Evolution News

Homosexuals Are Vital Element In Our Evolution

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Interesting research about the chances of homosexual expressions being partially due to birth order. This makes evolutionary sense. We know that in nature, this happens to a number of species. Some mammals have their brothers and sisters stop having offspring in order to act as uncles and aunts to the dominant female.

Researchers notice boys born after brothers have increasing chances of being gay.

By Karen Kaplan, Times Staff Writer
June 27, 2006

Having one or more older brothers boosts the likelihood of a boy growing up to be gay — an effect due not to social factors, but biological events that occur in their mother's womb, according to a study published today.

In an analysis of 905 men and their siblings, Canadian psychologist Anthony Bogaert found no evidence that social interactions among family members played a role in determining whether a man was gay or straight.

The only significant factor was the number of times a mother had previously given birth to boys, according to the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The so-called fraternal birth order effect is small: Each older brother increases the chances by 33%. Assuming the base rate of homosexuality among men is 2%, it would take 11 older brothers to give the next son about a 50-50 chance of being gay.

Naturalists studying primates and monkeys in the wild have noticed for many years that in every tribal group, there are these oddball members who don't participate in breeding new offspring. Yet they belong to the community and perform important functions. Anthropologists have seen this, too. All cultures have homosexual members. Nearly universally, they are a small but very significant percentage. They enrich their communities far beyond their actual numbers because they are not burdened by family obligations for the most part, except to help raise young by being aunts and uncles.

Not only today but during all of history, these same populations would adopt siblings or nieces or nephews or even total strangers and raise them. The desire to perform charitable acts is quite strong. Most mammalian mothers want their own babies to do well and show little interest in the welfare of other babies except for the all-important daughters who are part of the family. Non-breeding members of a community can bring the greater community together since they are not out to push their own genes alone but can reach out to more distant relatives.

What this means is, communities of animals that have some gay members in them are more likely to survive and thrive than ones with only competitive mothers and potential fathers. Species that live isolated lives like tigers, for example, don't have non-breeding members as a strong force since no one is interacting with anyone else as a group.

In southern Africa, there is a species of rat that has all the siblings go non-breeding in order to assist one mother in raising her young. This is the most extreme example of this evolutionary solution which is quite common in some insect species such as bees, ants and termites, for example.

In medieval times, European cultures struggled with the problems of inheriting property. They realized it would fritter away if everyone inherited the father and mother's lands so primogenisis was created whereby the eldest son would inherit everything and all the siblings would have to either marry into someone else's estates or go off and kill or somehow wrangle land or money in some fashion. One way was to be apprenticed with some master, for example. Often, though, because of the high death rate, the younger males would hang out, unmarried, until their elder brother died.

If he died with a son, the unmarried brother would adopt the son and raise him as his guardian. If the uncle was married, the lure of displacing the elder brother's son would be a great temptation and history is full of stories of royal uncles killing the sons of deceased older brothers!---which is probably why the genes of sons who had no temptation to have children would exist, for brothers who took care of their brothers flourished while the evil uncles who killed their nephews nearly always triggered wars of succession.

Religions led by childless brothers working with other childless brothers, tend towards humanism, I would venture to suggest. Namely, they ask for followers to share with non-children and to reach out to a greater community. It is sad they couldn't openly ask for tolerance of gays. This is probably why the Catholic Church, for example, ferociously persecuted gays for so long, for example. Because the strictures of the religion are very gay, it attracts gays and this disturbs social mores since the Church now wants everyone to breed because this spreads the religion much better than the more difficult process of winning over strangers, this tension is tearing the Church apart.

It seems very odd to me, this fear of gays, when Nature has created this situation in order for us to flourish. Instead of hating this, we should be celebrating this. We should have not only a Father's Day and a Mother's Day but also an Uncle and Aunt's Day. For these people have been throughout history for the last million years, extremely important people indeed. Often overlooked.

Maybe we should celebrate them on Valentine's Day.

Ancient jewelry found.

BBC: The earliest known pieces of jewellery made by modern humans have been identified by scientists.

The three shell beads are between 90,000 and 100,000 years old, according to an international research team.

Two of the ancient beads come from Skhul Cave on the slopes of Mount Carmel in Israel. The other comes from the site of Oued Djebbana in Algeria.

The finds, which pre-date other ancient examples by 25,000 years, are described in the US journal Science.

One of the problems with the very famous cave art in France is the idea that humans suddenly became very artistic because of evolution. Yet all the archeological evidence clearly shows that our big brains pretty much finished evolving, size-wise, at least 120,000 years before. As humans came hiking out of Africa to colonize the rest of the planet at that time, they took culture and art to the furthest corners of the planet. The most isolated of these nomads, the people who settled in Australia, had art, abstract figures, ancient stories and an interest in the stars just like the ones who stayed in Africa or walked off into Eurasia.

They didn't produce a brilliant series of paintings of astonishing reality.

Just like if I were to go into the subways today and pick a random group of people out of the crowd and ask them to draw, say, a horse! Most would be goofy sick figures. If I were to do this day after day, I might run into an artist like myself who can rapidly sketch off a dramatic, well designed horse. In other words, this is a rare thing to find in any case!

There are many skills most people barely master. We have to send our young to over a dozen years of schooling and training in order to teach them how to do various tasks. We know from famous examples of idiot savants that people with barely functioning brains can draw amazingly detailed, complex pictures even as they can barely cope with simple tasks! So the ability to draw is most likely an inherited trait and is probably as rare as homosexuality.

I know that I never scribbled. I started off, the minute I could grasp a pencil, drawing complex pictures. It just was the way I wanted to do things. When my kindergarden teacher punished me for refusing to smear paint around 'finger painting', I was furious. I wanted to use one finger and draw, not smear it all around. It struck me as stupid and useless.

