Posted on 04/02/2004 4:25:18 PM PST by PatrickHenry
Arlington, Va.—How land-living animals evolved from fish has long been a scientific puzzle. A key missing piece has been knowledge of how the fins of fish transformed into the arms and legs of our ancestors. In this week's issue of the journal Science, paleontologists Neil Shubin and Michael Coates from the University of Chicago and Ted Daeschler from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, describe a remarkable fossil that bridges the gap between fish and amphibian and provides a glimpse of the structure and function changes from fin to limb.
The fossil, a 365-million-year-old arm bone, or humerus, shares features with primitive fish fins but also has characteristics of a true limb bone. Discovered near a highway roadside in north-central Penn., the bone is the earliest of its kind from any limbed animal.
"It has long been understood that the first four-legged creatures on land arose from the lobed-finned fishes in the Devonian Period," said Rich Lane, director of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) geology and paleontology program. "Through this work, we've learned that fish developed the ability to prop their bodies through modification of their fins, leading to the emergence of tetrapod limbs."
NSF, the independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering, funded the research.
The bone's structure reveals an animal that had powerful forelimbs, with extensive areas for the attachment of muscles at the shoulder. "The size and extent of these muscles means that the humerus played a significant role in the support and movement of the animal," reported Shubin. "These muscles would have been important in propping the body up and pushing it off of the ground."
Interestingly, modern-day fish have smaller versions of the muscles. According to Coates, "When this humerus is compared to those of closely-related fish, it becomes clear that the ability to prop the body is more ancient than we previously thought. This means that many of the features we thought evolved to allow for life on land originally evolved in fish living in aquatic ecosystems."
The layered rock along the Clinton County, Penn., roadside were deposited by ancient stream systems that flowed during the Devonian Period, about 365 million years ago. Enclosed in the rocks is fossil evidence of an ecosystem teeming with plant and animal life. "We found a number of interesting fossils at the site," reported Daeschler, who uncovered the fossil in 1993. "But the significance of this specimen went unnoticed for several years because only a small portion of the bone was exposed and most of it lay encased in a brick-sized piece of red sandstone."
Not until three years ago, when Fred Mullison, the fossil preparator at the Academy of Natural Sciences, excavated the bone from the rock, did the importance of the new specimen become evident.
The work was also funded by a grant from the National Geographic Society.
I've taken the evidence, and decided that neither of your "choices" apply. Instead, the evidence indicates evolution, which is neither "random occurrance [sic]" nor "intelligent design".
Does your bathroom clean itself up. Did a tree come from a tiny seed and grow into a giant Sequoia from the code in a molecule at random ? Like a coin falling from a table ?
No, no, and no. Do you have any relevant points? No, no, and no.
How does the evidence suggest random ?
It doesn't, it suggests evolution.
Maybe the coin fell over and replaced itself three million times and somehow got up went and mixed the nucleic acids into a complex code.
Or maybe you need to learn something about evolution before you continue to misunderstand and misrepresent it.
I prefer to read non-stupid theories, actually, like evolution.
Like how can a mature human not believe in Biblical things yet believe all the trash about evolution.
Which "trash" would that be, exactly?
In both cases it is "faith",no?
No. Accepting evolution does not require "faith", it requires familiarity with the evidence, understanding of the process involved, and knowledge.
*smirk*.
Sheesh, man, go to bed already. At least one of us has to be rested to take the day shift.
C++, yeah. One of the things I didn't have experience in when I was being shaken out of the programming tree ten years ago. Suddenly "object-oriented" was the answer to everything and the best thing since sliced bread.
Got me thinking that the academic types really do change the fads every so often just to thrash the market for new courses.
Presented with 29+ lines of independent evidence that life on earth is related by common descent, you make a cross with your fingers and yell "Statistics!" to make it all vanish in a puff of smoke.
You don't learn anything that way, not that you're trying to. You have nothing to offer science or science education.
Retrospective astonishment is a lousy argument for dismissing history anyway. Much of what happens all the time is in some sense improbable. Specific people do win the Lottery, sooner or later. Shuffle a card deck and deal it out. What you see, whether or not it looks like anything to you, is a one chance in 52 factorial outcome. (One in fifty-two times fifty-one times fifty times forty-nine ... times three times two times one.) Every time.
False dichotomy. Very little is truly random. Even throwing a pair of dice across the street is a deterministic process. (It's just practically impossible to model accurately.)
Schroeder cites a Wistar institute conference as showing evidence of the improbability of evolution. The symposium was transcribed from audio and published in 1967 as Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, a Symposium Held at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology April 25 and 26, 1966, Paul Moorhead and Martin Kaplan, eds. Needless to say, this is quite out of date. Worse, it does not support Schroeder at all. Only one paper comes anywhere near proposing that the origin of life and subsequent evolution is improbable: Murray Eden, "Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory" (pp. 5-20). He does not really argue that evolution is improbable, but rather that no present theory accounts for certain peculiarities of life on earth, especially the fact that all living organisms are composed of a very tiny fraction of all the possible proteins.
