One thing has happened that really has me fascinated. It is the first time I have ever heard of anything like this, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't happened before. There is a certain type of fish that is evolving backwards. Lake Washington in Seattle, was the subject of a toxic cleanup in the 1960s. I don't know how many of you have seen some of those horror movies where someone falls into a vat of toxic waste and then turns into a monster? Anyway, in a way that is what has happened to a type of fish in that lake. In adapting to it's poisonous surroundings, it evolved backwards. The fish is the threespine stickleback. What makes this all the stranger, is that scientists believe that evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years, yet this fish was able to evolve backwards in only a relatively few years. Does this mean that if something catastrophic happens to the earth, we might evolve back to cavemen or worse, in a short period of time? If this holds true for animals and it turns out that it also holds true for us, then how do we know that it hasn't happened to us in the dim past? Maybe some of those old movies, like Rocket ship XM, where they find people on Mars that had reverted to cave people after nuclear destruction, were right? Wow this would just be another reason why we should get rid of that stuff. One researcher stated, "There are not many documented examples of reverse evolution in nature, but perhaps that's just because people haven't really looked." How did all this happen? Well there is a theory. I can't buy it because there is a huge hole in the thinking, but I will present it anyway. Some scientists believe that when the lake was polluted, it was so murky that it provided protection from the stickleback being seen by predators, but when it was cleaned up the visibility increased so much that the fish needed protection and reversed back to a state where it had bony armor. The problem that I find with this, is that the lake was not always polluted and yet the fish had not reverted to our knowledge.The transparency in the lake did go from a few inches to over twenty five feet today. Scientists think that they know what gene controls the plating in the fish and they call it Eda. They claim that there are two types of this gene, one is for slight plating and the other for full plating.

An editor of a scientific journal has stated that he discovered a genetic defect in us. According to what he said, he believes that this defect sets back humans over a million years on the evolutionary scale. He believes that this genetic defect, a sort of disease if you like, is producing people that look and act they way they did over a million years ago. He states that the victims of this hideous disease walk on all fours and speak some primitive type of language. Here is where I have a problem. Since language is learned, shouldn't we assume that the people are only muttering sounds? The researcher is a professor at a university in Turkey. The condition has been named Uner Tan syndrome. He claims to have found a family in Turkey, where five children from a family of nineteen have this affliction and walk on all fours. He stated that they spoke to each other in a primitive language that had only a couple of hundred words, but understood each other. All of the five were mentally retarded. He stated that they couldn't count to ten and were totally unaware of where they lived, but had strong arms and legs. I would also like to know why he believes that this retarded condition reflects how man was millions of years ago? The researcher stated that he found the site that caused this condition and it is the area of the genome called chromosome 17p, which happens to be where the biggest genetic difference is between chimps and men. There is a theory that states that evolution does not take place over long periods of time, but in sudden spurts. This doesn't account for reverse evolution. A U.S. biologist stated that backwards evolution is plausible and testable in people.

I believe that most of us know at least a little about how this country works. Knowing this, we have to figure that the military would love to get their hands on something like this. Think of all the mindless soldiers that they could create, that might be much stronger than us and obey orders without questioning them. It is like something out of a Hollywood script. Think about what the military might try and do with this and how it has a possibility of setting back the entire human race. Some government organizations in the 1960s had no problem giving designer drugs to unsuspecting employees to see their reactions, so we can't take it for granted that this is too horrible for them to do. I really hate to say this, but if a new weapon is involved, I would put nothing past those military scientists. Before we believe that reverse evolution actually took place in humans, let's hear what another U.S. biologist had to say about the matter. “My opinion is that the chance that this human disorder is related to the evolution of our early ancestors and their mode of walking is remote...” This scientist doesn't believe that just one or a few genetic changes could have resulted in upright walking. Now get this, he also stated that what looks like a case of reverse evolution could really be caused by new genes mimicking the effects of the old ones. I will leave it to you to figure out that statement.

Some scientists believe that they have caused a crustacean to undergo reverse evolution. The crustacean are called facetotectans. This creature was given a hormone to force the juvenile form of the creature to grow into the adult and what the scientists got amazed even them. The creature, to the surprise of everyone that observed it, seemed to evolve backwards. What happened next was it shredded it's exoskeleton and became a creature that was eyeless, had no limbs and sort of wiggled around. Clearly the resultant creature was far more primitive than what it had been. The scientists were so shocked that they had to repeat the experiment several times, but they got the same results each time. The resultant creature is so primitive that it lacks a digestive tract and nervous system.

In line with all this, scientists decided to see if they could reconstruct a primitive gene. The gene they were attempting to replicate was over one half billion years old. They took two modern mouse genes, that had descended from the ancient gene and spliced key portions of it together to try and replicate the ancient gene. One of the scientists stated, "We've shown some of the elements involved in the process of evolution by reversing this process and reconstructing a gene that later became two genes," Apparently the process of one gene splitting into multiple genes has occurred many times in nature during evolution, but it had never been put back again before this. Here is the part that I like. Scientists are now saying that maybe they could use this to cure a genetic disease, by cutting out the part of the gene causing a disease and restoring it to it's prior, disease free condition. The type of genes that the researchers were working with were the Hox genes. They control an embryo's stem development. If the Hoxa 1 gene is knocked out, a mouse dies because his brain stem malfunctions and he can't breathe, among other things. There is a similar disease that is prevalent among some races of people, such as the Navajo and Apache indians. Hopefully this research could lead to a cure for this ailment.

New Scientist has reported that researchers have found that two different types of bacteria are trying to merge back into one previous type. In other words, this is reverse evolution of bacteria. The two types of bacteria, Campylobacter coli and C. jejuni just happen to be the major causes of food poisoning. It is believed that these two types of bacteria had been one, over one hundred million years ago and were headed back in that direction. It turns out the these two types of bacteria have recently begun to exchange genetic material at a rapid rate. So what is going on here? We certainly can't say that evolution is going backwards, but can we say that maybe it has just started to do so in a few species? Could this be the beginning of reverse evolution in more and more animals, or has this type of thing always gone on in a few species, but was relatively unnoticed in the past? There is no way to know what was missed in the past, since during most of our past there was no way of detecting anything like this. As we know, we only recently acquired the ability to even notice these things. Perhaps some of what we think are different types of animal fossils that we have acquired, are really of the same animal who has evolved backwards?