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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!
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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"
Whatever the faults of the Chinese regime may be, being beholden to christian fundamentalist interests is not one of them.
Following the naming convention of the "Peking Man", is this one going to be "Peking Duck"?
EvilCON - Made Famous by
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
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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.
Often proponents of creationism and intelligent design tend to choose the dating technique that fits the picture they have in their minds. For example, the poster above me stated a single, unrefined example of a dating technique being off in order to set a mindset that this technique is unreliable, and, unjustifiably, useless in all situations. He or she also states the half life of carbon-14, and a continued presence of it in fossils to understate the possible age of the fossil, conviently fitting into creationary mold set by the bible. How old is the world again? 6,000 years?
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
Carbon dating is only reliable to ~60k years because it is a naturally occuring isotope. It can be found anywhere at any time. However, living things tend to have higher levels of radioative C-14 than non living things, because of hte way carbon is recycled through living organisms.
After ~60k years, the level of C-14 in a sample can not be reliably seperated from the "background noise" of the C-14 that might just happen to be lingering around.
Potassium-argon dating can not be used on once-living things because radioactive Potassium-40 decays into Argon, a gas, which tends to escape into the environment -- unless it's in solid rock. Thus is is useful for dating lava flows. Also, the half-life of radioactive Potassium-40 is very long, about 1.3 million years (compare to C-14 at a mere 5730 years). Therefore K-Ar dating is only useful for dating "really old non-organic things" like... ancient lava flows.
It's simply a matter of using the right tool for the job.
=Smidge=
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.
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.
Where is it stated that Carbon-14 dating was used to derive the age of the fossil? The article makes no mention of it; presumably a different dating technique was used that does not have the same limitations as Carbon-14 dating. It would appear that your commentary is a non-sequitur.
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.
This is another example of creationists distorting facts
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
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.
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.
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.
The Soviet Union had good competence in a few key areas that were funded well, but lagged in overall development.
Stephan
I am not a fundie but there has to be a reliable way to date something. Otherwise scientists would not claim things like the age of the ducks in the article or any scientific paper.
Uh, no; there doesn't have to be a reliable way to date something. There are a great many ways of dating old things. Usually, scientists consider a date determined by a single method to be preliminary and requiring verification. The verification usually happens by using several different methods. If they all come up with a similar date, that is considered good support for the date.
Most of the methods used by paleontlogists are based on various sorts of decay processes, mostly the decay of radioactive isotopes. Taken singly, each of these has ways that that the samples can be contaminated, giving a bad date. But different chemical elements or compounds have different kinds of contamination that produce different kinds of dating errors. If you use N different dating methods, it's unlikely that all would be contaminated in such a way as to produce the same error. So if all N (or N-1) give the same date, that implies that there's little or no contamination, and the date is reliable.
The first scientific papers dealing with a new discovery often have tentative dates due to the use of a single dating method. But with new fossil beds, once good fossils have been excavated, it's routine to apply several different dating methods to pin down the fossils' ages more precisely.
This whole topic is a serious scientific field in it own right. Explaining how it all works would take several years of intensive study.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.