The floor of the ocean off the coast of the Pacific Northwest has sprung a leak.
The spring, known as Pythia’s Oasis, is likely venting water from beneath local tectonic plates through a fault called the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
This liquid is likely acting as a lubricant between the two plates colliding at the fault, and losing too much of it could increase the likelihood of a damaging earthquake.
Technically, it’s a spring, because water is flowing in and not out. But in the ways that matter, it definitely is a leak. It’s known as Pythia’s Oasis, and it’s a spring of almost-fresh water most welling up from under the
From its humble origin(s), life has infected the entire planet with endless beautiful forms. The genesis of life is the oldest biological event, so old that no clear evidence was left behind other than the existence of life itself. This leaves many questions open, and one of the most tantalizing is how many times life magically emerged from non-living elements.
Has all of life on Earth evolved only once, or are different living beings cut from different cloths? The question of how difficult it is for life to emerge is interesting—not least because it can shed some light on the likelihood of finding life on other planets.
The origin of life is a central question in modern biology, and probably the hardest to study. This event took place four billion years ago, and it happened at a molecular level—meaning little fossil evidence remains.
Many lively beginnings have been suggested, from unsavory primordial soups to outer space. But the current scientific consensus is that life emerged from non-living molecules in a natural process called abiogenesis, most likely in the darkness of deep-sea hydrothermal vents. But if life emerged once, why not more times?
What is abiogenesis?
Scientists have proposed various consecutive steps for abiogenesis. We know that Earth was rich in several chemicals, such as amino acids, a type of molecules called nucleotides or sugars, which are the building blocks of life. Laboratory experiments, such as the iconic Miller-Urey experiment, have shown how these compounds can be naturally formed under conditions similar to early Earth. Some of these compounds could also have come to Earth riding meteorites.
Next, these simple molecules combined to form more complex ones, such as fats, proteins or nucleic acids. Importantly, nucleic acids—such as double-stranded DNA or its single-stranded cousin RNA—can store the information needed to build other molecules. DNA is more stable than RNA, but in contrast, RNA can be part of chemical reactions in which a compound makes copies of itself—self-replication.
The “RNA world” hypothesis suggests that early life may have used RNA as material for both genes and replication before the emergence of DNA and proteins.
Once an information system can make copies of itself, natural selection kicks in. Some of the new copies of these molecules (which some would call “genes”) will have errors, or mutations, and some of these new mutations will improve the replication ability of the molecules. Therefore, over time, there will be more copies of these mutants than other molecules, some of which will accumulate further new mutations making them even faster and more abundant, and so on.
Eventually, these molecules probably evolved a lipid (fatty) boundary separating the internal environment of the organism from the exterior, forming protocells. Protocells could concentrate and organize better the molecules needed in biochemical reactions, providing a contained and efficient metabolism.
Abiogenesis could have happened more than once. Earth could have birthed self-replicating molecules several times, and maybe early life for thousands or millions of years just consisted of a bunch of different self-replicating RNA molecules, with independent origins, competing for the same building blocks. Alas, due to the ancient and microscopic nature of this process, we may never know.
Many lab experiments have successfully reproduced different stages of abiogenesis, proving they could happen more than once, but we have no certainty of these occurring in the past.
A related question could be whether new life is emerging by abiogenesis as you are reading this. This is very unlikely though. Early Earth was sterile of life and the physical and chemical conditions were very different. Nowadays, if somewhere on the planet there were ideal conditions for new self-replicating molecules to appear, they would be promptly chomped by existing life.
What we do know is that all extant life beings descend from a single shared last universal common ancestor of life (also known as LUCA). If there were other ancestors, they left no descendants behind. Key pieces of evidence support the existence of LUCA. All life on Earth uses the same genetic code, namely the correspondence between nucleotides in DNA known as A, T, C, and G—and the amino acid they encode in proteins. For example, the sequence of the three nucleotides ATG always corresponds to the amino acid methionine.