Never tell a teacher that. Heh.

The fabulous artist(s) who drew the pictures in those caves was a genius. A rare talent. One that wasn't reproduced. There was little like it before or after. Like Michaelangelo or any other great genius, one can only marvel. Most art we find is on the level of common stick figures and hen scratchings. This is normal. Ocassionally, one finds cultures that successfully teach art to more than one member and then one sees thousands of years of great art such as ancient Egypt of the even more astonishing art of democratic Greece, that very brief flowering.

The art of the medieval cathederals was very much a group creation that ran for several hundred years within a tight group of creators who formed a secretive guild.

One of the oddities of learning is that children learn the worst under parental tutelage. This is why unmarried aunts and uncles were tremendously important. They have enough emotional distance to teach! They aren't agitated by other issues. One suspects that many great long artistic achievements were of this nature. The guild system was run in similar fashion. Namely, each guild master taught each other's children or relatives or strangers. Parents deliberately shipped off their own children so they could avoid the conflicts of trying to teach them.

BBC: Red-stained bones dug up in a cave in Israel are prompting researchers to speculate that symbolic thought emerged much earlier than they had believed.

In layers in the cave archaeologists have found ochre-stained tools indicating that the red pigment was probably produced in the cave, possibly as part of the burial ritual.

Somehow the ability was then lost. After the initial evidence of symbolic behaviour in Qafzeh about 100,000 years ago it disappears, only to emerge again about 13,000 years ago.

We haven't the foggiest idea why distant people did things. We can only guess. I would suppose that people in various extended families would play around with things and then it becomes a 'fad' with them just like fads happen today, and everyone does it for a while and then other things happen and they forget the fad and it fades away as they try other toys out.

During the climatic changes coupled with humans killing not only all their more distant relatives in the homo-genus, eating all the local game, the need to control food gathering and make it less precarious was a pressing matter that consumed a lot of brain power. Once this was mastered, humans went right back into playing around with paint and carvings and making splendid art for various purposes.

Unlike the unknown cave painter(s), talented people didn't just come up with ideas themselves but thanks to a sabler, more organized society, they could be trained by their elders (aunts and uncles) to produce acceptable images. It is really all that simple.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Living In Rift Valleys=The Eternal Gardens Of Eden

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The formation of rift valleys coupled with landmasses splitting off from each other are the engine for rapid change in ecosystems. Today, with humans reuniting even the most isolated parts of the earth, carrying biomatter from all parts to all other parts, we are now a Neo-Pangea planet. Probably the only animals to survive the Permian extinction were those living in rift valleys if the data about the oxygen levels thinning out disasterously except for these at or below sea level areas are true.

One major biodiversity hot spot today is the coast of Brazil.

The Atlantic Forest or Mata Atlântica stretches along Brazil's Atlantic coast, from the northern state of Rio Grande do Norte south to Rio Grande do Sul. It extends inland to eastern Paraguay and the province of Misiones in northeastern Argentina, and narrowly along the coast into Uruguay. Also included in this hotspot is the offshore archipelago of Fernando de Noronha and several other islands off the Brazilian coast.
Long isolated from other major rainforest blocks in South America, the Atlantic Forest has an extremely diverse and unique mix of vegetation and forest types. The two main ecoregions in the hotspot are the coastal Atlantic forest, the narrow strip of about 50-100 kilometers along the coast which covers about 20 percent of the region. The second main ecoregion, the interior Atlantic Forest, stretches across the foothills of the Serra do Mar into southern Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. These forests extend as far as 500-600 kilometers inland and range as high as 2,000 meters above sea level. Altitude determines at least three vegetation types in the Atlantic Forest: the lowland forest of the coastal plain, montane forests, and the high-altitude grassland or campo rupestre.

The map above shows how South America and Africa nestled with each other 100 million years ago. Slowly, they began to grow apart and the fissure between them was very active. The center of South America and the center of Africa are depressions just like the center of the North American continent is identical. Indeed, it is rather amusing that these three continents which were, unlike Eurasia, pretty stable entities for the last 200 million years, all have these mysterious depressions.

In the news is this interesting tidbit about the Amazon.

EARTH SINKS THREE INCHES UNDER WEIGHT OF FLOODED AMAZON
As the Amazon River floods every year, a sizeable portion of South America sinks several inches because of the extra weight—and then rises again as the waters recede, a study has found.

This annual rise and fall of earth’s crust is the largest ever detected, and it may one day help scientists tally the total amount of water on Earth.

“What would you do if you knew how much water was on the planet?” asked Douglas Alsdorf, assistant professor of geological sciences at Ohio State University. “That’s a really exciting question, because nobody knows for sure how much water there is.”

When I rotated South America back into its original position vis a vis Africa, one can see instantly how the Amazon drained into the gigantic rift valley between the two developing continents. Ditto the Congo river. Much of the water falling on both continents was channeled into that growing depression. One supposes it had many long lakes like the ones we see today in the Californian and East African rift valleys! Jungles and many lakes linking to each other in a huge conglamoration, with steep slopes rising on the South American side below the Amazon depression, this was the tremendous 'Garden of Eden' that spawned all the first mammals as well as the first flowering of the great dinosaurs.

When the Permian extinction occured, the accidental survivors were those creatures who lived in this very sheltered place. Even if desertfication and dessication raged across the planet, any water falling would flow into this vast rift zone. If the winds howled, they skipped over this rift zone. If there were tremendous tornadoes scouring the dead land masses, they hopped over this rift zone. Life clung to its barest essentials in this rift zone and when the plants and then the animals again emerged, it was from this generous cradle.

