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Missing Link Fossil Discovered
choongiri writes "The Guardian is reporting the discovery of a missing link of evolution. From the article: "Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago.""
This link to bbc news includes a picture of the fossil.
Doesn't look very tasty.
Don't Hate, Gestate
Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable. pp 138-197.
According to Swedish radio this is not a direct ancestor to us. However this find is important since it is close to the trunk from which the mamals is derived.
Fox has some pictures of the model and sketches accompanying their article.
For sale: one sig space, gently used. Inquire for details.
Yes, beneficial mutations are often observed.
The Talk Origins FAQ I've linked to is comprehensive, easily searched, and quite objective. Even better, it points the way to more in depth books, articles, and sources--you can, if you choose, go from a one-page FAQ summary all the way to the primary evidence. Otherwise, I would recommend a book such as Ernst Mayr's "What Evolution Is." Much more difficult than the FAQ, and a tiny bit dated, but also much more rewarding.
What IS surprising, is that there is no image - not even the obligatory 100-pixel-across thumbnail, which links to a lame-ass 200-pixel-across "Large Picture". I am very interested in seeing this thing - so where the bloody hell is it?
Picture courtesy of New Scientist.
Re: showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago
Not so. Arthropods (millipedes and centipedes etc) first conquered the land around 500 million years ago and were walking around long before this newly-discovered beastie. Their fossilised footprints have been found. "The oldest body fossil of a land animal is a 430-million-year-old millipede."
"Our own ancestors, fish-like amphibians, first lumbered ashore a mere 370 million years ago. There they found a world teeming with plants and giant creepy crawlies."
Reduce, reuse, cycle
So you're saying that because your belief system cannot conceive of anything before time t, therefore all times before t are meaningless?
No. Others have used the 'north pole' analogy. 'Before the Big Bang' is akin to 'north of the north pole': it's simply an empty statement. Not part of the coordinate system. Undefined.
Here's another puzzle for you: what part of England is a thousand miles from the sea? What do you mean, there's no such place? You mean that just because your belief system can't conceive of places in England further from the sea than distance d, therefore such places are meaningless? Same goes with "external." The whole universe was contained in this ball of energy so there is no "internal" or "external." So the whole question is absurd and moot.
The moment you posit a ball you also have to admit a bounding surface (to wit, a 3-sphere). And when you admit a bounding surface, shying away from what is on the other side of that boundary is intellectual cowardice.
A 3-sphere? No, no, no. Nothing of the sort. A 4-sphere, possibly, in which case the 3-surface would be the space of our universe and the radial directions would correspond to the forward and backward time directions (btw, another analogy for you, what's below the centre of the earth? You mean that because your belief system can't imagine locations > r kilometres down, means all depths below r are meaningless?). An infinite flat expanse of 4-space, also quite plausible. And there are other interesting geometries proposed based on quirks of the microwave background; it's still an open problem in cosmology.
The trouble with these discussions is that it's rather hard to speak meaningfully about these things without using general relativity. Thus you get these rather woolly analogies, translating the clear and precise equations into ambiguous and inaccurate English.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.