Missing Link Fossil Discovered 864
choongiri writes "The Guardian is reporting the discovery of a missing link of evolution. From the article: "Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago.""
Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep - there's no such think as a missing link. There might have been in the past, but morphological properties allow us to make the connections without having to see all the transitional forms in between. As parent noted: Ambulocetus was predicted by evolution, and then it was found pretty much oin the form predicted, with the bony structures of the inner ear as predicted, in the geological strata at the date predicted - so there's nothing new about evolution proving its own efficacy.
It might be exciting for scientists to actually discover a predicted fossil (well, of course it is!) but us mere mortals don't need to see it to know the truth: we have seen mud skippers on mud flats. We have seen an eel a kilometre from water in the middle of a field, wriggling to the next waterway. We've learned that Inter-tidal zone animals are extremely tough, and can survive long periods of exposure to the extremely hard environment of "air".
So this isn't exactly surprising.
What IS surprising, is that there is no image - not even the obligatory 100-pixel-across thumbnail, which links to a lame-ass 200-pixel-across "Large Picture". I am very interested in seeing this thing - so where the bloody hell is it?
Re: The thing most interesting to me about this (Score:5, Interesting)
A similar thing can be seen on a NOVA [wikipedia.org] episode that they air now and then, where a palentologist used existing fossils in the sequence of whale ancestry to estimate the date of an intermediate form, consulted geologists re where to find exposed land that was the bottom of a shallow sea at that date, visited the site (now a desert) recommended by the geologists, and found vertebrae for the predicted species lying exposed in the sand. Excavations uncovered more complete specimins showing the predicted features of "nose" and legs.
> I think that's just neat.
Way neat.
Re:The Great Transmogrification (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions (Score:2, Interesting)
In short, it's a load of crap. Giving God credit for evolution is about as effective as giving fish credit for plate tectonics. In fact, it's worse. The utter mind-blowing jaw-dropping bodypartnoun-verbing power of evolution is that it requires no intelligence at all to create something fantastic. Caltech has a program called Avida which shows exactly this, evolution is extremely effective when simulated by a computer. A number of programs have been written to use evolution to do the designing.
Make a number of random models.
Test model based on some goal.
Allow better model to reproduce more.
Introduce random mutation to reproduction.
If you can test for a property in a model, you can implement evolution in a computer program.
Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions (Score:5, Interesting)
1. What caused the big bang? or What external force was there that caused the big bang?
Time was created during the Big Bang so "before" is meaningless. There is no "before" or "after" or "cause" and "effect" if there is no Time.
Same goes with "external." The whole universe was contained in this ball of energy so there is no "internal" or "external." So the whole question is absurd and moot.
2. Why did the sea creatures decide to go on land?
They didn't "decide" to do anything. They were compelled by nature to seek land: to lay eggs, to find food, to mate safely.
3. Get them to explain the evolutionary path that lead to creatures having sight.
Here goes: an eye spot that detects light and dark develops into a pit eye, which enables the creature to detect direction. This develops into a Pinhole Eye. This develops a protective layer. The layer develops fluid. Fluid turns into a protein lens. Cornea and Iris separate. Organism is perfected into what we have now. Totally simplified of course but good enough for slashdot!
teleology (Score:3, Interesting)
The ancestors of this animal most likely lived in shallow water and perhaps came into contact with air all the time. It might have been able to jump out of the water for a very short period of time. Yet in order to evolve lungs that could take advantage of oxygen in the atmosphere there must have been some informational exchange.
I think some will argue that there doesn't have to be any information involved because random genetic change and natural selection will over time evolve a lung that can retrieve oxygen through the air. The major presupposition is that the genetic code that allows for breathing on land is implicit in genetic change. The group of possible genetic alterations included at least one genetic sequence which would result in land breathing capabilities.
If genetic change is truly random then it could have possibly happened somewhere that was not close to land. Therefore such a change would have not been selected. Then either the space of possible genetic changes is rather small (unlikely) or there is an informational element to evolution.
Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions (Score:5, Interesting)
Also not speaking for the parent poster, but I'd just like to make a couple of comments from a theological point of view.
First off, evolution actually fits better with Christian theology than young-earth creation, because it depicts "creation" as an ongoing process rather than a one-off event. It places God in history rather than outside it, which is one of the themes that you'll find running through the Bible.
