I believe that Greene is a working physicist too. At Columbia if I'm not mistaken. He was one of several guys that resolved the tearing problem in a particular kind of multi-dimensional space.
"If you want to learn more about the universe, go out there and personallly and look."
This has got to be about the silliest thing I've ever heard on slashdot. By building giant telescopes and machines to capture radiation from space, we ARE looking. Your insinuation that sending a person into orbit, the moon, or even mars is somehow superior to that is nuts.
"One geologist on site with comparatively primitive tools would learn more in 1 month than all of the missions all the nations on Earth have sent to Mars so far."
And getting that geologist there and back will cost so much and require so much time that for the same amount of money in less time, we could design countless landers and robots to do all his work before he even got there.
"People who believe we can do everything with science packages are the same people who believe that they can understand humans by watching "Reality TV"; they don't see that intermediation by a poor technology results in poorer results."
But not that much poorer. Certainly not enough to justify all the extra pointless expense. And "the universe" is, well, a bit bigger than our solar system IMHO.
"You can always look online, there's plenty of resource. There are tons of books. The hard part is reading them with open minds."
I think i've been pretty patient and open to the criticisms of ID proponents. The problem is that they are so obviously misguided, and many of their criticisms are just recycled creationist diatribes.
"Right now most of id has shown doubt about what was spoon feed to most of us during high school and college."
Even if that were true, and I don't think it is, this still doesn't show ID as having produced anything in the way of testible, useful theories of their own.
"I only believe this because a lot of evolution articles and books are biased to, so you can arrive at a happy medium and make a good choice."
The problem is that the truth is not necessarily found in the middle of two camps. Just because some people deny the Holocaust doesn't mean the truth lies in the middle, between mainstream historians and the deniers. The mere ability to make a fuss doesn't mean that they have made a worthwhile point.
I disagree. Manned spaceflight is a political vision, not a scientific one. Bush and Griffin are gutting real science to focus on fairly pointless goals, from the perspective of science.
Who are we trying to impress by putting a creature that's not well adapted to space, in space? The universe? I'd rather learn more about the universe, thanks.
What we're looking for in the fossil record is not a fully formed modern whale that happens to have legs and walk on land (some whales are born with throwback legs, but they could nevre walk on land)
"It must have existed but where is it."
It is Ambulocetus and Pakicetus, for starters. These creatures may not look like whales to the quick glance, but on closer inspection they have features which are unique to modern whales, as well as features that place them in a particular class of land mammals. This mix of features alone shows them to be ancestral to modern whales, though not necessarily _directly_ ancestral. It's generally unlikely and unecessary that we'd ever turn up the particular fossils that are directly ancestral to modern life.
"The whale with legs is a start but there must have been whales with nubs all the way up to whales with pelvic bones and skeletal structures that would all the legs to hold it's weight."
Creatures with features like this are found, and I noted them above. But keep in mind that you are quite wrong about the idea that we MUST find fossils for every single stage of any connection between this modern creature and that. The fossil record is just not that robust or complete, and likely never will be. Luckily, fossils are only a tiny part of the story of how lines are demonstrated, and only a very tiny part of how evolution is shown to be true. Anyone telling you that fossils are the be all and end all of whether evolution is true and unless we find the fossilized form of every animal that ever lived evolution can't be proven is misleading you.
"Right now it looks like a abnormality or something that could have been used for swimming."
Actually in Basy, it could not have been used for swimming. It might have been used for copulation.
"In evolution these forms must have existed but I don't see them all hiding or by chance their fossil records just don't exist."
Then you don't understand the nature of the fossil record.
"We will keep digging and maybe the records will show us this happening but it hasn't."
It has: again in part because fossils are only a tiny part of the story now.
"It's easier for evolution because they can just keep digging and saying well we are close and maybe in a million years the tree of life will be complete or at least show the walking whale."
No. We don't expect the fossil record to ever be complete. It is more than robust enough now, as it is, to be absolutely certain that common descent is true. It would be nice in some specific cases where ancestry is ambiguous if we had more fossils to help resolve smaller questions. But we have and have NEVER had the expectation that we'd simply get a picture of the entire tree of life spelled out in fossils. It's not that easy.
"For id they have to work extra hard and so far, I believe, they've done a pretty good job."
What is you measure of "good job"? What have they ever provided an explanation for? What predictions have they made that have come true? What discoveries has their theories led to? Nothing.
No, the fossils must reflect it, and do. We can't expect a complete fossil record, but we MUST always expect the fossil record and any new finds to either fit into the evolutionary scheme, or else disprove it. So far, it holds up against all the evidence we've found.
"I was thinking of the tail thing for human embryos. The offspring of animals do differ but not by much."
Indeed: because they are all basically minor modifications on a long-standing overall scheme.
"I guess with evolution now going with such small successions of changes there never will be a transformational phase."
I don't know what you mean by transformational phase. Evolution has never predicted that cats would transform into dogs or anything like that: nothing has changed other than what creationists wrongly claim.
"As long as any creature is similar to another that should be good enough."
Nope. The similarities and differences must match up in very particular ways. Otherwise, it's NOT good enough.
The best I can say is that he makes a good try of it, but ultimately he's arguing upriver (and apparently this was written before the discovery of far more of the fossil remnants of the creatures he lists as incomplete). He also misuses plenty of concepts like, for instance, vestigial, which he implies MUST be functionless. But the point of vestigial features is not whether or not they retain some function or not: it's that they are examples of a trait obviously adapted from a previous usage and, in this case, eventually lost altogether. All this handwaving never quite explains why it is that fossils with features unique to both modern whales and land mammals doesn't conclusively demonstrate that there once existed creatures who were at the very least indirectly ancestral to both groups.
"For the embryos I thought all vertebras develop in this fashion."
Well, finned fish never form leg buds, and they are vertebrates. Dolphin embryos develop in a characteristically tetrapod fashion, despite not ultimately (at least normally) having four legs.
"But I haven't looked at a tree of life in a while I'm sure that it states all vertebras come from the same lineage."
Well, yes. But that doesn't mean that all vertebrates have the same traits. Some vertebrates, like birds, have wings. Others, like mammals, bear live young. And so on.
"I see your point on morphology. I'm leery than about that discipline of science. If anything can morph into anything than what good is it?"
But anything can't morph into anything. An insect can't morph into a dolphin: it can only give birth to modified insects. Likewise, a eukaryote cannot start producing prokaryote cells. If evolution is true, then the changes that life can go through are constrained in many many sorts of ways. The fact that all observed life seems to obey those constraints is another good reason why we think common descent is so certain.
