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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.""
If I could MOD you up, I would!
Yep - there's no such think as a missing link. There might have been in the past, but morphological properties allow us to make the connections without having to see all the transitional forms in between. As parent noted: Ambulocetus was predicted by evolution, and then it was found pretty much oin the form predicted, with the bony structures of the inner ear as predicted, in the geological strata at the date predicted - so there's nothing new about evolution proving its own efficacy.
It might be exciting for scientists to actually discover a predicted fossil (well, of course it is!) but us mere mortals don't need to see it to know the truth: we have seen mud skippers on mud flats. We have seen an eel a kilometre from water in the middle of a field, wriggling to the next waterway. We've learned that Inter-tidal zone animals are extremely tough, and can survive long periods of exposure to the extremely hard environment of "air".
So this isn't exactly surprising.
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?
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
> This was a predicted, sought find. This wasn't just like, some people found a fossil and was like "wow! this fills the gap in a missing link between reptiles and fish!". They set out to find something like this, targeted the most likely places in which to find it, and actually found what they were looking for.
A similar thing can be seen on a NOVA episode that they air now and then, where a palentologist used existing fossils in the sequence of whale ancestry to estimate the date of an intermediate form, consulted geologists re where to find exposed land that was the bottom of a shallow sea at that date, visited the site (now a desert) recommended by the geologists, and found vertebrae for the predicted species lying exposed in the sand. Excavations uncovered more complete specimins showing the predicted features of "nose" and legs.
> I think that's just neat.
Way neat.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
1. What caused the big bang? or What external force was there that caused the big bang?
Time was created during the Big Bang so "before" is meaningless. There is no "before" or "after" or "cause" and "effect" if there is no Time.
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.
2. Why did the sea creatures decide to go on land?
They didn't "decide" to do anything. They were compelled by nature to seek land: to lay eggs, to find food, to mate safely.
3. Get them to explain the evolutionary path that lead to creatures having sight.
Here goes: an eye spot that detects light and dark develops into a pit eye, which enables the creature to detect direction. This develops into a Pinhole Eye. This develops a protective layer. The layer develops fluid. Fluid turns into a protein lens. Cornea and Iris separate. Organism is perfected into what we have now. Totally simplified of course but good enough for slashdot!
Also not speaking for the parent poster, but I'd just like to make a couple of comments from a theological point of view.
First off, evolution actually fits better with Christian theology than young-earth creation, because it depicts "creation" as an ongoing process rather than a one-off event. It places God in history rather than outside it, which is one of the themes that you'll find running through the Bible.
Secondly, various biblical verses claim that humans are "made in God's image", or words to that effect. This has caused a lot of theological discussion over the years, such as the way that God has been depicted in art. Should God be represented as a grey-haired old man in the sky? "God is spirit" (see John 4:24), after all.
Well if God has no body, it makes more sense to say that the part that when we say "made in God's image", we're not talking about our bodies, which we understand to be evolved animal bodies, but rather the "spirit" part.
This looks like intellectual wankery, much like counting pin-head-dancing angels, and you'd be partly right. But for people who care about this sort of thing, evolutionary theory actually answers a number of long-standing theological problems, and the answers turn out to be much simpler than anyone thought.
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