Natural Science Forum / Biology / Evolution / July 2008

Sympatric Speciation or Speciation without Changes in Genes
For a long time, sympatric speciation has been considered as an
unlikely mode of speciation because, paradigmatically, the process of
speciation has been considered to require accumulation of differences

On the one hand, a planet needs enough gravity to hold
in the necessary gases to have the atmosphere that
leads to life.
On the other, 'there is probably not enough energy in

Rewriting Darwin: The new non-genetic inheritance - From New Scientist
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.romanian/msg/ccf8322969990515
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I sent the following e-mail to David Deamer one of the
most notable people in the origin of life study.
Surprisingly he sent back his comments within an hour.
He agreed with some, disagreed with some and at the

Using Claude Shannon's formulas for measuring the redundancy of symbol
tokens in message strings , and given a large enough text to work with, it
is possible to identify the language of a text simply from the statistical
analysis of token use alone, since all languages have ...

A few hundred thousand years ago,  the world population was very smal
yet we had several species of man. In the past 1000 years the world
population has grown orders of magnitude larger, yet how come no new
species have evolved?

The major component of life is the nucleotides,
purines (A,G) and pyrimidines(C,T,U). Both strongly
absorb UV light. When life began the earth was
bombarded with unfiltered UV light from the sun.

Mark Hubey wrote:

Just read an interesting article on chaperones in the current Sci.Am.  Their
central function remains that of promoting and enabling the proper 3-D
configuration of amino acid chains into finished protein, but many
additional functions involving intricate disassembly and ...

Nature 454, 37-38 (3 July 2008) | doi:10.1038/454037a; Published online 2
July 2008
Origins of life: How leaky were primitive cells?
David W. Deamer

A recent essay:
  http://alife.co.uk/essays/evolution_sees/
This essay deals with the supposed blindness of evolution.
To quote from its ending:

A friend has told me he witnessed the following in a semi-rural suburb
north of Athens.
There are many stray dogs in the area. A woman in a nearby house was
putting food out for them regularly and a group of dogs had taken to