US scientists may have resolved 'Darwin's dilemma'

Fox News ^ | 11/15/2014 | By Matt Cantor

[SeekAndFind]

Charles Darwin worried about a possible hole in his theory of evolution, but some American scientists may just have plugged it. For about a billion years after the dawn of life on Earth, organisms didn't evolve all that much.

Then about 600 million years ago came the "Cambrian explosion." Everything changed relatively quickly, with all kinds of plants and animals emerging—which doesn't quite seem to fit with Darwin's theory of slow change, hence "Darwin's dilemma." Now, within a few days of each other, two new studies have appeared that could explain the shift, ABC News reports.

One, by scientists at Yale and the Georgia Institute of Technology, suggests that oxygen levels may have been far less plentiful in the atmosphere prior to the Cambrian explosion than experts had thought.

The air may only have been .1% oxygen, which couldn't sustain today's complex organisms, indicating a shift had to happen before the "explosion" could take place.

In a separate study, a University of Texas professor explains where that oxygen burst may have come from: a major tectonic shift. Based on geological evidence, Ian Dalziel believes what is now North America remained attached to the supercontinent Gondwanaland until the early Cambrian period, in contrast with current belief, which has the separation occurring earlier.

[SkyDancer]

PS - the pharynx is inside the body ....

[Mechanicos]

Still a Horse.

[SkyDancer]

Ya, and about that appendix thing .....

[BroJoeK]

GeronL: "But even this article says there was no real evolution for 600 million years before the “Cambrian explosion”."

Well... the article says: " For about a billion years after the dawn of life on Earth, organisms didn't evolve all that much.
Then about 600 million years ago came the 'Cambrian explosion.' "

"All that much" is a matter of opinion from people of obvious bias towards multi-celled critters.
But those who love single-cells could doubtless point to many exciting changes over those short billion years. ;-)

Second, while the Cambrian itself was "only" about 20 million years long, starting aroung 540 mya, the "explosion" actually began 60 million years before that, and lasted another 70 million years beyond -- so we are really talking about 150 million years of "Cambrian explosion".

I mean, really... "150 million years" only takes a second or two to say, but it's a very long time indeed, once conditions for evolution are just right

[BroJoeK]

SkyDancer: "Nope - they all should have done it, not just a few ...."

According to whose rule book?

[SkyDancer]

Theirs.

[BroJoeK]

Big Red Badger: "Then Why do We wring our hands over endangered Species?
We should Celebrate the dodo Bird !"

Evolution of even a new species can take a million years.
If you remember your biological classifications, they go up the scale from species to genus to family to order to class, etc.
The old dodo bird was a kind of pigeon, millions of years of evolution separated from other pigeons.

You might look at it this way: God worked on that dodo bird for millions of years, and then mankind came along and wiped it out in just a few years.
And, so far as we know now, we'll never get them back, a terrible waste of God's effort, I'd say.

Of course, I'm a big fan of history, don't want to see it carelessly destroyed.

[BroJoeK]

Hugin: "Which of course doesn't answer the question, it merely changes the location."

Agreed. We don't know what we don't know.

[BroJoeK]

GeronL: "but no proof of that happening has ever been found?"

Of course it has, it's universal, and we can see the results in any zoo.
For example, if you put Indian and African elephants together, they not only won't breed, they make each other sick.

Another example is zebras -- over a dozen breeds & sub-species which eagerly interbreed, within three species that don't normally interbreed with each other in two genera which not only don't, but can't be forced to interbreed successfully.

That's what evolution-speciation is all about.

[CodeToad]

“However, of all the millions of species which ever lived, the numbers of fossil species found so far is no more than 1%. “

Then how do you know there are millions more not found if you haven’t found them?

I guess I am a billionaire, I just haven’t found the billions.

[Olog-hai]

“Concerning natural processes” is fine to say (not without defining same, however—such is strictly within the bounds of observation, so please see the definition of the phrase), but conjecture does not make for good science (or science at all) and by definition has to be excluded.

