The Devastating Issue of Dinosaur Tissue

[Willtor]

A little bird* pointed out to me that "The Ancestor's Tale" (which, until now, I hadn't cracked) indicates that we share a common ancestor with rodents roughly 75 mya. It looks like rabbits and hares break off from their line about 70 mya. There's a good diagram of this on page 180. So, my graphics are flawed in that way. But, again, LoG, try to get the gist of what I'm saying.

* - (special thanks to USincognito: +1 Insightful)

 

[LoG]

A little bird* pointed out to me that "The Ancestor's Tale" (which, until now, I hadn't cracked) indicates that we share a common ancestor with rodents roughly 75 mya. It looks like rabbits and hares break off from their line about 70 mya. There's a good diagram of this on page 180. So, my graphics are flawed in that way. But, again, LoG, try to get the gist of what I'm saying.

Your diagram was correct based on previous information which had Lagomorphs breaking off about 55 mya. New information however is that they broke off 100+ mya based on molecular sequence data. Almost double the previous date. Although theoretical, if found Evo's will be patting their back on how the find was predicted. As it stands now, a fossil they suspect is a Lagomorphs specimen has been dated at 85 mya. The example you were using which may have included data you were not sure of, still fulfills the conditions of what according to you should create a fundamental problem for evolutionary theory. But it really doesn't does it? Even if there were fossils of that type found in Cambrian strata it wouldn't be a problem. Are you getting the gist of what i am saying Willtor?

Which part of If escaped your attention? XD What Willtor proposed was a thought experiment:

It may have been a thought experiment but it was still a valid real-life example where the branching off date was shifted by 50 my. None of you had a problem with it thereby proving my point that evolutionary theory or at least its adherents, easily accomodate the new age.

More importantly, you have failed to show how this: disproves evolution in any way.

What part of my statement "unfalsifiable theory"did you not understand, shenren? As I'm sure you are well aware, a thing cannot be disproved when it is not falsifiable or in the case of ToE allowed to be.

simply doesn't cut it at all. So what if dinosaurs are alive today, and so what if they were in the same strata as other species which went extinct around that time? I'm sure, for example, that you can find dog fossils in the same strata as australopithecine fossils. Does the fact that dogs are extant while australopithecines are extinct today pose any problems for the theory of evolution?

When soft parts which have a maximum life span of 100,000 years are found in a fossil that has been dated by other index fossils or radiometrically at 65 mya, it is technically a problem no matter which way you slice or dice it.

 

[Willtor]

Your diagram was correct based on previous information which had Lagomorphs breaking off about 55 mya. New information however is that they broke off 100+ mya based on molecular sequence data. Almost double the previous date. Although theoretical, if found Evo's will be patting their back on how the find was predicted. As it stands now, a fossil they suspect is a Lagomorphs specimen has been dated at 85 mya. The example you were using which may have included data you were not sure of, still fulfills the conditions of what according to you should create a fundamental problem for evolutionary theory. But it really doesn't does it? Even if there were fossils of that type found in Cambrian strata it wouldn't be a problem. Are you getting the gist of what i am saying Willtor?

Indeed, if fossils are uncovered that predate what the genetic data indicates is possible, either the genetic data is unreliable or the ToE is flawed. You've pointed to a correction, which is a reasonable thing to do. If, however, it is agreed that our current means are not in error (or, at least, that they have a small enough margin of error), then the older fossil actually does present a problem.

I am more than willing to give up the ToE in that case. I presume you are prepared to present the requisite research? I'd need your references both for lagomorphs and for the fossils in question. (again, Ancestor's Tale argues for a break of rabbitkind from other rodents at 70 mya, so I obviously need to see the newer research disputing that and indicating a break at 100+ mya; also, the research discussing fossils that predate the 100+ mya break)

 

[RealityCheck]

Indeed, if fossils are uncovered that predate what the genetic data indicates is possible, either the genetic data is unreliable or the ToE is flawed. You've pointed to a correction, which is a reasonable thing to do. If, however, it is agreed that our current means are not in error (or, at least, that they have a small enough margin of error), then the older fossil actually does present a problem.