From 150 million years ago to when the continents finally split apart and the ocean rushed in about 100 million years ago, most mammalian as well as placental creatures had split off into today's family groups. Long before the annihilation of the dinosaur's reign 65 million years ago, most mammalian animals were already marching literally away from each other as the various continents spread apart.

Our insect eating, big eyed, tree climbing, nurturing only one or at most, two infants at a time, ancestors lived on both sides of the great rift split. This is why monkeys evolved on both continents. It didn't take long for Africa to bump into Eurasia and this accelerated the mammalian explosion which is still underway in the form of homo sapien biomass.

Hundreds of millions of humans now restlessly range about the planet every year.

Nearly 200 million people now live outside their country of origin - up by about a quarter since 1990, a United Nations report on migration says.
The report by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan says most migrants have gone to rich countries, and one in every five to the US.

In some countries money sent home from abroad accounts for a large proportion of the national income.

Mr Annan said migration was a now a major feature of international life.

He described his report to the UN General Assembly as an "early road map for this new era of mobility".

When the second mass death hit, many mammals survived rather well, considering all things. Once again, as storms raged and roared after the meteorite strike, those sheltered by the mountains of the Brazilian side of the former rift valley could cling to the trees and endure it. And the animals living in various watersheds could move upslope to avoid the unusual floods created by the displacement of so much ocean waters.

Aside from these catastrophes, the environment of a rift zone is conductive to evolution since it cuts off populations from each other in many slight or large ways whereby they can develop sexual habits that emphisize differences yet are not so isolated like islands or mountains, where they never intermix with their foundation species again.

Here is a classic example of electric fish in the Amazon making sexual choices that appeal to themselves, causing divergence of a species that is not geographically seperated.

Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Managing Editor

Electric fish emit weak signals from an organ in their tails that serves as a battery. Different emissions signal aggression, fear or courtship.

While the fish can apparently understand each others' warning signals, "They seem to only choose to mate with other fish having the same signature waveform as their own," explains neurobiologist Matt Arnegard of Cornell University.

But in the Ivindo River in Gabon, Arnegard and colleagues have found fish with the same DNA emitting distinctly different signals. The fish are likely on the verge of splitting into two species, the researchers announced today.

"We think we are seeing evolution in action," Arnegard said.

Even when populations are not segregated from each other the frivolous choices made by creatures having sex propell evolution relentlessly forwards. In the chaos of the animal world when one wants to mate and have young, choosing carefully is of primary importance and various creatures evolve various obsessions and judgmental tricks to whittle down, who to have sex with.

Trees in the rift valleys evolved alongside insects and tree dwellers to get them to fertilize or plant the seeds so the forest could grow. Consumers of growing things have to be discriminating so they get maximum energy while using minimum labor and all these forces on top of avoiding being eaten by each other and strangers is part of the eternal, infernal machinery of evolution.

I live on a mountain facing a complex valley system. My home overlooks a very minor, extremely ancient rift zone where Africa collided with North America 400 million years ago. The geology here is very complex and extremely old. The great mountains which loomed over this rift zone have been whittled down to little nubbins today. Even so, it works as a classic rift zone even today!

The weather going up every 50 ft is different. Many a time, my son, going to school down in the valley below, would be warm up here and thanks to cold air falling when there is no wind, it would be freezing cold and wet in the valley even as the sun shines merrily here above.

Or the valley would be warm while freezing winds whip the forest around me only 100 ft above! When very violent storms come ripping across New York, the uplift of the Rensselaer plateau shelters our valley and tornadoes, hail, lighting and floods all skip overhead leaving us virtually untouched. The type of trees changes as one climbs the hillsides. The types of birds, when flowers bloom, when snow melts, what kinds of animals live where are all very strongly affected by elevation. The watershed caused by the rills of hills surrounding and feeding into the Taconic former rift zone make this a very rich biodivirse environment.

Listening to the frog populations in spring as the different species begin their courtship, first deep in the bottom bogs in the valley and then each week, a new chorus of diffent voices begin to sing until the amphibians living under the rocks and next to hidden springs high up the mountainside join last, it is an aural reminder of the power of rift valleys. The fireflies each have their own flashing system and they don't mate with each other, each zone avoids the zone above and below, some fly high, some stay low in the grass. The mountain tree dwelling fireflies coat the forest (alas! Not this year!) set the whole mountaintop afire in late June.

Moths and butterflies have their strict zones. The awful blackflies rarely pester me above my house but just below my house, they are extremely annoying.

Thanks to our valley/watershed/plateau uplift configuration, bird watching here is quite spectacular. We have a tremendous diversity of birds, on the ground and in the air. Several owl species, many song birds, water birds, raptors, scavanger birds, ground dwellers, every day, I see dozens of different birds here!

This makes me sensitive about saving the earth, saving diversity and understanding how all this amazing and wonderous generosity of life came to be.

Crows Aren't The Only Smart Birds

Elaine Meinel Supkis

In National Geographic, there is an interview about a book about smart crows. I have had many, many birds of many kinds over the years. All of them pretty smart. Crows, roadrunners, blue jays and jackdaws, just for example, show many amusing signs of 'intelligence.' Sometimes, I think they are smarter than many humans.

John Roach
for National Geographic News
June 6, 2006
Crows make tools, play tricks on each other, and caw among kin in a dialect all their own.

These are just some of the signs presented in a recent book that point to an unexpected similarity between the wise birds and humans.

"It's the same kind of consonance we find between bats that can fly and birds that can fly and insects that can fly," said Candace Savage, a nature writer based in Saskatoon, Canada.

"Species don't have to be related for there to have been some purpose, some reason, some evolutionary advantage for acquiring shared characteristics," she added.