"Yes I would say life from that period would be different to a degree. It seems like there was simple life forms than boom a bunch of different ones."
Which were, at least compared to modern life, still pretty simple, and still obviously quite related to each other. And keep in mind that the "boom" took place spread out over the course of 30 million years: pretty fast in terms of evolutionary pace, but no small potatoes either.
"There's going to be change over time but such a radical event seems like it would either seriously change evolutionary theory or dump it for a new one."
Evolution did change to some extent: things like the Cambrian Explosion did away with a view which was known as phyletic gradualism, which was the idea that the amount of morphological change in all living things was constant. In contrast to that, most biolgoists today think that changes are more stuttery: populations remain fairly stable for longer periods of time after they reach equilibrium, and then burst out and change a lot faster when the environment changes and they have to adapt.
Genetics also seems to confirm this, in that most of the genetic code is unexpressed: mutational change to it don't actually affect anything, so bigger changes tend to come in clumps rather than at a steady rate. Likewise, studies in populations today show that creatures are actually capable of changing many many many time FASTER than what we see in the fossil record: faster even, in fact, than anything seen in the Cambrian explosion. That means that a lot of what natural selection does is not speeding up change, but rather slowing it down.
"What source are you using that humans came from eukaryotes and opisthokonts?"
Well, all of our cells are eukaryotic. And our reproductive cells are always obvious opisthokonts, as opposed to using cillia or some other means of propulsion found elsewhere in life. As for how we know that we are descended from...
"I'm finding lots of for and against on this subject. I guess I'm looking for the smoking gun, which isn't going to happen."
"I guess I can see how dna could show that. But also, how many ways are there to make a wheel, quite a few but they are all still wheels. Fingers, hearts, lungs, etc. pretty much act the same way and perform the same functions. But aren't evolutionists looking for the whale with legs."
Sure. And indeed, there are several key fossils showing the transition from land mammal to whale: which includes the titular "whale with legs" (though, remember, a whale is a modern animal: this creature is one that has features of BOTH land mammals and modern whales). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilosaurus
In fact, modern whales are actually sometimes (very rarely) born with legs, just as humans are occasionallu born with tails (and like humans, whose embryos form and then reabsorb tails, whale embryos form and then reabsorb legs).
"At that point they can say what was a whale walked on land and helped form land mammals. It sounds like evolutionists have given up on that."
I'm not sure what you mean. Not only have they not given up on it, but genetic testing that showed that whales were most closely related to land mammals in a particular part of the world is exactly what directed them to look for transitional fossils in the place they eventually found the "whale with legs."
"The body plans are different enough to warrant a different classification. I'm human just like someone from Africa is human and someone from Japan is human as well."
The problem is that there is no "different enough" in morphology anymore than there comes a point where a pile of salt becomes a dune of salt, added grain by grain.
Here's a good article on what endosymbiosis is all about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiotic_theory It took decades before enough evidence amassed to convince most biologists that it was true.
Sorry, hit post too soon: "I guess I mean that we see a bunch of radically different life forms in a very short period of time and from there on we don't see the same thing ever happen again."
Again, this is a confusion based on the misunderstanding of how taxonomic classifications work. All modern life has to have been descended from at least one of the things alive in the Cambrian era. That means that all modern life is subsumed underneath and inside one of the categories made up of the creatures alive at that time. But that doesn't mean that life today is necessarily an less radically different from other Cambrian lifeforms than Cambrian lifeforms were from each other. I would certainly argue that a dinosaur is far far more radically different from a trilobyte than a chordate is from a trilobyte. And yet dinosaurs ARE classed as chordates!
"Life changes to fit the environment, but we never get bacteria changing into something else that changes into something else and so on until it's unrecognizable as coming from bacteria."
Well again, that's right, because evolution is pretty conservative. For instance, we are all STILL, even after all this time, Eukaryotes and Opisthokonts. Our ancient one-celled ancestors were also Eukaryotes and Opisthokonts, but the no frills versions: they were JUST nucleated cells with flagella, without any of the high order cell specialization and multi-cellular coordination that we have. But look closely at all our cells, and you can see that we are characteristically and recognizeably still eukaryotes and opisthokonts.
"Life on this planet is very similar. We could even throw in that it's all carbon-based life. But..."
Note: I didn't just say that it's very similar. It's that there is a single particular a pattern of similarity AND difference that we find confirmed from every angle we look at things. In addition, life groups by its nature into nested clades where certain sets of features are strongly correlated throughout time. That sort of pattern only ever exists for one reason: when traits are passed via ancestry. Indeed, just as we can run a DNA test (which is basically a test looking for degrees of grouped/correlated traits between two samples) to figure out that you are your mother's son, we can run the same exact sort of DNA test to find out that humans are related to monkeys. The underlying logic works the same way: if it's valid for paternity, why not for evolution?
"But unless a transitional form is found we still have just lots of life with similarities. "
I'm not sure what you mean. Transistional forms are all over the fossil record. Of course, it's important to understand that the idea of there being a special "transitional" thing as opposed to other "normal" life is misleading. All the creatures that ever lived are "transitional" in a very real sense, even if they may not have left offspring (most don't make it).
A really knock-dead impressive transitional form is generally one which happens to have features which are normally unique to two different groups of modern animals. For instance, a certain number of digits with fingernails are unique to a particular group of land mammals, and nostrils pushed up the head are unique to whales. That's why fossils with both traits are considered "transitional" between modern whales and land mammals. But keep in mind that if some branch of these transitional creatures had by happenstance lived on without losing their hind legs, then no one would have thought true whales to be uniquely possessing blowholes in the first place.
Ah, so reading the article you posted I see what the problem is. Where this article goes radically off base is where it assumes that there is something special or more fundamental about "phyla" emerging for the first time in Cambrian. But remember, taxonomic groups are classifications we created first to describe and group MODERN animals. Applying that system to the past can thus be a little confusing when we start thinking about ancient animals, because we forget that modern animals are descended from ancient animals, and thus have a lot more categories and groups, having undergone many many more divisions and so much more change. But this doesn't mean that just because we can class a Cambrian creature into a species within a phyla that the sudden emergence of its "entire" phyla is any more distressing than the sudden emergence of domesticated dogs from wolves in their time. These "phyla" only became distinct from each other as differences between the species magnified over time. The first appearance of a phyla in ancient times should not be interpreted as anything more stunning than the appearance of a new species in recent times.
