Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Find Missing Link in Bird Evolution
BlueCup writes "Dozens of fossils of an ancient loon-like creature that some say is the missing link in bird evolution have been discovered in northwest China. The remains of 40 of the nearly modern amphibious birds, so well-preserved that some even have their feathers, were found in Gansu province, researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science. Previously only a single leg of the creature, known as Gansus yumenensis, had been found."
They were planted there by the Flying Spaghetti Monster to test the convictions of the faithful!
Join Tor today!
Wonderful. They may have "found the missing link" but now there are two missing links to take its place!
No you fools, now there are two missing links (previously we wanted to find C between A and B, now we want to find D between A and C, and E between C and B) Of course this all really goes to show that you can never completely verify evolution no matter how much evidence you collect (just like any scientific theory), which is fine since you can be certain of the truth of something even if there is a remote possibility of later disproof. The public's obsession with "missing links" just goes to show that they don't understand knowledge very well.
Philosophy.
KFC's stock soared 100 points with the news that the protoduck would be served boneless and with hot sauce. When asked to comment on the decision to serve 100 million year old extinct bird, a kfc representative was quoted as saying "It has to taste better that the cluck we serve now"
Regardless, it is pretty cool that China, given their track record for openness and freedom of speech, is open to scientific progress.
~ C.
What if this bird, that was flying around, fell out of the sky and landed in this pond?
..god put it there to confuse the silly evolutionists..just like George Bush was elected to confuse the rest of the World.
It's the chicken and egg thing all over again.
"During Gansus's time, a group of birds called the Enantiornitheans--known as opposite birds because their wing joints are reversed compared to their modern relatives--dominated the skies. But the opposite birds perished along with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago."
Did these birds fly upside down, or in reverse gear?
Oh well, what the hell...
I think deviled eggs, only because "Buffalo" (word or city) is much more recent than "eggs" or "devil".
I would finish this post, but I find myself a bit peckish (adj. def 2), no pun intended...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
"...Previously only a single leg of the creature, known as Gansus yumenensis, had been found." ...But did it taste like CHICKEN???
Now just to find where humans fit into that line. I think they might be 6th or 7th, I'm not sure.
Do not mark in this space. For official office use only.
Huh ?
Is "Can you say OOOOLD news" department at it again ?
Read radical news here
That's no ancient loon-like creature, that's my wife!!
Chinese culinary historians were also very excited by the discovery, noting that this pushes back the date of the earliest known example of Peking duck 110 million years.
I'm suffering from a severe case of cognitive dissonance. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,199695,00.html
Those of us with room-temperature IQs are perpetually assured that there is overwhelming evidence for Darwinian gradualism in the fossil record. So, after reading the news release linked above, I asked myself, "Self, why is this big news?"
I guess I just don't get it. Why has the missing link in bird evolution just been found, when I have been assured for years that there is overwhelming evidence in the fossil record that the enigma of bird evolution was already solved?
Sigh. I'm apparently too stupid to understand Darwinian logic.
Filed under: Intelligent Design -- GilDodgen @ 10:23 pm
Karma? Sorry, i don't believe in superstition. http://talk.thinkingmatters.org.nz
Following the naming convention of the "Peking Man", is this one going to be "Peking Duck"?
EvilCON - Made Famous by
The article throws out a date of 110 million years. It should be noted that carbon-14 has a half-life of 5730 years and should be fully decayed in ancient fossils. However small quantities of C-14 that has not fully decayed are still found in ancient fossils.
Often evolutionists choose the dating technique that fits the picture they have in their minds. For example, 200 year old lava flows have been dated to be 3 billion years old by the potassium-argon dating method.
Are there any real experts out there who can explain how they know this creature was amphibious? I looked at the image, and I see no indication that this creature spent most of its time in the water. It seems no different than a duck - adapted to the water, but certainly not spending most of its time there. How can you tell?
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
I'm not that knowledgable about evolution but I do know that many keep saying that there really is no such thing as the "missing link" and people that keep refering to such an elusive idea do not fully understand. Why then, does slashdot, supposedly with a fairly intelligent readership, seem to keep posting articles with headlines containing "missing link" so often? Why keep talking about it like it has been found (again and again) if it really doesn't even need to exist in the first place? Sorry, I'm confused.