I am more than willing to give up the ToE in that case. I presume you are prepared to present the requisite research? I'd need your references both for lagomorphs and for the fossils in question. (again, Ancestor's Tale argues for a break of rabbitkind from other rodents at 70 mya, so I obviously need to see the newer research disputing that and indicating a break at 100+ mya; also, the research discussing fossils that predate the 100+ mya break)

Willtor, it is not necessary to give up the Theory of Evolution just because you find an 80 million year old rabbit fossil. You simply may have to give up the current picture of rabbits appearing much later in time. Evolution itself does not predict WHEN something will appear or even SHOULD appear. Evolution theory gives us the rules and guidelines for how to put puzzle pieces together when we find them. If we only find rabbit remains that are, say, 5 million years old or less, and never 80 million, we conclude rabbits appeared about 5 million years ago. But the 80 million year old rabbit fossil indicates that we are missing something.

To be sure, the first thing that would happen here is "check the methods" work. It may not be 80 million years old at all, as the finder may have made a serious error in conducting dating methods. It may not be a rabbit, but something else. And of course, you need to look now for other 80 million year old rabbit fossils, because if one exists, you ought to find others of roughly that age. Or even 50 or 60 million years old, if they've lived for so long.

Checking the work is a key here. I recall years ago that a particular astronomer checked one of his telescopes one time, and he saw that it had picked up a rapidly pulsing object. It appeared to be a pulsar, but it was pulsing incredibly rapidly - something on the order of a hundred times per second. This implied a rotation rate so fast that it ought to tear the pulsar apart. So he shut the telescope systems down, brought them back on, and aimed it back at that spot. Sure enough... there it was.

So for a little while that telescope was trained on that spot, and it studied this pulsar. Astronomers were baffled, and wondered if theories of stellar evolution and stellar dynamics might have to be revised and rewritten. Or if, perhaps, they really didn't understand pulsars at all.

Then someone else managed to get time with the scope, so it was moved away from its rapid pulsar. This new person suddenly discovered, in a completely different part of the sky, another rapid pulsar - pulsing so fast it ought to be torn apart.

Naturally this led to aiming the telescope at random parts of the sky. And everywhere they found pulsars that rotated so fast...

Turns out that one "camera" attached to the telescope was emitting a rapid electronic pulse, and it was being picked up by the system and appearing as a pulsar. Once this piece of equipment was removed, all the pulsars disappeared.

Okay, back to the rabbits. Now let's assume that you've checked as much as possible, and other scientists verify and agree - it's an 80 million year old fossil. What next? Well you don't ditch ToE. You ditch the notion that rabbits are recent mammals, and try to now piece together rabbit evolution based on this new evidence. But that's it. You rewrite the part of "when rabbits first appeared".

The same holds true in other areas. When quantum field theory was formulated, it was found that it described the behavior of rapid sub-atomic particles far better than Newton's classical motion theories. Did we ditch Newton altogether? No, we recognized that Newtonian mechanics are valid and useful to a certain point - and beyond that, we must use different theories and mathematics to describe the universe.

 

[Mallon]

I think it's important to point out at this point that finding a T. rex alive today would, in fact, be damaging to the theory of evolution. The point being that as a single species, we would expect T. rex to have evolved to adapt to its changing environment in the last 65 million years. What wouldn't be a problem is if we found a descendant of T. rex living in the present. Something perhaps identifiable as a tyrannosaurid, but not T. rex itself.
This is the very same reason why finding coelocanths alive today poses no threat to the TofE, because the living coelocanth is not the same species as those Paleozoic forms familiar to the fossil record.

 

[RealityCheck]

I think it's important to point out at this point that finding a T. rex alive today would, in fact, be damaging to the theory of evolution. The point being that as a single species, we would expect T. rex to have evolved to adapt to its changing environment in the last 65 million years. What wouldn't be a problem is if we found a descendant of T. rex living in the present. Something perhaps identifiable as a tyrannosaurid, but not T. rex itself.
This is the very same reason why finding coelocanths alive today poses no threat to the TofE, because the living coelocanth is not the same species as those Paleozoic forms familiar to the fossil record.

But then again, you have creatures such as sharks that have remained relatively unchanged since the Triassic period.

 

[Willtor]

If, indeed, scientists build the phylogenic tree using the genes of modern animals (and if their methods are sound), the tree should accurately represent the dates of common ancestors (with some reasonable margin of error). If we share a common ancestor 75 mya and a fossil is found at 80 mya, for all I know it fits the margin of error. If we share a common ancestor 75 mya and a fossil is found at 150 mya, that's a problem.

At that point, although I am not an expert in the field, I can't very well hold the view that evolution presents a complete picture of what it is intended to show. That's not to say that I would think that it didn't, but that I couldn't honestly think that it did. At that point, I would have to remain uncertain as to the origins of the species. If I were an expert, I would be checking and rechecking the methods. If more anachronisms presented themselves, I might start proposing alternate theories.

