We may no longer suffer the evolutionary pressures that plagued our ancestors, but this doesn’t mean mother nature has gone into retirement...
Back in 1965, Rudolph Zallinger created an illustration for Time Life books, which has been much-imitated and satirised. The original image, called The March Of Progress, depicted a chimpanzee-like creature on the left, and ended with what can be fairly described as a healthy-looking and athletic man of European ethnicity on the right. The message from this influential image and its title was clear: human evolution is a progressive march from primal origins to the final, all-singing, all-dancing, all-Tweeting specimens that we are today. We represent the pinnacle of Mother Nature’s achievements. She can now rest, her work being at an end, with the creation of a being that has mastery over its own fate. Human evolution now appears to be over.
Except it isn’t – not by a long way. In fact, it will never be over, nor could it be. Evolution is something that is happening all the time in all populations of all species on the planet. The word ‘evolution’ simply means ‘cumulative change’, with biological evolution referring specifically to changes in allele frequencies different versions of the same gene, and their distribution changes all the time. This is because new mutations arise in the genetic code and individuals move between populations. Sometimes, the changes are simply down to chance. And when any of these happen (and they always happen), biological evolution is occurring.
ENDLESS EVOLUTION
This story is from the Christmas 2016 edition of BBC Focus - Science & Technology.
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This story is from the Christmas 2016 edition of BBC Focus - Science & Technology.
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Do We Finally Know How the Egyptian Pyramids Were Built? - A number of breakthrough studies are beginning to paint a picture of how these wonders of the world were built, but much of the story still remains a mystery...
A number of breakthrough studies are beginning to paint a picture of how these wonders of the world were built, but much of the story still remains a mystery...How the Egyptian pyramids were built has long been a mystery. Constructed as tombs for the pharaohs over 4,000 years ago, more than 100 of them remain. The largest one, the Great Pyramid of Giza, was originally 147m tall (482ft). It's made up of about 2.3 million stone blocks, each weighing between 2.5 and 15 tonnes, and would have had to be transported to the building site and lifted into place with techniques available at the time. To put this into context, it's akin to lifting a double-decker London bus to the top of St Pauls Cathedral a few million times.
An Artificial Heart Inspired by Plumbing - Mechanical circulation could revolutionise transplant design and reduce waiting lists
Mechanical circulation could revolutionise transplant design and reduce waiting lists. In July, this artificial heart was successfully implanted, for the first time, into a patient with end-stage heart failure. Built by The Texas Heart Institute (THI) and BiVACOR, the replacement organ has been dubbed the Total Artificial Heart (TAH). Although, being an implant rather than transplant, it's designed to temporarily support patients while they wait for a real heart transplant.
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