Theoretically, however, there could have been more genetic code variants between species. But all life on Earth uses the same code with a few minor changes in some lineages. Biochemical pathways, such as the ones used to metabolize food, also support the existence of LUCA; many independent pathways could have evolved in different ancestors, yet some (such as the ones used to metabolize sugars) are shared across all living organisms. Similarly, hundreds of identical genes are present in disparate live beings which can only be explained by being inherited from LUCA.
My favorite support for LUCA comes from the Tree of Life. Independent analyses, some using anatomy, metabolism or genetic sequences, have revealed a hierarchical pattern of relatedness that can be represented as a tree. This shows we are more related to chimps than to any other living organisms on Earth. Chimps and we are more related to gorillas, and together to orangutans, and so on.
You can pick any random organism, from the lettuce in your salad to the bacteria in your bioactive yogurt and, if you travel back in time far enough, you will share an actual common ancestor. This is not a metaphor, but a scientific fact.
This is one of the most mind boggling concepts in science, Darwin’s unity of life. If you are reading this text, you are here thanks to an uninterrupted chain of reproductive events going back billions of years. As exciting as it is to think about life repeatedly emerging on our planet, or elsewhere, it is even more exciting to know that we are related to all the life beings in the planet.
Deep, deep in geologic time, some 600 million or 700 million years ago, the very first animals evolved on Earth. Their closest relatives that still live today include sponges, sea anemones and comb jellies. But exactly which of these is truly the closest relative to the very first animals has remained one of the most contentious questions in evolutionary biology. With few fossils of these early, squishy animals, their history has necessarily been muddy, and it has been challenging to reconstruct what happened.
A study published on May 17 in Natureresolves the relationships of these early animals by looking at the chromosomes of sponges, comb jellies, jellyfish and three close single-celled relatives of animals. By studying the pattern of chromosomes at the base of the animal evolutionary tree breaking and fusing together, a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, University of Vienna, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and University of California, Santa Cruz, determined that comb jellies, more formally known as ctenophores, are in fact the closest relatives of the first animals.
“Understanding these deepest relationships in the animal tree of life is absolutely critical for reconstructing the history of the origin and evolution of a lot of the complex traits that we’re most interested in—things like the nervous system and animal symmetry,” says Casey Dunn, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, who was not involved in the study.ADVERTISEMENT
The implicit assumption for more than 100 years was that the history of animal evolution was largely a stepwise addition of complex features in the animal lineage, Dunn explains. Chief among those widely held assumptions was that sponges are really primitive because they lack neurons and muscles. That led to the idea that they must have split off from the animal lineage before neurons and muscles originated. Comb jellies have muscles and a network of neurons, so they were thought to branch later.
But back in 2008, based on early information from the first sponge and ctenophore genomes, Dunn and his colleagues had proposed that comb jellies branched before sponges did. The researchers found that the inventory of these animals’ genes didn’t match the idea that sponges were a “snapshot of time before this machinery evolved,” Dunn says. Sponges already had genes that resembled those for neurotransmitters; perhaps these were used for cell-to-cell communication long before the evolution of neurons, with their specialized shape and function.
After that 2008 paper, dozens of studies appeared. Some were consistent with Dunn’s result, and some refuted it. “I personally have remained neutral on this debate,” says Paulyn Cartwright, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Kansas, “because applying subtly different models of evolution for how sequences evolve could change the result—meaning that the findings were not very robust one way or another.”
“So my conclusion was that it’s a very difficult problem,” adds Cartwright, who was not involved in the 2008 paper or the new study. “Part of the reason why it’s so challenging is because we’re looking at something that happened over half a billion years ago. And not only did it happen half a billion years ago, but it probably happened relatively quickly in geological time, so there’s not a lot of information to reconstruct these very ancient events.” Also, ctenophores have had half a billion years to undergo their own independent evolution, and they have a variety of features that are unique to their lineage.
