Rapid evolution in threespine sticklebacks

Posted on May 17, 2008 by petrel41

This video from the USA is about fossil sticklebacks and evolution.

From the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in the USA:

Researchers document rapid, dramatic ‘reverse evolution‘ in the threespine stickleback fish

Adaptation coincides with the ’60s cleanup of toxic pollution in Seattle’s Lake Washington

SEATTLE – Evolution is supposed to inch forward over eons, but sometimes, at least in the case of a little fish called the threespine stickleback, the process can go in relative warp-speed reverse, according to a study led by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and published online ahead of print in the May 20 issue of Current Biology (Cell Press).

“There are not many documented examples of reverse evolution in nature,” said senior author Catherine “Katie” Peichel, Ph.D., “but perhaps that’s just because people haven’t really looked.”

Peichel and colleagues turned their gaze to the sticklebacks that live in Lake Washington, the largest of three major lakes in the Seattle area. Five decades ago, the lake was, quite literally, a cesspool, murky with an overgrowth of blue-green algae that thrived on the 20 million gallons of phosphorus-rich sewage pumped into its waters each day. Thanks to a $140 million cleanup effort in the mid-‘60s – at the time considered the most costly pollution-control effort in the nation – today the lake and its waterfront are a pristine playground for boaters and billionaires.

It’s precisely that cleanup effort that sparked the reverse evolution, Peichel and colleagues surmise. Back when the lake was polluted, the transparency of its water was low, affording a range of vision only about 30 inches deep. The tainted, mucky water provided the sticklebacks with an opaque blanket of security against predators such as cutthroat trout, and so the fish needed little bony armor to keep them from being eaten by the trout.

In 1968, after the cleanup was complete, the lake’s transparency reached a depth of 10 feet. Today, the water’s clarity approaches 25 feet. Lacking the cover of darkness they once enjoyed, over the past 40 years about half of Lake Washington sticklebacks have evolved to become fully armored, with bony plates protecting their bodies from head to tail. For example, in the late ‘60s, only 6 percent of sticklebacks in Lake Washington were completely plated. Today, 49 percent are fully plated and 35 percent are partially plated, with about half of their bodies shielded in bony armor. This rapid, dramatic adaptation is actually an example of evolution in reverse, because the normal evolutionary tendency for freshwater sticklebacks runs toward less armor plating, not more.

“We propose that the most likely cause of this reverse evolution in the sticklebacks is from the higher levels of trout predation after the sudden increase in water transparency,” said Peichel, whose Hutchinson Center lab has established the stickleback as a new model for studying complex genetic traits.

Heritable Differences in Schooling Behavior among Threespine Stickleback Populations Revealed by a Novel Assay: here.

In a remote area of British Columbia’s Vancouver Island, Kennedy Lake’s deep blue waters stretch over 25 square miles. The lake is home to the threespine stickleback, a diminutive fish species that has provided rich fodder for evolutionary study: here.

Stickleback fish show initiative, personality and leadership: here.

A common species of fish which is found across Europe including the UK, called the nine-spined stickleback, could be the first animal shown to exhibit an important human social learning strategy: here.

France’s forgotten history of slavery

Posted on May 17, 2008 by petrel41

This video is called European colonialism Slavery in Africa.

From French daily L’Humanité:

By Rosa Moussaoui

France’s forgotten history of slavery returns to view

Translated 17 mai 2008, by Susannah Readett-Bayley

Memory. The slave trade and historic violence to black populations that have been hidden for so long in history books are slowly but surely being acknowledged. Freedom march tomorrow, in Paris.

