How LIFE began

“When the earth formed some 4.6 billion years ago, it was a lifeless, inhospitable place. A billion years later it was teeming with organisms resembling blue-green algae. How did they get there? How, in short, did life begin? This long-standing question continues to generate fascinating conjectures and ingenious experiments, many of which center on the possibility that the advent of self-replicating RNA was a critical milestone on the road to life. “

Leslie Orgel of the research professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego explains ...

“….all these problems are worrisome, but they do not completely rule out the possibility that RNA was initially synthesized and replicated by relatively uncomplicated processes. Perhaps minerals did indeed catalyze both the synthesis of properly structured nucleotides and their polymerization to a random family of oligonucleotides. Then copying without replication would have produced a pair of complementary strands. If, as Szostak has posited, one of the strands happened to be a ribozyme that could copy its complement and thus duplicate itself, the conditions needed for exponential replication of the two strands would have been established. This scenario is certainly very optimistic, but it could be correct. “

Storyteller: Leslie E. Orgel, senior fellow and research professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego
http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/lab/2948/orgel.html

Story Research: Why is origin of life such a difficult problem?

How PLATYPUS stayed the same

The duck-billed platypus takes true honors although the species has only been around about 100,000 years. This creature's basic design, however, has endured for about 110 million years — one of the longest-lived successful body plans, say Ondine Evans and Anne Musser of The Australian Museum The champs with this good survival strategy are the egg-laying monotremes, a group that evolved about 110 million years ago in the mid Cretaceous period. (See chart.)

The duckbill platypus is a current member of the ancient monotreme group. Indeed she harkens back to an even earlier design — that of the mammal-like reptiles that predated the dinosaurs by 80 million years and lived in the late Carboniferous period, about 300 million years ago.

The platypus is an unusual mammal. She lays eggs. She waddles like a reptile with legs to the side rather underneath her body. She has a single orifice for all systems: urinary, excretory, and reproductive. That's the origin of the word "monotreme": Mono – Greek for "one," trema – Greek for "hole." A simple, successful design.

Storytellers: Ondine Evans and Anne Musser of The Australian Museum
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/aprilholladay/2005-01-14-wonderquest_x.htm
Story Reteller: April Holladay, Wonderquest, USA today

Story Research: Duck-billed platypus: Primitive or not?
11/23/07 -The "implausible" platypus continues to surprise

How the BACTERIUM got her Flagellum

The bacterial flagellum is a complex molecular system with multiple components required for functional motility. Such systems are sometimes proposed as puzzles for evolutionary theory on the assumption that selection would have no function to act on until all components are in place. However, published attempts to explain flagellar origins suffer from vagueness and are inconsistent with recent discoveries and the constraints imposed by Brownian motion. A new model is proposed based on two major arguments. First that even very crude motility can be beneficial for large bacteria. Second, homologies between flagellar and nonflagellar proteins suggest ancestral systems with functions other than motility. Therefore, like the eye contemplated by Darwin, careful analysis shows that there are no major obstacles to gradual evolution of the flagellum.

Storyteller: Nicholas Matzke, Public Information Project Director, M.A., Geography, U.C. Santa BarbaraB.S., Biology, B.S., Chemistry, Valparaiso University

http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/flagellum.html

Story Research: Darwinism gone wild

How BAT got his wings

Karen Sears, at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, has discovered why intermediate forms may be missing in the fossil record.

A change to a single gene allowed bats to grow wings and take to the air, a development that may explain why bats appeared so suddenly in the fossil record some 50 million years ago.
Bats have been an evolutionary enigma. That’s because the oldest fossil bats look remarkably like modern ones, each having wings formed from membranes stretched between long fingers, and ear structures designed for echolocation. No fossils of an animal intermediate between bats and their non-flying mammal ancestors have been found. We’ve never had an adequate explanation” for the sudden appearance of bats, Nancy Simmons of the American Museum of Natural History in New York told New Scientist. “This sounds like a remarkable discovery.”
The lack of transitional forms has also led to speculation about the origin of bats, with some believing that primates are their closest relatives. Genetic studies now show they are closest to ferungulates, which include horses and pigs, or to the shrews and moles.

Storyteller : Karen Sears, at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6647

Story Reteller : Dave Thomas of Panda's thumb http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2004/11/a_quantum_leap.html

Storyteller 2 : Jennifer S. Holland, National geograghic
Sixty million years ago, on a planet crawling with mammals, one tree dweller rose above the crowd on paper-thin wings

How SHARK got his jaws

Paleontologists believed that, over millions of years, lamprey-like creatures evolved into jawed, bony fish. Picture a leech longer than your forearm with a rasp-like mouth that flares open at the end of its body. It turns out lampreys, long thought to have taken a different evolutionary road than almost all other backboned animals, may not be so different after all, especially in terms of the genetics that govern their skeletal development, according to findings to be published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "The lamprey is like the great-, great-, great-aunt descended from the earliest backboned animal," said Michael Miyamoto, Ph.D., a professor and associate chairman of UF's zoology department.

Storyteller: Michael Miyamoto, Ph.D., a professor and associate chairman of UF's zoology department.

http://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php?article_id=53910782640

See also: How SALAMANDER found his feet

How SALAMANDER found his legs

The first animal to crawl onto land from the ocean probably looked a bit like today's salamander and researchers have wondered how it was able to switch from swimming to walking. Now, European scientists have built a robot with a primitive electric nervous system that they say mimics that change in motion.

So they first designed a basic nervous system modeled on that of the lamprey, a long, primitive eel-like fish. Then that design was modified to show how it could evolve into a nervous system that also could control walking.

Its swimming motion uses undulations like the lamprey, while on land the robot uses a slow stepping gait with diagonally opposed limbs moving together while the body forms an S-shape.