Meh.
"Not again?"
Google: "All your data are belong to us."
As you probably don't know, given the woeful understanding of science shown by creationist, no real scienctist uses carbon-14 for objects that old. So please shut the fuck up instead of displaying your ignorance to the world.
Is it just me or does anyone else find that there's an unusually large number of unique fossils coming from China? Maybe it's because, like products manufactured for Walmart, they're mostly cheap crap http://www.paleodirect.com/fakechinesefossils1.htm
NT
This isn't the missing link, it's a missing link. The fossil record is imperfect, and that makes every new fossil discovery a previously 'missing link' that connects a pair of things together in an evolutionary chain. This doesn't indicate a problem with Darwin's theory, just the tendency for journalists to sensationalize things in hopes that people will actually pay attention to less-than-earth-shattering discoveries. Unfortunately, scientists play the same game, as it helps give their work higher profile at the expense of distorting its actual value.
If anyone has told you that the "enigma of bird evolution" is already "solved" they would be wrong. The biggest problem with that statement is that there is no single enigma that needs solving. We know a lot about bird evolution, and this new discovery gives us a bit more information. But there is no single fact that awaits discovery that will allow us to say 'there, that's solved it, time to move on to cold fusion'. Most of the debate over evolution arises from this reduction of complex ideas to overly simple terms.
yp.
Ah, Now there are two missing links, you know how it all goes, at least until they find another, then there will be three, ad infinum.
...which is actually very easy to solve thanks to evolution. The ancestors of birds laid eggs too; this means the last representative of reptiles in the chain laid an egg from which the first bird hatched. Ergo the egg was first.
The dilemma that paleontologists face is to define which species was actually the first bird, but that doesn't affect the answer to this question.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
to g3t some eye there are and easy - only part of GNAA if
Follow the dating methods chain link and see if these are all distortions:
9 9
http://creationsafaris.com/crev200606.htm#dating1
There is no such thing as evolution. Flying Spaghetti Monster is the sole being responsible for making the earth and the universe as it is. It is He who put the fossils there so evolutionists would be fooled and the public's faith would be tested. If you believe, then, upon the day of Reckoning, when fiery meatballs fall from the sky and water tastes like marinara sauce, you will be saved.
Scientists agree! Join the Church of the http://www.venganza.org/Flying Spaghetti Monster!
Um ... they found an old duck ... and we still have ducks today ... and ... um ... can somebody please help me out figure out why the story title says "Scientists Find Missing Link in Bird Evolution". Thanks.
There is nothing wrong with fossils coming out of China, in fact some of the fossil data coming out of China via legitimate digs by reputable scientists is very interesting. The problems start when foreign museums go buying fossils on the black market that have no history and that have been taken totally out of context by the looters who dug them up which in turn reduced their scientific value considerably and makes them valuable mostly to amateur collectors who buy them for bragging rights. Using black market fossils for scientific work can be a dangerous business and many scientists consequently shun fossils obtained on the black market. If you want to buy fossils off of dodgy characters expect to get burned even if you are an expert. The most famous recent example of the perils of doing this is probably the National Geographic 'Archaeoraptor' debacle which fooled some leading experts and was incidentally partly exposed by a Chinese scientist who found the counterslab of one of the fossils used to make up the faked composit. The ironic thing is that in the end the scientific significance of the two halves of the National Geographic composit fake turned out to be almost as great as that of the composit would have been had it been genuine. Furthermore, had the specimens that were carved up to produce this fake been sold, complete and undamaged along with some sort of contextual data they would probably have been more valuable than the fake turned out to be.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Skirting the Godwin rule a bit, but Nazi Germany was one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world at the time (Engineering mostly, biology... not so much.) Scientific progress is a neccessary but not sufficient condition for a free and happy state.
Uncommon Descent, even after their failure in basic statistics this morning, kind of outdid themselves with that post.
The entire complaint there is that the find was called "the missing link". Except... who called it "the missing link"? Well... Fox News.
