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.""

Comments

It's not a missing link, and nice predictions

[Ignorant Aardvark]

Can we please stop using this "missing link" terminology? It's one of those terms often bandied about by creationists, but it has very little meaning in science. And anyway, everytime we find another transitional fossil the creationists are just going to point to the two gaps on either side of the new transitional and say, "Now there's two missing links! Nyah nyah nyah!" They already don't believe evolution is possible anyway.

Now as for this find, there's something very important here that the writeup isn't covering. The scientists used their theory to not only predict the existence of such a transitional species, but also where, geologically, it would be located. And guess what - they found what they were looking for exactly where they were looking for it! Talk about predictive power! The predictive power of the theory of evolution is one of its many strengths, and one often overlooked by science-deniers.

Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions

[M0b1u5]

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?

Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions

[rk]

"Then do you also believe that Homosapien is the final product of Creation? Are we the zenith of Evolution?"

Well, I don't know about this we business, but I know I am... :-D

Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions

[mikeburke]

Get them to explain the evolutionary path that lead to creatures having sight.

Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable. pp 138-197.

Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions

[arrrrg]

2. Why did the sea creatures decide to go on land?

Well, putting the loaded word "decide" aside, the obvious answer is that land represented a huge unexploited ecological niche, with tons of food and no predators.

Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions

[Tatarize]

I don't even like the term transitional form. It seems to imply that there is a set goal of evolution, that the species is making the transition from this form to that form. In reality, going all the way back to our earliest ancestors you won't find a parent which was a different species than its offspring (some very special cases exist though, but typically never). Everything is a transitional form, from what its ancestors were to what its progeny will become.

The organism 1.39390 isn't really making the transition from 1.39389 to 1.39391. It's just there.

If anything is, I am a transitional form between apes and super-humans.

Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions

[myth_of_sisyphus]

Well, I'm just an amateur who's done a bit of reading on this so I'll give it a try:

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!

Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions

[kmcrober]

Sweet Zombie Jesus, you have to be kidding. ID is BS. Period. An educated and honest human being has no excuse for pandering to such an invidiously ignorant ideology. A quick reply to your frankly ridiculous bullet points:

1. Evolution is a biological phenomenon. It has no answer for this question, because this question is not relevant to the evolution of species. Inasmuch as you are indicting all of objective science, I'll simply note that ID has no better answer than consensus physics. "Jesus did it" (or Unnameddesignerwhowewon'tcallGodeventhoughweallkno wthat'swhowe'retalkingabout) is not a testable or falsifiable answer, and is a statement of faith rather than a scientific hypothesis.

2. Sea creatures did not "decide" to become amphibious. Evolution is not a directed process in which species consider their options and choose one. Nor do species evolve "towards" a higher form. That sort of teleology is, again, not a scientific hypothesis. This question is particularly egregious; even a primary school education should have taught you that creatures don't "decide" on how to evolve. I'll charitably assume that you mean, "How did aquatic species become amphibious and then terrestrial species?" The answer is complicated, because science is hard. Read a book. Preferably one by a real scientist, or at least someone with a biology degree. The shortest and easiest (and therefore oversimplified) version is that organisms capable of thriving in more and more marginal environments reproduced more successfully, preserving and spreading their inheritable successful traits.

3. Again, this question betrays remarkable ignorance. Darwin proposed an evolutionary chain for the development of the eye well over a century ago, and evolutionary biology has demonstrated that the eye evolved early and often. (There's a pithy quote to that effect, but I can't recall to whom it should be attributed.) Even basic light-sensitive skin cells can confer an advantage, and the development of those cells into complex lens-bearing eyes is hardly the deep and overpowering mystery that hacks like Behe would like credulous fools to believe that it is. Again, please read a book by someone who *isn't* a creationist. You will be amazed how much there is to learn.

Obviously, I am very contemptuous of your ignorance. But it's more than just that--what is so aggravating to me is the classic creationist arrogance. You assume that your questions are great traps to confound scientists and educated people, when in fact they are literally so foolish that a child could answer them. Do you really think that you know better than specialists who have spent their entire adult lives studying the field? Do you really think that they will be unable to answer your questions? Why haven't you learned the answers to those questions by now yourself? I suspect that the problem may be that you're getting your information from biased sources, such as ID blogs. Someone has badly misled you. But as impoverished as your understanding of the issue is, I'm even more disappointed by the moderators who rated your questions as "interesting." Honestly, the exposure of such rank ignorance on a site geared towards highly educated and presumably intelligent people is disillusioning.

I need a drink. You need a book. Let's hope we both get what we need.

Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions

[Pseudonym]

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.

Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions

[x2A]

If you think "what caused the big bang" is such a brilliant question to prove the existance of a god, try this one: what created god?

If you think that everything must have been created, then you can't believe in a god that wasn't created. If, on the other hand, you believe that god can get away without being created, then how can you believe that the big bang can't?