"We were trying to understand what really happened during the transition from primitive fishes to amphibians, like the salamander," said "We were trying to understand what really happened during the transition from primitive fishes to amphibians, like the salamander," said physicist Auke Ijspeert.

Storyteller: Auke Ijspeert, a physicist of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

Story reteller: Jeanna Bryner http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,257938,00.html

Story reteller: Randolph E. Schmid http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=12363

See also How SHARK got his jaws

How Beetle got the bomb

"The bombardier beetle shoots its enemies with a boiling hot chemical weapon that evolved millions of years before its modern analog in human technology: automatic valves in the pulse-jet engine of the German V-1 flying bomb the terrifying 'buzz bomb' of World War II that rained indiscriminate death on England."

Three Cornell University biologists, working with the late Professor Harold (Doc) Edgerton of MIT, have discovered this surprising anticipation of technology by nature. Writing in a recent issue of Science, Cornell scientists Jeffrey Dean, Associate Professor Daniel J. Aneshansley, and Professor Thomas Eisner explain their remarkable discovery, which required co-author Doc Edgerton's high-speed photography to catch the beetle in action.

Dr. Eisner explained the cycle that apparently occurs within the beetle an average of about 500 times per second: "The bombardier beetle uses what is essentially a binary weapon. It stores the two ingredients of an explosive chemical process hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide in a pair of reservoirs, and the catalysts for the reaction...in [another] pair of reaction chambers."When the beetle is disturbed, muscles around the reservoirs contract just enough to force a little of the hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide through one-way valves that are normally closed. As the catalysts start the reaction, heat and pressure of the oxygen [liberated from the hydrogen peroxide] quickly close the valves. Pressure continues to build until the reaction chambers vent through the tip of the abdomen with a high velocity pulse of quinones." Then the reaction chamber pressure drops enough to reopen the biological valves, and the process repeats itself automatically at a rate hundreds of times per second.

Storytellers : Cornell scientists Jeffrey Dean, Associate Professor Daniel J. Aneshansley, and Professor Thomas Eisner

Story reteller : Roger Segelken
Doc's Parting Shot; A Shooting Beetle

See also:
Insect Inspiration

Story reteller: T. Ryan Gregory, Evolutionary biologist , University of Guelph, Canada.
Evolution of the Bombardier Beetle
and Bombardier Beetles and Climbing Mount Improbable

How human got so brainy

Forget the textbook story about tool use and language sparking the dramatic evolutionary growth of the human brain. Instead, imagine ancient hominid children chasing frogs. Not for fun, but for food. According to Dr. Stephen Cunnane it was a rich and secure shore-based diet that fueled and provided the essential nutrients to make our brains what they are today. Controversially, according to Dr. Cunnane our initial brain boost didn't happen by adaptation, but by exaptation, or chance."Anthropologists and evolutionary biologists usually point to things like the rise of language and tool making to explain the massive expansion of early hominid brains. But this is a Catch-22. Something had to start the process of brain expansion and I think it was early humans eating clams, frogs, bird eggs and fish from shoreline environments. This is what created the necessary physiological conditions for explosive brain growth," says Dr. Cunnane, a metabolic physiologist at the University of Sherbrooke in Sherbrooke, Quebec.

Storyteller: Dr Cunnane, University of Sherbrooke in Sherbrooke, Quebec.
http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/2006/02/theres-something-fishy-about-human.html
Reteller : Allen MacNeill, Biology and evolution Teacher at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.

How Woodpecker used his head

According to Ivan R Schwab of the University of California, to equip the bird for its ecological niche, evolution has provided the woodpecker with a thick bony skull with relatively spongy bone, especially at the occiput, and cartilage at the base of the mandible to partially cushion the incessant blows. This woodpecker has evolved several unique mechanisms to prevent brain damage, retinal haemorrhages, and retinal detachment. The woodpecker has other unique adaptations that deserve recognition and may contribute to the protection from intracranial injuries. The tongue is most unusual as it originates on the dorsum of the maxilla, passes through the right nostril, between the eyes, divides into two, arches over the superior portion of the skull and around the occiput passing on either side of the neck, coming forward through the lower mandible, and uniting into a single tongue in the oropharyngeal cavity. The muscles encase the bony hyoid throughout this muscular course into the oropharynx and are additionally secured in the floor of the mouth creating an apparatus that allows for extraordinary protrusion of the tongue of up to 4 inches beyond the tip of the bill! These musculotendinous bands create a curious sling-like structure that probably functions as an isometric shock absorber if contracted before each strike. This sling would also serve to distribute the potential shearing forces. Such length is useful for penetrating insect nests beneath the bark of trees. The sharp tongue (literally) is coated with sticky saliva for smaller insects such as ants and has backward pointing barbs that are useful in impaling larger insects and grubs. For added emphasis, the tongue is equipped with excellent tactile abilities to allow for recognition of smaller insects, such as ants. The chisel tipped mandibles are constructed of individual fused plates of keratin called rhamphotheca, and the longitudinal trabeculae are reinforced with calcium.

Storyteller : Ivan R Schwab University of California, Davis, Department of Ophthalmology

http://bjo.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/86/8/843

How Angler fish got his tackle

An anglerfish, looking for all the world like a rock or shell, waves before its maw a piece of bait resembling small fish found in this region. The bait, which is part of the anglerfish's body, has fins, a tail, and black spots for eyes. The waving about of the bait attracts predatory fish close enough for the anglerfish to snap them up. The authors surmise that the anglerfish evolved this realistic bait (and rod and reel) in order to save energy in acquiring food.

Storyteller: Pietsch, Theodore W., and Grobecker, David B.; "The Complete Angler: Aggressive Mimicry in an Antennariid Anglerfish," Science, 201:369

Acknowledgements: http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf005/sf005p09.htm