Evolution is... er, right.

[dangermom]

One can also perhaps understand how the Salt Lake Tribune would like to consider Brigham Young University as being the vanguard of a revolution in biology.

Eh, I have to doubt that statement. The SLTrib is fairly well-known as being, at best, ambivalent about the LDS Church. It’s not exactly in BYU’s pocket.

[Terrifel]

Er, sorry. That wasn’t my intended meaning. I simply meant to suggest that newspapers often tend to talk up the doings of their local universities. For example, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette might do a story on the revolutionary, soon-to-be-ubiquitous fruits of the Robotics Department at Carnegie-Mellon University (located in Pittsburgh). Maybe that wasn’t the case here, and newspapers across the country will soon be reporting the stick insect breakthrough, I don’t know. I certainly didn’t intend to slur the Salt Lake Tribune (or the researchers at Brigham Young, for that matter. Stick insect research is dangerously underfunded as it is).

[Darwin_s_Finch]

A few snippets from the stick-bug paper in question (Whiting, M., Bradler, S. and Maxwell, T. “Loss and recovery of wings in stick insects”. Nature. 421, 264 - 267 (2003)):

Here we show that stick insects (order Phasmatodea) diversified as wingless insects and that wings were derived secondarily, perhaps on many occasions. These results suggest that wing developmental pathways are conserved in wingless phasmids, and that ‘re-evolution’ of wings has had an unrecognized role in insect diversification.
[…]
Entomologists have long assumed that re-evolution of wings in apterous lineages was impossible, because functional wings require complex interactions among multiple structures, and the associated genes would be free to accumulate mutations in wingless lineages, effectively blocking the path for any future wing reacquisition. However, this assumption requires that developmental pathways for wing formation are largely independent of pathways required for development of other structures. For instance, in Drosophila and other insects, leg and wing imaginal discs have a common origin from a single group of cells and the developmental pathway for wing determination has been largely co-opted (recruited) from the pathway required for limb formation. Therefore it is not surprising that the basic genetic instructions for wing formation are conserved in wingless insects, because similar instructions are required to form legs, and probably other critical structures.
[…]
Re-evolving complex structures from the same basic building blocks may be a more general trend in evolution than previously recognized… Our results support the hypothesis that the developmental pathway for wing formation evolved only once in insect diversification, but that wings evolved many times by silencing and re-expressing this pathway in different lineages during insect evolution.

Which pretty much reinforces much of what has already been said here

[Beagle]

Does any of this mean I might get the blowhole I always wanted?

DA-DA-DUM-CHING!

[tracer]

*Originally posted by E-Sabbath *
**What it does do is give support for punctured equlibirium, by showing a method of rapid change being possible. I think. **

Actually, this pseudogene-reactivation scenario is not necessary to explain punctuated equilibrium.

All that is necessary to explain punctuated equilibrium is a relatively constant rate of mutation, and abrupt changes in a population’s environment. In a stable environment (and by “stable environment” here I mean that the weather, food sources, predators, and any other external factors that the population encounters remain the same over a very long period), almost no expressed mutations are going to be beneficial, so individuals with expressed mutations will tend to die away quickly. After a sudden shift in the environment, however, a significantly larger percentage of mutations (say, 0.01% instead of 0.0001%) will be beneficial, and thus mutations have a much higher chance of sweeping to fixation throughout the population.

[E-Sabbath]

I didn’t say it was necessary, Tracer, just that it might give support, by displaying a method by which the expressed mutations might show dramatic changes in short periods of time.