Darwin alarmed by six-legged mutant cane toad Anyone who doubts that the cane toad will ultimately gain supremacy over Australia is directed to the Northern Territory News, which has a chilling story on a hexaped mutant Bufo marinus captured south of Darwin. Bufo marinus (aka Cane Toad) - a regular four-legged version Bufo marinus (aka cane toad) - with a paltry four …
Creationists awakened would be more likely.
Major British science site leads with article "Darwin alarmed?" over God's decision to create a six legged toad in utter violation of the Darwinsitic religion.
Grab you Bibles and praise the lord.
"Oh toady lord!"
Hang on, that can't be right.
"Oh lord of the toads!"
No, that doesn't work either.
"Tell me lord, how should one praise thy toadyness?"
So you're saying that _this_ toad has a soul? since to be pious it would need to be not only self-aware but also be capable of faith?
or maybe that _all_ toads have souls?
Does that mean that you are postulating that _all_ animals have a soul?
Be careful - once you open the pandoras box of religious stupid double-talk you can't close it again...
Oh - and for anyone of a religious bent the above is a joke....
Depends on the original text. I'm pretty sure (having had several discussions with various people about the matter) that the word for soul in this context is entirely different from the word that is used to suggest god put his "breath" into humans to make them live. Many would hold that this is what is really meant by the soul and why humans are different from animals.
Stronger/longer legs in 80 years due to natural selection is entirely possible. If the conditions favour longer legged toads, then that is what you will get.
Extra legs (like longer legs) is a mutation, that will be unlikely to spread as the article points out that the toad in question was clumsy. We can assume clumsy toads will be less successful than their long-legged brethren.
Short answer: Don't expect Zergs rushing to knock down your door anytime soon.
"Stronger/longer legs in 80 years due to natural selection is entirely possible. If the conditions favour longer legged toads, then that is what you will get."
The toads aren't in a closed system, but expanding outwards. The longer/stronger legged toads can travel more than their short/weaker legged compatriots, meaning that each breeding cycle only breeds those with long/strong legs as they keep expanding out.
It would be interesting to find out how those left near the origin are fairing. Are they more muscular overall, having to compete with each other? Are they smaller, having to fight for the same resources? Any other advantages or disadvantages show up that aren't seen in those out on the perimeter?
Though mutations might take millions of years to occur, the success of them can happen in mere decades.
Think about it - the gene mutations to give a toad longer legs than its mother/father will only happen quite rarely - and even rarer for them to not negatively affect the animal and even rarer to positively affect the animal. DNA and its associated mechanisms actually has a lot of error-checking-and-correction code inside it, according to the geneticist I live with, so it's quite hard for even a mutation of junk DNA to actually do anything noticeable. But once a toad is out there with longer legs, breeding and stealing food that the other toads can't get to / can't get to fast enough, the wipeout and replacement can be quite quick.
This is what we see in the archaeological record too. It took BILLIONS of years to get from single-celled to multi-celled animals. But it took only MILLIONS of years to get from there to crustaceans because it was SO much more efficient and successful to be an animal than a cell. And we've only been around for 200,000 years in our modern form (i.e. not hairy, having goosebumps instead of your hair standing up, having wisdom teeth that do nothing and are too big for your jaw, etc.).
Genetic mutation is damn slow. Natural selection is damn fast (literally, within generations and with lots of animals a generation can be less than a year!). Evolution is a conjoining of both concepts to explain long, long histories. When we evolved out of our predecessors, the predecessor pretty much died off or was isolated very, very quickly. There aren't still Neanderthal walking the Earth because we wiped them out, either because we perceived them as a threat and destroyed every simple example across the globe or (more likely) we interbred and eventually bred their genes out for more successful ones. And we did it far, far, quicker than you'd think.
This is why it is hard / nonsensical to go looking for a Missing Link to join ancient species and ourselves. The amount of time the evolution takes to a even a single example of a more successful form is enormous, but the change is almost immediate when it happens.
Why the French? The Chinese are much closer and there are a lot more of them. Get a bunch of Chinese medicine doctors to say that it makes your penis bigger, or gives you more "staying power" and you'd have hoards of Chinese come in to catch them all. The cane toad problem would be solved in less than 5 years...
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