Posted on 12/05/2003 3:26:16 PM PST by bondserv
New Record-Setting Living Fossil Flabbergasts Scientists 12/05/2003
A remarkably-detailed fossil ostracode, a type of crustacean, has been announced in the Dec. 5 issue of Science1 that is blowing the socks off its discoverers. Erik Stokstad in a review of the discovery in the same issue2 explains its significance in the evolutionary picture of prehistory:
Over the past half-billion years [sic], evolution has dished up [sic] an almost endless variety of novelties: lungs, legs, eyes, wings, scales, feathers, fur. So when paleontologists find a creature that doesn’t change, they take note. (Emphasis added in all quotes.)Two things about this fossil are exceptional. (1) It has a “jaw-dropping” amount of detail, such that even small fragile parts and soft tissues were perfectly preserved. (2) It is indistinguishable from modern ostracodes:
What’s most amazing, ostracode experts say, is how eerily similar the soft-tissue anatomy is to that of modern relatives. “I was flabbergasted,” says Koen Martens, a zoologist at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.This fossil, found near Herefordshire, U.K., was found in Silurian deposits estimated to be 425 million years old. That means that its modern counterparts are living fossils, virtually unchanged for all that time:
Some ostracode specialists are stunned. “This is a demonstration of unbelievable stability,” says Tom Cronin of the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia. Whereas ostracodes diversified [sic] into some 33,000 living and extinct species, “these guys have just been plodding along totally unfazed.”This fossil, named Colymbosathon, is also upsetting those who look for evolution in the genes:
Finding a modern cylindroleberid in the Silurian clashes with molecular data, which suggest that the group and related families originated relatively recently, says evolutionary biologist Todd Oakley of the University of California, Santa Barbara. There’s no conflict for zoologist Anne Cohen, a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, who thinks Colymbosathon actually belongs to a long-extinct family. In any case, the new fossil indicates that a basic ostracode body plan was already present in the Silurian. It could also help [sic] sort out evolutionary relationships of fossil ostracodes.David Horne (Queen Mary College, London) predicts more “long-lost evolutionary blueprints” [sic] may emerge from these deposits. “The probability that they will find similarly preserved representatives of other ostracode lineages, and of other arthropods, is both high and extremely exciting.”
This is just one more of many remarkable, astounding, flabbergasting examples of living fossils. “Unbelievable stability” is not a prediction of Darwinism. The Darwinian world is supposed to be a fluid world, filled with diversification, radiation, and innovation. During the imaginary 425 million years, the continents moved all over the world, animals crawled onto the land and became geckos and crocodiles and birds and caribou. Mountains rose and valleys sank, and glaciers repeatedly advanced and retreated over much of the planet. Some animals moved back into the oceans and became whales, porpoises, manatees and sea lions in just a small fraction of this much time, and humans emerged from grunting chimpanzees, invented language and abstract thought, and conquered space. Is it reasonable to assume that in this slow whirlwind of continuous dynamical change, these ostracodes just reproduced themselves over and over millions of times without any change whatsoever?
Darwinists are caught in a crossfire of antagonistic evidence. Only a well-armored Darwinist could be excited about incoming bombshells like this. Only by wearing Kevlar-lined lead helmets around their brains can they keep the bullets from penetrating and the insides from exploding.
<blockquote>blockquoting</blockquote>
the passages you're responding to? It's a confusing chore to read your posts without them.
Thanks.
It's going to be both, depending on whether the environment is changing or not. This isn't rocket science, you can get it if you put down the "snappy phrase's for creationists" handbook and think about it for a minute.
Oh, indeed. And we have geological inversions with fish over mammals, and we have dino bones that occasionally show up in silurian debris. However, this is a field of inquiry with a wide amount of potential variation. A fossilized bone has no say about where chance diversions of strata will take it. Fortunately, the science of this stuff doesn't look at one bone, and try to draw a conclusion. It looks at all the data we have available, and groups it statistically, and, statistically, you have no case. It is clear as a bell, looking at the accumulations of evidence, that the trend in fossils, viewed from high above, is a rather orderly, continuous march from small to large, simple to complex, monolithic to segmented, isolated to conglomerated.
I guess I should say, it is clear as a bell, unless they have a theological iron in the fire.
That's exactly what I think it is. Just as I think that's what the theory of gravity is. They just happen to be ideas that seem to currently explain best what we see happening in the physical world.
Is it not the scientists being the current "witch burners" to anyone who disagrees with their entrenched "ideas", ask any scientist who is not working to prove entrenched "ideas", how open minded "the establishment" is.
If any scientist puts up a rigorous and devastating attack on basic evolutionary theory in a formal paper in a biological journal (which, by the way, is where we do science these days), and sees it stand up to rigerous attack because he's done his homework, his career would be made. He'd have a permanent chair in a dozen universities around the world.
Sticking your nose up in the air about some crank theory and refusing to offer your homework for inspection where scientists do their sciencing, which is what ID'ers do, is hardly the same thing. Behe and Denton and their fellow travelers have gained the scientific disrespect they have received in the old fashioned way: they earned it.
It is the job of a scientist to struggle with doubts and disagreements--look through any technical scientific journal--that is what they are there for--to disagree and haggle about theories.
Sure. Right after you brew up a c-class star undergoing a phase change in your back yard. Obviously, if they can't do it, those astronomers must just be trying to pull a fast one on us with all this gibberish about steller evolution.
Sure. The question is, can I get a doubter to buy it? If you ask that question about the theory of gravity, you can do the calculations for another set of bodies in the heavens you've never looked at, and see if your predictions hold true. Can you predict when the next really outrageous example of God's intervention will occur in similarly metrically predictable manner?
We believe in gravity with high confidence because of these inductive demonstrations. We have not proved the theory of gravity--we just believe it with a high degree of critically verifiable confidence. Same reason we believe in evolutionary theory with a great deal of confidence. We keep predicting the general nature of what we will find if we keep diging, and we keep finding things where we predict we'll find them in greater abundance than we find them where we don't predict we'll find them. That is the basis of graduate educations in paleontology.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=138942
http://www.team.ars.usda.gov/symposium/1994/twelve.html
http://ejournal.sinica.edu.tw/bbas/content/2002/2/bot432-07.html
http://www.patentec.com/data/class/defs/800/269.html
http://www.isleofviewirisgarden.com/catalog_pages/species_isc/species_1.htm
http://www.biology.iupui.edu/biocourses/N100H/ch17spec.html
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s11024.htm
So are lions and tigers the same species? How about llamas and camels? Zebras and horses? Is that what you plan to teach in ID class? Can I quote you on this at the next school board meeting?
No. It is proven by the fact that the world was occupied entirely by prokariotes long before slime mold ever showed up, and occupied by slime mold long before segmented worms, and occupied by segmented worms long before armored species and by armored species long before vertibrates, and by vertibrates long before mammals. Grains of rice and humans are comtemporaries--their differences in chromosome count are a pretty minor question when considered beside the issue of, for example, whether to have multiple distinct chromosomes in physically separated packages with vast regions of untranscribed material between, or not.
And from small to large most fossil data shows our current flora and fauna was once MUCH lager than todays.
That's as between the Cretatious and the current eras, when there was a major change in CO2 levels, and a consequent major reduction in overall productivity.
Again, you are using the microscope, and declaring the apature noise to be data. Humans and dinos are ALL bigger then earthworms, which are ALL bigger than prokariotes, which were the owners of the earth for far, far longer than all the vertebrates put together.
No. It is proven by the fact that the world was occupied entirely by prokariotes long before slime mold ever showed up, and occupied by slime mold long before segmented worms, and occupied by segmented worms long before armored species and by armored species long before vertibrates, and by vertibrates long before mammals. Grains of rice and humans are comtemporaries--their differences in chromosome count are a pretty minor question when considered beside the issue of, for example, whether to have multiple distinct chromosomes in physically separated packages with vast regions of untranscribed material between, or not.
And from small to large most fossil data shows our current flora and fauna was once MUCH lager than todays.
That's as between the Cretatious and the current eras, when there was a major change in CO2 levels, and a consequent major reduction in overall productivity.
Again, you are using the microscope, and declaring the aperture noise to be data. Humans and dinos are ALL bigger then earthworms, which are ALL bigger than prokariotes, which were the owners of the earth for far, far longer than all the vertebrates put together.
Indeed they are. Which in no way answers the rebuttal I just offered. Quotes for respected scientists are not where you look to figure out what science currently thinks. For that, you must look at current scientific journals. I offered you a few in the long list of cites above. See if you can detect enormous doubts about Darwinian evolutionary theory at work in the metrics of cross-species fertilization in them. Or in the patent for a technique for cross-species fertilization I cited.
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