This is because while the "different bodyplans" may well have become very distinct far down the road, when the only modern examples of each of those plans are quite different from each other, but back in the Cambrian, the "bodyplans" they speak of are really not all that different from one another. Nor do they really appear without any precusors at all, as the graphs purport to show. The Cambrian explosion does represent a big increase in the diversity of multicelluar forms, but remember that this was back when most of those forms were still pretty simple. The simpler somethings structure is, the easier it is to experiment with different concepts, since you aren't yet as committed to any particular structural constraints. And in any case, plenty of pre-Cambrian life has been found that fills in many of the seemingly unrooted appearances (most notably are the pre-Cambrian
Actually, that first article is about endosymbiosis, which is what I was talking about in the other post: mitochondria and some other organelles are now thought to have originally been parasites or symbiotes that got embedded in other cells. Of course, I wouldn't trust AiG's take on this (indeed, a lot of their "questions" seem woefully uninformed about the basics of things like reproduction and so on)
The second article is about another of the ubiquitous proteins: i.e. a component of living things that seems so basic to all life that it's present everywhere and conserved against too much change. Actin is a protein that is seemingly so central to the function of a cell that it hasn't diverged much at all (though it has diverged somewhat). You can do the same tests with actin that you do with cytochrome C, and you get the same results: the same tree (at least to the extent that you get much detail at all, since as the article notes, most animal life has the same sequence of actin and its only when you start comparing animal life to other kingdoms that you start to see differences)
The main points of both articles pretty much confirm what I was talking about (aside from the sniping of the AiG writer, endosymbiosis is considered to be quite real, and while it complicates the story about the origins of life, it doesn't contradict them).
"Theories, such as some of those you mentioned, often attempt to explain or predict phenomenon that extend beyond the boundaries of that which is actually observed."
I think you are confused as to what "observed" means in science. Observations are what we are trying to explain in the first place: you form a hypothesis in order to explain some observation. Testing the hypothesis requires just that: testing it in any way you can think of relative to what it claims.
You are trying to set up a distinction between scientific claims about the past and about the present which just doesn't exist. Scientific claims about the present aren't any more "proven" than anything else.
"I always thought the big bang theory sounded a lot like genesis "in the beginning", if someone were to have written it a few thou years ago."
That's the silliest thing about this particular controversy. This poor kid apparently never got the creationist memo that said "Resolved: Big Bang is actually GOOD for us, we don't oppose it anymore, we embrace and promote it!" I mean, in addition to being on the wrong side of science, he even got the ID/creationist side of things backwards. I just hope he now has a chance to complete college.
"Taken with a little grain of salt and lacking good terms (at the time), it fits precisely."
Wellll.... so does the Greek concept that the stars are embedded in a great glass dome. With enough grains of salt. Let's not go too crazy here.
"I guess what I'm saying is because some life is similar doesn't mean that they evolved from a root ancestor."
That's true, which is why mere similarity is not really the story. The story is finding a very particular pattern of similarities AND differences, and finding the same exact pattern in every which way we can think to look at the evidence. AND having all of those apparent links match what we find in the fossil record. AND having all those connections match up with what we know of geological history, population statistics, and so on.
Remember also that it's not only the functional expressed parts of genes that match up: it's also the non-important parts too. For instance, all living things have a protein called cytochrome C. This protein, while basic to all life functioning (and hence ubiquitous) can come in many different forms. Like most proteins, you can change lots of parts of its sequence without affecting its function much or at all. And so, when we look at this protein in different creatures alive today, we find that random differences have cropped up in the non-important parts of the protein (those that don't affect it's function, and so hence natural selection doesn't actively work on) in such a way that creatures who are supposedly more distantly related have more distantly related versions of cytochrome C. There is no reason that this pattern (which, again, matches up with the fossils, the other genetic tests, the morphological groupings, and so on) should exist, and yet it does. It's the fact that all the evidence converges on the same conclusion that convinces scientists that common descent is so certain. If it wasn't true, then there is no real reason why all these things would converge. If any one of them were in error, or if somehow ALL were in error, the answers they gave should be random, not matched up.
"Beaks of finches might serve as an example; they are still finch's just different beaks."
The problem is that once you really start to look at life as biologists look at it, there is no real distinction between "different beaks" and "different finches" and "different creatures." All are just matters of some degree or another. For instance, between apes and men, not much is different in the structures of our faces other than the shapes of our jaws and our hair being finer and shorter.
"With 90% of the phyla showing up in fewer than 2% of animals being here"
Wait, I'm not sure I got what this means. 90% of the phyla: which phyla, and what "here"?
"it seems that it would be hard for simple organism to mutate into a bunch of complex ones and then stop evolving, those figures might not be exact but they are pretty close."
I'm not sure to what the figures are referring to, please explain in more detail for me. I'm also not sure what you mean by "stop evolving." While different forms of life evolve at different rates, and major morphological changes tend to be pretty stop and go as far as becoming fixed in a population, nothing really "stops" evolving unless it stops reproducing and/or dies out.
"and I dont think any species has literally turned into another in 'real time'"
Of course they have. The biological species concept requires only reproductive incompatibility to arise to separate one species from another. This has been observed to happen countless times in multicellular life within human lifetimes.
"Also if we really understand these genetic mechanisms so well, then how come there is no proof of macro evolution, no simulation that seems to prove it, etc.. and dont use circular reaasoning."
Not only is there proof of macroevolution, but it's regarded as an almost blase fact by biologists. I have no idea what you mean by "no similation seems to prove it" or "there is no proof." That's ridiculous.
There is no "updated" in what I described. The first eukaryotes were single celled. Multicellular eukaryotes are a SUBGROUP of eukaryotes, not something completely new. Multicellular eukaryotes with bony parts are a subgroup of multicellular eukaryotes, not something completely new. At no point does anything tantamount to a cat evolving into a dog ever happen. What does happen is that existing creatures are modified over time. But the modifications are actually relatively small potatoes: they never amount to radically shifting into new, higher forms of life. Humans are still mammals, birds are still tetrapods, elephants are still eukaryotes.
"Interesting read. A couple questions though. It talks about whales and snakes being similar but can't breed, and then it talks about human families with cousins and siblings. It seems to show that yes the humans are the same because technically all the people in the same family can breed with each other but the whales and snakes can."
I assume you meant "cannot."
"So they are totally different, at least from what the author of this points out."