Fox News manages to disprove evolution sheerly by how they chose to word their headline? Wow. Who would have seen it coming?
This is really the most fascinating thing about the "Intelligent Design" movement. The most extreme and fundamental flaw with "Intelligent Design" creationists is that they simply don't produce anything; year after year while evolutionary biology moves ahead and makes interesting new discoveries, intelligent design creationists keep repeating the exact same mantras over and over, year in and year out, barely stopping even to revise them in the face of refutations. While science goes out and does research, intelligent design creationists sit around and do nothing, because they either already know all the answers or don't care what the answers are.
You'd think intelligent design creationists would be kind of embarrassed of this, and try not to call attention to this. But no. In fact, they take it as a point of pride. Every time evolutionary biologists learn something new, intelligent design creationists-- in particular those at Dembski's uncommon descent blog-- jump on it and claim victory. "Ah ha!" they said. "Evolutionary theory now knows something it didn't before! Why didn't it know that before? This shows how flawed evolution is, that they keep discovering new things!". IDCers see evolution's willingness to learn and constant progress as a sign of weakness, flipfloppery and intellectual bankruptcy. The IDCers themselves, meanwhile, are safe from any such allegations, as each year they remain exactly as ignorant as they were before.
I sure hope this is not some kind of rooster. I am not looking forward to spam like:
Enl4r9e y0ur missing link now
Free \/ia9ra and C14L!S for your Gansu cock
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Evolutionary links are inferred from biological data. With living species this is done primarily with DNA, but for fossils you have to use morphological information. So the taxonomists would line up all the specimens they have and figure out morphological connections among them. You might find that one group of fossils all have a certain bone structure, so they get grouped together while another group with different bone structure is interpreted as being a different lineage. You might be lucky enough to find a specimen with an intermediate structure, linking the two groups. This is a very basic explanation - there are all kinds of variations for deciding which features to use to make your classification, what to do with features that produce conflicting results and how to interpret the differences, but you get the idea...
yp.
Under an atheist's worldview, all our thoughts are constrained by the laws of physics. An atheist cannot say that he believes something because it is true. You wouldn't believe anything because it is true. You would believe something because the atoms in your brain are bouncing around in a certain way. An atheist couldn't trust their own rational capabilities, if they are to be consistent in their atheism.
So if you are a strict materialist, you would have to say that not only do religious people have pre-determined conclusions, but that is the case for everyone.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Penguins were created in Newark, New Jersey, in 1912.
".... and the earth isn't round, either. Nope, it's shaped like a burrito!"
- Director of the Institute of Scientific Penguinism
To this the Duck replied, "What kind of bird are you, if you can't swim?"' - Sergei Prokofiev
Previously only a single leg of the creature, known as Gansus yumenensis, had been found.
Perhaps someone with more background in this subject can clear this up for me. If they only had a leg, how the hell did they know what it was? Educated guess? Or did the researchers realize their unidentified legbone matched these new fossils and reclassified the original leg fossil?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
Science's website tells us that it's "an early ornithuran bird". Okay, so it's still a bird, just different from the birds we have today. The fact that some species have now gone extinct does not validate the evolutionary hypothesis. Once again, there is a blatant discrepency between what the media (including Slashdot) reports it to be and what it really is.
Having viewed your posting history, I now recognize you as a frequent poster to Evolution discussions. You have made a habit of posting demonstratably false information, and then refusing to respond when your claims are exposed as ill-informed or total fabrications. This does not speak well of your credibility.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Since they are aquatic, and we know waterfowl have penises, albeit ones with lymphatic engorgement rather than bloodvessels, this would be interesting to know, since 97% of birds don't have one. Other types of birds that do are ratites - Emu, Ostrich, etc.
...these fossils are at least an order of magnitude too old to have such "modern" features.
GSM should take a little more care with its duckies.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Wow, and here I was thinking that Superman is the missing link in bird evolution...
C'mon people, get it right. There is no such thing as a 'missing link'. What we have here are previously unknown Transitional Fossils (you know - the kind that the Creationists keep insisting don't exist). Let's try to use the correct terminology. Furthermore, the subject line indicates that there is only one missing link, and we've found it (yay!). Truth is that there are countless missing Transitional Fossils, and no - it's has nothing to do with the loud yammering of Ignorant Bible-Bashers. The truth is the the conditions for fossilization are pretty strict. As a result, the fossil record is a lot more sparse than we would like.
