| Human Nutrition When recognized, these evolutionary complexities are visible in all species. For example, persons who eat a raw food diet notice that their weight normalizes and they lose fat. The reason why was unknown. Nutrition authorities of course have an explanation—the same explanation they use for every question. Fewer calories. They say fat equals calories consumed minus calories burned up. How could they be wrong? Except they then say to burn up more calories with exercise to lose weight, as if they didn't notice that scientists have been studying dozens of regulatory process under the control of signal molecules. Persons who get more exercise put on more weight, because regulatory processes require more fat production when getting more exercise. The reason why a raw food diet causes fat to disappear is because there is a physiological pattern under the control of regulatory molecules which produces that result. This pattern would have evolved with monkeys which need to be light weight for climbing trees. They ate raw food and needed to be light weight. Humans still carry those patterns of physiology. You might think humans have changed too much since they branched off from monkeys to carry similar patters in their DNA. Not so. Nature carries DNA patterns permanently. Ninety percent of all DNA is not being used, because evolution will not discard old DNA. Not only is DNA saved, it is religiously maintained without mutations, at least in some areas. Sometimes, mutations are detected, excised and replaced with correct bases. How then can evolution occur? Apparently, there are stabilized areas of the DNA which are coated with proteins to inhibit evolution. Exposed areas of the DNA promote evolution where there needs to be improvements. For example, you can feel with your tongue below your front teeth and detect two small dots. Those dots are remnants of hooks used by ancient fish to catch prey about 400 million years ago. Evolution reduced them to a level where there is no more selective advantage in removing them and then maintained them. When agriculture began, about 50,000 years ago, most people would have been working in the fields 12 hours per day and eating once per day. They needed a lot of fat. So eating grains, primarily wheat, promotes fat production. Chemicals in wheat are recognized by the control mechanisms for fat production. Vertebrate Evolution Evolution is shaped by environmental forces. Major steps in evolution are created by major changes in environmental conditions. When terestrial life began, 543 million years ago, fish were soft bodied, as bones had not yet developed. When a planet exploded in the asteroid belt and left good quality soil on the surface of the earth, amphibians formed and moved onto land. They created internal bones. It took gravity on land to cause bones to form. How then did fish acquire bones? They would have gotten bones from amphibians which migrated back into the water. Then the boney fish migrated back out of the water onto land (400-300 million years ago) and evolved into mammals. This pattern is evidenced by recent studies which show the limbs of mammals evolved from fish fins (Science Daily, Jan 21, 2014). The amphibians which stayed on land evolved into reptiles. Reptiles are not as advanced as mammals, because they did not go through the drastic environmental changes of migrating back into the ocean and back onto land, as mammals did. The experience of going back into the oceans and back out created much more evolutionary change for mammals than reptiles experienced. This pattern of migration is indicated by the two dots which humans have below their front teeth. If the dots are remnants of hooks used by ancient fish, then mammals evolved from boney fish. Going into the oceans and back out did not in itself shape the evolution of mammals. Instead, it made the DNA more prone to evolution, presumably by stripping proteins away from a large part of the DNA so it could evolve more freely. The amphibians which evolved into reptiles did not undergo as much change as mammals, as their DNA would have been less available to evolution. The proteins which protect DNA did not disappear from the mammalian line; they mysteriously acquired the ability to allow evolutionary change while continuing to resist undesirable mutations. Evolution does not occur as significantly or rapidly in the oceans as on land, because the oceans are extremely stable. It takes environmental change to produce evolutionary change. Tides create more change near the shoreline. For this reason, most of the diversity in the oceans resulted from land creatures continually adapting to the oceans throughout evolutionary history. Mammals are still adapting to the oceans and creating a wide variety of sea creatures. Eventually, birds acquired a high degree of evolutionary adaptability starting from reptiles, while other reptilians remained extremely stable. The Morel Muhsroom The phenomenon of variable patterns of physiology is highly observable with the morel mushroom. Whenever morel mycelium is grown on a surface of liquid or gel, the mycelium forms a tissue which includes blocky cells, in place of mycelium, and pigments within the blocky cells. The mushroom has no use for such a tissue. Its formation is a reversion to an earlier pattern of growth at the base of trees. The morel evolved from a yeast which grew at the base of trees and extended mycelium into the soil to feed on bacteria. The tendency to revert to such surface growth indicates that the morel spent more time growing at the base of trees than as a free mushroom. A time scale can be derived for morel evolution, because morels re-evolve during each ice age. Ice ages have been cycling at 100 thousand year intervals. Remnants of the previous two cycles are around as the cup fungi Discinia and Disciota. They have telltale signatures on the surface of the spores. It appears that cold air sweeping off the front edge of the ice sheet causes a yeast to evolve into the morel mushroom. So the time scale of an ice age can be divided into three parts. About 30 thousand years might be required for the ice sheet to be fully formed; then about fifty thousand years would be spent by the yeast growing at the base of trees (probably elms, because they exude a lot); and the remaining 20 thousand years would be how long the morel was a free mushroom. So morel mycelium growing in a laboratory wants to revert back to the type of growth that it was producing 20-70 thousand years ago. Pseudomonas fluorescens and ATP