I'm not sure what you're asking. Yes, whales and snakes are different from each other, though in some ways they are actually very very similar. They can't breed because we wouldn't expect species that have diverged so long ago to have compatible genomes. Once species are no longer in the same reproductive gene pool, there is no force keeping them close enough together, and they drift off in different directions, eventually becoming incompatible.
"The article also seems show a more conservative evolution."
Indeed! One of the things people don't seem to realize about evolution is that it is taxonomically very conservative. The changes it proposes are almost never radical digressions from the past. In fact, descendants of something almost never leave the taxonomic groups to which their ancestors belonged.
"It says there where a bunch of different organisms that changed into all the life we see today. So not everything stems from a single cell through the tree of life."
Well, it basically DOES say that. The real confusion near the very beginning is that a) life probably started with something far simpler than any cell apparent today and b) early life almost certainly swapped around genetic material without reproduction, making tracing any exact lineage hard and almost meaningless. But the basic idea of all of life's diversity starting from basic protobionts is still very much the same, as is the tree of life.
"Also the genetics part seemed weird. Life on earth is pretty complex. How many ways can dna make the proteins needed for an arm? So because our arms and apes arms are similar than I would think the genetic codes would be similar. So if something looks or has a similar internal makeup similar to something else one would have to assume that the dna would be a pretty close match."
Yes, and indeed that's exactly what we find. The exceptions are helpful to look at too. Sometimes we'll find traits in creatures that developed indepedently, such as shark fins and dolphin fins. They LOOK pretty similar to each other. But genetically, they are not. So humans have ape arms, but dolphins don't have shark fins. That fits in perfectly with what the tree of life predicts.
There is no good substitute for doing a journal search and reading about this stuff directly. Talkorigins has reams of this stuff: it was set up to BE a resource for showing laypeople the actual biology. And here's a decent recent example described pretty well in terms of the way in which reproductive incompatibility occurs in abalone, one of the very simplest and easiest to understand examples (scroll down belwo the reply box): http://p222.ezboard.com/freligiousdebate60574frm43 .showAddReplyScreenFromWeb?topicID=2.topic&index=1 6
"Besides, I would think that even if what you said was a good analogy, the filters would be filtering out the resultant DNA and the noise too: i.e. the resultant DNA has less diversity than what it had to start with, noise included."
No, because variation is constantly increasing due to mutation and other factors. Granted, natural selection can indeed outpace it: in fact one of the major conclusions about what natural selection functionally does on a macroevolutionary scale is that it SLOWS DOWN morphological change, rather than speeding it up.
"As the GP said, they adapt by removing genes, they don't mutate new ones."
But they do mutate new ones: that's the "noise." Traits aren't beneficial or detrimental until they are expressed and shoved up against some environmental pressure. How do you think the variation of "longer/shorter" legs got to be there in the first place?
"But if these 'mutations' are enough to make new ones, (in other words enough to form a macroevolution,) wouldn't that bring the newer species out of the older taxonomic groups?"
No. Macroevolution works by branching at the tips of the twigs, not on the trunk, so to speak. New species always belong to all the same "older" groups as their direct ancestors.
"Tetrachromatism has been around forever. It's not restricted to humans"
Uh, sorry, but no. Tetrachromatism is common in reptiles and birds (even pentachromatism), but in humans it IS a fairly recent (sex-linked) mutation, and certainly a different underlying trait (bird vision is quite different in terms of function). Apparently, you need some more grade school biology.
"Now the important thing to realise is that during this time no new information (DNA) has been added that wasn't in the original population. All that has happened is that information (DNA) has been removed."
Which completes a process that serves to increase the information content in the gene pool as a whole. You see, first random variation adds noise. Selection is basically putting that noise through an environmental filter. The result is information about the environment encoded into DNA.
"I can't give you an example because all observable mutation don't change animals from one species to another they just change the attributes of a species (e.g. blue roses aren't natural but they are still roses). If I knew of an example I'd share it but I can't find any. The wingless beetles are still beetles. The different finches are still finches."
I hope this doesn't come as a shock, but scientists don't really use terms like "roses" or "wingless beetles" or even "finches." They use the taxonomic system. And, as it might interest you to know, since you seem to be under the illusion that it should, evolution never proposes that descendants move out of older taxonomic groups. All future descendants of roses will still be usefully classed as roses, just as roses are still usefully classed as flowering plants.
For instance, the ancestors of human beings included first members who were Eukarya. Next there members that were Eukarya AND Opisthokonta. Then a sub-category of that which emerged was Animalia, then Eumetazoa, then Bilateria, then Coelemata, then Deuterostomata, then Chordata, then Craniata, then Vertebrata, then Gnathostomata, then Osteichthyes, then Sarcopterygii, then Stegocephali, then Tetrapoda, then Anthracosauria, then Amniota, then Synapsida, then Therapsidae, then Cynodonta, then Theria, then Eutheria, then Euarchontoglire, then Archonta, then Anthropoidea, then Haplorhini, then Catarrhini, then Hominoidea, then Hominidae, then Hominini, then Homo, then Homo Sapiens, then Homo Sapiens Sapiens. At no point in anywhere along that long ancestral change did anything cease to be a part of the parent group.
Perhaps that's why you aren't finding examples of one creature turning into another: evolution doesn't suggest that anything of the sort happens. Speciation happens all the time, observably. It's just that it forms a branching pattern, not a lateral one as you suggest.
It's not only crazy, but actually not much of a mystery how it happens. Unless yo uwere being sacrastic. Because yeah, people that admit that genetically motivated morphological change that can diverge an Asiatic wolf into a Pug or a Great Dane, but deny that the same process can ever create genetic incompatibility between isolated population ARE sort of unbelievable. Good grief: the morphological difference between a human and a basal ape is TINY. We have the same number of hair folicles, the same basic ear structures, the same molars... most of what we have is shorter hair, a bigger braincase, a rebalanced hip, and an indent in our palate. That's not much change at all: well within the degree to which people admit "microevolution" can do within a species. Why is it so hard to understand that reproductive isolation can lead to reproductive incompatibility due to genetic drift?
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that Greene is a working physicist too. At Columbia if I'm not mistaken. He was one of several guys that resolved the tearing problem in a particular kind of multi-dimensional space.
"If you want to learn more about the universe, go out there and personallly and look."
This has got to be about the silliest thing I've ever heard on slashdot. By building giant telescopes and machines to capture radiation from space, we ARE looking. Your insinuation that sending a person into orbit, the moon, or even mars is somehow superior to that is nuts.