Savage's book, Crows: Encounters with the Wise Guys of the Avian World (October 2005), explores the burgeoning field of crow research, which suggests that the birds share with humans several hallmarks of higher intelligence, including tool use and sophisticated social behavior.

Many years ago, in New Jersey, we lived in a Victorian house surrounded by very tall trees. One day, a fierce late spring thunderstorm shook the trees violently and out of his high crow's nest, a half naked baby crow fell to the yard below. My daughter picked up the baby bird as it floundered about. The parents watched all this closely and with greatest fear and interest.

I thought I could climb a ladder up to the nest and put him back in but it was much too high, crows love very high nests. So with the parents flying in circles around me, I took their baby inside. They stood on the window sill watching me dry off their baby and make a warm nest for him. Crows eat meat so I opened a can of cat food and began to feed him, always letting his parents watch me at work. I couldn't turn him loose for he couldn't fly, so I built an aviary that had a window to the outside with a perch for the parents to roost upon.

They came often and watched their baby grow up with us. Soon, baby was very tame and he rode on my shoulder or the children's heads as well. We would turn him loose and let him roam the house when we were watching. Early on, we taught the cats to leave him alone. Cats fear crows anyway so this was easy.

Our crow enjoyed the African finches who also had an aviary in the kitchen. He would try to have conversations with them but they were scared as he grew huge very quickly thanks to the cat food. He watched me take the can with the cute cat face on it, put it into the electric can opener and then I would push down on the handle and it would open the can.

One day, I heard the can opener running over and over again. I went into the kitchen. The crow had pushed a can with the cat picture into the can opener and was jumping on the handle to open it but he didn't figure out how to lock the can into the can opener so it didn't work. He hopped up and down, examining the can critically, shoved it around trying to adjust it to fit right and would then jump on the handle.

He was getting pretty angry about this. I started to laugh. He cawed angrily at me. I then engaged the can and viola! It opened. He was quite upset he couldn't do it.

His parents tracked my every movement whenever I left the house. I would take baby outside regularily to visit them. Finally, he grew up and I released him back into the wild. The parents stopped shadowing my movements around the neighborhood but he began to follow me around. When my daughter walked to school which was across the park, he would fly after her. When I shopped in the village, he shadowed me.

For several years, he did this. When he had babies himself, he taught them to follow me or my kids around the neighborhood. We felt like we were Odin and his crows.

But I find all birds are 'smart' in various ways! I have made roadrunners my pets in Tucson. This is because I would clean the swimming pool filter and it would have snakes and lizards as well as fat bugs in it and the road runners would lurk nearby to eat the things I dumped. So I began to play with these drowned creatures and the roadrunners loved this. In the end, they would stand on the diving board and I would swim around with a snake or lizard in my hand and then come plunging out of the water to leave it on the board, they would eat is and then hop up and down as I splashed them.

They followed me about the desert when I practiced cross country racing. And they waited at my bus stop in order to run in front of me to the swimming pool. They nested in the saguaro in front of my bedroom window and when they wanted me to come out, they would tap on my window with their beaks.

My godmother, a published bird expert in the 19th century, taught wild blue jays to have tea with her. She put peanuts under tea cups and they would flip them over to eat the nuts. They perched on the rims of the cups to drink with her.

Actually, she taught me a lot about birds. She thought all birds were fabulous creatures worthy of study and protection. I agree. Whole heartedly. I wish we had more birds. I really miss them especially now, as caterpillars decimate my entire forest.

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Hummingbirds Fighting For Juicy Feeder

Elaine Meinel Supkis

This last two weeks has been a battle to the death with the gypsy moth invaders. They won. Except for a few fruit trees which I carefully clean off every three hours, all the trees as far as I can see are completely and totally stripped of all leaves! It looks like winter. Already, the local bird life is very disrupted by this. Since I feed wild birds, I have had a chance to watch them closely since they are sticking to my house a lot now.

Over a week ago, I was climbing around my pear tree trying to save it. So far, the tree still has leaves! While up in the crown, a buzz flashed by my ear. I couldn't see who it was and thought it was one of my bees checking me out. Then a second buzz and in my face was the tiniest of birds---a ruby throated hummingbird. He looked really bad off, feathers dull, skinny, he was desperately trying to get nectar from the flower pots on my deck.

The caterpillars have decimated not only the trees, especially the wild cherries, but also ground flowers. The hummingbird was starving. I ran inside and told my husband, we had to go out and buy a feeder for the hummingbirds that afternoon. So we set it up two hours later and the hummingbird spied on it for another day, wondering if it was dangerous. Finally, he took a sip.

From that moment on, it was 'his' feeder! An hour after he supped, the female who is drabber than the showy male, came to feed. For four days, they visited the feeder regularily. The male began to stake out the feeder. He would sit on one of my dead rosebushes that was killed by the caterpillars and watch the feeder closely. If any of us came outside, he would buzz us but as the days went by he quickly became accustomed to our faces.

Then another starving hummingbird showed up. The male became quite excited. His chest which was fairly dull became a brilliant red as he flexed his tiny feathers and flashed a signal that clearly said, 'Danger!' Then he flew back and forth in front of the invading hummingbird, displaying his emerald blazon of glory. At first, the invader fled. But then would sneak back and take a sip.

After a week of displaying and sneaking, the invader was strong enough to fight back. Yesterday, instead of retreating, they fought like French duelists, darting back and forth through the pear tree's interlacing branches, slashing at each other with rapier beaks.

The results are, they all take turns now.

I have bees as well as hummingbirds. These creatures have an eye for beauty and beautiful means colorful. They have carefully cultivated flowers for millions of years. Bats fertilize the flowers of cacti in the desert and their flowers are all white because they glow in the moon and star shine. But hummingbirds and bees live in the desert and because of that, many cacti and other plants display brilliant red, yellow and pink flowers. Each plant offers their customers the prettiest dainties and the bees and birds have a most discriminating eye.

