Seed Vaults

Previously I have mentioned the amazing seed vault in Norway, that seemingly offers plants a better chance of surviving a cataclysm than humans have.

Other places to find species kept safe include:

Native Seeds - 2000 plant varieties in Tucson, USA.

Ambrose Monell Cryo Collection - houses a million frozen tissue samples representing the DNA of a wide range of animal species. Located in New York City.

Millennium Seed Bank Project - large underground frozen vaults in West Sussex, UK, preserving the world's largest collection of seeds. Now has over 1 billion seeds stored. Aiming to cover 24,000 species of plants, approximately 10% of all existing dry land flora.

Supporting Evolution Snippets from New Scientist

Can mutation really lead to the evolution of new species?

Yes. Several species of abalone shellfish have evolved due to mutations in the protein "key" on the surface of sperm that binds to a "lock" on the surface of eggs. This might appear impossible, but it turns out that some eggs are prepared to be penetrated by deviant sperm. The same thing can happen in fruit flies, and likely in many other groups too. In yeasts, the mutations that led to some new species forming have not only been identified, they have even been reversed.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/dn13673-evolution-myths-mutations-can-only-destroy-information.html

Organisms do not always hang about waiting for a helpful mutation to occur. For instance, the parasite that causes sleeping sickness has thousands of spare genes for its coat proteins, which it mixes and matches to generate new coats faster than its host's immune system can keep up.

More controversially, a few biologists think some microbes may have evolved mechanisms for boosting the mutation rate in specific genes when they are struggling to cope with a changing environment, or for "storing up" variation for when it is needed

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/dn13698-evolution-myths-evolution-is-random.html

It won't be long (hopefully pre-2012) before a prominent scientist dares to suggest that we evolve the the way our DNA chooses, into new species.

Rollback your DNA

Found this at The Scientist. Seems even after DNA has been changed, planst can revert back to the DNA of their ancestors:

She had found that a mutant Arabidopsis plant could "fix itself" back to the wild-type and take on the genetics of its grandparents. That seemed to contradict the laws of Mendelian inheritance.

It all sounds very similar to current Windows software that saves a snapshot of your system, and lets you rollback to those settings if something bad happens - like catching a computer virus

According to this theory, somewhere in the plant cells exists an RNA copy of ancestral DNA, sequences of which the plants can tap and randomly substitute into their own DNA, accounting for the reversion. Of course, Gregor Mendel's law of segregation states that offspring inherit two alleles for one trait, one allele from each parent. That means there's a linear relationship of inheritance between parent and child, and each offspring's alleles can only come directly from their parents' alleles. A non-Mendelian system of inheritance has "enormous implications," says Lolle, with the potential to unseat nearly two centuries of assumptions in genetic research.

...Researchers speculate this mechanism evolved as a way to evade viruses that often create double-stranded RNA as they spread in the host system.

Risk Distribution Law For Evolution

I've been saying for a long time that a bombardment of cosmic rays would cause high rates of mutations in humans, but our bodies are capable of repairing DNA damage, and can choose which damage to leave unfixed. That's correct - choose.

Now supporting evidence has arrived:

Barkai and her team discovered a sort of "risk distribution law" for evolution. They found that a genetic "phrase" that regularly shows up in the promoter region of genes (the bit of genetic code responsible for activating the gene) contains a key to gene conservation: The expression of a gene that contains the sequence TATA in its promoter is more likely to have evolved than that of a gene that does not have TATA in its promoter.

In other words, the level of risk appears to written in the gene code, in a way that's similar to financial risk analysis: When the cost of error is high, an investor's willingness to chance the risk is low, but if the cost of a mistake is negligible, even if the chance of making one is high, the possibility of gain may make the risk worthwhile. Evolution, it seems, discovered this principle millions of years before Wall Street. (more here)

Example:

Perhaps we could afford to mess with the size of our ears, but we would rather not take any risks with our eyes.

A gene associated with the size of ears might have the sequence TATA, so when mutated, the DNA is not repaired, and new sizes of ears develop. But a gene associated with the eye might not have the sequence TATA, so our body repairs any damage to it.

----

This means that many humans can mutate in similar ways - and this gives us the potential to mutate into a new human species, via cosmic ray bombardment