It's these inconsistancies that leave the sane world laughing at you.

Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions

[mcc]

1. What caused the big bang? or What external force was there that caused the big bang?

I'm sorry, what does this have to do with evolution versus intelligent design?

Though the big bang cosmology theory has nothing to do with biology, I would agree that Science in general probably doesn't at current have an answer to what caused the big bang. I've seen a few tentative attempts to answer that question, but I don't think there's a consensus. The thing is though, this doesn't exactly matter. We don't take the big bang seriously because we know or care where big bangs come from; we take it seriously because we observe it's what seems to have happened. Nobody particularly wants the big bang theory to be true. Nobody has a particularly vested philosophical interest in the universe being an explosion. We do, however, have rather a decent lot of evidence concerning the exact way that the universe formed, gathered from looking at the aftermath (i.e.: the universe). That evidence has come to suggest what is called the big bang theory. If this is messy, or strange, or we can't come up with a good explanation as to what caused the cause behind that big bang, there really isn't anything we can do about this. Unlike religion, science doesn't get to decide what happened. Science is forced to go whereever the facts the universe contains takes it. And whether we want them to or not, those facts point at this.

But of course our inability to explain the Big Bang is quite separate from the status of other theories-- for example, the theory of Evolution-- in which we understand not only what happened, but the mechanism, reasons, and context that brought the thing that happened about.

2. Why did the sea creatures decide to go on land?

Oh, that's easy; there was food up there. Plants have been on land since at least 475 million years ago. Creatures have been permanently stationed up there since at least 425 million years ago. It's entirely unreasonable to say those millipedes "decided" to get up on land; this is undue anthropomorphization. The change to settle on land was made possible by mutation, which was a random act not guided by any conscious decision making process. It also seems unlikely to me that the first creatures to leave the ocean had any kind of purposeful goal, since I doubt they had enough sensory equipment to tell what the heck they were even doing.

More likely the very first time it happened, it went like this: something that could eat algae was crawling along a rock eating algae. This rock happened to be partially in, and partially out of, the ocean. The thing kept crawling along the rock, eating algae, and eventually it reached the interface between the ocean and the atmosphere, and it kept on crawling, and kept on eating algae. Why not? Of course, it may well have died very shortly after that, depending on whether and how long it could survive in the atmosphere. But: if there's all these algae and plants out in the dry world, and nobody's out there eating them or their dead, well heck, free food and no competition. This creates what we think of (it's a metaphor of sorts) as "evolutionary pressure", kind of like how, if we lived in a world where canned food was common but there weren't any can openers, the process of capitalism would create a tremendous metaphorical pressure for somebody to invent and start selling some.

Now let's say there's not just one thingy that eats algae and one rock where the algae is growing out in the atmosphere. Let's say there's lots and lots of thingies and lots and lots of rocks. The earth is pretty big. If, by coincidence, one of the thingies somewhere on the earth eventually winds up with some genes that, in its little gastropod nervous system, make it feel like it's a really good idea to

Remain strong!

[scapermoya]

Clearly, His Noodliness is testing us.

Please, don't use "missing link".

[Black Parrot]

The fossil record is (and always will be) full of holes for the simple reason that not everything gets preserved (and some environments make preservation extremely unlikely), and there's no "magic fossil" that's needed in order to make the big puzzle fall together.

For the most part, the big puzzle is already together. Yeah, there are lots of areas where we'd like to have more detail, but "missing link" implies that we're looking for some sort of Holy Grail, and are in a jam without it.

That simply ain't the way it is.

IANAEB

[Stephen Samuel]

I Am Not An Evolutionary Biologist -- So talking about this makes me feel a bit like a fish out of water.

A better missing link

[corngrower]

This link to bbc news includes a picture of the fossil.

Pictures

[lifeisgreat]

Since the write-up lacked anything flashy, here's an article from the Nature journal about the find.

Doesn't look very tasty.

Re: The thing most interesting to me about this

[Black Parrot]

> 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.

Missing link

[irish_spic]

Heh, there's lots of missing links here in canada - calling each other hosers and swilling cheap beer, eh.

Sorry, not a missing link

[DumbSwede]

You can only find a "link", not a "missing link." Once found it is no longer missing.
In much the same way as a hot water heater is unneeded since hot water is already hot.
/attempted humor

Re:Can we stop with the stupid comments?

[2short]

"Evolution on a cosmic level has never been observed and it's not much more than an educated guess"

Horseshit. It's a well constructed theory supported by vast mountains of evidence. It is the foundation of the entire science of biology. Every biologist in modern times has spent their career testing it, and found it solid. If it's an "educated guess" then plate tectonics is a wild shot in the dark.

Not direct ancestor

[Envall]

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.

Obviously

[robla]

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".

That qualifies as the missing link then, doesn't it.

Land Arthropods were Much Earlier.

[giafly]

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."