Genetic adaptation

One of the questions plaguing scientists, especially environmental scientists these days, is how long does it take Mother Nature to adapt to change? How long will an organism take to adapt to a new environment? How long does it take a maple tree to adapt to a 10-degree change in weather patterns? How long does it take wheat to adapt to acid rain? How long does man need to, say, adapt to a change in oxygen levels in the air? Or put another way: Will adaptation take longer than the time of environmental degradation, resulting in death of a species, perhaps our species?

The way scientists measure this period of adaptation is by studying our planet’s past.

When did life first appear? What were the first plants? When did plants evolve flowers for procreation with bees and insects? When did that ape stand upright and begin the development of man? Obviously, the more recently any of these major evolutionary changes took place, the quicker the organism can adapt to current planetary changes like global warming, pollution, acid rain and so on. So when you have fixed-time discoveries like our ancestor Lucy (found at Aramis, Ethiopia) aged 3,200,000 years or the first flowering plants of 30,000,000 years ago (found embedded in rock in China and Nubia), environmental scientists can plot the time for current adaptation based on a known time span for evolutionary changes: flowering plants (meaning also pollinating insects), to seed-bearing plants, to wind-borne plants.... and so on to today’s species. Kind of like a whole Earth/Galapagos scientific study but using rocks and fossils as guideposts.

The study of the environment as a science is so recent that it is not surprising that most of what we hypothesize about our environment falls away before becoming theory or fact. You try grappling with Earth’s environmental problems when the science changes daily! Global warming has become “not as cold as it once was” and (once every) 500-year droughts have become signposts of a massive continental change that is irreversible. Now, for these poor struggling scientists, grappling with their own scientific quicksand come two bits of news from paleontologists that have drastically changed their timeline on every living thing:

Famous Lucy, at 3,200,000 years of age, isn’t the oldest human ancestor standing upright.

That honor goes to bones of a woman found in central Kenya by researchers from the College of France. Nicknamed the Millenium Woman, her bones are 6,000,000 years old.

The first flowering plants, well the earliest examples we now know of, are now from New Jersey not China or Nubia. In digging the parking lot for a new mall in 1999, a developer came upon a field of charcoal. A primordial fire had swept through a forest and charcoal crystallized every plant and flower. Dozens of species of flowers and plants, seeds and all, have been found, including Clusia, perfect in every detail. Age of the charcoal field? 90,000,000 years; dinosaur time. Bees at the time of dinosaurs! What an incredible discovery, what a serious timeline shift, from 30,000,000 years all the way back in time to another 60,000,000 years.

And now in southern Africa, in just two generations, elephant are being born without tusks — evolutionary change because of hunting and poaching pressure. Their environmental pressure from poaching hastened DNA changes.

The trickle-down effect of all this is amazing and prompts environmental scientists to some scary, but action-requiring, conclusions: We’ve been here, the plants and us, for longer than anyone knew, and yet we can quickly adapt to pressure and change needed. Our capability to change in time to adapt to the alterations we are swiftly making to the planet as a whole may, in fact, be possible. Everything may have to adapt and become new again as Mother Nature – around us and in us — proves that she, and she alone, knows our true history and probably controls our destiny.

Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.