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New evolutionary research disproves living missing link theories
University of Montreal ^ | February 10, 2011 | Unknown

Posted on 02/10/2011 4:52:11 PM PST by decimon

Genetic research proves worm has evolved to be less sophisticated than its ancestors

Evolution is not a steady march towards ever more sophisticated beings and therefore the search for the living "missing links" is pointless, according to findings published by a team of researchers led by Dr. Hervé Philippe of the Université de Montréal's Department of Biochemistry. "Aristotle was the first to classify organisms – from the least to the most sophisticated. Darwin's theory of evolution continued this idea, with the concept of a hierarchy of evolution. This way of thinking has led researchers and skeptics alike to look for less sophisticated ancestors in order to prove or disprove evolution," Philippe explained. "What we now know is that evolution does not happen in a single direction – when people talk about a missing link, they're generally excluding the possibility of more sophisticated ancestors."

The researchers compared the genomes of two kinds of marine worms with simple morphology – Xenoturbellida and Acoelomorpha – with those of other animals. They demonstrated that their previous position at the base of the bilateral symmetry animal group – that includes insects, mollusks and vertebrates – was inaccurate. "Instead, we determined that Xenoturbellida and Acoelomorpha are closely related to the complex deuterostomes, which is a major lineage containing sea urchins, humans and sharks," Philippe said. "I've put them in that order intentionally because it seems strange, which demonstrates our tendency to always put organisms in order of complexity." The findings mean that the worms had evolved from a more sophisticated ancestor through major simplifications.

"We did already know that most parasitic organisms had evolved to be less sophisticated than their ancestors – they lost certain abilities that they no longer needed. The independently living Xenoturbellida and Acoelomorpha do not fall in this category," Philippe said. The research is a striking example for the important role of secondary simplification in evolution and is part of 20 year project that is nearing completion. The findings were published in Nature on February 10, 2011.


TOPICS: History; Science
KEYWORDS: creationism; crevo; evolution; godsgravesglyphs; scientism
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1 posted on 02/10/2011 4:52:14 PM PST by decimon
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To: SunkenCiv

Descending opinion ping.


2 posted on 02/10/2011 4:52:55 PM PST by decimon
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To: decimon

This is where I post the HT pic and say “They didn’t look too dang hard.”


3 posted on 02/10/2011 4:54:28 PM PST by bigheadfred
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To: decimon

“We did already know that most parasitic organisms had evolved to be less sophisticated than their ancestors – they lost certain abilities that they no longer needed
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

HUH???

How is that evolution? this must be a different phenomenon, completely separate from evolution.


4 posted on 02/10/2011 4:55:31 PM PST by mamelukesabre (Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum (If you want peace prepare for war))
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.


5 posted on 02/10/2011 5:00:13 PM PST by raygunfan
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To: mamelukesabre

>>How is that evolution?

It is political correctness applied to evolution.


6 posted on 02/10/2011 5:03:55 PM PST by Bryanw92 (We don't need to win elections. We need to win a revolution.)
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To: decimon

Their ancestors were very sophisticated—could speak French without an accent, talk knowledgeably about wines, and solve Rubik’s cube in no time at all.


7 posted on 02/10/2011 5:25:07 PM PST by Verginius Rufus
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To: mamelukesabre
How is that evolution?

It's adaptation.

8 posted on 02/10/2011 5:26:27 PM PST by decimon
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To: raygunfan

I dissagree


9 posted on 02/10/2011 5:26:35 PM PST by mamelukesabre (Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum (If you want peace prepare for war))
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To: Verginius Rufus
Their ancestors were very sophisticated—could speak French without an accent, talk knowledgeably about wines, and solve Rubik’s cube in no time at all.

Peter Sellers?

10 posted on 02/10/2011 5:28:35 PM PST by decimon
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To: decimon

I don’t see it. It’s loss of features due to lack of use. There’s a difference.


11 posted on 02/10/2011 5:30:24 PM PST by mamelukesabre (Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum (If you want peace prepare for war))
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To: decimon

And those ancestors supposedly developed those uselss traits and such why?
It’s all bologna. God created all creatures, and we all adapted to our surroundings. The key is we are all still what we were created to be.


12 posted on 02/10/2011 5:40:56 PM PST by vpintheak (Democrats: Robbing humans of their dignity 1 law at a time)
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To: mamelukesabre
It's the best description there is. ALL genetic mutations in species involve a loss of information. Never has there ever been a mutation that included the addition of genetic information-never. Yet, the addition of information over time leading to new species is a main assumption of Darwinian evolution.

In other words—the theory of evolution is completely false.

13 posted on 02/10/2011 5:54:06 PM PST by Spudx7
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To: decimon; StayAt HomeMother; Ernest_at_the_Beach; 1010RD; 21twelve; 24Karet; 2ndDivisionVet; ...

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Thanks decimon.

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14 posted on 02/10/2011 6:03:24 PM PST by SunkenCiv (The 2nd Amendment follows right behind the 1st because some people are hard of hearing.)
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To: Spudx7
In other words—the theory of evolution is completely false.

The problem is with the basic laws of mathematics and probability, with which evolution is essentially incompatible. The (proportionally) biggest group of people not buying into evoloserism is mathematicians, and not Christians.

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a system for pivoting flight feathers so that they open on up strokes and close on down strokes, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through lungs and a high efficiency heart, a specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters, a beak (since you won't have hands any more...) etc. etc. etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening at once (which is what you'd need), best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. For the pieces of being a flying bird to evolve piecemeal would be much harder. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:

Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now:
OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools.

2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...

3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.

4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.

5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:

ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!

Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

15 posted on 02/10/2011 7:35:33 PM PST by wendy1946
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To: wendy1946

Very good Wendy. Very good.


16 posted on 02/10/2011 7:52:09 PM PST by 1010RD (First, Do No Harm)
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To: 1010RD
My pleasure. Evolution is mainly defended by academic dead wood and by people with lifestyle problems. Evolution is about lifestyles, and not about science.


17 posted on 02/10/2011 9:09:29 PM PST by wendy1946
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To: decimon

Well, that explains the First Sasquatch...


18 posted on 02/10/2011 9:35:28 PM PST by Publius6961 ("In 1964 the War on Poverty Began --- Poverty won.")
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To: mamelukesabre

It’s called devolution. Liberals, for instance, devolved from conservatives.


19 posted on 02/10/2011 9:55:39 PM PST by calex59
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To: wendy1946

Great, I have tried to reply to articles about evolution with this type of conciseness but never seem to make it. I particularly love your dissection of Punctuated Equilibrium, one of the dumbest of the evolutionary theories.


20 posted on 02/10/2011 10:20:31 PM PST by calex59
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