Posted on 02/28/2013 11:45:33 AM PST by EveningStar
An ancient sea predator had a spiraling whorl of teeth that acted as a lethal slicing tool, according to new scans of a mysterious fossil.
Helicoprion was a bizarre creature that went extinct some 225 million years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Of course a trait can be beneficial in some environments, and harmful in others.
One may also recall the fat years and the lean years from Pharoh’s dream in Genesis: During the fat years, all the mutations can survive, and life prospers, a trait that out breeds the competition provides an advantage. A trait that outbreeds the competition may have an opportunity to get more mutations: (1000 animals will see more mutations than 5 animals).
During the lean years, many die. Animals with packages of mutations or that can not adapt their behaviors to live do not survive, or perhaps even die out without issue.
Of course that requires believing in occasional global warming without insisting that humanity causes it. Since weather is chaotic and can bifurcate at any time, that is reasonable from this side of the keyboard.
Or G-d might have buried fossils in the ground to fool us, as a cunning ploy to guide us to oil deposits.
So a cockroach should be at the top of the food chain.?
Nope. Read what I wrote. One criterion is that the species get to or near the top of the food chain. I’ve never seen any evidence that the cockroach brought down a smilodon.
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You missed the point. If mutations occur because of a particular tendency to mutate, then a species will develop traits that are harmful in all environments.
You appear to be hooked on the "all evolution must be good" kool-aide.
There is no evidence that mutations survive because they are beneficial, there is only the fact that mutations survive because they aren't bad enough to terminate the species.
You should question more of what you have accepted as fact.
I return to the giraffe. There are no short species of giraffe, despite an abundance of ground level food that has kept numerous other competing species around during the same period of time that the giraffe mutated. There are tons of negatives to the giraffe's structure. So why would we think it evolved in order to survive? Far more logical to conclude that it evolved due to a one-way tendency of a given gene to mutate, and the species has survived inspite of the mutation, not because of it.
How is stating that some mutations are harmful a way of saying that all mutations are good?
Of course there is a short species of giraffe. It is not called a giraffe. It is called an Okapi. Both giraffes and Okapis descended from a common ancestor.
A trait that is helpful in one environment may be bad in another. Barriers are very important to understanding evolution, as they permit different living things to interact with their different environment, to change gene frequencies. When barriers change, the opportunities and pressures on species change.
Creationists demand not only special creation of each species but also special delivery to an environment where that species can survive/thrive. By contrast, evolutionist have studied the effect of barriers, or lack of same. Darwin in particular wrote many papers that combined laboratory (or bathtub!!!) study of plant/seed viability, ocean currents as a means of transport, to predict limits of species extent. Then the predicted species extent was compared with traveling botanist’s reports. That combines to a fair approximation of a controlled experiment.
cockroaches probably feasted when a similodon broke its jaw and starved....
All life is grass.
Scavenging is not predation. Cockroaches were never apex predators. This isn’t difficult.
I object to what always appears to be self-fulfilling theories in evolution, e.g.
1. The angler fish evolved a long probe from its head to dangle as bait, with a bit of bio-illumination for good measure.
2. The proof is that the angler fish appears to use the body part as bait and the angler fish isn’t extinct.
Forget the logic behind trying to justify the benefit of such an appendage in its early stages before it was long or bio-illuminate.
The claims made in evolutionary science seem a lot like those made with global warming, where the assertions of causality can take either side of the coin, and are always correct based on the premise that they cannot be proved to be false, e.g.
-If a bird is brightly colored, it is because the bright colors give it an advantage in mating, but if a bird has dull earth tones, it is because those colors camouflage the bird from predators. The proof is that both types exist; producing enough offspring and evading enough predators.
-Tree sloths evolved to be very slow to conserve energy and not attract predators, while monkeys are quick and nimble to evade predators. The proof is that they both exist despite having predators.
I’ve always laughed at archeologists that find a handful of items and immediately begin to fabricate an entire civilization complete with beliefs, motivation, and folklore. Its complete fiction that cannot be proven to be untrue, thus one must accept the experts’ assertions. Questioning the archeologist’s assertions doesn’t mean that I reject that the underlying artifacts actually exist, I just don’t accept the following conjecture as fact.
Biologists should cease trying to ascribe specific reasons for specific evolution when there is no proof (like this article). In all likelihood, some changes (such as height or color) probably are attributed to better surviving changes in the environment, while other changes are likely a genetic quirk that the species manages to use or tolerate. Or there is some genetic mechanism, yet undetermined, that guides mutation.
There are some species, such as the phasmids, that defy mathematical plausibility, falling into the “a trillion monkeys with a trillion typewriters” arena. Even an atheist should have a lot of doubt that such things are purely the result of chance, 400 million years just isn’t enough time. It’s like seeing someone get a straight flush ten times in one night and not questioning how the cards are being shuffled.
Biologists should be open to the possibility that something besides random mutation is at work. In fact, the implausibility of the math should be pushing them to look for it. Just as the implausibility that tadpoles sprang from mud led to further inquiry.
Scientists that refuse to acknowledge incredibly implausible probabilities are no more believable than people who insist that the fossil record isn’t real.
scavenging is not predation, but one can get a bunch of calories from it.
Any particular morphology would be exceedingly unlikely, when seen from the point of view of its predecessors.
But any particular morphology can be seen to be a very likely ancestor, when seen from the point of view of modern man with experience of the species that evolved from that particular morphology.
Yogi Berra said “Predicting is hard, especially about the future.”
Yes but the discussion began about the role of apex predator and scavengers never get that title
I’m certain that if we found a perfectly shaped, full size sailing ship, made from a single piece of quartz, on the moon, that no scientist would conclude it resulted form a series of random events over billions of years.
Yet, the argument that it was just a mathematical oddity, would be the same as what you just presented, i.e. It only seems impossibly complex, because you are looking at the end result.
You demonstrate an enormous amount of faith.
T-Rex did a bunch of scavenging.
if...
Mutations can be random, survival of the fit is less random.
Berra Yogi said...”The past is hard to predict.”
Berra Yogi said...”The past is hard to predict.”
Unproven supposition
Mutations may not be as random as you think, if a gene is predisposed to mutate in a certain way. In fact, we already know this to be the case with certain genes.
Such a mutation could in fact be far more impactful on the gene pool, even if having a net negative impact on survival, than other mutations that provide minute positive impacts on survival. All that is required is that the math be weighted in that mutations favor. If the mutation is a 1/10,000 chance, but only causes 1/100,000 individuals to fail, then it will continue and increase. Scientists shouldn't preclude that every change is an adaptive necessity for survival.
I saw a youtube video of a wild goat of some type. It had unbelievably long horns and was using the tip of its horn to scratch its butt over its back. A handy use of the horns no doubt, but would you conclude that those monstrously long horns were a survival adaptation that came about out of a usefullness for butt scratching? I would not. Yet, biologists would happily conclude that they know the precise purpose that the long horns were evolutionarily adapted for. Perhaps that purpose is no different from the butt scratching, i.e. the goat developed progressively longer horns and found a few good uses for them.
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