Evolution And The Biosphere
Time to look at the bigger picture. The evolution according to the Evolution Theory looks in my opinion more or less like a umbellifer. New branches are positioned under a small angle to their ancestor branches. Below a photo in 3D and schematic picture of this in 2D.
This results into ‘flowers’ (symbol for species in general; not limited to flowers) forming more or less an umbrella like screen, expanding in time, in relatively close proximity of each other. A lot of the space around the spreading stem stays empty or is only partly filled. Every new species grows in time very slowly away from his or her ancestor, leaving a long trail of transition forms or even of ‘missing links’. The differences between ancestors and new species are quiet small and both have traits that are (especially om the beginning) closely related; not clearly different traits that would excel in the same or different biospheres. There are many transition forms needed with each time a bit adjusted traits, that characterizes each of these forms, before a significant distance is realized compared to species 1, with which it all begins. And so before you can really speak of a new species characterized by a different and new trait. An extremely time consuming process.
When you compare this with a schematic picture of NI (especially with evolutionary revolution) you get a very different result: see the picture below. Each branch shows a new or principally changed focused trait. To illustrate this every angle is made 90 degrees. So the angle is way bigger and can go in any direction. The result is a 3D beam structure with beams (species) going in every possible direction. These perpendicular angels are possible due to the fact that the DNA regions that determines the new trait are basically already there and therefor just have to be switched on by coincidence or by a trigger. The consequence of this different way of branching is easy to see this way: the evolution of species according to NI does not only goes much faster but is more principal and also leads to a way better filling of the biosphere by a huge amount of species that are less competing with each other and that are far more complementing each other.
So what to make out of this? My theory is that the ‘NI-tree’ resembles the first step of the evolution of life or of a principle new type/family of species and the ‘ET-tree’ resembles the following phases of developing new species within one family. So most branches in the NI-tree end eventually in a branch of the ET-type. This combination will give by the far best filling of all biospheres. So indeed a mix of the three models that have become standard in attempts to understand the nature of evolutionary divergence in fossil lineages: directional change, unbiased random walk, and stasis.
Revolutionary evolution followed by evolution (due to random and/or directional mutations) leads to an optimum filling of all biospheres.
The specification of a new species according to the Evolution Theory will, as already said, produce many transition forms; NI will produce only a limited number. Until today not many fossils of transition forms have been found. And as already mentioned many times a discussion is going on if a fossil is indeed a transition form or only family. So again an indication that NI combined with ET gives a better description of the evolution of life than the Evolution Theory on its own. Earlier I showed my surprise that, if you read about the evolution of cheetahs, you will find stories about fossils of its ancestors concerning the evolution of theirs sculls but not about the evolution of their physical development influencing their running speed. Now that becomes easier to understand. Running speed is a focused trait so less transition forms and brain volume is not a focused trait concerning cheetahs so more transition forms.
There are clear examples of a sudden appearance of a new family of species during the history of evolution. Represented by a 90 degrees angel in the picture above. I will present a few of them.
Mammal ancestors became warm-blooded in burst of Late Triassic evolution (source: James Ashworth, First published 20 July 2022). This jump in the body temperature of mammals happened over 200 million years ago. A new study, published in Nature, suggests that ancestors of mammals known as mammaliamorphs abruptly went from being cold-blooded ectotherms to warm-blooded endotherms, rather than experiencing an extended period of change. This extremely fast burst of evolution would have rapidly redefined how these animals lived, transforming our ancestors into more active creatures that lived a wide range of lifestyles. Dr Romain David, a researcher who co-led the study, says “We found that the body temperatures of non-mammaliamorph synapsids were around 24-29⁰C, similar to extant lizards, but jumped by 5-9⁰C in mammaliamorphs around 233 million years ago, during the Late Triassic”.