It is only anti-science people that try to disguise conjecture as science.

[Olog-hai]

No, the scientific method has but one definition. Excluding that which is empirical (which means outside of theory, and conjecture does not dare touch it), evident, observable, repeatable and reproducible, you have excluded the scientific method.

[Olog-hai]

“Gnosis” does mean science, since “science” and “knowledge” are synonyms, and “epistemes” means art.

You appear to be quite anti-science. Why do you assume such a stance? (Never mind anti-other things too.)

[Olog-hai]

Nobody’s ridiculing scientific word usage, but the abuse of same.

As for the NAS, aside from it being government-linked due to its Congressional charter, it has had too many members that also share membership in the communistic FAS.

[BroJoeK]

quoting BJK: "my guess is they will find some combination or sequence "

Texas Songwriter: "Your statement seems to be a series of faith statements."

What are you talking about?
Did you never go to school?
Did they never show you a dictionary?
Which dictionary in the whole wide wonderful world told you that my word "guess" means "faith"?? "Guess" means guess -- go ahead, look it up!

Texas Songwriter: "How does a chemical, or multiple organic chemicals organize into a cell.

I mentioned before that about a dozen different hypotheses have been proposed (including panspermia) for how that might have first happened.
None are confirmed, so nobody knows for sure.
However, a lot of work has been done, and I've read where scientists are today far beyond the old 1952 Miller-Urey experiment:

Texas Songwriter: "Your reference to extraterrestrial life infers ID, but seems to leave that notion hanging out there like a matzo ball."

Pal, I merely reported the fact that various ideas on panspermia are among the hypotheses proposed for origin of life on earth.
So far, the only actual evidence of it is some more complex organic molecules found on comets.
That would suggest that nearly all the real creative work was done here on earth...

Texas Songwriter: "The complexity of the simplest cell is so complex that man has never yet been able to develop such a primordial cell.....and that is with intelligence applied, yet you seem to want to rely on blind luck, happenstance, and hope."

We can be certain that the full complexity of today's simplest cells did not evolve overnight, or on a time-scale equivalent to the lifetimes of today's scientists!
Rather, it must have happened in many, many small steps over not just millions but billions of years.
Doubtless, we would not even consider the first "cells" to be fully alive, since they wouldn't have reproduced using DNA or even RNA.

quoting BJK: "...those first 'cells' were in a reduced atmosphere so that there was no oxygen available to drive those enzyme systems..."

Doubtless those first cells were anaerobic, of which there are still many descendants surviving today.
They prove that life can survive on just about any energy source available.
As for complex enzyme systems -- you can be certain they were not there in the beginning, but must have evolved slowly, slowly over millions & billions of years.

Remember, when the "Cambrian Explosion" started, the earth was already nearly four billion years old.

Texas Songwriter: "Your schematic of the invagination of a select portion of ectoderm which invaginated, becomes sequesters and then takes on a completely different functional form ( light sensitivity, sight) with just the good luck to develop a lens."

"Good luck" or God's good planning, the process is still the same -- descent with modifications and natural selection result in increasing complexity and sometimes diversity.
The point of the schematic is to show that our sophisticated eyeballs were preceded by many others less highly engineered.

Texas Songwriter: "Ontology recapitulates phylogeny".....the old lie of Ernst Haeckel and fraudulent drawings of embryos."

In fact, there's more truth in it than you care to admit.
Haeckel's drawings were wrong, but the basic idea, not so far off -- many creatures have similar early stages of fetus development.

Texas Songwriter: "We know these are fraudulent, yet public school books still lie to young students to inculcate this nonsense."

Here is our current understanding:

"The Haeckelian form of recapitulation theory is considered defunct.[23]
However, embryos do undergo a period where their morphology is strongly shaped by their phylogenetic position, rather than selective pressures"

[BroJoeK]

PapaNew: "Darwinism (the "Origin of the Species") requires TRANSFERENCE between major animal groups.
There is NO evidence of that"

Basically, you're just playing word-definition games -- what is a "transference", what is a "major animal group"?
The fact of the matter is that no individual animal ever magically gave birth to offspring of another "major animal group" -- but that is what you suggest evolution requires.
It does no such thing.