It is now official. Netcraft confirms: Intelligent Design is dying
.003% of the worlds population. This is consistent with the population of the southern United States.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Intelligent Design community when IDC confirmed that Intelligent Design market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all people. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Intelligent Design has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Intelligent Design is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Really Cool Test for Plausibility.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict Intelligent Design's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Intelligent Design faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Intelligent Design because Intelligent Design is dying. Things are looking very bad for Intelligent Design. As many of us are already aware, Intelligent Design continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Intelligent Design leader Pope Benedict XVI states that there about are 2 billion believers of Christianity. How many believers of Intelligent Design are there? Let's see. The number of Christians who believe in Intelligent Design versus Evolution posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 1 to 10000. Therefore there are about 2 billion/ 10000 = 200000 believers. The approximate population of the world is 6 Billion. 200000 / 6 Billion * 100 =
All major surveys show that Intelligent Design has steadily declined in Believers. Intelligent Design is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Intelligent Design is to survive at all it will be among the ignorant and cultists. Intelligent Design continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save Intelligent Design at this point in time. For all practical purposes, GOD is dead. Where is your God now
Fact: *Intelligent Design is dying Where is your God now?
Note: satire
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
You're using a strawman fallacy... trying to troll perhaps?
It always strikes me as peculiar when people refer to "atheism" as though it were a unified philosophy. Dividing people into "theists" and "atheists" in itself is silly, since it is obvious that opinions vary greatly in the "theists" camp, even within the same sub-groups. What kind of uniformity or cohesiveness do you expect when you group people by entities they do not believe in?
What I find more disturbing in general is that in spite of all the scientific progress humanity has made, the view that humans are practically irrelevant in the scope of the universe is challenged infinitely more than the view that we should all follow a martyred faith healer.
see a Text Widget
"Gansus is the oldest example of the nearly modern birds that branched off of the trunk of the family tree that began with the famous proto-bird Archaeopteryx," said Peter Dodson of the University of Pennsylvania, a co-author of the paper along with Lamanna, You and others. the problem here is that Archaeopteryx may not be their ancestor... http://research.unc.edu/endeavors/spr97/bird.html of course, any EVIDENCE that contradicts their view is shuffled off to the side and never discussed in public. sicence at its best, no?
What I find more disturbing in general is that in spite of all the scientific progress humanity has made, the view that humans are practically irrelevant in the scope of the universe is challenged infinitely more than the view that we should all follow a martyred faith healer.
the power of anyone, be they man or god, is in the power of their ideas.
calling jesus a martyred faith healer doesn't really address his ideas.
how about calling him the one that loved others equal to himself. would the world be a better place if people loved others equal to themselves?
ultimately, that is the question and the martyred faith healer drew a line in the sand - humanity can never achieve long standing peace and harmony precisely because they break the law of relationships... if people value themselves more than others, all h*ll will break loose.
being a matyr and being a faith healer are *only* important once one realizes the relational equation that said person laid down.
do unto others as you would have them do unto you - OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR OWN MISGUIDED ACTIONS.
that equation is absolute. a donkey riding, faith healing, matyr taught that law 2,000 years ago and everyone since his time has proved him right.
the only reason to follow him is b/c he's right.
they found aunt martha! we've been looking for the old bird for years!
It's not a strawman. I'm not saying that atheists believe such and such. It's just I described the logical conclusions if you are consistent with an atheistic worldview.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
"The fossils even reveal impressions of feathers, webbed feet and other rare details, though none of the remains include a skull."
These were ducks ready to be butchered, but ran and hid after getting their heads chopped off.
Well, I "believe" in evolution but i think the talk about is silly. For one are seriously handycapped because there is only limited fossil evidence.
/masses, charges etc. of a gas. And macroscopically "most" variables are irrelevant, the "remaining" variables are things like temperature, (energy, particle, impulse)densities, -flows. :D) In kinetic gas theory and the like, the macroscopic relations can be derived from the microscopic relations using methods of eliminating irrelevant variables and approximation.