In particular, Eden argues that given all "polypeptide chains of length 250 [amino acids] or less...There are about 20^250 such words or about 10^325" (p. 7). This number is ripe for quoting, but it does not stand as the odds against life, and even Eden did not even imply such a meaning--to the contrary, he admits that perhaps "functionally useful proteins are very common in this space [of 10^325 arrangements]," and facing tough criticism in a discussion period (where his paper was torn apart, pp. 12-9) he was forced to admit again that perhaps "there are other domains in this tremendous space which are equally likely to be carriers of life" (p. 15). But his main argument is that life is concentrated around a tiny fraction of this possible protein development "space" and we have yet to explain why--although his critics point out why in discussion: once one system involving a score of proteins was selected, none others could compete even if they were to arise, thus explaining why all life has been built on one tiny set of proteins. One thing that even his critics in discussion missed is the fact that his number is wrong: he only calculates the number of those chains that are 250 acids long, but he refers to all those and all smaller chains, and to include all of those he must sum the total combinations for every chain from length 1 to 250. Of course, the number "250" is entirely arbitrary to begin with. He could have picked 100, 400, or 20. He gives no arguments for his choice, and as we have seen, this can have nothing to do with the first life, whose chain-length cannot be known or even guessed at [5].
Among the huge flaws in Eden's paper, pointed out by his critics, is that he somehow calculates, without explanation, that 120 point mutations would require 2,700,000 generations (among other things, he assumes a ridiculously low mutation rate of 1 in 1 million offspring). But in reality, even if only 1 mutation dominates a population every 20 generations, it will only take 2400 generations to complete a 120-point change--and that even assumes only 1 point mutation per generation, yet chromosome mixing and gene-pool variation will naturally produce many at a time, and mix and match as mating proceeds. Moreover, a beneficial gene can dominate a population faster than 20 generations, and will also be subject to further genetic improvements even before it has reached dominance. I discuss all of these problems in my analysis of Schroeder above. But in the same Wistar symposium publication, C. H. Waddington (in his "Summary Discussion") hits the nail so square on the head that I will quote his remarks at great length:
The point was made that to account for some evolutionary changes in hemoglobin, one requires about 120 amino acid substitutions...as individual events, as though it is necessary to get one of them done and spread throughout the whole population before you could start processing the next one...[and] if you add up the time for all those sequential steps, it amounts to quite a long time. But the point the biologists want to make is that that isn't really what is going on at all. We don't need 120 changes one after the other. We know perfectly well of 12 changes which exist in the human population at the present time. There are probably many more which we haven't detected, because they have such slight physiological effects...[so] there [may be] 20 different amino acid sequences in human hemoglobins in the world population at present, all being processed simultaneously...Calculations about the length of time of evolutionary steps have to take into account the fact that we are dealing with gene pools, with a great deal of genetic variability, present simultaneously. To deal with them as sequential steps is going to give you estimates that are wildly out." (pp. 95-6)
Yeah why is that, that species can't inter breed.. If its a DNA thingy and DNA has one ultimate source.. You'd a thunk some species could sometime, somehow.. Even when related species breed the result can't RE-breed.. Just questions I ask, myself.. I know better than to ask you. You might respond with two pages of links to God knows what.. But God doesnt have an ISP, as far as I know.. So he dont know what your posting either.
Is God cool or WHAT ?.
You would seem not to have one of those omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent Gods if you think He's excluded from the Internet for lack of an ISP. Did He not pay His bill?
Damn, you missed the movie... Dincha.
No Worries.. The DVD will be out soon though..
The first computer I ever programmed on (in 1975) was an already-outdated IBM-360 with 45K of main memory. By comparison, I bought an Osborne I (one of the first portables) in 1983 with 64K RAM. Seemed mind-blowing at the time that I could lug around a machine "bigger" than the giant mainframe of just a few years earlier.
You must have seen it stoned.
What a concept..
Here are some (very few, considering how many there are) of your fellow Evol-Doers expressing doubt in their faith.
Entroy Anyone?? Klein, Martin J., “Thermodynamics in Einstein’s Thought,” Science, vol. 157 (August 4, 1967), p. 509 Citing Albert Einstein: “Classical thermodynamics is the only physical theory of universal content concerning which I am convinced that, within the framework of its basic concepts, it will never be overthrown.”
