Scientists have found that memories may be passed down through generations in our DNA

[doneit]

Would not instinct be considered memories passed down?

 

[Happy 7]

Epigenetics and Inheritance

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/epigenetics/inheritance/

Nice and simple 3min. read.
No need to want it to be more/less than it actually is.

Enjoy.

 

[Pinball Wizard]

I remember this one time back in 1776 when my, great grandfather (to the 5th power) cracked the liberty bell.

I can remember the exact words of George Washington's crossing the Delaware River:

"It's not that cold, shut up and row!"

 

[floralheart]

I'm pretty sure this has been known for 5,000 years or better.

The structure, cheating and manipulation of modern civilization is based upon this fact.

 

[floralheart]

There are so many lies in this world. Science is the new religion, the new faith based reality.

It's hard to hear about "new discoveries", disclosures, what ever you want to call them. It's a tangled web of lies, controlled by the few, intended for the many.

 

[Sam_Skunkman]

What I am saying is that life evolved so it would continue to be successful in its current environment or it moved to one it could succeed in or it simply die out

success is contingent on environmental adaptation

you cannot adapt/evolve over generations without memory or those changes would have no relative context. everything that has evolved has evolved with purpose, the most obvious being environmental adaptation.

SURE YOU CAN, AND I AM PRETTY SURE EVOLUTION USES MUTATION TO DRIVE EVOLUTION. MOST MUTATIONS JUST DIE OFF BECAUSE THEY DO NOT HAVE ANY ADVANTAGE. THE FEW THAT DO FLOURISH ARE VERY SOON A GREATER AND GREATER PART OF THAT GENEPOOL.

the organisms that live off of sulfur plumes from the underwater volcanoes are one example

there are creatures that have adapted/evolved along with the environment and there is a mechanism at place that is causing it

DO YOU REALLY DENY THAT RANDOM MUTATION IS THE DRIVER OF EVOLUTION?

how does a plant evolve to create a chemical to aid it against predators? does it not have to have environmental interaction and doesn't that interaction have to change the dna for it to manifest as a physiological change?

AGAIN RANDOM MUTATION IS THE ANSWER, THE ONES THAT HAVE A LITTLE MORE OF A GIVEN CHEMICAL MAY HAVE AN ADVANTAGE THAT ALLOWS THEM TO BE MORE SUCCESSFUL.

NO IT DOES NOT REQUIRE ENVIORNMENTAL INTERACTION IT REQUIRES RANDOM MUTATION.

TWO TYPES OF PHYSIOLOGICAL CHANGE, NONADAPTIVE AND ADAPTIVE METHYLATION of DNA. I SUGGEST YOU TRY AND UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE. HINT, YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT
NONADAPTIVE.

-SamS

 

[Hank Hemp]

I remember why Gen. Washington stood as we crossed!

I remember why Gen. Washington stood as we crossed!

I can remember the exact words of George Washington's crossing the Delaware River:

"It's not that cold, shut up and row!"

Cause every time he sat down some enlisted man handed him a oar. Lazy ass officers, never held up their end did they.

But seriously, did Carl Sagan talk a bit about this in his book, The Dragons of Eden?

 

[Weird]

DO YOU REALLY DENY THAT RANDOM MUTATION IS THE DRIVER OF EVOLUTION?

yes i deny it is random

if it were random mutations that spurred evolution would not be environmentally congruent and the complexity of species in given ecosystems would not be a constant

 

[Sam_Skunkman]

No problem,
We will have to drop this, I see mutation as random as can be, you do not.
It is like arguing with people of faith, they can not see your side, because they know they are right, god is on their side, they need no proof.
-SamS

yes i deny it is random

if it were random mutations that spurred evolution would not be environmentally congruent and the complexity of species in given ecosystems would not be a constant

 

[HUGE]

Here is how you know mutation is not random. Its quite simple. Organisms respond to enviornmental stimuli. Organism exists, every generation mutations occure, yes you could call some of tuem "random" but on a whole the mutations are a response to changes ij the creatures enviornment. Lets take whales they were once a land creature. Then it began feeding more in the ocean/rivers because the land food was less available. Generation after generation small mutations occured that allowed the creature to better exist in water. It wasn't that the land creature one day "randomly" mutated its legs to almost non existance, grew fins and wiggled its way to some water whwre these new random mutations would work. Now each successfull mutation is stored in the subsaquent generation. Not in its mind as hey I used to have legs then I began swimming. But stored in the dna.