Many species of birds have turned this critical eye upon themselves and the females in particular have selected their mates with a very judicious eye looking for brilliant colors. We are a dull, uninspiring species in comparison.

Many of the sharpest colors we see in nature is due entirely to the tireless efforts of tiny bees and small hummingbirds, working hard to spread pollen of flowers they like. We forget their importance. Bees today are under the gun and so are hummingbirds. In the case of the birds, nearly all of whom commute from north to south with the changing seasons, human destruction of their winter quarters as people move increasingly into warm latitudes, is destroying their entire species.

I used to care for hummingbirds in Tucson. The ruby throats came in winter and left in summer. As suburbs ate up their environment, at first it was little problem for them because people planted flowers. But now, houses and malls blanket the Tucson Valley and most people no longer garden because water is costly. Golf course don't help. They are mostly grass.

The real problem is in Central America. The jungles are being hacked away rapidly and global warming is doing a good job of killing off flower species the hummingbirds have carefully cultivated for millions of years.

The insect eating birds are in graver straits than the hummingbirds. I have nesting boxes high up under the eaves for them. Swallows and fly catchers have lived there for years. But their numbers are not increasing but the insect population is! I used to have many more insect eating birds follow my mower around as I hayed the fields. This year, I had two crows! The mower would cause clouds of insects to rise and my birds would circle me as I patiently ran up and down the cuts. The fewer insect eating birds we have, the more bugs. This insect invasion has made my insect eating birds happy but they can't make even a slight dent in the insect invasion.

Pesticides and habitat loss in the south are decimating them faster than they can reproduce. My goldfinches have successful nestings up here on my farm and then they fly off. If even two return, I consider this fortunate!

I have habitat for many more! But they decrease each year rather than increase. I farm in such a way as to encourage them nesting. Before heading south, the swallows will come here by the hundreds but they are just as bedevilled as the goldfinches. This saddens and alarms me.

We won't get a balance of nature using chemicals. We need birds, we need worms in the soil, we need water that isn't acidic and we need regenerative soil. As an organic farmer, I lament the loss of all of this.

I hope we figure out how to work with Nature before She decides to pull the plug on homo sapiens.

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Arctic Very Warm 55 Million Years Ago

Elaine Meinel Supkis

I wish I had Dr. Who's Tardis so I could go back in time to see the earth at various times. Lacking that, I use my imagination plus a great cascade of data and informed opinions to try to visualize various times in the past. Perhaps the reason the Arctic was extremely warm 55 million years ago, is because it was a rift zone with an inland sea. All rift zones are below sea level and hotter than higher elevations.

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer 34 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Scientists have found what might have been the ideal ancient vacation hotspot with a 74-degree Fahrenheit average temperature, alligator ancestors and palm trees. It's smack in the middle of the Arctic.

First-of-its-kind core samples dug up from deep beneath the Arctic Ocean floor show that 55 million years ago an area near the North Pole was practically a subtropical paradise, three new studies show.

The scientists say their findings are a glimpse backward into a much warmer-than-thought polar region heated by run-amok greenhouse gases that came about naturally.

It is very hard to see which is the cart and which is the horse when looking at partial evidence. The earth morphes and changes, land masses warp and they rise and fall depending on if they are splitting apart or being shoved together. Erosion rates vary wildly depending upon how many plants manage to colonize the land. As continents shove together into giant land masses like ancient Pangea or spread evenly apart like today, this alters micro as well as macro environments.

This map shows the various rift valleys that formed as Pangea began to move apart 180 million years ago. We know that Africa and South America were still attached 100 million years ago because the lemur/monkey ancestors lived along the entire rim and down into the heart of that gigantic, possibly the biggest ever rift valley. These tree dwelling mammals were superbly adapted to living in dense, warm jungles. During the halcyon days of yore, the planet's thermostat was set higher than today. It varied, fluctuating sufficiently to cause various die-offs and evolutionary stress points which is why we refer to various geological data points as being "Jurassic" or "Cretaceous", for example.

Also it shows that what happened 55 million years ago was proof that too much carbon dioxide — more than four times current levels — can cause global warming, said another co-author Henk Brinkhuis at Utrecht University.

Purdue University atmospheric sciences professor Gabriel Bowen, who was not part of the team, praised the work and said it showed that "there are tipping points in our (climate) system that can throw us to these conditions."

And the new research also gave scientists the idea that a simple fern may have helped pull Earth from a hothouse to an icehouse by sucking up massive amounts of carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, this natural solution to global warming was not exactly quick: It took about a million years.

With all that heat and massive freshwater lakes forming in the Arctic, a fern called Azolla started growing and growing. Azolla, still found in warm regions today, grew so deep, so wide that eventually it started sucking up carbon dioxide, Brinkhuis theorized. And that helped put the cool back in the Arctic.

We really don't know what the engine of change is, when looking at things like an ecosystem suddenly producing lots of carbon. The environment is a complex creature, it can lose its balance if any part of the system suddenly begins to tip all the others into a new climate response. The number one system that can trigger sudden, tremendous changes, is the star shining nearest to our planet: the sun.

The sun isn't a stable entity shining relentlessly the same way all the time. It can vary, sometimes wildly, in how much energy it is shedding. These variations impact the earth. On top of this, the earth isn't geologically "dead" but rather, extremely--if slowly-- dynamic. The ratio of ocean to land changes as the continents shove together or tear apart. The ratio of mountains vs valleys changes, too.

I think people, even professional geologists, forget this little business!