Control of body temperature is also associated with greater control over development, and around the same time as endothermy is estimated to have evolved, mammaliamorphs also started to develop larger brains and more complex nervous systems. So potential focused traits seizing this opportunity to become focused traits. The origin of mammalian endothermy is one of the great unsolved mysteries of palaeontology. Many different approaches have been used to try to predict when it first evolved, but they have often given vague or conflicting results. So, yes, switching on a gene or genes that already was/were present in DNA could be an explanation: no outside circumstances but internal circumstances and an example of revolutionary evolution. Maybe first latent present as a potential focused trait waiting for the right internal conditions to really become a focused trait.
Another example of an abrupt evolutionary development was the first appearance of mammals. Robert Carroll, a palaeontologist at McGill University, argues in Trends in Ecology and Evolution that “The extreme speed of anatomical change and adaptive radiation during this brief time period requires explanations that go beyond those proposed for the evolution of species within the modern biota.” Further on it is stated that the (micro)evolution does not provide a satisfactory explanation for this extraordinary burst of novelty and concludes that the major evolutionary transitions in animal evolution still remain to be causally explained”. Some paragraphs back I already wrote that complex evolutionary transitions are impossible to explain on the basis of ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘random mutations’. Switching on genes, that already were (for a long time) present in DNA can be an explanation. In combination with new focused traits and maybe also a ‘package deal’.
The evolution of birds and the presence of the DNA-region concerning feathers long before the first birds appeared on the face of the earth, have already been discussed. But there are more interesting things to tell about the evolution of birds. First I will present some information I found in articles like “Mass extinction 66 million years ago triggered rapid evolution of bird genomes”.
Shortly after an asteroid slammed into Earth, 66 million years ago, the evolutionary story for the early ancestors of birds began. An University of Michigan study has identified important changes in birds’ genomes sparked by the mass extinction. The researchers found that the mass extinction event sparked shifts in the nucleotide composition. They also found that these shifts seem to be connected to the way birds develop as babies, their adult size and their metabolism. Within approximately 3 million to 5 million years of the mass extinction, surviving bird lineages tended to develop smaller body sizes. So changes in DNA composition were associated with the mentioned mass extinction. The study emphasizes that the extinction events can actually influence organismal biology by altering important aspects of how genomes evolve.
If I understand this well, one could read that an external trigger (the slamming of the asteroid into the earth) changed the focused traits of the concerning species so birds could survive this catastrophe and start their evolution. And body weight played a decisive role in this evolution. And also is stated that this happened in more than one lineage at the same moment.
Another very interesting article in this respect is “How birds became birds” by Michael J. Benton. Other sources are for instance: M. S. Y. Lee et al., Science 345, 562 (2014), P. Godefroit et al., Science 345, 451 (2014), F. Zhang et al., Nature 463, 1075 (2010), Q. Li et al., Science 327, 1369 (2010), J. Clarke, Science 340, 690 (2013) and M. N. Puttick et al., Evolution 68, 1497 (2014).
These sources tell us that fossils show that many unique morphological features of modern birds, such as feathers, reduction in body size, and the semi lunate carpal, long preceded the origin of clade birds, but some may be unique to birds, such as relative elongation of the forelimb. The high evolutionary rates arose primarily from a reduction in body size. Traits associated with birds evolved before their origin, at high rates. Macroevolutionary analysis has confirmed that the trend to miniaturization happened at evolutionary rates 150 times faster than normal. The mentioned authors found that theropod (ancestor of birds) body size decreased 12 times, from an initial mean mass of 163 kg to 0.8 kg. The question is put forward how such a long-term trend could be maintained.
I already wrote that the losing of weight of the ancestors of birds was probably a focused trait. The above findings make it hard to deny that. And there were already ‘useless’ traits waiting to get their chance (waiting for an internal fit). And the evolution, after the moment these traits seized this chance, went way more rapidly and directionally than the Evolution Theory could ever be able to explain. To summarize: the evolution of birds looks very much like initiated by a revolutionary evolution with as result that losing weight became the new and decisive focused trait waiting for an internal and external fit.
