Missing link found by Norwegian scientist

CACTUSJACKmankin · May 20, 2009

Baggins said:
I believe the description paper is in press - something called PLoS One? - but the purchase and work on this fossil was paid for by a disparate group who all wanted their day in the sun and got it today.

So in short - no.

incase anybody missed it:
Darwinius masillae
PLoS ONE: Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology

Honkytnkmn · May 20, 2009

Baggins said:
Ah! Conclusive proof that you don't have the first idea about what evolution is or how it works.

Only someone completely ignorant of the mechanisms of evolution would use the argument a worm turning into a worm isn't evolution.

Ok, not just you but everyone, The worm turning into a worm comment was awfully flippant and I'm sorry.

Anyone who knew anything about evolution would know that a worm can only ever evolve into a modified worm.

Thanks for outing yourself Mr Creationist

But now I'm stumped I always thought the idea behind evolution was that we evolved from one celled organisms over a period of billions of years. If this isn't the case, let me know.

Hespera · May 20, 2009

Honkytnkmn said:
Ok, not just you but everyone, The worm turning into a worm comment was awfully flippant and I'm sorry.

But now I'm stumped I always thought the idea behind evolution was that we evolved from one celled organisms over a period of billions of years. If this isn't the case, let me know.

Reckon I am stumped too, pard. Thats pretty much how I had it figgered too.. Baggins will have to explain this.

LittleNipper · May 20, 2009

Ectezus said:
Every living organism ever lived is technically a missing link or transitional fossil if you like.
Humans now also differ slightly from humans 100 years ago but it happens slow enough for no generation to notice it themselves.

Ectezus

This is very true. 100 years ago humans could live without TV, computers, automobiles, radio. Most even existed with only a few changes of clothing and did nearly everthing by hand and yet they seemed happy.

Today humans have everything at their fingertips and are getting fat, lazy, arrogant, and they are not very content.

And this is progress?

Gawron · May 20, 2009

Posted by Littlenipper:

"Today humans have everything at their fingertips and are getting fat, lazy, arrogant, and they are not very content."

Hey! I had to put down my double-chile-cheeze-bacon burger in order to type why I resent this remark. And I will, but I...am........ah, forget it. I think I will take a nap.

Ya putz.

Hespera · May 20, 2009

LittleNipper said:
This is very true. 100 years ago humans could live without TV, computers, automobiles, radio. Most even existed with only a few changes of clothing and did nearly everthing by hand and yet they seemed happy.

Today humans have everything at their fingertips and are getting fat, lazy, arrogant, and they are not very content.

And this is progress?

No call to take a totally one sided view of things. A hundred years ago, there were an awful lot of ugly ways to die that are now easily cured or prevented.

As for how they "seemed happy" a hundred years ago.....hmm. tough to figure that one. Were they? how would we know?

Still, if you want to go get in your time machine and get a factory job / apt in New Yorks Hell's Kirchen. or maybe Hong Kong of 1909, go for it.

A visit to any of several contemporary third world countries would do fine as a substitute for time travel.

Bit of a side note... why do you suppose it is that in Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong etc you see a lot of prosperous people with all those modern conveniences but you dont see any fat people? I bet there are more in the local Walmart at this moment than in all of Tokyo.

You dont see bums in those places either. Just a lot of serious minded people going about their business.

Not trying to argue or anyhting... just wonder whats your take on why this is.

sbvera13 · May 20, 2009

Honkytnkmn said:
But now I'm stumped I always thought the idea behind evolution was that we evolved from one celled organisms over a period of billions of years. If this isn't the case, let me know.

It is, it just looks like you misunderstand how those changes occur. They are so small, they will be unnoticable to each generation. It takes hundreds of generations for the changes to add up.

We're talking about things as simple as hair color. Do you have the exact same hair color as your parents? Same height? Same eye color? Same body type? Same blood type? Probably not all of them. Yet you are still human. Those small changes are what natural selection acts on.

Take for example the Scandanavian tendency to have blond hair. Vitamin D is produced by sunlight interacting with the skin. Up north, less sunlight strikes the earth, thus less Vitamin D. Those people that can absorb more sunlight will have better nutrition, and be better able to have healthy children. It turns out, blond hair lets sunlight through to strike the scalp. Over a couple thousand years, blond became the dominant hair color in the nothern regions. That is natural selection at work. A lighter skin tone happened for the same reason.

So no animal will ever give birth to anything that is not it's own species. Given enough time, that population of animals can change so that when you compare Generation 1 to Generation 10,000, they look like different species. But in reality, there's no place to draw the species line in history. Is it at Generation 5000? 7000? 5001? 5002? 5003? 9,999? 2465? It's a smooth continuum of change from 1 to 10,000, and we can only assign species names by looking back at key points. In reality, there is no such separation, it's only us looking back and giving names out so we can understand the steps more easily. "Species" is a tool for our understanding more than it is something distinct of its own in nature.

Pesto · May 20, 2009

Honkytnkmn said:
Ok, not just you but everyone, The worm turning into a worm comment was awfully flippant and I'm sorry.

But now I'm stumped I always thought the idea behind evolution was that we evolved from one celled organisms over a period of billions of years. If this isn't the case, let me know.

Yes and no. What you are referring to is more specifically called common descent. It is the idea that all living things on the planet descended and diversified from a single root species via the process of evolution.

The scientific definition of evolution is "change in allele frequency within a population." An allele is one version of a gene. For example, your basic blood type (O, A, B, or AB) is determined by a single gene which has three alleles, O, A, and B.

Let's say there is a population of people, and you do blood tests to determine everyone's blood type. You find out 50% are type A and 50% are type O. A few decades later, you test everyone again. By this time, some people have died of old age, and new babies have been born. Your results come out that 70% are type O and 30% are type A.

This is called a change in allele frequency. The first time you tested everyone 5 out of 10 people had type O blood. The second time 7 out of 10 had type O. The allele frequency for type O changed from 5 out of 10 to 7 out of 10. This is an example of evolution, albeit a rather mundane one, and it happens whether common descent is true or not. There's much more to how evolution works, but this is the most basic idea behind it.

Evolution and an old Earth (for which we have evidence from geology) allows for the possibility of common descent. Fossil finds like the one this thread is about lend support to common descent.

Honkytnkmn · May 20, 2009

So when you say Evolution, you really mean Adaptation not Common Descent. My mistake. I thought when you said Evolution you meant Common Descent not Adaptation.

TheReasoner · May 20, 2009

Honkytnkmn said:
So when you say Evolution, you really mean Adaptation not Common Descent. My mistake. I thought when you said Evolution you meant Common Descent not Adaptation.

Why are the two supposed to be different? Small changes can add up over time after all. And a few billion years is a LOT of time!

Pesto · May 20, 2009

Honkytnkmn said:
So when you say Evolution, you really mean Adaptation not Common Descent. My mistake. I thought when you said Evolution you meant Common Descent not Adaptation.

No. When I say evolution, I mean evolution. What I described is evolution. If you'd like to refer to that specific type of evolution as "adaptation", then we can do that.

Common descent is another example of evolution, but over a long period of time.

"Adaptation" and common descent are not the same thing, but they are both examples of evolution.

Morcova · May 20, 2009

Honkytnkmn said:
I'm just glad we finally resolved this debate. I mean there is no question now.

People who were educated on the issue didn't have any questions before this.

Bombila · May 20, 2009

CACTUSJACKmankin said:
incase anybody missed it:
Darwinius masillae
PLoS ONE: Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology

I'll add these interesting commentaries on the find, its publication on PLoS ONE, the extreme hype, and my own comment that it is a very beautifully preserved 47 million year old fossil.

Darwinius changes everything : Not Exactly Rocket Science

Poor, poor Ida, Or: "Overselling an Adapid" : Laelaps

ETA Greg Laden's very good article

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?utm_source=bloglist&utm_medium=dropdown

USincognito · May 21, 2009

Honkytnkmn said:
So when you say Evolution, you really mean Adaptation not Common Descent. My mistake. I thought when you said Evolution you meant Common Descent not Adaptation.

Ummm. And those species that adapt popped out of thin air? No, they decended with modification from their ancestors. Common descent.

USincognito · May 21, 2009

Honkytnkmn said:
But now I'm stumped I always thought the idea behind evolution was that we evolved from one celled organisms over a period of billions of years. If this isn't the case, let me know.

Hespera said:
Reckon I am stumped too, pard. Thats pretty much how I had it figgered too.. Baggins will have to explain this.

Sbvera and Pesto's answers are good, but let me go macro.

Evolution is a one way street. There is apparently lots of gene transfer that occured amongst unicellular organisms and there's a few methods of co-option amongst metazoans (eating, symbiosis, ERVs), but the basic body plan, from embryo to adult for the various metazoan phylas were set when the last common ancestor lived.

What that means is that descendant populations will always have the characteristics (even if modified) of their ancestors. A worm will not turn into a snake even though the worm and snake shared a common ancestor hundreds of millions of years earlier. A rose will never turn into a mushroom even though they shared a common ancestor hundreds of millions of years earlier.

What does happen is that there are modifications to body plans. Fish fins develop into terrestrial tetrapod limbs using the same bones which then form the limbs of amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. In mammals we find wild divergence of form and usage, but the bones of the limbs are all the same.

Developmentally, we see the same thing. While Bilaterian animals might be viviparous, oviparous or oviviparous, all the young start as an egg which is fertilized (except for parthenogenetic species) by sperm. However there are two major groups, protostomes where the mouth develops first and deuterostomes where the anus develops forst. No squid will ever develop an anus first, nor will any fish develop a mouth first. On the flip side, all oviviparous sharks, oviparous turtles and viviparous whales are deuterostomes and will always have their mouth develop second.

The tree of life web project is an excellent and easy to navigate resource for seeing how life radiated from ancestor to descendant. If you're not that into mollusks or plants, start with Sarcopterygiians and work your way through the terrestrial tetrapods descended from them.

Baggins · May 21, 2009

Hi Honkytntmn ( great user name )

USincognito explained it better than I could have done.

Species only evolve into modifications of themselves they can't become something entirely different.

But over billions of years, or even tens of millions of years, that can produce massive diversity.

Species carry their heritage with them, we are humans but we carry our history in our genes, we are mammals, tetrapods, chordates etc.

And if you go back far enough we too are just modified worms, we share a common ancestor with modern worms that was probably pretty worm like and lived around 600-700 million years ago.

But whilst modern worms still look pretty much the same we have been on a much more interesting evolutionary journey.

The usual creationist question to this is why, in that case there are still worms, why didn't they evolve so much.

To which the answer is; because being a worm is a perfectly good answer to passing on your DNA, the ecological niches that worms inhabit have always been there, it is just that some worms evolved to fill different niches and we are the end product of hundreds of millions of years of such evolution as is pretty much every other multicellular animal on Earth.

The is a name for the branch of biology that characterises everything in terms of its evolutionary heritage is cladistics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladistics

USincognito · May 21, 2009

Baggins said:
USincognito explained it better than I could have done.

Thanks, and I should have added "not to speak for Baggins, but after 3 years together here, I think I know what he meant."

ragarth · May 21, 2009

Dunno if these have been posted: Darwinius changes everything : Not Exactly Rocket Science
Darwinius masillae : Pharyngula

It's important to keep things in perspective. While Darwinius is a valuable find, every new fossil is a valuable find. Darwinius was overhyped as being more valuable than it actually is. That first link is funny.

jake4130 · May 21, 2009

...especially here in a Christian Forum.

Bottom line kids, The Bible is the complete Word of God and it's all true, every bit of it. Either you believe that or you don't. There is no in between. You can't pick and choose from it what you choose to believe "ala cart" style. Either you believe it to be the Word of God in its entirety or you don't.

And you cant do the typical "The New Testament is true but the Old is mostly fables" either. I mean we have already found the base of the Tower of Babel, what more do you want?

Any Christian that doubts for a second that evolution is a myth needs to read "The Case for a Creator" by Lee Strobel or at least put the DVD in your Netflix queue. Anybody that believes that evolution might be true at that point is just in denial.

For that matter, pick up your Bible and read it and then decide who might be lying to you. The world? The enemy with his plots to steal, kill and destroy?

Science is important for sure, but you also have to accept that we are not God, we are very fallible beings that are living in a fallen world and simply don't have the capacity to fully understand how it all works even given our best efforts.

An improbability of accidental design is exactly what points us to God in the first place.

Believe all of it, actually walk in your faith and get on with it. "So, because you are lukewarmneither hot nor coldI am about to spit you out of my mouth." Revelation 3:16

Ectezus · May 21, 2009

jake4130 said:
Either you believe it to be the Word of God in its entirety or you don't.

Psst! The Flintstones is not a documantary on how dinosaurs lived together with humans...

- Ectezus

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