 

[HUGE]

Evolution=survival of tje fitist=fitist=that which is able to survive best in the current enviornment.=not random.

 

[Happy 7]

So... If one stresses an organism the right way, one can cause specific mutations?
Interesting, why is no one doing it?

 

[Weird]

Evolution=survival of tje fitist=fitist=that which is able to survive best in the current enviornment.=not random.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_effect

Baldwin effect

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Not to be confused with Baldwin's rules.
Not to be confused with the Baldwin effect (after Jack Allen Baldwin) in astronomy (see e.g. this definition).
The Baldwin effect, also known as Baldwinian evolution or ontogenic evolution, is a theory of a possible evolutionary process that was originally put forward in 1896 in a paper, "A New Factor in Evolution," by American psychologist James Mark Baldwin. The paper proposed a mechanism for specific selection for general learning ability. Selected offspring would tend to have an increased capacity for learning new skills rather than being confined to genetically coded, relatively fixed abilities. In effect, it places emphasis on the fact that the sustained behavior of a species or group can shape the evolution of that species. The "Baldwin effect" is better understood in evolutionary developmental biology literature as a scenario in which a character or trait change occurring in an organism as a result of its interaction with its environment becomes gradually assimilated into its developmental genetic or epigenetic repertoire (Simpson, 1953; Newman, 2002). In the words of Daniel Dennett,

Thanks to the Baldwin effect, species can be said to pretest the efficacy of particular different designs by phenotypic (individual) exploration of the space of nearby possibilities. If a particularly winning setting is thereby discovered, this discovery will create a new selection pressure: organisms that are closer in the adaptive landscape to that discovery will have a clear advantage over those more distant. (p. 69,[1] quoting Dennett, 1991)
​

Examples

Suppose a species is threatened by a new predator and there is a behavior that makes it more difficult for the predator to kill individuals of the species. Individuals who learn the behavior more quickly will obviously be at an advantage. As time goes on, the ability to learn the behavior will improve (by genetic selection), and at some point it will seem to be an instinct.
Baldwin gives the following case involving cooperation: "Animals may be kept alive let us say in a given environment by social cooperation only; these transmit this social type of variation to posterity; thus social adaptation sets the direction of physical phylogeny and physical heredity is determined in part by this factor" (Baldwin, 1896, p. 553).
The appearance of lactose tolerance in human populations with a long tradition of raising domesticated animals for milk production has been suggested as another example. This argument holds that a feedback loop operates whereby a dairy culture increases the selective advantage from this genetic trait, while the average population genotype increases the collective rewards of a dairy culture.
Contrary effect

The opposite of the Baldwin effect is 'shielding'.[2] Modern medicine, for example, could artificially control a harmful pathogen, thus preventing any genetic immunity against it from being selected for. Here, learned behavior that improves fitness also prevents genetic adaptation.
Status

The Baldwin effect theory has been controversial, with scholars being split between "Baldwin boosters" and "Baldwin skeptics".[3] The theory was first called the "Baldwin effect" by George Gaylord Simpson in 1953 (p. 3[3]). Simpson "admitted that the idea was theoretically consistent, that is, not inconsistent with the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis" (p. 4[3]), but he doubted that the phenomenon occurred very often, or if so, could be proven to occur.
There have been a number of arguments against the effect. For example, it has been argued that the change from learning to instinct might not constitute an improvement, because only very stable environments where change is extremely slow would favour innate traits as opposed to the plasticity of learning (especially social learning, which doesn't have such high costs as individual learning by trial-and-error). The very mechanism of the transition has also been questioned, as genetic variations which "tend to decouple [...] behaviour from environmental signals" might be "distant from those genotypes that mediate plastic, learned response".[4]
Still, "it is striking that a rather diverse lot of contemporary evolutionary theorists, most of whom regard themselves as supporters of the Modern Synthesis, have of late become 'Baldwin boosters'" (p. 4[3]). These Baldwin boosters

are typically evolutionary psychologists who are searching for scenarios in which a population can get itself by behavioral trial and error onto a "hard to find" part of the fitness landscape in which human brain, language, and mind can rapidly coevolve. They are searching for what Daniel Dennett, himself a Baldwin booster, calls an "evolutionary crane," an instrument to do some heavy lifting fast. (p. 4[3])
​

According to Dennett, recent work has rendered the Baldwin effect "no longer a controversial wrinkle in orthodox Darwinism" (p. 69[1]).
See also

