Guest “what has a higher recovery rate? COVID-19 or Extinction?” by David Middleton
What do the Coelocanth, PETM benthic foraminifera, the Incilius genus of toads and Aldabra white-throated rail bird have in common? Apparently, a very high recovery rate from… Extinction!
Hat tip to Mrs. Middleton…
An extinct bird just ‘evolved itself’ back into existence
The Aldabra hasn’t existed in almost 100,000 years. Now it’s back
Thomas ShamblerMay 18, 2020The Aldabra white-throated rail bird was declared extinct, a victim of rising sea levels almost 100,000 years ago.
However, the flightless brown bird has recently been spotted – leaving scientists scratching their heads as to how – and why – the species has come back to life.
According to research in the Zoological Journal of Linnean Society, the re-incarnated Aldabra bird is a product of ‘iterative evolution’. That’s when old genes thought to have died out re-emerge at a different point in time.
[…]
Esquire… No, seriously, Esquire
Honestly, does a bird that can’t get out of the way of sea level, deserve to not be extinct? Why in the name of Sam Hill would a bird, so vulnerable to the map datum, re-evolve just in time for catastrophic (1-3 mm/yr) sea level rise to re-extinct it? Or… Did the alarmists genetically engineer it to use as a prop for Green New Deal infomercials? Eaquiring minds want to know. I didn’t read the rest of the article… So let me know if any of my questions were answered.
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For those unfamiliar with his Monte Python “Holy Grail” footnote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs
In synchronistic fashion, I just showed this to my 6-yo twins re: COVID-19 last week.
I thought the response to the link was hilarious, given that it is tl esquire
“The request could not be satisfied.”
Poor request, it goes home frustrated.
A nice biological curiosity. If one is embarrassed to quote from Esquire, there is an article on the same story from the Smithsonian Institute:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-evolution-brought-flightless-bird-back-extinction-180972166/
At first sight this re-evolution of a bird appears to break (or refute) Dollo’s law of evolution, that evolution can’t go backwards to revisit previous forms:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollo%27s_law_of_irreversibility
Dollo’s law of irreversibility (also known as Dollo’s law and Dollo’s principle), proposed in 1893[1] by Belgian paleontologist Louis Dollo states that, “an organism never returns exactly to a former state, even if it finds itself placed in conditions of existence identical to those in which it has previously lived … it always keeps some trace of the intermediate stages through which it has passed.”[2]
However I think there is a way out of this problem for Dollo’s law. With the Aldabra rail we don’t see a bird evolving from the rail into something else, then back to the flightless rail. Instead, the bird goes extinct from flooding, then it’s original evolution from still-living relatives is repeated when these relatives again fly to the island, and again find that they can safely unevolve flight. The arrow of evolutionary time is not being reversed (as would refute Dollo’s law). Instead it is just re-running. Again forward in time, not backward. Evolution has discovered a franchise.