In the Nature paper, the team took a new, creative approach to analyze the genomes of these early animals. Over hundreds of millions of years, gene sequences mutate so much that any signal about the relatedness of different lineages is washed out. “So you need something that evolves very slowly that you can track,” says Dan Rokhsar, an evolutionary genomicist at U.C. Berkeley, who oversaw the study. Instead of looking at alterations in nucleotides (single-letter changes in DNA), the method—developed by Rokhsar, along with Oleg Simakov and Darrin Schultz, both at the University of Vienna—focuses on larger-scale features in the genomes: groups of genes on chromosomes.ADVERTISEMENT
This technique is based on a simple idea: over evolutionary time, the order of genes on a chromosome gets shuffled via mutations—for instance, via inversions that flip the order of genes within a chromosome. Although their order may change, the genes on a chromosome form a kind of linkage group: they don’t usually shuffle with genes on other chromosomes. But on rare occasions, chromosomes can break and fuse, leading those linkage groups to mix. These events are rare enough that it is possible to trace them all the way back to the origins of the first animals.
The key insight is that chromosome fusion and mixing is as irreversible as the mixing of milk in a cup of tea. So the researchers deduced that if they observed fusion-with-mixing events that were shared between two lineages, then that event must have occurred in the common ancestor of those two lineages. The irreversibility of fusion-and-mixing events makes them particularly well-suited for resolving relationships in the animal tree that have resisted more conventional methods.
To elucidate the relationships at the base of the animal tree, the researchers assembled sequences of each chromosome for the comb jelly Bolinopsis microptera, two deep-sea sponges and three unicellular relatives of animals: a choanoflagellate, an ichthyosporean and a filasterean amoeba. They also used existing chromosome-scale genomes of cnidarians(sea anemones, jellyfish and corals, among others), sponges and amphioxus, or lancelet—an invertebrate that is very closely related to vertebrates and is a bilaterian, an animal with bilateral symmetry.
From this wealth of genomic data, the team discovered four fusion-and-mixing events shared by bilaterians (amphioxus), jellyfish, and sponges but not by ctenophores. If sponges branched before ctenophores, that would require these exact same four fusion and mixing events to have occurred independently in two lineages, the chance of which is vanishingly small. The researchers’ findings therefore provide strong support for the idea that ctenophores branched first. “This paper is a sea change in the discussion of these relationships and their evolutionary implications,” Dunn says.
“I’m very much convinced that [the researchers] have solved this debate because of the type of characters they’re using,” Cartwright says. “They have very strong data to support the early diverging ctenophores.”
What the finding means is that the ancestor of all animals, including sponges, already had a well-developed nervous system, and it probably was free-swimming, Cartwright adds. “We have to rethink the function and the structure of the early ancestor of animals. It wasn’t like a simple sponge, but it was likely something much more complex,” she says.
Another implication of the findings is that sponges lost a lot of the elements of a proper nervous system and muscular system because they’re filter feeders attached to the bottom of the ocean floor. The elements of a nervous system in the sponge genome may not be so much the beginnings of an animal nervous system as the remnants of a well-developed nervous system in the ancestor, Cartwright explains.
Rather than animal evolution proceeding as a gradual increase in complexity, it’s clear that evolutionary losses are part of the story. It has also become clear that early animals evolved unusual nerve cell features. Recent discoveries have shown that ctenophores have no synapses, the tiny connections between neurons. Instead the cells of their primitive nervous system, known as a nerve net, are fused together, forming a syncytium—“an entirely new way to build a nervous system,” Dunn says. And although sponges lack neurons, they have cells with neuronal features, called neuroid cells, in their digestive system.
One takeaway from this long quest is that, as more information is learned, researchers may find that early animal nervous systems are more diverse and innovative than we can currently imagine. Now we have a solid tree on which to pin them, providing a roadmap of sorts for future discoveries about the evolution of essential animal features.
New York City is sinking in part due to the extraordinary weight of its vertiginous buildings, worsening the flooding threat posed to the metropolis from the rising seas, new research has found.
The Big Apple may be the city that never sleeps but it is a city that certainly sinks, subsiding by approximately 1-2mm each year on average, with some areas of New York City plunging at double this rate, according to researchers.