Back to mankind: is the evolution of mankind according to the process of the ‘survival of the fittest’ or according to a ‘revolutionary evolution’ followed by a directional evolution? I already presented my theory that the origin of mankind started with a fundamental change of one of the focused traits of our ancestors to ‘human intelligence’ or at least to a trait or traits that are essential parts of, or conditions for, this specific human trait. So I am convinced that the evolution of mankind started with a switch concerning one or of a couple of the focused traits of our ancestors.
There is in my opinion a considerable number of motivations for this opinion:
- We walk upright, apes don’t (and as already described there are many new and changed traits involved in this fundamental switch);
- Apes don’t menstruate like humans. They do, but way less than women;
- The chimpanzee is our closest living relative. The nucleotide difference between the two species is small, maybe the difference is not more than 1–2%. But that is logical because both our DNA’s come from the first living cell. These findings generated the unjust common belief that humans are extremely close to chimpanzees at the genetic level. But if one looks at proteins, which are mainly responsible for phenotypic differences, the picture is quite different, and about 80% of proteins are (partly) different between the two species.
- There are 350,000 species of beetles—that’s an awful lot of relatives. Humans have no fellow species in existence. We’re all alone. The process of diversification has still to start (if ever, because there was not a long perioded needed to reach ‘harmony’ after ‘human intelligence’ became our focused trait).
- Humans’ closest living relatives, biologically speaking, are chimpanzees, but while humans are classified as Homo Sapiens, which puts us in the genus Homo, chimpanzees are in the genus Pan.
- Humans eat meat on a regular basis. This has major implications. Men had to start killing other animals, competing with other carnivores, handling a weapon, the use of fire and cooking, hunting in groups including communication and so on.
- Language is a unique trait of the human species, of which the genetic architecture remains largely unknown. Through language disorders studies, many candidate genes were identified. Such complex and multifactorial trait is unlikely to be driven by only few genes. By the way: some dogs and also some horses do understand a couple of commands (while we don’t understand their barking and neighing). So inside these animals some basics of the trait of using and understanding language must be part of their DNA. Another proof that a new trait doesn’t evolve out of nothing.
Evolutionary mankind is seen as a primate. This is motivated by summing up traits we share with apes. But the differences in my opinion are way larger. See above and that are far from all the differences.
I already mentioned the difference between humans and chimpanzees (and all other primates) concerning the growth of some 30 different body parts before and after birth. With respect to the above statement there are even more very remarkable aspects about the human evolution. This concerns HARs, which stands for ‘Human accelerated regions’. It presents a set of 49 segments (genes, enhancers) of the human genome that were and are conserved throughout the evolution of all mammals, so during at least 10th of millions of years, but that changed rapidly and significantly during (only) our evolution. Also in chimpanzees these changes didn’t happen. Many of these regions play roles in the brain. Doesn’t that look like directional evolution and like focused traits?
Evolution with no intelligence has no control mechanism and could, in my opinion, has therefor the risk to spin out of control: there are no limitations to how far a trait, that defines a species, could grow with the risk of complete extinction of all rivals and prey and in the end extinction of this very successful species itself. If traits are basically programmed in DNA way before a new species makes use of it and prospers from it, one can imagine that this also includes a maximum to the development of this trait. Like a maximum length of the neck of a giraffe, the running speed of a cheetah or indeed of the brain capacity of humans. That would avoid the evolution from spinning out of control and so avoid an evolution in reverse reducing the amount of species and living creatures.
I am talking about the implications of NI. One of the most discussed moments during the evolution of life is the disappearance of dinosaurs. There is an intense discussion going on between scientists about their extinction. Was it indeed the impact of a huge meteorite some 66 million years ago that finished them off or did the reduction of the number of dinosaurs already start sooner? One way or another these scientists all look solely for an external trigger that made life impossible for dinosaurs, like this meteorite, draught, extreme eruptions of volcanoes and so on. But nobody seems to consider the possibility of any internal factor, the DNA of Dinosaurs, that could have played a role in this extinction process.