But why speak in hypotheticals? Let's wait on LoG to present his evidence.

 

[Willtor]

But then again, you have creatures such as sharks that have remained relatively unchanged since the Triassic period.

This is what I was going to say. If the environment is largely unchanged, the T-Rex might not change, significantly.

 

[shernren]

It's very telling that it took an evolutionist to uncover the real implications of the T-Rex find:

I think it's important to point out at this point that finding a T. rex alive today would, in fact, be damaging to the theory of evolution. The point being that as a single species, we would expect T. rex to have evolved to adapt to its changing environment in the last 65 million years. What wouldn't be a problem is if we found a descendant of T. rex living in the present. Something perhaps identifiable as a tyrannosaurid, but not T. rex itself.
This is the very same reason why finding coelocanths alive today poses no threat to the TofE, because the living coelocanth is not the same species as those Paleozoic forms familiar to the fossil record.

In other words, the T-Rex find would be a reasonably strong argument that the general evolutionary trend is that of strongly-conserved equilibrium, and thus cannot be called upon as a source of radical alteration seen in the fossil record. The argument has duly been rebutted, but it is interesting to note that the person here who would have the most to gain from making the argument ... didn't.

To Lion of God: I apologize for the earlier statement about "if", which I should have checked out with research to look at properly. In any case, it looks to be a significantly interesting example for evolution, and I will try to post a detailed literature search result in this thread when I'm done. Turns out the lagomorph family was a completely unfortunate choice, since the morphological data alone seems to have been insufficient to resolve the cladistic relationships between the lagomorphs and other families.

But I still think you are wrong on this:

What part of my statement "unfalsifiable theory"did you not understand, shenren? As I'm sure you are well aware, a thing cannot be disproved when it is not falsifiable or in the case of ToE allowed to be.

Why is a theory unfalsifiable if irrelevant evidence fails to falsify it? If I say "My being alive today doesn't make Willtor believe that the Big Bang didn't happen, therefore the Big Bang is unfalsifiable", that is utter nonsense unless I can show that the Big Bang cannot accommodate my being alive today. In the same way, your claim that evolution is unfalsifiable based on the dino example is moot unless you can show that evolution cannot accommodate a recent dinosaur find, since evolution does not necessarily predict that dinosaurs should be extinct today.

 

[shernren]

From [SIZE=-1]www.carnegiemnh.org/mammals/publications/Zalambdalestes.pdf[/SIZE]

He noted (p. 648) that ‘‘the molar of Alymlestes is very close to the initial condition of Lagomorpha.

Will read through the next hundred pages within the next few weeks. But for now it seems that Alymlestes, while being a lagomorph, is an extremely ancestral one (note that this is a morphological conclusion, which does not depend at all on which stratum the fossil was found in), so there is no conflict here. The real falsification of evolution would come if a descendant species had to be placed chronologically before its ancestral species. Since we do not see such a relationship between Alymlestes and its ancestral species, this does not constitute a falsification of evolution. If Alymlestes were found within strata that date to before the emergence of zalambdalestids (the containing mammalian clade), however, then I'd probably consider YECism seriously again ...

 

[Mallon]

But then again, you have creatures such as sharks that have remained relatively unchanged since the Triassic period.

By "relatively unchanged", do you mean that sharks have not changed at all? Because they have. The sharks we know today were not around in the Triassic. Name one species of living shark that was alive in the Triassic. You can't. All sharks have evolved. Sure, they've retained much the same bauplan for the last few hundred million years, but that's only because the need for change in an insulated environment like the ocean isn't great. If the bodyplan of sharks as a whole has served them well for the last few hundred million years, then there is no need to change it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

 

[RealityCheck]

I think it's important to point out at this point that finding a T. rex alive today would, in fact, be damaging to the theory of evolution. The point being that as a single species, we would expect T. rex to have evolved to adapt to its changing environment in the last 65 million years. What wouldn't be a problem is if we found a descendant of T. rex living in the present. Something perhaps identifiable as a tyrannosaurid, but not T. rex itself.
This is the very same reason why finding coelocanths alive today poses no threat to the TofE, because the living coelocanth is not the same species as those Paleozoic forms familiar to the fossil record.

