I've been studying examples of extreme evolution, starting with a yeast that forms the spore outside the cell, Nadsonia fulvescens, in graduate school and then a mushroom that evolved from a single celled yeast and emerging from the ground 20 thousand years ago, Morchella esculenta.

There are huge amounts of evolution physiology in those two species; so I became an evolution physiologist. Probably no one else calls themselves an evolution physiologist. Small amounts of evolution physiology get integrated into all microbiology, because microbes evolve while being studied. But the scale doesn't generally compete with the evolution studies based on fossil evidence. Physiology studied on the broad scale of evolution fills in a lot of gaps that fossil evidence leaves out.

ATP Induction Of Differentiation

Mycologists don't know that the most important question in mycology has been answered, which is, what causes differentiation to occur. That question originated during the early 1950s, as yeast scientists determined that once sporulation began it would go to completion but the trigger mechanism could not be found. Every chemical on the shelves was tested; and it did not create the trigger mechanism.

Then in 1967, a botanist in the Netherlands, A.F. Croes, took a look at some graphs and said, there is a peak in the energy level just when sporulation of yeast begins and the energy peak is probably the trigger mechanism. Two years later, I found measured evidence that it is an energy peak that starts the sporulation process. Depletion of nitrogen shows the result. Without nitrogen, no synthesis can occur, while energy continues be produced as ATP resulting in a large amount of ATP being produced and promoting yeast sporulation.

It is now apparent that a peak in the ATP level is the inducer for differentiation in all fungi. The reason is obvious. A peak in the ATP level shows that cell structures are adequately developed and physiology is suitable to complete the differentiation process.

The effect is shown in growing the common mushrooms. After mycelium covers the compost, a layer of peat moss is used to cover the mycelium, called a casing. Mycelium grows slowly through the casing, since water seals out oxygen. After about six weeks, mycelium that gets to the surface transforms into a mushroom.

The difference between inside the casing and the surface of the casing is oxygen availability. The only major thing dioxygen gas does in biology is generate ATP.

Yet mushroom scientists are still looking for a substance inside the casing that causes the mushroom to form. Why wouldn't the mushroom form inside the casing, if the causative agent were inside the casing?

During the 1980S and 90s, the substance was assumed to be acetylene. Later it was assumed to be a bacterium. That's decades after my results were published; but mycologists do not tend to read microbiology journals, because they work in botany departments and study plant physiology instead of microbial physiology.

Morel Mushroom Physiology

After graduate school, I did independent research on the morel mushroom using an old farmhouse as a laboratory. The conditions couldn't have been more ideal for studying mushroom physiology. I found that the morel evolved from a single celled yeast, beginning about 50 thousand years ago and emerging from the ground about 20 thousand years ago.

The physiology of the morel mushroom produces a stunning amount of information on physiology and evolution. First, it shows that morphology is extremely easy to evolve. It's simply counting cells in different directions. And it shows that physiology is extremely resistant to evolution, because the inside of cells cannot be redesigned without disrupting endless complexities.

So the morel mushroom is stuck with yeast physiology which is quite detrimental to it. That includes excreting acid to kill bacteria in the soil and feeding on them. The mycelium spreads broadly through sandy soil, which dilutes the acid to the maximum amount that the mycelium can tolerate while killing bacteria.

Attempts to grow morels runs into the problem that acid accumulates and destroys the mycelium under artificial conditions. It's necessary to get highly concentrated growth in producing mushrooms in a practical manner. But the concentrated growth of morel mycelium causes acid to destroy the mycelium. The solution would be to use a mutant that does not produce acid. A single point mutation could suffice.

But the morel is mostly novelty. Mushrooms usually produce the innate flavor of fungus or yeast. But a few produce specially designed flavor to attract animals to eat them and carry the spores around, which includes truffles and original bolete, Boletus edulis.

Boletus edulis should be easy to grow, except that no one can start the mycelium. Through much effort, the French got mycelium started for truffles but didn't know what to do with it after that got it. They wouldn't have known how to induce differentiation or how to optimize nutrition. Mycologists are clueless on nutrition, because nutrition must account for the entirety of physiology, while microbial nutrition and physiology are extremely complex.