If we look at that side of the ‘equation’ other possible courses come into view. For instance an external trigger that had a negative and deteriorating effect on the DNA region defining their Natural Intelligence. Yes for instance the famous meteorite. Or the susceptibility of the concerning DNA region, so their focused traits, didn’t correspond any longer with the direction of a better fit. Or the concerning region in the DNA of mammals and other types of species gave a clearly better result in that respect. Or maybe they reached the maximum of their focussed traits and a decline followed.
It would not surprise me at all if the amount of different kinds of species exploded during or even shortly before, and so not after, the extinction process of the dinosaurs started. You can even imagine that the NI of dinosaurs was less developed than that of mammals so they were not able to adjust fast enough to the changing circumstances opposite to mammals. No capabilities or a not strong enough capabilities for the needed evolution, considering the impact and acute consequences of the meteorite hitting the earth. So evolution itself led to the survival of species with some kind of favourable NI, originated maybe just from a random mutation. But the already quoted article about the ‘sudden’ burst of birds in the same period looks like an indication that this was not random at all and triggered by this catastrophic event.
What will be the end of cars running on fossil energy? Yes indeed the electric car; an alternative that more or less suddenly appears to be the better solution for our goals concerning the future of our world. So did the mammals become a success because the extinction of dinosaurs gave them the space to do so or did the success of mammals take away the space for the dinosaurs? The all accepted theory is the first but I wonder if the second scenario isn’t what really happened or at least played a significant role. If you look at the NI-tree is it possible that the same part of the biosphere is reached by different branches coming from different sides (implicating different traits), so a strong competitions will be the result of this: hunting in the same space for the same prey in different ways and based on different traits and so capacities. In our time you see also these kinds of processes in a smaller scale happening due to the import of so called exotic species which push away local plants, fishes and so on.
Extinction, like described above, is considered to be the result of not being fit anymore in certain slowly or, more often mentioned, rapid changing circumstances. Or as the result of a competition with a better fitting species eating the same food. Internal changes on a genetic level are much less seen as the cause of an evolutionary dead end. That is quiet logic because ‘survival of the fittest’ can’t cope with such a process. It only has one direction and to is consequently into the direction of a better fit than ancestors had. But based on the principles of NI such a process is quiet thinkable because not all changes would be coincidental and so not concern one individual but could be the result of a changing focused inheritable trait and so could also concern a group of individuals that have this negative mutation more often than randomly so with much more impact as long as there is an internal (less) fit. A gene in the DNA that is switched on resulting in new proteins and so in a new trait, can of course also being switched off due to certain influences and mutations. A trait can disappear out of the phenotype in this way. And a focused trait can become a non-focused trait. It is even thinkable that a certain switch leads to the production of a protein with a negative impact on the concerning species.
The loss of a trait can have a huge impact, but compensation could also be an option. Like mankind starting to smell less and less, possibly compensated by hunting prey by using ears and sight. I have had dogs and their sight is less than that of humans. Losing the focus on an trait also doesn’t have to be lethal. If this trait has developed over the years towards an appropriate level, or if there are also other effective (focused) traits or if there is a new focused trait, there are opportunities to live on and maybe to make a change in the direction of the evolution. So choosing another way of hunting (for instance not individually but in groups), choosing other prey, operating by night instead of by day and so on.
I would like to finish this chapter with another example of extinction. Yes a tricky one but nevertheless something I would like to speculate on. I am talking about the disappearance of the Mayans living in the southern lowlands in South America at the end of the first millennium. Long before Spanish conquistadores started their bloody job in these parts of America. Before the Mayans vanished from the face of the earth they had a huge empire with many big cities, high pyramid’s, temples and so on. Even today new remnants are found of impressive cities overgrown by trees. It is still a big mystery how such a strong and elaborated civilisation could have disappeared so completely from the face of the earth without leaving a clou. Many suggestions have been made like drought, overpopulation, environmental degradation, warfare and shifting trade routes. Or a combination of these factors. But what about an internal instead of external factor? Maybe a focused trait changed in another one which had a negative effect on the health of the Mayans, or on some essential traits like intelligence, the digestion of food or the quality of vision. The inheritance of a negative focused trait can finish off a civilisation within a few generations.