But if T-Rex evolves and adapts to its environment over 65 million years, then it won't be a T-Rex any more. In that case, what you would find is exactly what you next propose - a descendant of T-Rex. It would not be the same as a T-Rex, because whatever changes occurred over those 65 million years would result in what WE would call a different species. (But what you MIGHT expect to then find is other related species that are ALSO descended from T-Rex.)

 

[RealityCheck]

By "relatively unchanged", do you mean that sharks have not changed at all? Because they have. The sharks we know today were not around in the Triassic. Name one species of living shark that was alive in the Triassic. You can't. All sharks have evolved. Sure, they've retained much the same bauplan for the last few hundred million years, but that's only because the need for change in an insulated environment like the ocean isn't great. If the bodyplan of sharks as a whole has served them well for the last few hundred million years, then there is no need to change it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

No, I meant relatively unchanged. As you say, they have retained much of the same anatomy and physiology as their prehistoric, Triassic ancestors, but since the Triassic period they have undergone only minor changes. As you say, in the insulated environment of the ocean, there isn't much need to adapt. Especially when you're the predator, and there is always an ample supply of food around.

 

[Mallon]

But if T-Rex evolves and adapts to its environment over 65 million years, then it won't be a T-Rex any more. In that case, what you would find is exactly what you next propose - a descendant of T-Rex. It would not be the same as a T-Rex, because whatever changes occurred over those 65 million years would result in what WE would call a different species. (But what you MIGHT expect to then find is other related species that are ALSO descended from T-Rex.)

Agreed. We would certainly expect to see a tyrannosaurid fossil record extending past the end of the Cretaceous, which we do not.

No, I meant relatively unchanged. As you say, they have retained much of the same anatomy and physiology as their prehistoric, Triassic ancestors, but since the Triassic period they have undergone only minor changes. As you say, in the insulated environment of the ocean, there isn't much need to adapt. Especially when you're the predator, and there is always an ample supply of food around.

Agreed again. I think we're more or less on the same page, so I'm not quite sure what we're disagreeing about. What we have here is a failure to communicate.

 

[RealityCheck]

Agreed. We would certainly expect to see a tyrannosaurid fossil record extending past the end of the Cretaceous, which we do not.

Agreed again. I think we're more or less on the same page, so I'm not quite sure what we're disagreeing about. What we have here is a failure to communicate.

I think I just got suspicious when you seemed to be trying to equate "relatively unchanged" with "completely unchanged".

 

[Mallon]

I think I just got suspicious when you seemed to be trying to equate "relatively unchanged" with "completely unchanged".

I got (and still am) confused by your 'But then again, sharks...' comment, as though it contradicts my earlier musings about tyrannosaurids and coelocanths. Sharks remain unchanged for much the same reasons as coelocanths and a hypothetically living tyrannosaur.

 

[LoG]

I am more than willing to give up the ToE in that case. I presume you are prepared to present the requisite research? I'd need your references both for lagomorphs and for the fossils in question. (again, Ancestor's Tale argues for a break of rabbitkind from other rodents at 70 mya, so I obviously need to see the newer research disputing that and indicating a break at 100+ mya; also, the research discussing fossils that predate the 100+ mya break)

I gave this a lot of thought today Willtor, but frankly cannot see why the scenario you listed would present a challenge to the ToE. Historical precedents would disagree since this type of thing has presented a challenge before without causing anything more than a temporary hiccup. The branching off was first deemed to be 35mya-->55mya-->75mya with molecular biology coming up with dates of 89-125mya. If there is something you see in this as being a reason to doubt evolution then perhaps it has more to do with discernment than rationale. The resources I used for the info I provided is: http://www.answers.com/topic/lagomorpha-1 and http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/19/7/1053 .
I also searched through a number of links on both sites for additional information.

 

[Willtor]

The first link is relevant and talks a little bit about the controversy. I wasn't aware that lagomorphs have been so difficult to classify. But it doesn't indicate anything contradictory between the molecular and paleontological data. It talks about some surprise discoveries that occurred before the discovery of genetics (the "hiccups" you describe). But your second link is a research paper actually arrives at the conclusion that the genetic and fossil lines of evidence are consistent.

 

[Mallon]

For what it's worth, while all rabbits are lagomorphs, not all lagomorphs are rabbits. Just trying to avoid any confusion that may creep up.

 

[Willtor]

For what it's worth, while all rabbits are lagomorphs, not all lagomorphs are rabbits. Just trying to avoid any confusion that may creep up.

Also, all lagomorphs are glires, but not all glires are lagomorphs.