More importantly: We don't have a definition of a species. We don't even know whether a reasonable definition is possible. When people are talking about evolution they think about how the species evolve, while in reality there are only a whole lot of interacting organisms. The model people form in their head is far from reality, and we have no idea how to even specify how relevant it is to reality.(but, hey, let em dream)
Well, the model is relevant to the point that mice and flies can't breed to form a hybrid naturally, but i think the model is totally says nothing about how the mice themselves are evolving. I think people that find fossils are deluding themselves that they have a useable model. It's a kind of hindsight hey i can explain that model.
So basically i don't believe in all that "transitional fossil" shit. Mathematics using DNA probably have a much better chance of saying usefull things.
It may just be possible to try model some properties of "organism-design-dynamics" using less variables then exist in the actual process of evolution, but the task of finding it sounds more then dounting.
I should try illustrate what i mean. With variables of a system i mean every thing that describes a system at a given time.
For example, in a case of a gas/liquid the variables are all the speeds and position
(btw impulseflow == pressuretensor
Now theory of gasses/liquids can be complicated, imagine "theory of organism-design-dynamics"! If your "pro-evolution" you should not get yourself pushed into the actual mechanisms of evolution discussion. What else? There is little else to argue for evolution, so maybe you shouldn't.
So where i stand is that i will not say i believe in evolution, i believe in the current state of the universe is a result of the natural way the universe behaves, and our understanding of it is limited. Let them prove god suddenly appeared and created everything, that is the silly-est explanation possible anyway. Maybe i effectively say nothing, but i am pretty sure i am not saying nonsense either, as i would in getting in the evolution-discussion mess.
Another thing: computer simulations may be able to model organisms. Maybe a simulation with imaginairy physics may be able to create evolution. Ofcourse it will have to be very visual to convince people.
What sort of research have you seen? I remember from catholic religion classes, 70 years was considered about right. A survey of the scholarship at wikipedia claims ranges of:
- Mark: c. 68-73
- Matthew: c. 70-100
- Luke: c. 80-100
- John: c. 90-110
(years A.D.). Jesus is thought to have died ~30 A.D.Given that the average life expectancy at that time was ~40 years, it would have taken ancient men of the time for the accounts to have been first-hand witnessings. Peter is said to have lived until 64 AD - I don't think we know when he was born but he probably lived at least into his fifties, so not everybody died at 40.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Scientists are doing the best they can with the evidence they have.
Sorry, MOST scientists are doing the best they can with what they have. Some seem to be saying that they have Arrived at some point where they Really Understand the Truth, when what they have done is understand the evidence they have, pending new discoveries. I suppose you might be able to say that a scientist who makes unwarranted claims is not much of a scientist.
Likewise, the IDers are often presenting as Truth what their pastor has told them the Bible means. Now if their pastor is an actual prophet, that would be one thing. Very few people really believe their pastor is a prophet. Slightly more believe in the existence of modern prophets at all. Of those who claim to be prophets, they don't seem to come out and tell the whole world about evolution or How God Did It.
To summarize: there is very little reason to argue about this.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
There is no such thing as an "atheist" worldview, except in an abstract sense. There is only a theist worldview, and then some people who do not share it, all of whom have their own worldviews which need not necessarily have any relation to each other.
"Sigh. I'm apparently too stupid to understand Darwinian logic. -- GilDodgen"
(Replying to GilDodgen, not the poster)... Or common values like honesty, or decency, or all the other things that the merry band over at uncommon descent routinely break. DaveScot has been caught self-contrdicting, lying, and trolling so many times that it's impossible to keep track of anymore (and he almost never corrects himself), and yet Dembski still keeps the guy around. Deeply embarrasing, but the company kept is telling.
Back on point, the basic failure of Gil's understanding in this case is confusing learning more about the particulars of a specific lineage with learning about the overall picture of evolutionary change. The two are not the same, and we can learn lots and lots of totally new things about one thing without it necessarily doing much more than being yet another in an already overwhelming landslide of reinforcements of the basic idea.