In the Galapagos Islands, a shoreside crane toppled over while loading a shipping container onto a barge, capsizing the boat and causing a terrible oil spill of hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel. It was Charles Darwin's 1835 studies of the Galapagos Islands's biodiversity that sparked his theory of evolution by natural selection. From ABC News:

(The site of the spill,) San Cristobal Island is one of more than a dozen in the Galapagos, which is home to rare wildlife species and one of the world's most protected natural destinations. The remote islands are roughly 600 miles away from Ecuador, the country that owns them.

Ecuadorean President Lenín Moreno said he declared the state of emergency when the collision first occurred but said the situation was under control as of early Monday.

"Thanks to the timely intervention of several institutions, we have it under control. I am in permanent contact with @normanwray and the COE is activated to watch over the galapagueños," Moreno said in a tweet translated from Spanish. The COE is Ecuador's Emergency Operations Committee .

Darwintunes are short musical loops that mutate and evolve as listeners vote: "the higher rated loops get to have sex and have baby loops which form the next generation, to be rated, have sex, have babies and so on."

The examples given start out as warbly bursts of random noise. A hundred generations in, and it sounds like kids fooling around with water-filled bottles.

Five-hundred in, chords emerge. A thousand mutations in and melodies and rhythm are present…

Three-thousand, and drums and textures seem weirdly to emerge from the deep.

Eight-thousand generations down the line, and we have something simple and magical…

It's a wonderful example of a simple idea: that apparent design shows up fast, and the "designs" are often lovely.

This process, repeated for fifty thousand years, has given us all that we make, say and do; it is the process of "cultural evolution".

However, the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. For example, how important is human creative input compared to audience selection? Is progress smooth and continuous or step-like? We set up DarwinTunes as a test-bed for the evolution of music, the oldest and most widespread form of culture; and, thanks to your participation, we've shown that reasonably complex and pleasing music can evolve purely under selection by listeners.

Check out the full set below. [via r/internetisbeautiful]

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How can a mild-mannered grasshopper turn into a ferocious locust? Why are humans humans when we have share 80 percent of the same genetic material with a cow? In a fascinating long read at Aeon, David Dobbs delves into the differences between genetic change (evolution as you probably learned it in school) and genetic expression (the amazing powers of natural selection that scientists are only now starting to really understand). Read the rest