Slip-eyed flatfish found!

Darkfrog submitted, created time 5 months 4 weeks (www.nature.com)

Although young flatfish have one eye on each side of their heads, the adult flatfish sports both on one side. This allows the fish to lie on the sea floor looking up and still retain its depth perception. This ocular migration has puzzled gradual evolutionists. If the trait evolved gradually over many generations, then why aren't there fossils showing fish with partially migrated eyes?

Well today's Nature posts the discovery of two such fish fossils, blowing a giant raspberry at both creationists and sudden-jump evolutionists alike.

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Evolution and historical continguency caught on tape! E. coli amass traits over time.

Darkfrog submitted, created time 6 months 3 weeks (www.pnas.org)

Historical contingency is a new phrase for me. I gather that it means "the idea that a given new mutation cannot create a new trait unless certain other, related mutations have already taken place." Anyway, it's been observed, repeatedly, in a laboratory setting.

Researchers split some identical E. coli into twelve colonies and gave them a glucose-poor medium that contained citrate, which E. coli cannot ordinarily process. Eventaully, around generation 32,000 some of the E. coli gained the ability to use citrate as food

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Impact of an extreme climatic event on community assembly

davidd submitted, created time 10 months 3 days (www.pnas.org)

Extreme climatic events are predicted to increase in frequency and magnitude, but their ecological impacts are poorly understood. Such events are large, infrequent, stochastic perturbations that can change the outcome of entrained ecological processes. Here they show how an extreme flood event affected a desert rodent community that has been monitored for 30 years.

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