This sinking is exacerbating the impact of sea level rise which is accelerating at around twice the global average as the world’s glaciers melt away and seawater expands due to global heating. The water that flanks New York City has risen by about 9in, or 22cm,since 1950and…
If you enjoy watching cardinals or bluebirds at a feeder or seeing a great blue heron at the water’s edge, it may not be immediately apparent but the nation’s birds are under siege.
“Birds are declining,” said Ken Rosenberg, a conservation biologist with Road to Recovery, an organization that focuses on recovery of the nation’s most rapidly declining birds. “It’s death by a million cuts.”
They’re imperiled by habitat loss, disease and other threats. Several incidents this spring illustrate a few of the hazards.
The Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) is asking to keep the gray wolf species’ protected status after successfully increasing the wolf population.
According to WDFW, the state’s gray wolf population has grown nearly 28% each year since 2008, and hasn’t published a status report on the wolves since listing them as endangered back in 1980.
Based on 14 years of population growth, WDFW concluded that the species no longer meets the threat of extinction, or the state definition for a threatened species.
A man accidentally shot his friend while they were out hunting in Rasil Forest, Hulu Besut early yesterday morning, seriously injuring him. — Picture by Ahmad Zamzahuri
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Sunday, 21 May 2023 8:01 PM MYT
JERTIH, May 21 — A man accidentally shot his friend while they were out hunting in Rasil Forest, Hulu Besut, near here early yesterday morning, seriously injuring him.
Besut district police chief Supt Abdul Rozak Muhammad said the 38-year-old man was believed to have shot the 32-year-old victim between midnight and 1am.
“Preliminary investigations found that the suspect and the victim, who are good friends, entered the forest with a shotgun, believed to be homemade, to hunt mouse deer.
Cows and mongooses are among at least 65 species of animals that can “laugh,” according to a study from UCLA.
Researchers Sasha Winkler and Greg Bryant combed through existing scientific literature for their findings, meaning no animals were harmed or exploited in the study, which was published in the scientific journal BioAcoustics.
They were on the lookout for “play vocalizations” — or sounds that animals make when likely feeling happy and relaxed, similar to human laughter.
While scientists knew that certain species — most notably, primates and rats — express the equivalent of laughter during bonding, the UCLA study added to that list species including dogs, foxes, seals, mongooses, and three species of birds, including the Australian magpie and the parakeet.
“This work lays out nicely how a phenomenon once thought to be particularly human turns out to be closely tied to behavior shared with species separated from humans by tens of millions of years,” Bryant said.
Lady Freethinker applauds the scientists for exploring their theories in a way that did not exploit, harm, or remove animals from their natural environments or subject them to unnatural circumstances.
This study is another example of animals’ sentience, that they can feel emotions like we do, and that they deserve to live their days free from fear, pain, and exploitation!
You can help animals in laboratories by signing our most recent petition, urging Oregon to ban cruel tests on animals for cosmetics!
The controversial author on the importance of updating his landmark book on animal liberation, being ‘flexibly vegan’ and the ethical dangers of artificial intelligence for the non-human world
Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation, published in 1975, exposed the realities of life for animals in factory farms and testing laboratories and provided a powerful moral basis for rethinking our relationship to them. Now, nearly 50 years on, Singer, 76, has a revised version titled Animal Liberation Now. It comes on the heels of an updated edition of his popular Ethics in the Real World, a collection of short essays dissecting important current events, first published in 2016. Singer, a utilitarian, is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. In addition to his work on animal ethics, he is also regarded as the philosophical originator of a philanthropic social movement known as effective altruism, which argues for weighing up causes to achieve the most good.He is considered one of the world’s most influential – and controversial – philosophers.
Why write Animal Liberation Now? The last full update was 1990. Though the philosophical arguments have stood up well, the chapters that describe factory farming and what we do to animals in labs needed to be almost completely rewritten. I also hadn’t really discussed factory farming’s contribution to the climate crisis and I wanted to reflect on our progresstowards animal rights. Effectively, this is a new book for the next generation, hence the new title.
What progress have we made in our treatment of animals since the original book? And what have we learned about animal sentience? There have been some improvements in factory farming practices in some regions of the world, but in others we have hit new lows. China now has enormous factory farms and lacks any national standards for raising animals for food. Extreme forms of confinement also still dominate the US states with the most pigs and laying hens. Animal experimentation is now regulated in many developed nations, but what’s notable is how minimal it is in the US, where the vast majority of animals used in experiments aren’t covered. On animal sentience, we now have strong evidence that fish too can feel pain. There are also good reasons for thinking the same of some invertebrates – the octopus but also lobsters and crabs. How far sentience extends into other invertebrates is unclear.
Can you explain your position against speciesism, the belief most humans hold that we are superior to other animals? Shouldn’t humans count more? Just as we accept that race or sex isn’t a reason for a person counting more, I don’t think the species of a being is a reason for counting more than another being. What is important is the capacity to suffer and to enjoy life. We should give equal consideration to the similar interests of all sentient beings. Defenders of speciesism argue that humans have a special rational nature that sets them apart from animals, but the problem is where that leaves infants and the profoundly intellectually disabled. Instead of defending the idea that all humans have rights but no animals do, we should recognise that many things we do to animals cause so much pain and yet are so inessential to us that we ought to refrain. We can be against speciesism and still favour beings with higher cognitive capacities, which most humans have – but that is drawing a line for a different reason. If there are animals that have higher cognitive capacities than some humans, there’s no reason to say that the humans have more worth or moral status simply because they are human.
Many things we do to animals cause so much pain and yet are so inessential to us that we ought to refrain
The chapters in Animal Liberation Now about animal testing and factory farming are upsetting to read. Were they upsetting to write and rewrite and what pulled you through? I found them very upsetting, both 48 years ago and as I’ve worked on them over the past year. But I also felt driven to complete them so people know and can help stop it. I’ve had to develop a thicker skin and sometimes have had trouble getting to sleep, but it needed to be done. I do steer away from emotive language. I’ve never considered myself an animal lover and I don’t want to only appeal to animal lovers. I want people to see this as a basic moral wrong.
You have provoked the ire of the disability rights advocates over the years, including by arguing that parents should have the right the end the lives of severely disabled newborns. This has been criticised as an ableist view that could lead to other disabled people being less valued. What’s your response? In general, I think it is better to have abilities than not to have them. Most people hold that view. Obviously, there are forms of discrimination against disabled people that we should firmly reject. Ableism has a sound purpose when it calls out discrimination against disabled people on grounds not related to their disability.
If parents have a newborn with a severe disability and that child needs to be on a respirator to survive, doctors will invite parents to decide whether to allow the child to die. That happens regularly and is generally uncontroversial. Yet it is what the child’s future will be like that is really relevant. And I think, even in cases where the child doesn’t need a respirator, parents should be able to consult doctors to reach a considered judgment, including that the child’s life is not one that is going to be a benefit for the child or for their family, and that therefore it is better to end the child’s life. If that is ableist, then it isn’t always wrong to be ableist.
You argue there are certain situations where we could replace the animals we experiment on with humans… During the Covid pandemic, I supported 1Day Sooner, an organisation of well informed volunteers offering to test the efficacy of candidate vaccines. That could have saved many thousands of lives by speeding up vaccine introduction, but the volunteers were rejected. There is also a case for beneficially using humans in persistent vegetative states from which we can be absolutely clear that they will never recover. People could sign consent statements, as they do with organ donation, saying they don’t mind their body being used for research if that were to happen.
While effective altruism – the philanthropic social movement you helped originate – has its critics, it has gained a following in recent years, including in Silicon Valley tech circles (disgraced cryptocurrency founder Sam Bankman-Fried was prominent in the movement). One newer idea it has spawned is longtermism. It prioritises the distant future over the concerns of today and advocates reducing the risk of our extinction, for example, by thwarting the possibility of hostile artificial intelligence (AI) and colonising space. To what extent do you endorse longtermism? We should think about the long-term future and we ought to try to reduce risks of extinction. Where I disagree with some effective altruists is how dominant longtermism should become in the movement. We need some balance between reducing the extinction risks and making the world a better place now. We shouldn’t negate our present problems or our relatively short-term future, not least because we can have much higher confidence that we can help people in these timeframes. Though the lives of people in the future aren’t of any less value, how we can best help people millennia from now is uncertain.