Secondly, various biblical verses claim that humans are "made in God's image", or words to that effect. This has caused a lot of theological discussion over the years, such as the way that God has been depicted in art. Should God be represented as a grey-haired old man in the sky? "God is spirit" (see John 4:24), after all.
Well if God has no body, it makes more sense to say that the part that when we say "made in God's image", we're not talking about our bodies, which we understand to be evolved animal bodies, but rather the "spirit" part.
This looks like intellectual wankery, much like counting pin-head-dancing angels, and you'd be partly right. But for people who care about this sort of thing, evolutionary theory actually answers a number of long-standing theological problems, and the answers turn out to be much simpler than anyone thought.
Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions (Score:2, Interesting)
-matthew
Re:Can we stop with the stupid comments? (Score:2, Interesting)
Two serious mistakes in one sentence. Evolution has been observed [talkorigins.org], and is much, much more than an 'educated guess.' [talkorigins.org]
(And, incidentally, "Evolution on a cosmic level"? What does that even mean?)
Re:An elaboration. (Score:2, Interesting)
The fossil record is a nice benefit for evolutionary biologists, but the molecular record is sufficient to infer evolution beyond the level of doubt considered scientifically insignificant. So even without fossils, the fact that the DNA of all living organisms appears to fit so beautifully into a tree structure provides powerful evidence for a common ancestor.
Some Logic Errors.... (Score:2, Interesting)
First, they compare it to the "reptile-to-bird" fraud (and yes, it's been proven by NON-CREATIONIST scientists to have been known to be WRONG and NOT what it was said to have represented, yet was displayed and proclaimed as such anyhow - that's fraud, it's a lie... BUT that's not the point here...); This comparison claims to be on the same level of importance and uses that earlier finding as justification for the assumption of this one being relevant to what they are claiming it is. Basically "that one was a link, and since that's one, this has to be another." Well, not really. It COULD be something totally unique.
Second, the assumption that this thing lived and died, therefore had offspring of another type of animal is just plain silly. We breed dogs with all sorts of other types of dogs, sometimes wolves, coyotes, and even Jackals and Hyenas (all in the "canis" family) and we always get offspring that are DOGS! If we suddenly found a skeleton of a St. Bernard no one would think to claim it's a rabbit's ancestor in a transitional period of evolution. It's just not logical. A fossil/remains can tell you ONE THING and only one thing... that the creature to which those remains belonged to LIVED AND DIED. It can't tell you how many offspring it had (it's suspect whether most can tell you if they had ANY - forget that half (give or take) of most all species is of a non-childbearing gender)), whether those off spring survived or not, and certainly not what those off spring looked like - other than to assume that in the "millions of years" of human record of the animals of our world that the off spring would be just like the parents; as we've seen billions of times in humans alone (much less the thousands of variants of animals and all their offspring!)
Third, they simply claim that this previously undiscovered creature is something "in transition" from one being to another when this is the first one found. How do they know that it's not just a unique creature that died out (ie: gone extinct). We've seen entire animal groups wiped out by over-hunting or poaching (the Dodo bird comes to mind), if this happened many years ago and it was not recorded by someone for us to know today, how would we know?! We're always finding new information about animals that have been long since extinct... And we're finding new ones once in a while too...
Fourth, they seem to ignore the fact that we have aquatic animals today that have feet-like appendages, fin-like appendages, and live in the water more of their life than not. Most are reptilian, but there are mammals too. That is a problem... Reptiles are cold-blooded and egg-laying. Mammals are warm-blooded and bear live young... There's no way to prove that this was an "adaption" to moving from water to land - else, why do animals like ducks still lay eggs (or the platypus, et al) and some mammals (whales, dolphins, seals, etc) live entirely in the water (but not breathe in the water like fish and some reptiles) bear live young like mammals if this is indeed an evolutionary change... Frogs are reptilian but they live more of their life on land than in water (so it's believed currently, this has been a back-and-forth debate for years)... and look at gators or crocs- reptilian, breathe oxygen without gills, and still are cold-blooded and not mammalian breeding...
There's too much speculation along the lines of "this is what we expect to see therefore it's what we see, and what was/is" thinking in these types of articles.