"One geologist on site with comparatively primitive tools would learn more in 1 month than all of the missions all the nations on Earth have sent to Mars so far."
And getting that geologist there and back will cost so much and require so much time that for the same amount of money in less time, we could design countless landers and robots to do all his work before he even got there.
"People who believe we can do everything with science packages are the same people who believe that they can understand humans by watching "Reality TV"; they don't see that intermediation by a poor technology results in poorer results."
But not that much poorer. Certainly not enough to justify all the extra pointless expense. And "the universe" is, well, a bit bigger than our solar system IMHO.
"You can always look online, there's plenty of resource. There are tons of books. The hard part is reading them with open minds."
I think i've been pretty patient and open to the criticisms of ID proponents. The problem is that they are so obviously misguided, and many of their criticisms are just recycled creationist diatribes.
"Right now most of id has shown doubt about what was spoon feed to most of us during high school and college."
Even if that were true, and I don't think it is, this still doesn't show ID as having produced anything in the way of testible, useful theories of their own.
"I only believe this because a lot of evolution articles and books are biased to, so you can arrive at a happy medium and make a good choice."
The problem is that the truth is not necessarily found in the middle of two camps. Just because some people deny the Holocaust doesn't mean the truth lies in the middle, between mainstream historians and the deniers. The mere ability to make a fuss doesn't mean that they have made a worthwhile point.
I disagree. Manned spaceflight is a political vision, not a scientific one. Bush and Griffin are gutting real science to focus on fairly pointless goals, from the perspective of science.
Who are we trying to impress by putting a creature that's not well adapted to space, in space? The universe? I'd rather learn more about the universe, thanks.
"I want to see evidence of a whale born in what that was able to walk on land."
n s
Remember that science doesn't really use terms like "whales." The order cetacean is generally what we look at when we discuss the ancestry of whales.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_Cetacea
What we're looking for in the fossil record is not a fully formed modern whale that happens to have legs and walk on land (some whales are born with throwback legs, but they could nevre walk on land)
"It must have existed but where is it."
It is Ambulocetus and Pakicetus, for starters. These creatures may not look like whales to the quick glance, but on closer inspection they have features which are unique to modern whales, as well as features that place them in a particular class of land mammals. This mix of features alone shows them to be ancestral to modern whales, though not necessarily _directly_ ancestral. It's generally unlikely and unecessary that we'd ever turn up the particular fossils that are directly ancestral to modern life.
"The whale with legs is a start but there must have been whales with nubs all the way up to whales with pelvic bones and skeletal structures that would all the legs to hold it's weight."
Creatures with features like this are found, and I noted them above. But keep in mind that you are quite wrong about the idea that we MUST find fossils for every single stage of any connection between this modern creature and that. The fossil record is just not that robust or complete, and likely never will be. Luckily, fossils are only a tiny part of the story of how lines are demonstrated, and only a very tiny part of how evolution is shown to be true. Anyone telling you that fossils are the be all and end all of whether evolution is true and unless we find the fossilized form of every animal that ever lived evolution can't be proven is misleading you.
"Right now it looks like a abnormality or something that could have been used for swimming."
Actually in Basy, it could not have been used for swimming. It might have been used for copulation.
"In evolution these forms must have existed but I don't see them all hiding or by chance their fossil records just don't exist."
Then you don't understand the nature of the fossil record.
"We will keep digging and maybe the records will show us this happening but it hasn't."
It has: again in part because fossils are only a tiny part of the story now.
"It's easier for evolution because they can just keep digging and saying well we are close and maybe in a million years the tree of life will be complete or at least show the walking whale."
No. We don't expect the fossil record to ever be complete. It is more than robust enough now, as it is, to be absolutely certain that common descent is true. It would be nice in some specific cases where ancestry is ambiguous if we had more fossils to help resolve smaller questions. But we have and have NEVER had the expectation that we'd simply get a picture of the entire tree of life spelled out in fossils. It's not that easy.
"For id they have to work extra hard and so far, I believe, they've done a pretty good job."
What is you measure of "good job"? What have they ever provided an explanation for? What predictions have they made that have come true? What discoveries has their theories led to? Nothing.
"Yeah; it refers to having four color pigments in the retina rather than the four that (most) humans have."
You meant three.
"It's the norm in birds, who have three pigments with about the same sensitivity as ours, plus a fourth that's sensitive to violet/UV."
Some birds actually have five, to be complete.
No, the fossils must reflect it, and do. We can't expect a complete fossil record, but we MUST always expect the fossil record and any new finds to either fit into the evolutionary scheme, or else disprove it. So far, it holds up against all the evidence we've found.
"I was thinking of the tail thing for human embryos. The offspring of animals do differ but not by much."
Indeed: because they are all basically minor modifications on a long-standing overall scheme.
"I guess with evolution now going with such small successions of changes there never will be a transformational phase."
I don't know what you mean by transformational phase. Evolution has never predicted that cats would transform into dogs or anything like that: nothing has changed other than what creationists wrongly claim.
"As long as any creature is similar to another that should be good enough."
Nope. The similarities and differences must match up in very particular ways. Otherwise, it's NOT good enough.
"Here's an article that might show a problem with the basilosarus. http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.p hp/id/839 There's a section on whales there that was interesting."
The best I can say is that he makes a good try of it, but ultimately he's arguing upriver (and apparently this was written before the discovery of far more of the fossil remnants of the creatures he lists as incomplete). He also misuses plenty of concepts like, for instance, vestigial, which he implies MUST be functionless. But the point of vestigial features is not whether or not they retain some function or not: it's that they are examples of a trait obviously adapted from a previous usage and, in this case, eventually lost altogether. All this handwaving never quite explains why it is that fossils with features unique to both modern whales and land mammals doesn't conclusively demonstrate that there once existed creatures who were at the very least indirectly ancestral to both groups.
"For the embryos I thought all vertebras develop in this fashion."
Well, finned fish never form leg buds, and they are vertebrates. Dolphin embryos develop in a characteristically tetrapod fashion, despite not ultimately (at least normally) having four legs.
"But I haven't looked at a tree of life in a while I'm sure that it states all vertebras come from the same lineage."
Well, yes. But that doesn't mean that all vertebrates have the same traits. Some vertebrates, like birds, have wings. Others, like mammals, bear live young. And so on.
"I see your point on morphology. I'm leery than about that discipline of science. If anything can morph into anything than what good is it?"
