re: #436 Right Brain

This study claims that the plants changed their genetic make-up in response to a warm-spell. This is exactly what doesn’t happen, and it smacks of Lamarckian genetics-changing-to-fit-environment thought that preceded Charles Darwin. Some plants happen to have a different genetic make-up that responds well to warmer weather, these would appear gradually over a long long period of time.

What Mr. Weis was observing was a plant that could behave in different ways, much like a human could don a coat, or not. Carry water in a container, or not. There is no genetic change here, simply a clarification of the versatility a mustard seed.

re: #437 Charles

Actually Charles, 436 is quite right, and reading the article, there is a MASSIVE HOLE in it. There is never a mention of Epigenetics, while I won’t go on for pages, I’d recommend that you read up about it. But a basic description of Epigenetics is that it is the chemistry on our genes. Have ever wondered why all our cells have the genetic information but yet we have all this variety of cells; heart, lung, neurons, etc.? The reason is because of epigenetics, it acts as a kind of chemical time-space control. By methylating/acetylating (and numerous other markers) certain genes or histones can be tuned on and off. And this is heritable between cells, certain states of genes being on, off, and tuned to be partially on or off.

The fact is that the phenomena thats described here sounds exactly like an epigenetic factor

“The newer plants grew to smaller sizes, produced fewer flowers, and, most dramatically, produced those flowers eight days earlier in the spring.”

Everything here sounds directly from an epigenetic text book. It’s not to say that the plants aren’t adapting, but this is far from convincing that it’s a real change in the genetic code. It could just be genes are being turned off (not mutated or altered in any way), and epigenetic signals which do control blooming are simply being set to bloom earlier.

While this is definitely an interesting case, it does not prove an ‘evolutionary explosion’ the way that the scientists would like it. The changes still do require HUGE amounts of time.

en.wikipedia.org

Read this to get an overview