Are you vegan and how did you first become concerned about animal suffering? “Flexibly vegan” is how I would describe myself today. I don’t do it much, but I have no objection to eating oysters – I don’t think they can suffer – and oyster farming is quite an environmentally sustainable industry. Also, if I am out somewhere where it’s a real problem, I will go for something vegetarian. That my everyday purchases are vegan is the main thing.
A world of conscientious omnivores would produce much less meat and dairy products, with vastly less suffering
Myjourney began when I was a graduate student in philosophy at Oxford University in 1970. It was thanks to another graduate student explaining why he hadn’t chosen the meat option when we had lunch one day: he was vegetarian because he didn’t think the animals were treated right. My wife and I did some reading and became vegetarians soon after. Becoming mostly vegan took longer.
Conscientious omnivores oppose factory farming but continue to eat animal products from farmers who treat their animals well and don’t subject them to suffering. Do they get a pass? Honestly, I can’t show that they are wrong. Assume that the cows wouldn’t have existed if they weren’t going to be sold for their meat and the conscientious omnivores investigate how their food is produced, and can be confident that the animals really do have good lives and are killed painlessly and without suffering – then I think they do get a pass. They’re allies in the movement against factory farming, and a world of conscientious omnivores would produce much less meat and dairy products, with vastly less suffering.
What of meat grown from cultured animal cells? That gets more than a pass and I hope to try it soon. What is needed now is to produce it cheaply at scale. It is much better for the climate than meat from animals and for animal suffering. And while it is true that it still suggests that meat is desirable, there are people who are unwilling to make that switch to becoming vegan or vegetarian. The companies’ use of fetal bovine serum to develop their products is regrettable and I am pleased that many companies have found alternatives and stopped using it, but if there are no alternatives, its use can be justified. I don’t regard it as a reason for never eating them.
You’ve brought vegan recipes back in Animal Liberation Now. Why resurrect them and do you have a particular favourite? Popular demand! In 1975 there weren’t many good vegetarian or vegan cookbooks so it made sense to include recipes. Then, as that changed, I didn’t think people needed the recipes any more so I took them out. What I have put back is different. The focus is on my and my wife’s dishes. Both vegan recipes from our childhoods that we still make and then things we have started cooking since becoming mostly vegan. I have shifted to more Asian food and a favourite is the recipe for dal. It is a good meal and easy to make.
What are you working on now? The ethics of AI as it affects animals. A colleague and Ipublished our first paper on this last year. We need to ensure the AI systems starting to be used in factory farms to manage animals don’t further negatively affect their lives, that self-driving cars are programmed to avoid hitting animals and that biases against farm animals that can be replicated and reinforced through AI are minimised. ChatGPT refuses to give recipes for cooking dogs on the grounds that it is unethical but readily provides recipes for cooking chickens.
Animal Liberation Now by Peter Singer is published on 8 June by the Bodley Head (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Ethics in the Real World: 90 Essays on Things That Matter (updated and expanded) is published by Princeton University Press
An allegation that Wyoming Republican Party National Committeewoman Nina Webber sprayed bullets near a home last fall while hunting have been dropped with prejudice. She called the charge a political “hit job” and said that “the truth has finally come out.”
Wyoming GOP Committeewoman Nina Webber said she feels vindicated after charges alleging she was hunting recklessly near a home in Park County last fall were dropped with prejudice. She called the pursuit of the allegations a political “hit job.” (Courtesy Photo)
A Wyoming Republican Party National Committeewoman was cleared on a charge of reckless endangering on Wednesday after originally being accused of shooting bullets in close vicinity of a home and its residents while she was hunting.
On Wednesday, Park County Attorney Bryan Skoric dismissed the charge against Webber with prejudice, telling Cowboy State Daily the state did not have enough…
Exposing the Big Game 