But anything can't morph into anything. An insect can't morph into a dolphin: it can only give birth to modified insects. Likewise, a eukaryote cannot start producing prokaryote cells. If evolution is true, then the changes that life can go through are constrained in many many sorts of ways. The fact that all observed life seems to obey those constraints is another good reason why we think common descent is so certain.
"Yes I would say life from that period would be different to a degree. It seems like there was simple life forms than boom a bunch of different ones."
r ganism%20is%20any%20organic%20(Carbon-based)%20RNA /DNA%20protien%20which%20replicates%20&%20reproduc es.
Which were, at least compared to modern life, still pretty simple, and still obviously quite related to each other. And keep in mind that the "boom" took place spread out over the course of 30 million years: pretty fast in terms of evolutionary pace, but no small potatoes either.
"There's going to be change over time but such a radical event seems like it would either seriously change evolutionary theory or dump it for a new one."
Evolution did change to some extent: things like the Cambrian Explosion did away with a view which was known as phyletic gradualism, which was the idea that the amount of morphological change in all living things was constant. In contrast to that, most biolgoists today think that changes are more stuttery: populations remain fairly stable for longer periods of time after they reach equilibrium, and then burst out and change a lot faster when the environment changes and they have to adapt.
Genetics also seems to confirm this, in that most of the genetic code is unexpressed: mutational change to it don't actually affect anything, so bigger changes tend to come in clumps rather than at a steady rate. Likewise, studies in populations today show that creatures are actually capable of changing many many many time FASTER than what we see in the fossil record: faster even, in fact, than anything seen in the Cambrian explosion. That means that a lot of what natural selection does is not speeding up change, but rather slowing it down.
"What source are you using that humans came from eukaryotes and opisthokonts?"
Well, all of our cells are eukaryotic. And our reproductive cells are always obvious opisthokonts, as opposed to using cillia or some other means of propulsion found elsewhere in life. As for how we know that we are descended from...
"I'm finding lots of for and against on this subject. I guess I'm looking for the smoking gun, which isn't going to happen."
Well that link I posted before is a good start(the main page is just the start of things: the real meat is in the taxonomic class-by-class discussion of our ancestry:
http://home.comcast.net/~aronra/Clades.htm#An%20o
The talk.origins common descent FAQ is also a really great start:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
"I guess I can see how dna could show that. But also, how many ways are there to make a wheel, quite a few but they are all still wheels. Fingers, hearts, lungs, etc. pretty much act the same way and perform the same functions. But aren't evolutionists looking for the whale with legs."
Sure. And indeed, there are several key fossils showing the transition from land mammal to whale: which includes the titular "whale with legs" (though, remember, a whale is a modern animal: this creature is one that has features of BOTH land mammals and modern whales).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilosaurus
In fact, modern whales are actually sometimes (very rarely) born with legs, just as humans are occasionallu born with tails (and like humans, whose embryos form and then reabsorb tails, whale embryos form and then reabsorb legs).
"At that point they can say what was a whale walked on land and helped form land mammals. It sounds like evolutionists have given up on that."
I'm not sure what you mean. Not only have they not given up on it, but genetic testing that showed that whales were most closely related to land mammals in a particular part of the world is exactly what directed them to look for transitional fossils in the place they eventually found the "whale with legs."
"The body plans are different enough to warrant a different classification. I'm human just like someone from Africa is human and someone from Japan is human as well."
The problem is that there is no "different enough" in morphology anymore than there comes a point where a pile of salt becomes a dune of salt, added grain by grain.
Here's a good article on what endosymbiosis is all about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiotic_theory
It took decades before enough evidence amassed to convince most biologists that it was true.
Sorry, hit post too soon:
"I guess I mean that we see a bunch of radically different life forms in a very short period of time and from there on we don't see the same thing ever happen again."
Again, this is a confusion based on the misunderstanding of how taxonomic classifications work. All modern life has to have been descended from at least one of the things alive in the Cambrian era. That means that all modern life is subsumed underneath and inside one of the categories made up of the creatures alive at that time. But that doesn't mean that life today is necessarily an less radically different from other Cambrian lifeforms than Cambrian lifeforms were from each other. I would certainly argue that a dinosaur is far far more radically different from a trilobyte than a chordate is from a trilobyte. And yet dinosaurs ARE classed as chordates!
"Life changes to fit the environment, but we never get bacteria changing into something else that changes into something else and so on until it's unrecognizable as coming from bacteria."
Well again, that's right, because evolution is pretty conservative. For instance, we are all STILL, even after all this time, Eukaryotes and Opisthokonts. Our ancient one-celled ancestors were also Eukaryotes and Opisthokonts, but the no frills versions: they were JUST nucleated cells with flagella, without any of the high order cell specialization and multi-cellular coordination that we have. But look closely at all our cells, and you can see that we are characteristically and recognizeably still eukaryotes and opisthokonts.
"Life on this planet is very similar. We could even throw in that it's all carbon-based life. But..."
Note: I didn't just say that it's very similar. It's that there is a single particular a pattern of similarity AND difference that we find confirmed from every angle we look at things. In addition, life groups by its nature into nested clades where certain sets of features are strongly correlated throughout time. That sort of pattern only ever exists for one reason: when traits are passed via ancestry. Indeed, just as we can run a DNA test (which is basically a test looking for degrees of grouped/correlated traits between two samples) to figure out that you are your mother's son, we can run the same exact sort of DNA test to find out that humans are related to monkeys. The underlying logic works the same way: if it's valid for paternity, why not for evolution?
"But unless a transitional form is found we still have just lots of life with similarities. "
I'm not sure what you mean. Transistional forms are all over the fossil record. Of course, it's important to understand that the idea of there being a special "transitional" thing as opposed to other "normal" life is misleading. All the creatures that ever lived are "transitional" in a very real sense, even if they may not have left offspring (most don't make it).
A really knock-dead impressive transitional form is generally one which happens to have features which are normally unique to two different groups of modern animals. For instance, a certain number of digits with fingernails are unique to a particular group of land mammals, and nostrils pushed up the head are unique to whales. That's why fossils with both traits are considered "transitional" between modern whales and land mammals. But keep in mind that if some branch of these transitional creatures had by happenstance lived on without losing their hind legs, then no one would have thought true whales to be uniquely possessing blowholes in the first place.