Respiration now uses similar rotating proteins to create ATP. This parallel structure would have once been called convergence of evolution. But it is transposed evolution. Respiration would have acquired the rotating proteins from the locomotion of Pseudomonas fluorescens. The transformation would have occurred within the cells of Pseudomonas. The bacterium has highly varied nutrition and physiology. The isolation medium for it is glycerol and nitrate. Nothing else seems to grow on that combination. The rotating proteins are not essential for ATP synthesis; they simply speed up the process by moving the substrate molecules into and out of the reaction site faster. Without the rotating proteins, diffusion would be required for moving the molecules around. Every metabolic reaction would benefit from a rotating protein moving the reactants in place, but the process is too elaborate for anything but respiration. Speed is important for respiration, so organisms can get more done faster without running out of energy. This explanation would be anathema to biophysicists who study the respiration proteins. They make the absurd claim that the motion of the proteins is the source of the energy. Supposedly, the kinetic energy of motion is converted into the chemical energy of ATP. Kinetic energy can never be converted into chemical energy, because kinetic energy is in the motion of nuclei, while chemical energy is in the motion of electrons. The motion of nuclei cannot add energy to electrons without a nuclear reaction. No less absurd is ignoring the chemical enery which is carried to the respiratory system in a high energy electron associated with reduced energy carriers such as NADH. That high energy electron gives up some of its energy in cytochromes, which transfer the energy to ATP. The electrons which provide the energy have no influence over the motion of the rotating proteins, and biophysicist do not claim that they do. The rotating proteins gain their energy from a proton gradient. So biophysicists skip over the real source of energy in reduced carriers and contrive a source of energy in a proton gradient. The proton gradient does not need much energy, because all it has to do is keep the proteins rotating. An important lesson in respiration proteins is that such extreme evolution cannot occur where metabolic activity is highly active and complex. There are too many inter-dependent activities to allow such drastic changes. But there are no competing influences for the evolution of locomotion. So the rotating proteins could freely evolve without disruption while producing locomotion. Then adapting the rotating proteins to respiration would be simple enough that it could occur without disrupting essential metabolism. Respiration through simple diffusion probably existed before the rotating proteins were added. The upgrading of respiration would have occurred about 700 million years ago plus or minus 100 million years. The new form of respiration involving rotating proteins was so advantageous that it was carried into the cells of soft-bodied fish as bacterial parasites. These then evolved into mitochondria. Yeasts and Fat Production Another example of transposed physiology is fat production. There was no fat as energy storage before modern biology began, which is when the dinosaurs died out. Storage molecules as starch or fat did not exist. All evolution was being held back by nonwoody brush. Dinosaurs had to be large to move through the brush. Mammals had to be small to go under it. Flowering plants were extremely rare, as they could not find much space. When dinosaurs died out, grass shoved out the nonwoody brush and freed up evolution for all species. Mammals got larger, as they could walk over the grass. Flowering plants could grow within the grass and around it. As plants produced sugary substance, yeasts evolved from molds. Yeasts acquired a round shape, which improves absorption in liquids; and they gave up the most demanding characteristic of molds, which is the ability to tolerate dehydration while growing on surfaces. When glucose gets used up, yeasts induce formation of TCA enzymes and remetabolize the acetic acid, alcohol and fat which they created earlier. Other species do not have repressible TCA systems. Their TCA systems are in place all of the time.
The fossil evidence of yeasts only goes back 50 million years. This would be when plants produced sufficient sugar to promote yeast evolution. Fat would presumably have been nonexistent prior to that time. The bone structure of dinosaurs and early mammals indicates that these animals were not producing fat. They are too tall for fat production. Dinosaurs could have benefited from fat, because they needed a lot of weight to go through the thick brush. If they had fat, they would have been shorter and heavier like elephants.
The early mammals were also longer legged than they would have been if they stored fat. Modern mice are much shorter, because they are heavier due to fat storage.
It was the repressibility of the TCA system which allowed yeasts to evolve fat production. No other species would have been using repressible TCA systems, and therefore, it is most likely that no other species would have evolved fat production.
After yeasts evolved fat production, the related genes would have been transferred to other species by viruses. If this path of evolution is correct, animals would not have had fat during the first several million years of modern biology beginning 65 million years ago. Evidence of the evolution of fat may be visible in the fossil records. It would show up as a shortening of leg length for mammals. Mammals should have gotten shorter and heavier-boned when they acquired fat production. I doubt that anyone has looked at the fossil evidence to determine if this occurred.
Cottonwood and Willow Trees Another line of evidence of the evolution of fat is in the cottonwood and willow trees. These trees stopped evolving significantly very early on, because they found a highly exploitable niche by drawing water from stable sources such as lakes or rivers. Their seeds are very small compared to modern seeds. Modern seeds store a lot of energy as oils. If fat production was possible when cottonwoods and willows evolved, they would probably have had larger seeds. Their small seeds indicate that fat production did not exist when they evolved.
Cottonwoods and willows are more primitive than other trees in that they do not measure stress forces. Modern trees measure stress and widen where stress forces are greatest. As a result, all locations on the trees have an equal probability of breaking. Ancient trees including conifers do not measure stress. Their branches do not taper significantly beyond the effects of aging. Aging produces less taper than the measurement of stress. So conifers and cottonwoods have long branches without much taper. |
One of the most astounding products of evolution is the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens. It never branched on the evolutionary tree; it just kept adding more functions. About 800 million years ago it swam in an ancient sea using two polar flagella which rotate. Several proteins are used to create the rotary motion. Chemical energy as ATP is used to create the motion.