Do organs, like the heart, have a common ancestor?

[DJ_Ghost]

and the gills you say we had just poof, disappeared?

No, why, who said that?

The heart that we have was at one time supported by gills rather than lungs? where were they on our necks?

I think you are missing the point, humans don’t have gills but one of the life forms we evolved from did have. That life form had a heart as well. Whilst the reparatory system adapted from gills to lungs in certain ancestral life forms, the heart changed much less.

do we have any land creature with half gills half lungs? or lungs with gills at the same time.

Lungfish, as the name suggests, have both gills and lungs yes.

Ghost

 

[ServantofTheOne]

What would qualify as evidence for you?

some scientific evidence would be nice.

 

[DJ_Ghost]

some scientific evidence would be nice.

Yes creationists always say that, but all to often when presented with it they hand wave it away, redefine a central term or redefine science in order to avoid having to accept it, so the poster was asking what evidence was required specifically to avoid the goal post shifting he suspects will happen if he presents evidence.

Ghost

 

[Tomk80]

some scientific evidence would be nice.

And what would you consider scientific evidence?

 

[ServantofTheOne]

I think you are missing the point, humans don’t have gills but one of the life forms we evolved from did have. That life form had a heart as well. Whilst the reparatory system adapted from gills to lungs in certain ancestral life forms, the heart changed much less.

"one of the life forms we evolved from did have" isn't this just conjecture? how do you know for a fact that this occured.

"adapted from gills to lungs in certain ancestral life forms", another guess.

Lungfish, as the name suggests, have both gills and lungs yes.

by your estimation is this creature on its way to becoming us?
does this mean that we at one point had both gills and lungs, but while the lungs were developing, albiet not functioning yet, the gills were being used only until the lungs came online and somehow communicated this occurence to the gills and notified it that it is no longer necessary. and over time the gills that were no longer necessary completely disappeared like magic.

 

[Ledifni]

by your estimation is this creature on its way to becoming us?

See, this is the kind of thing we hate to see. Do you realize it would have taken you five minutes to find out that evolutionary theory makes it clear that no creature is "becoming" any specific species? So why, then, do you come in here and make us waste our time teaching you something you could have found out for yourself in five minutes?

 

[ServantofTheOne]

And what would you consider scientific evidence?

first please direct to where one can observe gills becoming lungs due to adaptation.

then show experimentation to demonstrate the truth or falseness of the hypothesis that gills become lungs through adaptation.

then we can conclude without doubt whether or not your experimentation validates or modifies the hypothesis.

 

[DJ_Ghost]

"one of the life forms we evolved from did have" isn't this just conjecture? how do you know for a fact that this occured.

"adapted from gills to lungs in certain ancestral life forms", another guess.

No these are not guesses, but before we waste any time providing evidence it would be nice if you tell us before hand what you do and do not accept. For example in a recent thread we all spent ages providing various evidence strings only to finally be told that the person we were talking to would only accept biblical references as evidence.

by your estimation is this creature on its way to becoming us?

That's not how evolution works, there is no ultimate goal, their is no steady forward progression.

does this mean that we at one point had both gills and lungs, but while the lungs were developing, albiet not functioning yet, the gills were being used only until the lungs came online and somehow communicated this occurence to the gills and notified it that it is no longer necessary.

They wouldn’t have to communicate anything, if the life form is getting oxygen from one system and not the other, that other system is no longer necessary, therefore if a mutation results in an organism not having the redundant mechanism the organism is still going to live to reproduce, and hence it may pass on its mutation.

How much do you know about the claims made by ToE so we know where to begin?

Ghost

 

[DJ_Ghost]

then show experimentation to demonstrate the truth or falseness of the hypothesis that gills become lungs through adaptation.

then we can conclude without doubt whether or not your experimentation validates or modifies the hypothesis.

Firstly science is falsificationist not verificationist, so we don’t need to construct an experiment that verifies it we need to construct a predictive model that can be falsified and then try and falsify it.

Secondly when you say “then we can conclude without a doubt” you are wrong. We should never conclude a thing without a doubt, we accept things provisionally with a a degree of certainty. In the case of ToE the degree of certainly indicated by the data is actually greater than the degree of certainty we have in the theory of gravity.

Ghost

 

[Tomk80]

"one of the life forms we evolved from did have" isn't this just conjecture? how do you know for a fact that this occured.

"adapted from gills to lungs in certain ancestral life forms", another guess.

