Within one generation, no less. From this 2008 article:

It's a miracle! Blind cavefish, despite having adapted to their lightless environment for more than a million years, can produce sighted offspring in just a single generation, a new study reveals.

The ability was discovered when researchers mated fish from distinct populations that had been isolated in separate caves.

In some cases the first-generation offspring of such unions could see.

Anyway, some thoughts below the cut.

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Mike just wrote an excellent post on the The Archaean Expansion. The number of complete genomes is increasing very rapidly. If I'm not mistaken, there are now 1457 complete prokaryotic genomes (98 of archaea and 1359 of bacteria) available at the NCBI; but much more are ongoing, see here.

I have an interest in what LUCA may have looked like, and in particular, the ancestral mechanism for coupling electron flow to proton pumping. Reconstruction of these types of enzymes' evolutionary history seems to show that an A-type O₂Red (also called SoxM) was present in the last common ancestor of Archaea and Bacteria. Although there are many proposed explanations for this phenomenon (most of which in my opinion are fle-friendly) , I still find it interesting that LUCA may have been ready for an oxidizing substrate at a time when there was little to no oxygen.

I have a nostalgic streak going

And good luck.

Because there's currently no Open Thread on the front page, here we go.

Polite, off-topic discussion ahoy. Also, that girl looks like a younger Eugenie Scott.

Mike Gene has come up with the 10 signs of intellectual honesty, which is a very nice thing to strive to be. Unfortunately, most of us over rate how intellectually honest we really are. And even if we were completely intellectually honest, we are still fallible human beings with a finite amount of knowledge.

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Vanderbilt researchers say:

“The thinking has been that there is very little horizontal gene transfer among plants and animals except for a few big, ancient events and maybe the occasional transfer of a single gene here or there,” Slot said. “Our discovery suggests that the horizontal transfer of gene clusters may have been a big player not only in the evolution of bacteria but also in more complex organisms.”

On pages 148 and 149 of his book Signature in the Cell author Stephen Meyer discusses design and a distinction between origins and operations science suggested by Charles Thaxton. Origins, be they of life, the universe or consciousness, are unique historic events. Unlike a physical process, which is observable and continually repeated, such as the replication of cells (and many other processes) origin events cannot be studied as they unfold. Thaxton would describe cellular replication as an example of operations science. If a physical process is observed and there is much about it that remains unknown we can be confident that with time the unknowns will give way to knowledge. Operations science is cited frequently by ID critics in exchanges with IDists albeit not with that label attached.
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Of interest to those among us – like me – who are fascinated by HGT in general. I was just asking Mike about this sort of thing, so this is a bit of serendipity.

CHICAGO — If a human cell and a bacterial cell met at a speed-dating event, they would never be expected to exchange phone numbers, much less genetic material. In more scientific terms, a direct transfer of DNA has never been recorded from humans to bacteria.

Until now. Northwestern Medicine researchers have discovered the first evidence of a human DNA fragment in a bacterial genome – in this case, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacterium that causes gonorrhea. Further research showed the gene transfer appears to be a recent evolutionary event.

More here.

If I understand what Cargo Cult Science is supposed to be, it refers to people mistakenly assuming their cause is identical to the real cause of a resulting event. In this case, the natives assumed that their look-alike airstrip, look-alike headphones and look-alike radio transmitter were the cause of airplanes landing. What the failure of their results should have told them is that they were wrong.

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Oleg(t) has dismissed most of us ID proponents as being nothing but a bunch of amateurs. I won't deny his accusation. When it comes to the field of biology, most of us are amateurs. (Of course, when it comes to recognizing other conscious minds and products of intelligent design, I think we are all experts.) But I will deny the relevance of his accusation. You see, the experts of biology, Dawkins, Coyne, Ken Miller, and others, keep writing popular books for us amateurs, in order to convince us of the truth of evolution. Why? Apparently they think we are capable of evaluating the evidence if it is presented to us properly. If they think we are capable of evaluating the evidence, then I see no need to listen to the accusation of another rank amateur telling us that we are not capable of evaluating the evidence.

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Some philosophers argue that Darwin was a teleologist. For example:

1) James G. Lennox in his article "Darwin was a teleologist" (and his exchange with Ghiselin).

2) Andre Ariew in his article "Platonic and Aristotelian Roots of Teleological Arguments in Cosmology and Biology"  in the book  "Functions: new essays in the philosophy of psychology and biology".

3) Similary, T. Hoquet in the article: "Darwin teleologist? Design in The orchids".

One of the reasons for arguing why Darwin was indeed a teleologist is related to his view of natural selection. To quote Ariew:

How is natural selection a teleological "force"? I see remnants of two sorts of teleology operating in Darwin. The key to seeing both is within Darwin's concept of natural selection which can be summed up as follows: as a result of individuals possessing different heritable abilities striving to survive and reproduce in local environments, comes an explanation for changes in trait composition of populations through time. Traits become prevalent in populations because they are useful to organisms in their struggle to survive. Aristotle's functional teleology is preserved through the idea that an item's existence can be explained in terms of its usefulness (Lennox 1993). What makes a trait useful is that it provides certain individuals an advantage over others in their own struggle to survive and reproduce. Secondly, the concept of individual striving to survive and reproduce plays the fundamental role in Darwin's explanation for the origins of organic diversity. The same concept reminds us of Aristotle's formal teleology – the striving for self-preservation.

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Thanks to Sal Cordova I now know that Larry Moran is a Soup Skeptic.

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Evolution News and Views has a video of Stephen Meyer arguing against Front-loading and Theistic Evolution. Hoping he might be offering an argument against Mike Gene's hypothesis, and possibly provide a way out of my dilemma (it keeps me up to all hours of the night: Mike Gene or Mike Behe? Mike Behe or Mike Gene?), I watched it.

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