55 million years ago, evidently the North Pole was further south than today, rapidly travelling north, I would guess. And it wasn't a deep sea as it is today but was very shallow which means that it possibly was even more shallow 100 million years ago. The big question is, why did it drop? Why is it deeper today compared to long ago?

These geological questions are most important. We are drilling for oil and seeking organic matter crushed into compact form so we can burn it and release the CO2 locked in it. This CO2 is changing the atmospheric mix. 55 million years ago, the earth had a warm spike. It was so warm and humid, the Azolla fern flourished in huge forests. 55 million years ago, trees were evolving and the first bees were already cultivating and encouraging variety in these trees, exploiting the earliest dogwoods. So we had huge, absolutely gigantic fern forests at the same time as we had early hardwood trees as well as pine forests!

The rise in temperatures occured during the time when all the continent's great rift valleys became increasingly big oceans as South America cartwheeled away from Africa and Africa split Madgasscar off from the main continent, Australia's split from Antarctica was now filled with sea water and India suddenly freed from Africa and Antarctica, went flying north at a greater speed than the other continents.

The earth's ecosystem was changing but perhaps the trigger for the super-warming 55 million years ago was caused by the sun. When the sun is very active, there is also more mutations. Also, when continents move away, the ecosystems, thanks to the "island" effect, undergo faster evolutionary changes.

Let's go back 100 million years. Africa was far from Eurasia which was mostly underwater, anyway. There was a huge rift valley forming right down the center of Panagea. As the land dropped, the Rift Valley became hotter and hotter especially since it was on the equator. Already, we suspect that humans have an affinity with rift valleys. This seems to be where we evolve the fastest.

The super-huge rift valley caused by the violent separation of Africa and South America as Africa suddenly headed north to collide with Europe, South America set sail, cartwheeling away, creating the southern Atlantic Ocean.

But while this great separation was underway, the rift valley it created was lined all the way around the perimeter by jungles. Dense jungles that grew on steep hillsides that overlooked the steaming rift valley. The giant dinosaurs that ruled the earth couldn't rampage down these steep cliffs. The earliest birds evolved there, launching themselves from tall, fronded trees, sailing over the upper stories of the ranks of ferns and cyclids that marched up the steep slopes. And in the midst of all this lush vegetation, tiny mammals lived. The first lemurs and tree shrews climbed dexterously about, eating insects and plants.

Already, on the hot plains below, the first rodents and rabbits dashed about, living in burrows and holes. The very first ungulates tip toed through the tangles of the steep slopes in this jungle paradise. One day, about 85 million years ago, there were a series of very great earthquakes and the ocean rushed into the valley, driving all the small and large creatures up the sides of the rift zone and they became separated until the recent ice ages which connected Africa to Eurasia to North and South America again with disasterous results for the New World's flora and fauna.

We still don't understand why so many dinosaurs were utterly wiped out. They struggled along, ever diminishing, just prior to a meteor strike in the Yucatan. Years ago, scientists thought only a few mammals survived a "nuclear winter" which killed off the great dinosaurs, ruthlessly pruning their evolutionary tree down to a few twigs. But this can't be a true picture any more since we now know that all the major mammalian families were living all over the planet during this key die-off phase.

Our own personal ancestors not only lived through it, they did it on seperate continents. So it wasn't a mere handful of survivors clinging to life, there were fairly large populations, relatively speaking. Of course, the end of the dinosaur dominance meant many more niches for mammals and avians to exploit and they exploded into them.

The real question is, how did we go from a "nuclear winter" 68 million years ago to a "halcyon summer" 55 million years ago?

When the Great South American/African Rift Valley split all the way apart, 68 million years ago, the oceans rushed in and filled this zone and the earth's water circulatory system completely changed. Now, waters from Antarctica could flow freely to the North Pole and the super-gigantic Pacific Ocean began to shrink in size. None of this explains why trees and crocodiles, frogs and birds, lemurs and ungulants, just for example, survived while both seafaring and land roaming dinosaurs had this very massive die-off. It is alarming that the species that dominated the earth were virtually wiped out.

We don't know if the earth went into a quick series of ice ages before building up into a super-warm period. 55 million years ago, when the fern population shot through the roof, trees still endured and mammals continued to evolve. Some of the biggest land roaming mammals evolved rapidly a mere 10 million years after giant dinosaurs mysteriously disappeared.

Here is a 1999 article about a hyper-warm earth 55 million years ago:

Quarry, a windy, desert site near Bitter Creek, Wyo., suggest otherwise. Prior to 57 million years ago, the mammals of North America were a motley collection of evolutionary dead ends. These included groups such as the multituberates, the so-called "rats of the dinosaur age," that have no modern descendants.

New species unlike these early North American species suddenly appeared in the Wyoming fossil record 57 million years ago. First came animals such as uintatheres, giant horned bunnies the size of small elephants that eventually went extinct, but may be a close cousin of today's rabbits. About 700,000 years later, another wave arrived, including the continent's first rodents.

Then, about 55.5 million years ago, a flood of species appear, including the Artiodactyls, ancestors of hoofed animals such as deer, pigs and camels, and the Perissodactyla, a group that includes rhinos, tapirs and the eohippus, or "dawn horse."

The sudden appearance of these species, combined with discoveries of early mammal fossils in China, strongly suggest that these new species originated in Asia, not North America, Beard said.

"Asia was this incredible Garden of Eden, or whatever you want to call it, for mammals," he said. By far the larger land mass, Asia was able to support a larger diversity of animals than North America and so animals that evolved there faced intense competition from other species. Asian mammals, as a group, thus may have been hardier than those that evolved in less competitive North America, giving the Asian animals an advantage that helped drive the North American native species to extinction.

NO. No. Not!