It's the best explanation of the available evidence. There's a difference between that and conjecture.

by your estimation is this creature on its way to becoming us?
does this mean that we at one point had both gills and lungs, but while the lungs were developing, albiet not functioning yet, the gills were being used only until the lungs came online and somehow communicated this occurence to the gills and notified it that it is no longer necessary. and over time the gills that were no longer necessary completely disappeared like magic.

No, this creature is not on it's way to becoming us. And no, 'we' have never had such structures. However, we are most probably descended from creatures like the lungfish, just as the lungfish themselves are descended from those creatures.

Furthermore, structures that aren't necessary anymore are often disappearing. We see this in cavefish, who still have rudimentary eyes but can't see with them. What happens is that creatures without those structures (or with degraded structures) survive better than those with, if the structure is not necessary anymore. Probably because forming those structures costs energy, which the creatures without those structures can spend on something else. No 'communicating' between lungs, gills and heart is necessary. You seem to have a severely screwed up image of evolution. Might I suggest that it would be a good idea for you to study a biology book?

 

[Tomk80]

first please direct to where one can observe gills becoming lungs due to adaptation.

then show experimentation to demonstrate the truth or falseness of the hypothesis that gills become lungs through adaptation.

then we can conclude without doubt whether or not your experimentation validates or modifies the hypothesis.

Are you completely dense. After I first stated that gills did not develop into lungs, you subsequently ask me to demonstrate that gills developed into lungs. Do you in any way understand how completely dishonest the above seems to me?

 

[kingreaper]

by your estimation is this creature on its way to becoming us?

No more than a hawk is

Or a flu virus

IE. not at all

does this mean that we at one point had both gills and lungs,

Yes

but while the lungs were developing, albiet not functioning yet,

The lungs always functioned

Ever hear of gas bladders? IMO it's pretty likely they are the precursors of lungs, first storing then collecting gases

the gills were being used only until the lungs came online

Not at all, gills are used by lungfish aren't they?

and somehow communicated this occurence to the gills and notified it that it is no longer necessary.

Why would they need to do that?

and over time the gills that were no longer necessary completely disappeared like magic.

Let's say eveeryone in the world was born with a huge block of tissue sticking out their back

A mutant is born without it

He runs faster, needs less food, can give more energy to his brain etc.

Isn't the no-lump allele gonna spread?

Same with getting rid of useless gills, those born without them are healthier than those with

Especially once they were co-opted for some other use








Here's a nice simple question


What does the ToE state?

 

[AirPo]

and the gills you say we had just poof, disappeared?

Who said humans once had gills?

The heart that we have was at one time supported by gills rather than lungs?

Wrong.

how exactly did gills transform to lungs.

They didn't.

i have a hard time understanding how gills gradually transformed to lungs.

Then stop trying to since that is not what happened.

 

[Cirbryn]

ServantoftheOne: “by your estimation is this creature on its way to becoming us?”

Ledifni: “See, this is the kind of thing we hate to see. Do you realize it would have taken you five minutes to find out that evolutionary theory makes it clear that no creature is "becoming" any specific species? So why, then, do you come in here and make us waste our time teaching you something you could have found out for yourself in five minutes?”

Actually I like seeing questions like this. I think it shows a willingness to examine the underlying science of evolution honestly. What I get tired of seeing is the person who is Creationist for theological reasons, but who thinks those theological interpretations make him an expert in the science of evolutionary biology. Such a person would have phrased the point as some kind of strawman argument along the lines of: “Evolutionists believe lungfish will evolve into humans. Isn’t that ridiculous!” ServantoftheOne just asked an honest question. Also, I’m not so sure it would have been as easy as you think to look up the answer independently. Suppose he’d gone to something by Tielhard de Chardin for instance? Evolutionists who know of him at all know he was an early 20th century supporter of orthogenesis rather than Darwinism, and would have argued that lungfish are indeed evolving towards becoming us. Creationists like to quote him for that reason, and if ServantoftheOne had started at a Creationist website he might have been linked to de Chardin and thought he was reading a Darwinian explanation when he wasn’t.


As for the answer to the question itself: populations evolve under Darwinian evolution to adapt to an ecological niche, not to advance towards some kind of distant evolutionary goal. Lungfish often find themselves in situations where their pools are drying up, and in the past those able to extract some additional oxygen through their swim bladders were able to survive and reproduce better, thereby leading to modifications in the swim bladder that enhanced its ability to extract oxygen (see here). Whether they might take what we might think of as the next evolutionary step onto land, however, would depend on what species they would be competing with in that new niche. Our lungfish-like ancestors weren’t competing with much of anything at that point in their evolution, so fish with increased ability to move and breathe on land left more descendants. Now things would likely be very different.

See also another post of mine on this issue in Talk.origins, here.