The sad and simple truth is that you have to take it on faith that "this must have happened" to truly make the evolution theory work. That's fine, and that's ok... but it's not scientifically sound. You can not test it, it can not be duplicated to ensure the theories hold out true, and the scientific principles of the methodology of study can not be applied to the evolution. When you take this into account and say "well we're here
Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions (Score:2, Interesting)
Whats the possability they just found some really old and big frogs that looked like aligators?
Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions (Score:4, Interesting)
Just by thinking it's not that hard to come up with a plausible suggestions on why slowly such an advantage would be gained.
I wrote about this a while back... (Score:5, Interesting)
I had some thoughts along these lines a while back: that by insisting on Biblical inerrancy, the fundamentalists are guilty of idolatry, and that by ignoring evolution they're missing one of God's finest works.
Ah, here it is [slashdot.org]:
Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions (Score:2, Interesting)
You will be compelled to stop because your frame of reference is the planet surface. For anyone with interplanetary or interstellar transport, North would be quite relative (of course, such a being would also not use ambiguous terms like 'North').
Similarly, I'm quite willing to concede that time 'started' at the big bang[1] -- for the three-dimensional universe we observe. However, to say that this makes the concept of 'before the big bang' meaningless is quite silly. Beyond comprehension? yes. Meaningless? no.
For example, did the indirectly observed energy->matter conversion we call the big bang create only one closed system (our universe) or did it create several, each with its own particle zoo and physical constants? How can we be certain of the answer either way (short of communication with a parallel universe, which would be impossible if the universe is a closed system)? If it did, what frames of reference will allow us to discuss multiple universes intelligently?
Another one: Where did this 'ball of energy' come from? Did we just replace Genesis with a "In the beginning was the void/And ${Unknown_Entity} said lo/And a superdense ball of energy came into being/and promptly exploded into a particle zoo"?
_Why_ does this 'ball of energy' exist at all?
I believe it was Feinman who once said that to do Physics, you must have the curiousity of a child, because a child will ask the most fundamental questions, and the more fundamental the questions get, the harder the answers!
[1] although IMHO our understanding of time is too elementary for this assumption. However it seems a reasonable assumption to make for the purposes of this discussion.
Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions (Score:2, Interesting)
Stop telling me how I think
Yes, I understand that 'time' has interesting properties in this universe. And I understand how the Big Bang implies the beginning of time (call it t0, or t-nought). However those who say 'before t0 is meaningless' either do not understand English semantics, are being misleading or are the victims (or perpetrators) of Big Bang Dogma, as I explain below.
> A barrier followed by some kind of unplace? What's beyond the North Pole?
As I said in another post [slashdot.org], North of the North Pole is meaningless only if you are planet-bound. (And if you are not, North is an ambiguous term anyway.)
Similarly, when someone asks about 'before t0', _semantically_ it is clear he is shifting the frame of reference to _outside_ our universe. This is something our minds can do easily, even though Physics has very little to say on the subject because it has no data to prove or disprove anything outside our universe's frame of reference[1]. So with today's technology and scientific understanding, 'before t0' is a question better left for philosophers.
[1] One could argue that there is nothing outside our universe, hence it is meaningless to shift our frame of reference to outside our universe. To which I say, the fact that there is nothing outside our universe is unprovable either way, hence its meaningless-ness is easily disputable.
To summarize: In our universe, time began at the big bang. This does make 'What happened before the big bang' a meaningless question, it merely forces you to re-consider your frames of reference.
Honestly, early 21st century science hubris is just as amusing as the 18th or 19th centuries, when they ran about smug and satisfied about there theory of phlogistons and corpuscular light.
Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions (Score:3, Interesting)
One picky point: The terms "retrodiction" and "postdiction" seem to be in competition. The paired prefixes "pre-" and "post-" would say that "prediction" and "postdiction" are the better pair. And "postdiction" is one char shorter, which will probably save you several seconds of typing over your lifetime.
Anyway, whichever you call it, this is a good example. One of the creationists bogus claims is that paleontology can't make predictions, because they can't find fossils from the future. This is a parody, of course, but it's the essence of the logical fallacy.
The answer to this, as with other non-experimental sciences such as astronomy, is that evolutionary biology can't make predictions per se, but it can make postdictions. And in this case, that's what the scientists did.
They had a pretty good estimate of when the first vertebrates moved onto land, roughly between 350 and 400 million years. They made the "prediction" that if we could find strata that date to the middle of that period, where the original terrain was shallow water along shorelines, we should find fossils of the intermediate forms. The fossils should look like lobe-finned fish, but the lobes should be extended into limbs that could function somewhat poorly on land. This would allow the critters to crawl out of the water to escape predators, at a time when there weren't any large predators on land.
