightened consciousness?
Barbara Marx Hubbard — Foundation for Conscious Evolution, President
Evolution is evolving from unconscious chance to conscious choice. We are entering the first age of conscious evolution.
Why? Because we obviously affect our own evolution by all the choices we make — from the food we eat, the number of babies we have, the cars we drive and the weapons we build.
Humans have no experience at being responsible for global change at this level. We are facing, as Bruce Lipton and Deepak Chopra recently wrote, the possibility of the collapse of our life support system. Or, I believe, the emergence of something new, something better than we have ever known before.
By Amy Coopes | AFP 
“In the arithmetic of life, One is always Many.”