Bolete spores do not germinate under known conditions. But there is a chemical that plant roots use to induce fungal spores to germinate and it draws fungi to roots, since plant roots have a highly developed symbiosis with microbes. That chemical is strigolactone. Bolete spores will probably germinate with strigolactone; but I haven't been working with it.

Physiological Patterns Get Stored

One of the results shown with morel mushrooms is that physiological patterns are stored in DNA to be activated as needed through control mechanisms.

When mycelium of morels is grown on a surface with optimal nutrition, it differentiates into a quasi-tissue including pigments characteristic of the mushroom type.

That's because the evolving, filamentous yeast would have grown at the base of trees while reaching down into the soil to feed on bacteria; and surface growth at the base of trees developed as a physiological pattern that can be produced in a laboratory. The patterns are nonsensical anomalies showing that the rapid and extreme evolution did not result in highly refined physiology.

Phenotypic Variation As An Adaptation Mechanism

Another important result is that morel mushrooms produce an extreme amount of phenotypic variation. That means various genes are turned on or off to create different results. It's how different tissues form in higher organism, while each cell has the same DNA. But the expression varies for each individual throughout biology in addition to each tissue within the individual.

Scientists have long had a general concept of phenotypes existing; but they didn't grasp how individual phenotypes evolved for adapting to environmental conditions. With morels, the phenotypes are so extreme that they show the relationship to environmental conditions.

All species of plants and animals produce variations in phenotypes as an adaptation mechanism. Phenotypic variation augments genotypic evolution in accounting for rapidly changing conditions.

Scientists do not usually know that individual phenotypic variation exists, except for some of the horticulturists. Horticulturists generally know that if seeds are planted, they get a different phenotype for each seed; so if they want the same result all the time, they need to use cuttings, which always produce the same phenotype.

Communication is so poor between scientists that most scientists do not know what horticulturists know about phenotypic variation. Scientists study by looking through a straw because of the extremely complex technicalities and the demands upon their time.

As a result, the biological sciences are like a box of puzzle pieces that are dumped onto the floor without putting the pieces together. So I put the pieces together. Doing that requires so much freedom and time that only independent scientists can break out of the usual patterns and investigate the extremely diverse subjects that connect the elements of science together.

The study of evolution physiology requires an agriculture background, because a lot of interaction with soil is involved in evolution and other scientists do not have a clue what soil is, why it matters or what sort of biology is produced by soil.

Modernization Of ATP Production

The most important subject in evolution physiology is the modernization of ATP production. Animal life could not evolve until ATP could be produced in a rapid and efficient manner for creating motion. Biologists know that the mitochondria that produce most of the ATP for animals originated with some organism which entered cells, but they don't know what that source was.

Adding up a lot of complex physiology shows that modern ATP production evolved with Pseudomonas fluorescens. That bacterium still has its same general characteristics as it acquired about 700 million years ago when it evolved modern respiration.

With the ancient evolution of P. fluorescens, it is the most common bacterium if fresh water, the most common bacterium blowing in the air and the most common bacterium that grows in spring soil feeding nitrogen to plants. It has a highly developed symbiosis with plants. Numerous offshoot species do something similar.

As P. fluorescens evolved two polar flagella, it needed rotating proteins near its cell wall with ATP creating the motion. Reversing that process modernized ATP production. The rotating proteins move molecules into place and then out of the way in a rapid manner. Otherwise, diffusion would be needed, which is very slow and problematic.

That process could not evolve in other types of cells, because drastic evolution would be too disruptive in the cytoplasm. But near the cell wall, the process could evolve without disrupting the rest of the physiology.

The Porphyrin Ring

Another important element of modern respiration is the porphyrin ring. It evolved over a billion years in cyanobacteria. That can be known, because the molecule is so complex that it would have taken about a billion years to evolve and only cyanobacteria existed for it to evolve in. Cyanobacteria needed the porphyrin ring to produce photosynthesis. Then animals used it to increase efficiency in modern respiration.

Biochemists had modern respiration worked out quite thoroughly over the past century, but they couldn't figure out the purpose of the porphyrin ring. Its purpose is to move electrons into and out of ATP production in a highly efficient manner. Three ATP molecules are energized from a single electron provided by NADH due to the efficiency of the porphyrin ring.

