Undead Astronauts

If you’ve been striking out in your love life, one way to fix that is to go out and murder/rape a bunch of people. James Holmes already has some twitter groupies, and past serial killers have gotten married behind bars. There’s an evolutionary reason for this, but you have to think that evolution is playing catch up here.

(Source: HS)

Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park once said, “Life finds a way.” I too have believed this regarding ecological disasters in that our rise wouldn’t have been possible without the one that wiped the dinosaurs out. The environment is important certainly, and all you’d have to do is look at China’s air and soil quality to confirm it. But is there justification for extreme environmentalism or is life and evolution more resilient than we give it credit for? A blog post pointed out a new study that looked at just such a scenario.

The study organism was a single-celled green alga, aka Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. The researchers established lines of this alga that differed in sexuality and the amount of genetic variation. Then, these lines were exposed to a relatively serious environmental change, the salt concentration. Starting with freshwater conditions, a steady increase of salt was implemented to eventually end up with near-marine conditions.

The study authors concluded:

We found that the combination of high initial diversity and obligate sexuality increased the likelihood of evolutionary rescue in populations exposed to a deteriorating environment by increasing their ability to respond to selection.

So what might this mean to us as humans facing the possibility of drastic environmental change? The need for high initial diversity suggests that, as insurance against disaster, people should maintain a portion of as many different populations as possible in genetic isolation while also creating new populations by interbreeding a portion of as many previously isolated populations as possible. A future where all races have been blended and genetic diversity is low (a utopia some liberals dream of) is a prescription for extinction.

(Source: Evolution)

yes, this is in alabama.
source

Edit: and lest anyone actually bought the hype that byrne believed in science, he responded!

As a member of the Alabama Board of Education, the record clearly shows that I fought to ensure the teaching of creationism in our school text books.

I believe the Bible is the Word of God and that every single word of it is true.