Ah, so reading the article you posted I see what the problem is. Where this article goes radically off base is where it assumes that there is something special or more fundamental about "phyla" emerging for the first time in Cambrian. But remember, taxonomic groups are classifications we created first to describe and group MODERN animals. Applying that system to the past can thus be a little confusing when we start thinking about ancient animals, because we forget that modern animals are descended from ancient animals, and thus have a lot more categories and groups, having undergone many many more divisions and so much more change. But this doesn't mean that just because we can class a Cambrian creature into a species within a phyla that the sudden emergence of its "entire" phyla is any more distressing than the sudden emergence of domesticated dogs from wolves in their time. These "phyla" only became distinct from each other as differences between the species magnified over time. The first appearance of a phyla in ancient times should not be interpreted as anything more stunning than the appearance of a new species in recent times.
This is because while the "different bodyplans" may well have become very distinct far down the road, when the only modern examples of each of those plans are quite different from each other, but back in the Cambrian, the "bodyplans" they speak of are really not all that different from one another. Nor do they really appear without any precusors at all, as the graphs purport to show. The Cambrian explosion does represent a big increase in the diversity of multicelluar forms, but remember that this was back when most of those forms were still pretty simple. The simpler somethings structure is, the easier it is to experiment with different concepts, since you aren't yet as committed to any particular structural constraints. And in any case, plenty of pre-Cambrian life has been found that fills in many of the seemingly unrooted appearances (most notably are the pre-Cambrian
Actually, that first article is about endosymbiosis, which is what I was talking about in the other post: mitochondria and some other organelles are now thought to have originally been parasites or symbiotes that got embedded in other cells. Of course, I wouldn't trust AiG's take on this (indeed, a lot of their "questions" seem woefully uninformed about the basics of things like reproduction and so on)
The second article is about another of the ubiquitous proteins: i.e. a component of living things that seems so basic to all life that it's present everywhere and conserved against too much change. Actin is a protein that is seemingly so central to the function of a cell that it hasn't diverged much at all (though it has diverged somewhat). You can do the same tests with actin that you do with cytochrome C, and you get the same results: the same tree (at least to the extent that you get much detail at all, since as the article notes, most animal life has the same sequence of actin and its only when you start comparing animal life to other kingdoms that you start to see differences)
The main points of both articles pretty much confirm what I was talking about (aside from the sniping of the AiG writer, endosymbiosis is considered to be quite real, and while it complicates the story about the origins of life, it doesn't contradict them).
"Theories, such as some of those you mentioned, often attempt to explain or predict phenomenon that extend beyond the boundaries of that which is actually observed."
I think you are confused as to what "observed" means in science. Observations are what we are trying to explain in the first place: you form a hypothesis in order to explain some observation. Testing the hypothesis requires just that: testing it in any way you can think of relative to what it claims.
You are trying to set up a distinction between scientific claims about the past and about the present which just doesn't exist. Scientific claims about the present aren't any more "proven" than anything else.
"I always thought the big bang theory sounded a lot like genesis "in the beginning", if someone were to have written it a few thou years ago."
That's the silliest thing about this particular controversy. This poor kid apparently never got the creationist memo that said "Resolved: Big Bang is actually GOOD for us, we don't oppose it anymore, we embrace and promote it!" I mean, in addition to being on the wrong side of science, he even got the ID/creationist side of things backwards. I just hope he now has a chance to complete college.
"Taken with a little grain of salt and lacking good terms (at the time), it fits precisely."
Wellll.... so does the Greek concept that the stars are embedded in a great glass dome. With enough grains of salt. Let's not go too crazy here.
"I guess what I'm saying is because some life is similar doesn't mean that they evolved from a root ancestor."
That's true, which is why mere similarity is not really the story. The story is finding a very particular pattern of similarities AND differences, and finding the same exact pattern in every which way we can think to look at the evidence. AND having all of those apparent links match what we find in the fossil record. AND having all those connections match up with what we know of geological history, population statistics, and so on.
Remember also that it's not only the functional expressed parts of genes that match up: it's also the non-important parts too. For instance, all living things have a protein called cytochrome C. This protein, while basic to all life functioning (and hence ubiquitous) can come in many different forms. Like most proteins, you can change lots of parts of its sequence without affecting its function much or at all. And so, when we look at this protein in different creatures alive today, we find that random differences have cropped up in the non-important parts of the protein (those that don't affect it's function, and so hence natural selection doesn't actively work on) in such a way that creatures who are supposedly more distantly related have more distantly related versions of cytochrome C. There is no reason that this pattern (which, again, matches up with the fossils, the other genetic tests, the morphological groupings, and so on) should exist, and yet it does. It's the fact that all the evidence converges on the same conclusion that convinces scientists that common descent is so certain. If it wasn't true, then there is no real reason why all these things would converge. If any one of them were in error, or if somehow ALL were in error, the answers they gave should be random, not matched up.
"Beaks of finches might serve as an example; they are still finch's just different beaks."
The problem is that once you really start to look at life as biologists look at it, there is no real distinction between "different beaks" and "different finches" and "different creatures." All are just matters of some degree or another. For instance, between apes and men, not much is different in the structures of our faces other than the shapes of our jaws and our hair being finer and shorter.
"With 90% of the phyla showing up in fewer than 2% of animals being here"
Wait, I'm not sure I got what this means. 90% of the phyla: which phyla, and what "here"?
"it seems that it would be hard for simple organism to mutate into a bunch of complex ones and then stop evolving, those figures might not be exact but they are pretty close."
I'm not sure to what the figures are referring to, please explain in more detail for me. I'm also not sure what you mean by "stop evolving." While different forms of life evolve at different rates, and major morphological changes tend to be pretty stop and go as far as becoming fixed in a population, nothing really "stops" evolving unless it stops reproducing and/or dies out.
"and I dont think any species has literally turned into another in 'real time'"
Of course they have. The biological species concept requires only reproductive incompatibility to arise to separate one species from another. This has been observed to happen countless times in multicellular life within human lifetimes.
"Also if we really understand these genetic mechanisms so well, then how come there is no proof of macro evolution, no simulation that seems to prove it, etc.. and dont use circular reaasoning."
Not only is there proof of macroevolution, but it's regarded as an almost blase fact by biologists. I have no idea what you mean by "no similation seems to prove it" or "there is no proof." That's ridiculous.
Start here:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
There is no "updated" in what I described. The first eukaryotes were single celled. Multicellular eukaryotes are a SUBGROUP of eukaryotes, not something completely new. Multicellular eukaryotes with bony parts are a subgroup of multicellular eukaryotes, not something completely new. At no point does anything tantamount to a cat evolving into a dog ever happen. What does happen is that existing creatures are modified over time. But the modifications are actually relatively small potatoes: they never amount to radically shifting into new, higher forms of life. Humans are still mammals, birds are still tetrapods, elephants are still eukaryotes.
