This is my dream: To live as my forefathers once did - in harmony with the land that sustains us. A project to investigate and innovate the creation of a low impact home with methods of living in a form of permaculture designed to sustain my family and improve biodiversity. To leave the land richer than before and in doing so enable others to do so.
Snakes in a lab
Posted 17/04/10 by Matt B in the Science category
Here is a great article that demonstrates and almost wilfull blindness by scientists that I beileve is slowing progress down.Scientists have discovered exactly how cobras raise their menacing hoods.
The story is sinple. A great study ahs worked out how the "hooding" actually works. The the article goes on to say that the same nerves and musles are present in non hooding snakes too.
"This is an example of evolution's remodelling [as] derived species emerge," said Dr Kardong. "There's been a change in the nervous system's control over these muscles."
Professor Young explained that cobras were not the only snakes to hood. "Several groups of unrelated snakes show almost identical defensive behaviour," he said. He now hopes to study how these other snakes raise their hoods.
Hello, can anyone else see the bleeding obviouse here? GCSE Biology anyone? Logic 101 too good for you? An introduction to populations in statistical anaysis too much like hard work?
There is the idea presented here that all these snakes "evolved" hooding on their own and that this used these existing adaptations.
Now the prevaling theory is that varience developed in life on earth through random mutations (changes). Okay so let's not debate that one here but let us remember that we are dealing with random. If you accept that random can introduce new information you must surely also recognise that it may also remove it too.
The assumption that complex is better is to impose an idiology on things that does not exist. Nature is not "working towards" it simple "is".
If a mutation that disabled, switched off or stopped a feature did not convey significant disadvantages within certain groups then that would not be purged from the genepool. Indeed sometimes it might be an advantage.
Think of humans we come in a variety of colours and there is no saying which colour came first. That different groups have different colour skin is without question. There is a good chance that we white humans are a mutation without the normal ability to pigment our skin. If you accept the prevailing "out of Africa" idea then this is almost certainly true.
Are we not told in school that humans once had tails. That we once had gills that parts of the body like the appendix are "left overs" from something else we don't have or use any more.
Why then is it so hard to grasp that hoods in snakes might have come before no-hoods.
My prediction is that future studies will show that hooding snakes all use the same of very, very similar mechanisms pointing back to a single hooded anscestor of hooded and not-hooded snakes.
Simple logic suggests it is the most likely outcome.
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