This week, my entire ecosystem has been under gigantic assault from a very small insect. This moth, the Gypsy Moth, isn't "superior" to native moths. It is ALIEN!!! This is the significant fact of its existence. It has freed itself from the constraints of its previous environment and leaving behind its natural restrictions such as predators and germs, for example, its population has exploded and in the process, it is destroying the entire balance of nature here and could possibly drive huge segements into extinction.

The human population is the same. We can invade all ecosystems, desert or jungle, savannah or rift valley. Mountains as well as seas. As we expand our territory, we take along all sorts of alien things which erupt into systems dominance in a geological eyeblink.

Why was Asia "a garden of Eden"? I would say, it was NOT. Not at all! I think the engine of evolutionary fast change occurs where fast changes are occuring, not at geologically stable environments! If one calculates the landmass of South America, it is close to Asia in size, 55 million years ago. Africa has even more than South America. 55 million years ago, Asia had no rift valleys! Africa's and South America's had split finally but the complex flora and fauna on both sides was still there.

North America was mostly under shallow seas still. The center of our continent isn't a rift valley but is a depression which is also probably what the North Pole is. As North America slides westwards, this sag in the middle is being pushed upwards. The New Madrid Fault events are uplifts in action which is why the Mississippi flowed backwards briefly. The Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon as the west rose higher and higher under the pressure of shoving into the Pacific plates.

Why do so many scientists want to believe that Africa isn't the cradle of much of modern living creatures? I know from the prejudices within my own family of scientists, there is great resistence to the idea that life forms form in giant rift valleys, most of which were along Africa's borders when all the continents formed Pangea! This is why marsupials live in both South America and Australia. The rift zones connecting these continents with Antarctica which was filled with tropical life forms during this time, created a host of pouched creatures that bore live young prematurely. The marupials were mostly eliminated in Africa because they couldn't compete with the invasion of the simian families.

There were no marsupials in Asia. Not then nor today. There are no lemur remains in Asia. When Africa hit Asia, the monkey population exploded across to Asia. Asian mammals traveled the other direction, too. But the connection was narrow and still is very very narrow! Just like the present connection between North and South America which allowed predators to destroy many life forms when they crossed the isthmus, heading south.

Like the gypsy moths destroying the entire forest here today, they upended the ecosystem. This is true of all invading species. Perhaps, it is an iron law of nature: invaders always flourish. Why some species invade while others don't is happenstance, luck, inertia, many forces cause this.

Here is a brief overview of the radiation of all the mammalian/placental life forms:

Although independent studies have resolved placental mammals into four major groups, it is not clear what the hierarchical relationships within the groups are, thus hampering the understanding of the early biogeographic history of placentals. The four major groups are: (1) Afrotheria [elephants, hyraxes, manatees and dugongs, aardvarks, golden moles, tenrecs, and elephant shrews], (2) Xenartha [armadillos, anteaters, and sloths], (3) Laurasiatheria [carnivores (e.g., bears, cats, dogs), pangolins, whales and dolphins, even-toed ungulates (e.g., hippos, cows, pigs), odd-toed ungulates (e.g., horses, rhinos), bats, and insectivores (e.g., shrews, moles, hedgehogs)], and (4) Euarchontoglires [rodents, rabbits, tree shrews, flying lemurs, and primates (e.g., humans, monkeys, lemurs)].

In the 14 December 2001 issue of Science, a team of scientists discuss alternative positions for the root of the placental tree. They report results based on Bayesian and other statistical methods and use a data set that comprises approximately 16,400 base pairs for each of 44 mammals and that includes segments from 22 different genes. 'We have resolved the interordinal relationships almost entirely,” says Mark S. Springer of the University of California, Riverside, a member of the team. “Based on molecular clocks, we found that the deepest split occurs between Afrotheria and other placentals at ~103 million years, a date that coincides with a major plate tectonic separation.'

55 million years ago a flood of species occured because the global climate changed. No longer was it just alien species overwhelming native populations. Climate change accelerates evolutionary changes. I would say, no continent is ever "barren" except if the environment is a very hostile place, namely, desert or ice. And I would also say that evolutionary VARIETY is accentuated by big differences in environments over small areas. Namely, a uniform environment isn't conductive to evolutionary change. This is why rift valleys which form relatively rapidly vis a vis other geological places, are the true "Garden of Eden". Each time humans underwent vast evolutionary change, it happened in the African Rift Valley, each time, humans suddenly erupted into motion, overwhelming all other simian populations as we spread out in all directions. Each wave of homonid expansion would spread as far as possible and then a new one would erupt as the hyper-hot house of the African Rift zone would cough up ever smarter, more ruthless hominids.

Each wave wiped out previous waves which is why we have no very near relatives. The last wave out of Africa happened a mere 150,000 years ago. These, homo sapiens, were the best armed, most ruthless apes of them all. Without claws or sharp fangs, not even strong arms, we invaded the entire planet and our impact on all ecosystems grows ever greater by the hour as we continue to multiply like crazy, taking down the entire planetary system. Across the planet, humans are rapidly destroying not just only all great apes but many monkey groups. Eventually, there will be none at all, at this rate, except those we keep as tools or pets.

This is probably why rift zones aren't causing more upwellings of new life forms. We are pretty much nipping everything at the bud now. There has been an upwelling of new life forms: humans, breeding or genetically altering everything around us, replacing not only species but almost everything in ecosystems we are colonizing. Our desire to create the perfect savannah/rift zone ecosystem is triggering desertfication instead.

This could destroy our species in the end.

My parents just disowned me yet again because I am in a huge dispute with them over the issue of where humans evolved. They, like many people who are believers that Africans are inferior humans (gahhhh!), want to imagine that "superior" white (sic) humans evolved in Asia completely seperate from the Africans and we are not very related at all. This is why the "Asian Garden of Eden" keeps popping up despite all evidence to the contrary.