• Evolvability
• Genetic assimilation
• James Mark Baldwin
• Lamarckism
• Pangenesis
• Phenotypic plasticity
• Weismann barrier

References

• Baldwin, J. Mark; A New Factor in Evolution, The American Naturalist, Vol. 30, No. 354 (June 1896), 441-451
• Osborn, Henry F.; Ontogenic and Phylogenic Variation, Science, New Series, Vol. 4, No. 100 (November 27, 1896), 786-789
• Baldwin, J. Mark; Organic Selection, Science, New Series, Vol. 5, No. 121 (April 23, 1897), 634-636
• Hall, Brian K.; Organic Selection: Proximate Environmental Effects on the Evolution of Morphology and Behaviour, Biology and Philosophy, 16: 215-237, 2001
• Bateson, Patrick; The Active Role of Behaviour in Evolution, Biology and Philosophy, 19: 283-298, 2004
• Sterelny, Kim; The Baldwin Effect and Its Significance: A Review of Bruce Weber and David Depew (eds) Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, pp x, 341 To appear in: Evolution and Development[4]
• Simpson, G. Gaylord; The Baldwin effect, Evolution, 7:110–117, 1953
• Newman, Stuart A.; Putting Genes in their place, Journal of Biosciences, 27:97-104, 2002

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending (Oct 19, 2010)
Notes

1. ^ Jump up to: a b Dennett, Daniel (2003), "The Baldwin Effect, a Crane, not a Skyhook" in: Weber, Bruce H.; Depew, David J. (2003). Evolution and learning: The Baldwin effect reconsidered. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 69–106. ISBN 0-262-23229-4.
2. Jump up ^ Levy, Steven; Artificial Life - The Quest for a New Creation (1992), Jonathan Cape, pp. 268-269
3. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e Depew, David J. (2003), "Baldwin Boosters, Baldwin Skeptics" in: Weber, Bruce H.; Depew, David J. (2003). Evolution and learning: The Baldwin effect reconsidered. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 3–31. ISBN 0-262-23229-4.
4. ^ Jump up to: a b http://www.vuw.ac.nz/phil/staff/documents/sterelny-papers/baldwin.pdf

External links

• Baldwinian evolution
• Bibliography

Categories:

• Evolutionary biology
• Selection

 

[NorCalDreaming]

DNA is definitely weird stuff. Saw some show on twins separated at birth and the guys both smoked the same brand of ciggy's, married wives with the same name, etc.

 

[HUGE]

So... If one stresses an organism the right way, one can cause specific mutations?
Interesting, why is no one doing it?

I believe they are. But I believe it is done mostly with bacteria and virus or other small creatire witu short life cycles.

 

[Happy 7]

Sources of Variation

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/variation/sources/

(esp. slide 9 'Mutations occur at random...')

Misconception

Genetic mutations arise in response to the environment.

Reality

Genetic mutations are constantly occurring.
Depending on the environment, mutations can be good, bad, or neutral.

Enjoy.

 

[HUGE]

Sources of Variation

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/variation/sources/

(esp. slide 9 'Mutations occur at random...')

Enjoy.

That is incomplete. As I mentioned every generation there are "mutations" and yes I suppose tou could call some or all of these mutations random. However it is the enviornment that determines which "mutations" will survive. And I feel strongly that "random" is being misused here. There is no organism on earth that is evolving against its enviornment. (You coupd perhaps argue that humans are). But at any rate lets take the case of the whale. If losing legs and growing flippers was random. How many random mutations occured to the base animal before no legs and fins won out. Sort of like the throw of dice is random however limited to 6 random outcomes. The gene pool contains most the info from the current animals ancestors. Lioe how the human brain has the reptillioncomplex, the mammillion complex, and the hman adaptation. The whale still has legs they are just under theskin. I doubt there is ever a whale born with full legs. However if the oceans were to dry up. Whatever the whale evolves into will probably have legs.

 

[Grass Lands]

This explains why I just don't feel right in this day and age...I've always felt like I should've been born in a time from the past.

 

[HUGE]

Ecoli mutating in response to enviornment.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2869130/

See adaptive mutation

 

[HUGE]

Ant eaters have long snout and tounge because they eat anys and need to get at them. They don't eat ants because they randomly mutated a long tounge and snout then began searching out a way to make use of them.

Birds fly south for the winter because they will die in the cold.

Suposobly humans started walking uprigh because the forests were turning to grasslands. Not that the prehuman just randomly started walking upright.