What happens instead is that separated populations of one species evolve separately until they can no longer interbreed; then we call them two species, not one.

Extended over tens and hundreds of millions of years, different species evolve, step by step, to new genera, families, orders, class, etc.
But no individual ever "transfers" into anything different.

PapaNew: "...whatever paltry evidence is conjured up is vastly outweighed by the tonnage of evidence of Intelligent Design which Darwinists "hand-wave and deny" although "there's nothing fraudulent or fake about it.' "

Of course, I believe the entire Universe is intelligently designed to produce exactly what we see today, including us.
We are not an accident, or even a probability, but we're here by design and for a purpose.

Science tells us that part of the methodology God used to get us here is called "evolution".
I sure don't have a problem with that, and don't really see why others like yourself do.

[BroJoeK]

The Ghost of Freepers Past: " Evolutionists Some Creationists think ridicule wins all arguments. It doesn’t.
It just makes them look guilty and childish."

There, fixed it for you...
Sure, you're welcome.

[BroJoeK]

DeoVindiceSicSemperTyrannis: "why didn't any of the "missing links" survive?
After all they would have been smarter than regular apes."

Where multiple species are competing for the same food in prime habitat, one will likely come out on top, and the others disappear.
Those species which do survive find ways to make it on land that others won't use.

I should probably also mention that there's DNA evidence of interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals & Denisovans.
So, in that sense, those old creatures did not fully disappear, they just joined, all in the family.

DeoVindiceSicSemperTyrannis: "...if everything is always survival of the fittest, then how does one explain symbiotic relationships?"

"Survival of the fittest" doesn't have to mean constant competition, and there are lots of examples in nature of species which help each other out.
Hard to say how such relationships started, but if you are a large African buffalo, and you wake up from a nap to find a bird pecking the ticks off your back, maybe you're still tired enough to let it continue, and even realize it's doing you a favor?

[BroJoeK]

Salvavida: "You just demonstrated your lack of academic savvy.
There is not ONE single paper submitted to American Academy of Science that has proven the issue which we speak of"

Shame of you.
You're playing word-definition games, and I'm sure you should know better.
In scientific terminology, no theory is ever "proved", only confirmed by tests and discoveries made using it.
Strictly speaking, those tests confirm by failing to falsify the theory.
When many different tests have failed to falsify a theory, it is considered strongly confirmed and "settled science".
That is the case with evolution and many other well known scientific theories.

Of course, "settled science" is only "settled" until somebody discovers new data or conducts a new test which does falsify it.
Then scientists, as they say, go "back to the drawing board" to devise new hypotheses to explain the new results, etc., etc.

Salvavida: "But there is NONE that has passed muster. Let that sink in. NONE."

If your American Academy of Science is a legitimate group, then they are not out challenging scientists to "prove" evolution.
Basic evolution theory (descent with modifications, natural selection) was long ago confirmed by many different tests, and has never been seriously falsified, so it is long considered "settled science".

But you can't "prove" such a theory, and every legitimate science association knows it.

Salvavida: "There have been many disparate claims that the linkage has been found, but they have all been disproven: I speak of MACRO EVOLUTION, not MICRO. Know the difference."

No, nothing about basic evolution theory has ever been "disproven".

As for some alleged difference between the process for micro versus macro-evolution, there is no scientific difference, it's exactly the same thing -- evolution over the shorter term (micro) and longer term (macro).
People who claim to see some difference are being deliberately deceitful, imho.

[eartrumpet]

Where multiple species are competing for the same food in prime habitat, one will likely come out on top, and the others disappear.

That's a laugh. Would you like a list of species that eat cottontail rabbits, or mice, or mosquitoes, or alfalfa, or minnows? Many species can compete for the same food and succeed.