To understand the porphyrin ring probably requires a background in electronics. I spent about half my time doing electronic work while researching the morel mushroom. What electronics shows is the nature of linearized electrons. Physicists do not understand that subject.

Biophysicists scrambled the subject of modern respiration claiming that the chemical energy of ATP is transformed from the kinetic energy of spinning proteins. They don't know that kinetic energy cannot be transformed into chemical energy, because kinetic energy is in the motion of nuclei, while chemical energy is in the motion of electrons.

What the porphyrin ring does is create the equivalent of linearized motion of the electrons of carbon. Aromatics and resonant organic molecules cause electrons to jump out of their circular orbit around carbon nuclei and travel in a quasi linear manner. A metal atom in the center of the porphyrin ring allows the number of electrons to increase or decrease, because metals are defined by their ability to accept or yield electrons without chemical reactions.

Metals are catalysts due to their ability to accept or yield electrons without a chemical reaction of their own. Carbon-based molecules are not catalysts in that simple manner, because they require a chemical reaction to accept or yield electrons. The chemical reaction means carbon-based molecules are one-time reactants which require another reaction to restore their properties. Vitamin C is that way. It will yield an electron by decomposing, which is not a catalytic process.

But the porphyrin ring linearizes electrons from carbon by allowing them to spin around the porphyrin ring which is aromatic, while an electron moves into and out of the metal atom in the center to allow a high energy electron to move into ATP and replace a low energy electron from ADP and inorganic phosphate.

The electrons spinning around the porphyrin ring will have a variety of energy states; so an electron of just the right amount of energy will enter the ATP molecule with very little heat as loss of energy. One electron from NADH energizing three ATP molecules will have very high efficiency, probably about 95% efficiency.

Zinc Produced Human Evolution

Zinc is a metal catalyst that is extremely important in strengthening the immune system. It is used by white blood cells to break down foreign substances including bacteria, viruses, used-up regulatory molecules and any other debris that enters the circulatory system. If pain and inflammation-control molecules do not get broken down by white blood cells, the pain and inflammation keep increasing and spreading unnecessarily.

There is very little zinc in plants, because there is very little zinc in the soil. Plants will absorb anything that is water-soluble, because roots are not selective. Selectivity would require proteins on the surface, which would result in attack and decay and would slow down growth. Plants also reduce the number of minerals that they require, so their habitat is not limited by shortages of minerals.

That means herbivores or vegetarians acquire very little zinc. So how do they break down foreign matter? They use superoxide, which is oxygen with an extra electron. It takes a lot of energy to produce superoxide; and the molecule needs to be surrounded by a lipid membrane to keep it from reacting with everything around it.

So just when the superoxide is needed most, it runs out. That occurs when a disease occurs. So the monkeys, being herbivores, had a short life-span. Then some of them became light carnivores and picked up more zinc, because the small amount of zinc available in plants accumulates up the food chain, much like mercury in tuna. With more zinc, the great apes could live much longer. And zinc strengthens bones, which allows the great apes to get larger.

But that still wasn't much zinc, until the great apes migrated to the coastal area of south west Africa. Sea creatures are loaded with zinc. That would include the birds which nest in a highly concentrated manner along that coast. The increased zinc from muscles, clams, birds and bird eggs would have allowed the great apes to evolve into humans.

Long life-span would have been the primary characteristic for human development. That's because older age results in the need to share knowledge. Throughout ancient literature, the elders are constantly mentioned as the source of wisdom. Even in modern times, humans do not start worrying about knowledge until they notice that the youngsters are getting a lot of things wrong that could be corrected with more knowledge. It's usually around age fifty that life-purposes start to shift away from the searching for a path in life to finding a need to do knowledge-correcting.

The "proof" (There is no real proof of anything, as proof is nothing but accepting the obvious as fact.) is in the brain lipids. Humans acquired a different type of brain lipids based upon the omega three fatty acids which sea creatures acquire, where the rest of their lipids are derived from the alpha linoleic acids found in plants as the source of other structural lipids of humans. As humans evolved their brains near the sea coast, the lipids from sea creatures were used. Later adaptations allowed other sources to provide those types of fatty acids.

The Transition To Modern Biology