Asimov, Isaac, “In the Game of Energy and Thermodynamics You Can’t Even Break Even,” Smithsonian Institute Journal (June 1970), p. 6 “To express all this, we can say: ‘Energy can be transferred from one place to another, or transformed from one form to another, but it can be neither created nor destroyed.’ Or we can put it another way: ‘The total quantity of energy in the universe is constant.’ “ This law is considered the most powerful and most fundamental generalization about the universe that scientists have ever been able to make."
Arp, H. C., G. Burbidge, F. Hoyle, J. V. Narlikar, and N. C. Wickramasinghe, “The Extragalactic Universe: An Alternative View,” Nature, vol. 346 (August 30, 1990), pp. 807-812. “Cosmology is unique in science in that it is a very large intellectual edifice based on a very few facts.”
Burbidge, Geoffrey, “Why Only One Big Bang?” Scientific American (February 1992), p. 120. “Big Bang cosmology is probably as widely believed as has been any theory of the universe in the history of Western civilization. It rests, however, on many untested, and in some cases untestable, assumptions. Indeed, big bang cosmology has become a bandwagon of thought that reflects faith as much as objective truth.” “This situation is particularly worrisome because there are good reasons to think the big bang model is seriously flawed.”
Darling, David, “On Creating Something from Nothing,” New Scientist, vol. 151 (September 14, 1996). p. 49 “What is a big deal—the biggest deal of all—is how you get something out of nothing.
Løvtrup, Søren, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth (New York: Croom Helm, 1987), 469 pp. p. 422 “I suppose that nobody will deny that it is a great misfortune if an entire branch of science becomes addicted to a false theory. But this is what has happened in biology: for a long time now people discuss evolutionary problems in a peculiar ‘Darwinian’ vocabulary—‘adaptation,’ ‘selection pressure,’ ‘natural selection,’ etc.—thereby believing that they contribute to the explanation of natural events. They do not, and the sooner this is discovered, the sooner we shall be able to make real progress in our understanding of evolution. “I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science”
Peters, R. H., “Tautology in Evolution and Ecology,” American Naturalist, vol. 110 (January/February 1976), p. 1 “I argue that the ‘theory of evolution’ does not make predictions, so far as ecology is concerned, but is instead a logical formula which can be used only to classify empericisms and to show the relationships which such a classification implies. The essence of the argument is that these ‘theories’ are actually tautologies and, as such, cannot make empirically testable predictions. They are not scientific theories at all.”
Capra, Fritjof, The Web of Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), 347 pp. Dr. Capra is Director of the Center for Ecoliteracy, in Berkeley, California.p. 228 “It has been estimated that those chance errors occur at a rate of about one per several hundred million cells in each generation. This frequency does not seem to be sufficient to explain the evolution of the great diversity of life forms, given the well-known fact that most mutations are harmful and only very few result in useful variations.”
Dr. Lee Spetner of Johns Hopkins University has written a fascinating book called, "Not By Chance: Shattering the Modern Theory about Evolution", that is a must read for anyone interested in scientific challenges to neo-Darwinian theory: "I have shown in my book that the broad sweep of evolution cannot be based on random mutations. I have shown it on both theoretical and experimental grounds. On theoretical grounds, I have shown that the probability is just too small for random mutations to lead to a new species. On experimental grounds, I have shown that there are no known random mutations that have added any genetic information to the organism. I go through a list of the best examples of mutations offered by evolutionists and show that each of them loses genetic information rather than gains it. One of the examples that where information is lost is the one often trotted out by evolutionists nowadays in an attempt to convince the public of the truth of evolution. That is the evolution of bacterial resistance to antibiotics." (This quote is from Dr. Spetner's own comments on Amazon.com about his book.)
Wald, George, “The Origin of Life,” in The Physics and Chemistry of Life (Simon & Schuster, 1955), p. 9 “One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are—as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation.”
Crick, Francis, Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981) p. 51-2 “If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare an event would this be? “This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is, if anything rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is conveniently written 20200 and is approximately equal to 10260, that is, a one followed by 260 zeros. “ Moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of rather modest length. Had we considered longer ones as well, the figure would have been even more immense. The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time.” p. 88 “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
Hoyle, Sir Fred, and Chandra Wickramasinghe, “Where Microbes Boldly Went,” New Scientist, vol. 91 (August 13, 1991), p. 415 “Precious little in the way of biochemical evolution could have happened on the Earth. It is easy to show that the two thousand or so enzymes that span the whole of life could not have evolved on the Earth. If one counts the number of trial assemblies of amino acids that are needed to give rise to the enzymes, the probability of their discovery by random shufflings turns out to be less than 1 in 10 to the power of 40,000.”
Now how many of these folks did you quote to support your phone book of links? And how many of the folks did you quote who know - in their hearts, if they are honest - that the above statements and many more like them, are true?
Irony: look up the meaning.
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