When homo sapiens stalked out of Africa and began their long conquest of the entire planet, they carried with them the rich gene pool of the African Rift Valley. As the populations spread, they put greater and greater geological distance between themselves. Cave dwellers in northern Spain didn't mate with homo sapiens fishing along the South African shores. The humans that walked and floated to Australia which hadn't been invaded by any alien species for 55 million years, were cut off by rising seas and didn't mate with African humans, either. The humans reaching Asia didn't move rapidly about, mating, either, until they tamed the horse and invented wheels and then saddles with stirrups. Then hordes of them reinvaded Europe and even northern Africa, repeatedly!

When humans crossed into North and South America, they became genetically isolated from Asia and Africa. This isolation enhanced human diversity. If all populations remained isolated forever, we would eventually evolve into sperate species but restless humans set on invading all environments have prevented this from happening and this has led a reversal of genetic differentiation. Only by mating using artifical rules can the few genetic markers that make humans look different from each other, remain. If people carrying pairs of recessive genes like blue eyes mate only with other equally recessive blue eyed genetic partners will the blue eye result appear frequently.

In general, these genetic oddities get submerged if a population isn't isolated. This is why Darwin was so amazed by the drab finches on several tiny islands off the coast of Peru. Each tiny island had finches with significant and singlular variations of beaks. None could breed with the others because birds, thanks to nest building and raising their young, are extremely picky about partners. They don't fly about mating with just anyone. So add geological isolation to sexual choice, distinct species can evolve very rapidly.

And so the germ of the idea of natural selection was planted in Darwin's mind which immediately understood the issues of human evolution and why Europeans in particular, managed to produce a population very high in recessive genes. Which are generally a genetic weakness! Recessive genes causing very pale skin means we get skin cancer and suffer terribly in the hot sun unless we cover ourselves carefully. When I cut hay in the hot sun, I wish I had dark skin. It is quite painful after only an hour unless I wear big hats, for example. All a pale skin means is we can eke out vitamin D from very limited sun exposure so we don't get rickets! How this confers evolutionary superiority is a puzzle.

My parents want to believe that pale skinned people suddenly evolved because the sun was disturbed for 75 years about 40,000 years ago, spitting out lots of x-rays. When I argued that this would cause us to evolve dark skins to protect ourselves from the sun's fury, they got really angry with me. The thought that excessive solar activity could lead to organisms evolving a protective shield offended them because they believe that pale skin is superior to dark skin!

They also became angry with me for suggesting that humans can be very ruthless, even killing off family members like Adam and Eve's son, Cain did in the Bible. To prove me wrong, they disowned me (for the fifth time in my life, heh! I am the black sheep!). Humans are kindly, they let me know in the most brutal fashion possible. They asked me to cease talking to them. Scientific debate irritates them too much.

Their sudden interest in human evolution took me by surprise this month because I have written about it for years and they never said a thing to me about it nor did they ever read anything I published. Suddenly, they blind side me by putting out a theory that most humans didn't come out of the Rift Valley in Africa after all. Only native Africans came from there, Asian types and Europeans came out of Asia exclusively.

They will have an audience for this racist notion. Many racists absolutely hate the idea that Mother Africa gave birth to us humans. Indeed, many want to believe Africans aren't human at all which was the excuse used to enslave them in the first place! And that takes me to my other dark theme: Naziism and why Neandertals suddenly disappeared totally at the exact same time homocidal homo sapiens invaded Europe and the Middle East.

America always teeters on the edge of turning Nazi. All political systems that harbor racism are a danger to themselves and others and can easily turn to the "Final Solution" sort of ideology. This is why Israel is rapidly morphing into a Nazi state. When examining the evidence geology, nature and evolution, one has to push away all racist ideas and keep an open mind.

Here is this week's news about an insane family (note the pale skin color!) which decided to kill off their own grandchildren for revenge.

"(The couple) met with the so-called hit man, where they paid the hit man $100 in cash as a down payment for the murder of the wife and her three children," Lake County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Christie Mysinger said.

"According to an arrest affidavit, Versie Jackson made contact with the undercover agent while her husband stayed in the car because he was reportedly too afraid the meet the person who would kill his grandchildren and daughter-in-law," Local 6 reporter Louis Bolden said.
The couple was taken into custody after the money was exchanged.

"According to an arrest affidavit, Versie Jackson made contact with the undercover agent while her husband stayed in the car because he was reportedly too afraid the meet the person who would kill his grandchildren and daughter-in-law," Local 6 reporter Louis Bolden said.

After an investigation, authorities said the couple's son, Jason Jackson, 31, concocted the alleged murder-for-hire plan from jail and asked his parents to seal the deal, Bolden said.
The 31-year-old is awaiting trial in a sexual molestation case, and his wife and children were scheduled to testify against him.

This is not uncommon. Humans use their vast brains to figure out all sorts of schemes. Some are noble but some are truly bizarre and quite unlike anything witnessed in the natural, non-human world! I would suggest our huge brains are reeling out of our own control. It is too big for our own good, perhaps.

I often marvel as to how we can spread out like invading gypsy moths, multiplying at a mad rate, even as we loathe our own genetic offspring and desire their termination just so one can commit crimes, abusing other, less related humans! The twists and turns in our minds are incredible. The bigger the brains, the more possibly self destructive.

Humans are the crazy ape. We ruthlessly kill or alter everything we encounter. We also multiply fast. Because of these paradoxical forces, we are in grave danger from ourselves, our domination of this planet will end badly for us if we don't rapidly figure out how evolution works, how ecosystems function and how we can live in harmony with each other and our planet.

The alternative is quite grim. I say this as a hyper-recessive gene human organism.

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