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.
Liberal inductivism is rampant.
Conservative Science = the observation to assumption ratio is small and reasonable.
Liberal Science = the observation to assumption ratio is large and unreasonable.
Liberal inductivism is rampant.
I asked you to show me one stunk up, lonely case of a deductive proof anywhere in a natural science journal, and you failed that task. Induction is overwhelmingly the mode of reasoning science employs. Employing inductive reasoning in a sharply critical way makes you a scientist, not a liberal.
How about an answer I can comprehend? I thought we started this part of the discussion with the claim that fossil gaps show that there is an unbridgable gap between species. Now the story seems to be that there is a bridgable gap between species, but there's an unbridgable gap between families. Is that the position we have got to now, or not?
Why should you build steam engines based on Newtonian mechanics, when Einsteinian mechanics is just around the corner?
A statement of overwhelming merit--if you happen to have the DNA of that silurian to compare with its modern cousins' DNA.
Creatures maintain physical form through substantial DNA drift--most multi-cellulars change much more in response to viruses than to environmental changes that would reflect in changes in physical morphology.
which suggest that the group and related families originated relatively recently, says evolutionary biologist Todd Oakley of the University of California, Santa Barbara."
So does finding silurian creatures above dinosaurs, or finding a dinosaur bone in the silurian, until we remember that a billion or so years is a long time for good data to lie about undisturbed by time and chance and to hold our water until we have a statistically significant weight of finds, and an understanding of what continental folding and erosion has done to the strata in question.
There is nothing new about this--it happens all the time, it just doesn't usually go so high up the Tree of Life as to make the news. And this news is premature--I see no signs of plans afoot to make any such revision on the basis of this evidence, as yet.
We know [sic] that mitochondria arose [sic] as intracellular symbionts [sic] in the evolutionary past. But in what sort of host? That question still has biologists dumbfounded. In the most popular theories, Giardia is seen as a direct descendant of a hypothetical eukaryotic host lineage that existed [sic] before mitochondria did. But Tovar and colleagues’ findings show that Giardia cannot have descended directly from such a host, because Giardia has mitosomes. So our understanding [sic] of the original [sic] mitochondrial host is not improved by these new findings, but our understanding of mitochondria certainly is. In its role as a living fossil from the time of prokaryote-to-eukaryote transition, Giardia is now retired. But it assumes a new place in the textbooks as an exemplary eukaryote with tiny mitochondria that have a tenacious grip on an essential — and anaerobic — biochemical pathway. (Emphasis added in all quotes.)
Also of interest in this report is Henze and Martin’s admission that the whole story of eukaryote evolution is slightly less than watertight: “The prokaryotes came first [sic]; eukaryotes (all plants, animals, fungi and protists) evolved from them [sic], and to this day biologists hotly debate how this transition took place, with about 20 different theories on the go.” Hate to break it to them on an already bad day, but the endosymbiont theory is not as watertight as they assume, either (see a rebuttal by Don Batten.)
Even assuming their assumption, Tovar et al. admit that whatever this endosymbiont was, it was not a simple clod: “Thus, the original endosymbiont must have possessed the capacity to synthesize Fe–S clusters and to assemble them into functional redox and electron transport proteins.” If you don’t know how to do that, don’t expect that a germ figured it out millions of years ago.
All scientific theories are "slightly less than watertight" they are just theories, and subject to change with new data coming in. How many times do I have to say this?
There is, by the way, also nothing particularly new here, Karl Woese was demonstrating back in 1999 that the Eukariote/prokariote relationship was far more complex then parent/sibling, and the base of the tree of life was re-ordered to show that there is no single commmon ancester at the base root. Eukariotes, Prokariots, and Archia, were, by some interpretations, evolved together by a pre-DNA form of life as various answers to the dilemma of diminishing resources in a cooling world. Mitocondria, like chloroplasts (which they most disturbingly resemble as to apparent origin, function and relationship within their hosts), were, by this thesis, implanted by a non-DNA based form of life that was experimenting with DNA, much as meat machines nowadays are experiments by DNA.
The case remains as I stated it: evolution is painfully obvious when you look at the overall record, revision of details as better data comes to light is the nature of science. Your inclination to view every detail of science's struggle for understanding as a refutation of the science involved, is understandable, since you are trying to make science compete with an alternative explanation of the universe that comes to you perfected by God. Understandable, but not very pursuasive.
So 'they' say......
Which way did you want it to move anyway? (Contemplating my naval). Hey naval, navy. AHHHH, it all makes sense now. Will you peer-review me?
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Note: this topic is from December 2003. Blast from the Past. Had already been added to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. |
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