 

[ServantofTheOne]

No these are not guesses, but before we waste any time providing evidence it would be nice if you tell us before hand what you do and do not accept. For example in a recent thread we all spent ages providing various evidence strings only to finally be told that the person we were talking to would only accept biblical references as evidence.

objective empirical evidence would suffice.

That's not how evolution works, there is no ultimate goal, their is no steady forward progression.

yes i understand there is no ultimate goal according to TOE, however isn't it fair to say that this creature can potentially become human if it follows the same environmental experience that supposedly produced the human species. I am not saying that TOE claims that this creature MUST become human as its goal.

They wouldn’t have to communicate anything, if the life form is getting oxygen from one system and not the other, that other system is no longer necessary, therefore if a mutation results in an organism not having the redundant mechanism the organism is still going to live to reproduce, and hence it may pass on its mutation.
How much do you know about the claims made by ToE so we know where to begin?
Ghost

TOE is a theory that groups of organisms change with passage of time, mainly as a result of natural selection, so that descendants differ morphologically and physiologically from their ancestors.

I asked what is the precurser to the lung, someone said gills, and i asked how did gills become lungs, numerous people then said, no thats not what happened. My original question was that if the human heart is dependent on the lungs for oxegenating the blood then what did humans have before the lung or heart, or which organ came first.

so far all i am seeing are best guesses, nothing scientific or definitive.

 

[looking4answers]

A simple search on google yielded this:

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/jun2001/992025301.Ev.r.html

Nice Avatar!

 

[ServantofTheOne]

Firstly science is falsificationist not verificationist, so we don’t need to construct an experiment that verifies it we need to construct a predictive model that can be falsified and then try and falsify it.

then what would you call a theory that is based on a process which is not only not verifiable, but also not falsifiable? can it be considered science?

You say C and B are descendants of A through a process called Y, and this process is not verifiable because of the enormous amount of time it takes for process Y to occur, at the same time process Y can't be falsified because it is a process that can't be tested to be conclusively falsified. then what are we left with?

if science is falsificationist, how would you group TOE in respect to science since it can niether be verified nor falsified.

Secondly when you say “then we can conclude without a doubt” you are wrong. We should never conclude a thing without a doubt, we accept things provisionally with a a degree of certainty. In the case of ToE the degree of certainly indicated by the data is actually greater than the degree of certainty we have in the theory of gravity.
Ghost

please explain how gravity has less certainty than TOE? how can one compare the 2 when one can be measured as a physical force that is consistent given conditions and verifiable to something that is a process that supposedly happened over long periods of time that can't be verified nor falsified?

 

[Douglaangu v2.0]

please explain how gravity has less certainty than TOE?

Explain why gravity occurs.

 

[Tomk80]

objective empirical evidence would suffice.



yes i understand there is no ultimate goal according to TOE, however isn't it fair to say that this creature can potentially become human if it follows the same environmental experience that supposedly produced the human species. I am not saying that TOE claims that this creature MUST become human as its goal.



TOE is a theory that groups of organisms change with passage of time, mainly as a result of natural selection, so that descendants differ morphologically and physiologically from their ancestors.

I asked what is the precurser to the lung, someone said gills, and i asked how did gills become lungs, numerous people then said, no thats not what happened. My original question was that if the human heart is dependent on the lungs for oxegenating the blood then what did humans have before the lung or heart, or which organ came first.

so far all i am seeing are best guesses, nothing scientific or definitive.

You might consider that this is because your question is confused. For example, since all mammals have lungs and a heart, these structures were already present when the first mammal arose. The question 'what did humans have before the lung or heart' does becomes very strange, as humans have always had lungs and a heart.

Then the question arises what kind of evidence you would accept. Just saying "objective scientific evidence" doesn't cut it. Do you want us to reproduce evolution in a lab? Sorry, that ain't gonna happen, and if it would happen, it would falsify all evolutionary models we have now.

But your occasional question for 'proof' implies to me that you are not asking for evidence. It implies to me that you are asking for absolute proof of common acnestry, a question which is equally impossible. The best that can be done is giving you the data and the best possible explanation of the data. If this is what you want, and if you can tell me what this data should consist of according to you, then I might want to put in the effort of actually searching something for you. What I want to avoid is shifting of goalposts or 'evidence' of which it is impossible to get.

 

[ServantofTheOne]

Explain why gravity occurs.

why does the earth revolve around the sun? can science attempt to answer the why to anything? i wouldn't think so, science is concerned with the how, not why.

How does gravity work you ask. i don't know exactly as i am not an expert in physics, but i do know that there is a force that keeps us from floating around in space. we call it gravity in english.