On April 28th, 1948, at the centenary celebration of the abolition of slavery at the Sorbonne, Aimé Césaire described the event in 1848 as “both huge but also insufficient”. Huge, because shortly after the rise of the people in a revolution that would topple the ‘Monarchie de Juillet’ the decree of abolition of slavery was declared, a result of the combined struggle against slavery and the dogged combat by men such as Victor Schoelcher. Insufficient, because the Republic would continue to dominate with other forms of colonialism, and because, while this decree would end the practice of slavery in the colonies, it would mark the beginning of many years of denial. This denial was flagrant in French President Jacques Chirac’s astounding declaration in 2000 at Point-à-Pitre : “Haiti has never been a French colony in the true sense of the word.” Two years before, however, 40,000 people claiming to be “descendants of slaves” mainly of West-Indian origin met on May 23rd, 1998 to march in Paris to “condemn the official denial of slavery”.

A “crime against humanity”

This movement — that demands that the hunting, capture, deportation, reduction to servitude, and subjection to the most atrocious cruelty and exploitation of millions of human beings be officially recognized — achieved a breakthrough in 2001 when the Taubira Law was voted in. This text, which calls slavery and the slave trade “crimes against humanity”, was a concrete step in bringing these issues back into national dialogue.

São Tomé and the Slave Trade: here.

Origins of the trans-Atlantic slave trade: here.

Role Of Slave Trade In Evolution Of American Wild Rice Species: here.

How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler

Posted on May 17, 2008 by petrel41

This video says about itself:

The US Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, began investigating Nazi finances 60 years ago and found Allied banks, including many British and American high street names, who continued to do business with Hitler’s Germany throughout the war.

This item about George W. Bush’s family is nearly four years old. Yet, today it is the most read article on the website of British daily The Guardian, according to that site.

From British daily The Guardian, September 25 2004:

How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power

Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today’s president

* Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington

George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator’s action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The debate over Prescott Bush’s behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the “Bush/Nazi” connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Remarkably, little of Bush’s dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush’s business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.

While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen‘s US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

Tantalising

Bush was also on the board of at least one of the companies that formed part of a multinational network of front companies to allow Thyssen to move assets around the world.

Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal company in Germany and grew rich from Hitler’s efforts to re-arm between the two world wars. One of the pillars in Thyssen’s international corporate web, UBC, worked exclusively for, and was owned by, a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands. More tantalising are Bush’s links to the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC), based in mineral rich Silesia on the German-Polish border. During the war, the company made use of Nazi slave labour from the concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

Lithuania and the Holocaust: here.

Sarkozy’s plans for anti-trade union laws in France

Posted on May 17, 2008 by petrel41

This is a video from France about striking workers demonstrating, in 2009.

From British daily News Line:

Saturday, 17 May 2008

SARKOZY THREATENS TEACHERS WITH ANTI-UNION LAWS

President Sarkozy threw down the gauntlet to the teaching unions immediately after the hugely successful national strike and demonstrations on Thursday.

He shocked union leaders by ignoring their protests against his ‘reforms’ and took aim at the right to strike.

He announced provocatively that he was ordering a Bill to go before the National Assembly, to be passed before the summer, calling for the introduction of a ‘minimum service’ on the days of strike in the primary sector.

This strike-breaking move would mean that the local authorities keep the schools open and organise supervised day care for the children.

Alongside this, education minister Darcos is to make it compulsory for the education unions to give at least forty-eight hours notice of any strike action to give time for the anti-strike plans to be put into effect.

The general secretary of the FSU teachers’ union, Gérard Aschieri, warned that a ‘red line has been crossed’.

Thursday’s mass demonstrations, of teachers and youth, when an estimated 450,000 marched, were nationwide and called by both the education and the public and civil service unions, to protest against the government’s job cuts, wage restraint and privatisation moves across all the public services.

Next Thursday, May 22, will see workers on the streets again as the five great union confederations, CGT, CFDT, FO, CGC and CFTC have called for a national day of action and demonstrations by workers in both the public and private sectors to defend pensions and the age of retirement from the right-wing ‘reform’ attacks.

All the SNCF rail unions have decided to strike on the 22nd and the RATP, Paris urban transport network, and Air France unions are also making the call.

Sarkozy’s provocation is expected to increase the turnout.