Jellyfish always have fascinated me. They are really one of the earliest forms of animal life on this planet. This picture depicts a type of jellyfish that glow in the dark.  Well kind of glow in the dark. National Geographic indicates that these animals contain a green fluorescent protein that makes them glow

My favorite scientific journal goes on to explain:

In 1961 researcher Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts noticed a molecule in this jellyfish that glowed bright green under ultraviolet light (as pictured).

After extracting the molecule from 10,000 specimens, Shimomura found the protein that creates the glow.

At some point, a light bulb went off. Some of Shimomura's colleagues realized that the protein could be attached to other proteins--enabling scientists to mark proteins of their choice with a green glow.

Since then, Shimomura's green fluorescent protein (GFP) has been used to decrypt previously invisible processes, like the spread of cancer or the development of nerve cells--earning Shimomura and colleagues a Nobel Prize in 2008.

Fluorescent proteins have also been used to engineer some truly strange beasts (and the odd plant), such as the glowing puppies, monkeys, mice, fish and other animals on the following pages.

I do not feel that the world is 6000 years old, I fully accept the concept of evolution, with a small deviation that I will explain later.  But somehow the scientists were able to use genetic engineering to get these mammals to glow.  It is not like they injected the animals, exactly.  They kind of toyed with the genes of these living beings and made them glow.

Now I get confused when I read articles like this one. You evidently have to shine a green UV light on the creatures for the glowing to occur. I think it is the same kind of light CSI uses to find sperm in motel rooms, but that is another story.  It does not appear that they glow without this added light.

But a new step in the evolution of our scientific abilities has recently been achieved.  Now the biologists can genetically engineer the animals so that not only do they 'glow' but their children will also glow.

Neat, huh?

Japan, May 27, 2009--Who knew artificial evolution could be cute? Common marmosets Kel (left) and Kou, pictured at Keio University School of Medicine in an undated photo released May 27, have skin that glows green under UV light (insets).

Born of genetically engineered, glowing parents, the baby monkeys came by their fluorescence "naturally"--the first time artificially introduced genes have been passed from parent to offspring in primates. The advance may raise the specter of genetically engineered lines of other primates, such as humans.

Twenty years ago or so there was this band called Devo. http://www.clubdevo.com/

The name was short for a concept dear to my heart: Devolution. The idea is that 'we' are not evolving upward, but downward. Wiki says:

In common parlance, "devolution", or backward evolution is the notion the species generally evolve into more "primitive" forms by losing adaptations no longer necessary in a new environment. According to this view, changes from one biome to another may usher in pressures to weed out an obsolete function which is no longer useful for survival after the transition, and that the probability of losing a organic function in a new biome, via the conventional evolutionary pressures to "evolve", is more frequent and explainable than the synthesis of a new organic function.

If you choose not to believe me, take another look at a snapshot taken at the 2008 Republican Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota.