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Fish with Limbs

Posted by michael on from the stop-poking-me dept.

kpogoda writes "American scientists have unearthed the world's oldest arm bone, a 365-million-year-old fossil that provides key evidence that fish used limbs in water well before animals used them to climb up on land."

3 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Eugenics? Pull the other one... by Tyreth · · Score: 0, Troll
    Well, we have two breeds of Darwinists then. Those who say that natural selection and evolution no longer takes place for humans, because our culture has eliminated its role with things such as the support of those in need. Then we have your proposition, that a different form of evolution takes place. Wow, the word "evolution" can yet again be used to explain anything it wants to.

    But anyway, if I suppose that evolution is true, what moral argument can you give me to stop me from murdering the weak, hurting the downtrodden, and generally getting my way when I know I can get away with it? As far as I can tell, any argument you give me I can respond with, "so?". As long as it's benefitting me, what do I care?

  2. Re:Reminds me of EYES by Tyreth · · Score: 0, Troll

    That's an amazing argument. You are saying that the following steps in the argument:
    1. An article made a proposal on how to get from a photosensitive cell to a full eye while each stage had a noticable survival benefit
    2. It was supported by an appeal to the myth of evolution
    That's not very persuasive. *If* we are questioning the validity of evolution in the first place, you _cannot_ appeal to it as evidence for an argument. If the article makes a proposition like this, then it must demonstrate that such steps can take place, and that must be done through experiments. You cannot just accept the truth of darwinist evolution and point to that as the evidence for the article's proposition.

  3. Re:One persuasive argument by Tyreth · · Score: 0, Troll
    The evidence for evolution is all around you. It's in every living thing, it's in the fossil record, and it's in recorded natural history. If anyone has "seriously misunderstood the issues", it's you. Your blatant misunderstandings and mischaracterizations of evolutionary theory and mechanisms demonstrate that you simply don't understand it. I'm not knocking your intellect, and I'm not trying to condescend; I'm trying to point out your obvious need for some better information.

    As I stated in another post in this very story, the fossil record does NOT support evolution. The current observed processes in biology do NOT support evolution. The facts are all in the minds of people.

    I do not try to "dismiss" evolutionary changes by talking about selection of pre-existing traits, as if I was missing the main point. What Darwin observed was not darwinist evolution. What darwin saw was genes that already existed, and were being selected. Darwinist evolution is a story about how those genes arrived in the first place, and THAT is what I have a problem with. I do not deny at all that changes in gene frequencies can result in remarkable structural variation (though that can be interpreted in many ways). You think that merely because a child is different from his parents that evolution is supported. Yet you confuse one type of evolution with another. Selection of pre-existing traits exhibits two features (among others):
    1. Rapid speciation
    2. Reduction of diversity in gene pool
    Neither of these support the darwinist position of slow speciation and an increase of diversity in the gene pool. I do not deny that mutations occur. I deny the plausibility of them as the mechanism by which today's already existing diversity originally came about.

    I suggest you read my first post which covers some things you said:
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=102702&cid=875 2031