Consulting with geologists turned up just such strata, unfortunately on Ellesmere Island. The biologists went there during the brief only-slightly-horrible summer, and found just the sort of transitional fossils that they expected, before the weather returned to its normal deep freeze.
This is a classical "postdiction", i.e., a prediction of what you'll find if you dig in such-and-such a place. As such, it's goood support for the biologists' understanding of how vertebrates colonized the land. It's not proof, of course, because scientists generally don't do proof. Rather, it's a demo of the predictive power of evolutionary theory.
And there's really no teleology here. Tiktaalik wasn't trying to evolve into us. It was probably just trying to get out of the reach of large predators. The ones that did this the best survived to leave offspring. Maybe they were our ancestors, though these particular individuals probably weren't.
Also, media hype aside, it's not any sort of startling discovery. We already had other fossils of fragments of transitional forms. But these are some of the best such fossils that we have. Some of them are nearly complete. And they're pretty much what we expected, based on the earlier partial fossils of similar critters.
These fossils are destined to be textbook illustrations for the next couple decades. And some paleontologists are destined to spend many of their future Junes on Ellesmere Island. They'll probably be making jokes about how global warming isn't happening fast enough for them.
Re:Queue the "Creationists are idiots!" posts (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not trying to start a flamewar, but I'd like to reply to your post. The views expressed are mine, and may not conform to any predefined set of views.
The reason that I favor evolution to creationism is that it demands explanation. My understanding of creationism (admittedly very basic, but unbiased)-- and indeed, most religious perspectives-- is that there is no answer to be found. A higher power did whatever it did, and we can never know its nature, so let's just accept it. This is not the attitude that has brought forth all the technological advancement over the span of human history. Why would a higher power "create" us with such a disposition for logic, and then expect us to deny it?
Evolution keeps us looking for that "missing link", to further solidify the theory with each new example. It isn't satisfied to say, "well, life originated in water, and moved to land, and now here we are"; it constantly refines itself, seeks new possibilities, and attempts to prove or disprove those possibilities.
and wondering how that is actually going to cause a new species, rather than just a more specialised version within the same species
You should extend that idea over a few thousand or million iterations, and see what you end up with. Most evolution is attributed to mutations, so a drastic change may have occured in one generation, or in 500... a stray group of cells (a prehistoric cancer of sorts) may have had the ability to process air and extract oxygen, and eventually beget a set of lungs for the creature. The creatures emerge from water, and those with larger fins survive, as they have greater motility and can eat more food. Those fins gain strength, and can eventually propel them forward consistently, eventually begetting legs. And so on, and so on...
I concede that evolution may not be correct. Perhaps a creator just created everything to look like it could have evolved from other things. But given our species' great capacity for reason, our defining characteristic, doesn't it seem more logical to follow the path of evidence, rather than of belief?
Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not necessarily obvious, but the only mechanism you need for evolution to occur is for small heritable variations to occur at some rate, some fraction of which are slightly (even infinitesimally) beneficial given the animal's environment (in the sense that they increase, even infinitesimally, the probability of the animal passing on its genes, after all effects of the variation are taken into account). It's not hard to see that if this occurs, the frequency of the beneficial genes will increase with time, leading to adaptation to the environment. It's also not hard to see that this mechanism certainly exists in nature, as we know from genetics.
I just think the fundamental "aha" moment of evolutionary theory is realizing that this leads inevitably to adaptation over time, to an arbitrary extent. There is no problem with new species arising, this happens when the some subgroup evolves its reproductive machinery to such an extent that it can no longer mate with other groups in the population. (Reading Dawkins is possibly the best way to initiate the "aha" moment if you haven't already experienced it).
I think the creationists are either too confused or lacking in logical faculties to grasp the basic mechanism, or in some kind of denial like the ID people where they postulate imagined barriers like irreducible complexity.
Re:It's not a missing link, and nice predictions (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, the Bible is certainly not the only old book that still applies to humans and society. In fact, there's no divine power needed for its survival: it's a popular book/story, therefore it can last for 8000 years, because it keeps getting passed around. It's not magic or coincidence, its relevance is the only way you could be reading it in this day and age!
'Relevance' can be highly subjective, though.