"Interesting read. A couple questions though. It talks about whales and snakes being similar but can't breed, and then it talks about human families with cousins and siblings. It seems to show that yes the humans are the same because technically all the people in the same family can breed with each other but the whales and snakes can."
I assume you meant "cannot."
"So they are totally different, at least from what the author of this points out."
I'm not sure what you're asking. Yes, whales and snakes are different from each other, though in some ways they are actually very very similar. They can't breed because we wouldn't expect species that have diverged so long ago to have compatible genomes. Once species are no longer in the same reproductive gene pool, there is no force keeping them close enough together, and they drift off in different directions, eventually becoming incompatible.
"The article also seems show a more conservative evolution."
Indeed! One of the things people don't seem to realize about evolution is that it is taxonomically very conservative. The changes it proposes are almost never radical digressions from the past. In fact, descendants of something almost never leave the taxonomic groups to which their ancestors belonged.
"It says there where a bunch of different organisms that changed into all the life we see today. So not everything stems from a single cell through the tree of life."
Well, it basically DOES say that. The real confusion near the very beginning is that a) life probably started with something far simpler than any cell apparent today and b) early life almost certainly swapped around genetic material without reproduction, making tracing any exact lineage hard and almost meaningless. But the basic idea of all of life's diversity starting from basic protobionts is still very much the same, as is the tree of life.
"Also the genetics part seemed weird. Life on earth is pretty complex. How many ways can dna make the proteins needed for an arm? So because our arms and apes arms are similar than I would think the genetic codes would be similar. So if something looks or has a similar internal makeup similar to something else one would have to assume that the dna would be a pretty close match."
Yes, and indeed that's exactly what we find. The exceptions are helpful to look at too. Sometimes we'll find traits in creatures that developed indepedently, such as shark fins and dolphin fins. They LOOK pretty similar to each other. But genetically, they are not. So humans have ape arms, but dolphins don't have shark fins. That fits in perfectly with what the tree of life predicts.
There is no good substitute for doing a journal search and reading about this stuff directly. Talkorigins has reams of this stuff: it was set up to BE a resource for showing laypeople the actual biology. And here's a decent recent example described pretty well in terms of the way in which reproductive incompatibility occurs in abalone, one of the very simplest and easiest to understand examples (scroll down belwo the reply box):3 .showAddReplyScreenFromWeb?topicID=2.topic&index=1 6
http://p222.ezboard.com/freligiousdebate60574frm4
"Besides, I would think that even if what you said was a good analogy, the filters would be filtering out the resultant DNA and the noise too: i.e. the resultant DNA has less diversity than what it had to start with, noise included."
No, because variation is constantly increasing due to mutation and other factors. Granted, natural selection can indeed outpace it: in fact one of the major conclusions about what natural selection functionally does on a macroevolutionary scale is that it SLOWS DOWN morphological change, rather than speeding it up.
"As the GP said, they adapt by removing genes, they don't mutate new ones."
But they do mutate new ones: that's the "noise." Traits aren't beneficial or detrimental until they are expressed and shoved up against some environmental pressure. How do you think the variation of "longer/shorter" legs got to be there in the first place?
"But if these 'mutations' are enough to make new ones, (in other words enough to form a macroevolution,) wouldn't that bring the newer species out of the older taxonomic groups?"
No. Macroevolution works by branching at the tips of the twigs, not on the trunk, so to speak. New species always belong to all the same "older" groups as their direct ancestors.
"Tetrachromatism has been around forever. It's not restricted to humans"
Uh, sorry, but no. Tetrachromatism is common in reptiles and birds (even pentachromatism), but in humans it IS a fairly recent (sex-linked) mutation, and certainly a different underlying trait (bird vision is quite different in terms of function). Apparently, you need some more grade school biology.
"Now the important thing to realise is that during this time no new information (DNA) has been added that wasn't in the original population. All that has happened is that information (DNA) has been removed."
Which completes a process that serves to increase the information content in the gene pool as a whole. You see, first random variation adds noise. Selection is basically putting that noise through an environmental filter. The result is information about the environment encoded into DNA.
"I can't give you an example because all observable mutation don't change animals from one species to another they just change the attributes of a species (e.g. blue roses aren't natural but they are still roses). If I knew of an example I'd share it but I can't find any. The wingless beetles are still beetles. The different finches are still finches."
I hope this doesn't come as a shock, but scientists don't really use terms like "roses" or "wingless beetles" or even "finches." They use the taxonomic system. And, as it might interest you to know, since you seem to be under the illusion that it should, evolution never proposes that descendants move out of older taxonomic groups. All future descendants of roses will still be usefully classed as roses, just as roses are still usefully classed as flowering plants.
For instance, the ancestors of human beings included first members who were Eukarya. Next there members that were Eukarya AND Opisthokonta. Then a sub-category of that which emerged was Animalia, then Eumetazoa, then Bilateria, then Coelemata, then Deuterostomata, then Chordata, then Craniata, then Vertebrata, then Gnathostomata, then Osteichthyes, then Sarcopterygii, then Stegocephali, then Tetrapoda, then Anthracosauria, then Amniota, then Synapsida, then Therapsidae, then Cynodonta, then Theria, then Eutheria, then Euarchontoglire, then Archonta, then Anthropoidea, then Haplorhini, then
Catarrhini, then Hominoidea, then Hominidae, then Hominini, then Homo, then Homo Sapiens, then Homo Sapiens Sapiens. At no point in anywhere along that long ancestral change did anything cease to be a part of the parent group.
Perhaps that's why you aren't finding examples of one creature turning into another: evolution doesn't suggest that anything of the sort happens. Speciation happens all the time, observably. It's just that it forms a branching pattern, not a lateral one as you suggest.
It's not only crazy, but actually not much of a mystery how it happens. Unless yo uwere being sacrastic. Because yeah, people that admit that genetically motivated morphological change that can diverge an Asiatic wolf into a Pug or a Great Dane, but deny that the same process can ever create genetic incompatibility between isolated population ARE sort of unbelievable. Good grief: the morphological difference between a human and a basal ape is TINY. We have the same number of hair folicles, the same basic ear structures, the same molars... most of what we have is shorter hair, a bigger braincase, a rebalanced hip, and an indent in our palate. That's not much change at all: well within the degree to which people admit "microevolution" can do within a species. Why is it so hard to understand that reproductive isolation can lead to reproductive incompatibility due to genetic drift?