Posted on 12/03/2003 4:53:26 PM PST by Pharmboy
LONDON (Reuters) - Fossils discovered in Ethiopia's highlands are a missing piece in the puzzle of how African mammals evolved, a team of international scientists said on Wednesday.
Little is known about what happened to mammals between 24 million to 32 million years ago, when Africa and Arabia were still joined together in a single continent.
But the remains of ancestors of modern-day elephants and other animals, unearthed by the team of U.S. and Ethiopian scientists 27 million years on, provide some answers.
"We show that some of these very primitive forms continue to live through the missing years, and then during that period as well, some new forms evolved -- these would be the ancestors of modern elephants," said Dr John Kappelman, who headed the team.
The find included several types of proboscideans, distant relatives of elephants, and fossils from the arsinoithere, a rhinoceros-like creature that had two huge bony horns on its snout and was about 7 feet high at the shoulder.
"It continues to amaze me that we don't have more from this interval of time. We are talking about an enormous continent," said Kappelman, who is based at the University of Texas at Austin.
Scientists had thought arsinoithere had disappeared much earlier but the discovery showed it managed to survive through the missing years. The fossils from the new species found in Ethiopia are the largest, and at 27 million years old, the youngest discovered so far.
"If this animal was still alive today it would be the central attraction at the zoo," Tab Rasmussen, a paleontologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri who worked on the project, said in a statement.
Many of the major fossil finds in Ethiopia are from the Rift Valley. But Kappelman and colleagues in the United States and at Ethiopia's National Science Foundation (news - web sites) and Addis Ababa University concentrated on a different area in the northwestern part of the country.
Using high-resolution satellite images to scour a remote area where others had not looked before, his team found the remains in sedimentary rocks about 6,600 feet above sea level.
And we probably agree than Einstein was a really smart dude -- running rings around most OTHER Humans, brain wise. Therefore one would think that on an Evolutionary scale, his genes would start to be propagated down the line of his family tree. ('Survival of the Smartest' and all that being the name of the game)
Well..... is that true? ARE his children and grandchildren showing examples of "what we'd expect" if the theory is true?
The human level of intelligence is not necessary for survival, and in fact it may eventually result in our extinction.
Bacteria have no intelligence in the usual sense of the word, but they comprise about 90 percent of the cells you walk around with. They have far more survival advantages than the beasts with big brains.
And even within the human community there is no evidence that superintelligent people have more offspring than the average.
...made several times in evolution (archer fish spit accurately at flying insects).(overheard during the 'learning process...)
Hey there, pre-Nemo: Whatcha doin'?
Oh, nuttin'. Just spitting up in the air.
What!!!
You actually put your LIPS in that poisonous stuff!?!?!
What do you mean: poison?
That stuff'll KILL ya! Don't you remember how our Uncle Finny flopped out on the bank one day, trying get away from the Enforcer Fish? He figured he could survive better by trying to get oxygen from the 'Air' easier than staying around to avoid them sharp teeth, but, as we all know, he found out he couldn't.
But that hasn't stopped his kids from trying it as well (what few there are LEFT of them!)
No! Keep your lips safe: don't spit. Practice Safe Eating by getting the bugs that land IN the water.
But I got REALLY close to an ant the other day! If I keep trying, maybe MY kids will get FRESH bug juice instead of these old waterlogged things all the time.
OY! What will become of you, pre-Nemo????
True.... let's drop it.
Then what was Cro-Magnon's advantage? less apt to get the flu?
I think that's a unwarranted broadening of the word 'learning', which ususally means the long-lasting change of behavior of an individual in reponse to stimuli. In evolution; some die and some don't, and the population changes, but no individual changes.
Well..... is that true? ARE his children and grandchildren showing examples of "what we'd expect" if the theory is true?
One of Einstein's grandchildren is a quite well-known engineer, but by and large they diodn't reproduce his success. He wasn't outstandingly fecund, either.
As for evolution in humans; in general social conditions at the moment don't seem to be selecting for high intelligence. But there's no reason why they should. There is no reason evolution need necessarily lead to the improvement of the species. If youi select for males who fornicate promiscuously and then abandon their many offspring, by making sure said offspring are raised by the state, then obviously you'll have a population that's 'enriched' in genes for that sort of behavior. We probably became relatively civilized because women favored men who were unlikely to abandon their offspring; invert the selective pressure and we'll move in the opposite direction.
See, you can be completely materialist and abhor promiscuity. :-)
The essential difference is that in natural selection, no individual learns, the population just changes. When you put an earthworm through a simple maze, the individual earthworm changes. You can extend 'learning' to a population, if you like, but I think that's an unwarranted broadening of the term, which makes it less useful.
Frankly it bothers me that pharmaceutical researchers of the day – with the full knowledge of evolution theory - didn’t “train” bacteria with the new antibiotics to see how long it would take them to "learn" to defeat it. Perhaps they had no appreciation for how aggressive the bacteria could be.
To be fair, penicillin was discovered long before we knew molecular genetics. But I agree that once resistance was discovered, we should have changed policies on the dispensation of antibiotics, and for various reasons we did not.
So I will argue that learning involves change and selection, but it is probably not useful to describe biological evolution as a form of learning.
Strangely, I had just located your post on the subject from a previous thread which I excerpt below for Lurkers:
"From this observation it is possible to make already several conclusions:
"2) A. was able to mobilize her pseudopodia giving them the appropriate message to approach this pigment and engulf it.
"3) With a certain delay which was obviously necessary to process the information related to the characteristic of the foreign body and the realization that it is indigestible follows another set of messages and the pigment was eliminated.
"The second phase of the observation experiment was even more interesting because it brought to the evidence the proof of the presence of memory. We have removed the pigment from the underlying microscopic glass dip, we put there a new drop of clear water and again placed there another pigment grain of Chinese Ink. The Amoeba stretched the pseudopodium to the closest pigment but did not touch it and, in contrary pulled back from the pigment grain. Obviously it preserved the memory for the identification of the indigestible pigment!
"It would be an exaggeration to speak about the mind or thinking but the period of might be 30 seconds which were passed by between the pigment taking and eliminating it; evokes the impression that the Amoeba needed a certain time to process the obtained information, i.e., it was 'thinking.'"
I disagree. There is considerable evidence for collective conscious behavior among the species - from muskoxen to bees. The linked FR article and discussion explores this in many interesting ways...
I agree with you, he would find the Popp investigations to be highly significant for his own work. Fortunately, I know he will soon be reading the McTaggert book. :^)
The discussion of Popp combined with our previous discussion of Grandpierre's evolution of consciousness has raised all kinds of possibilities in my mind!
Considering his previous work and affiliations and as a solar physicist, Grandpierre may be able to shed some 'light' on the subject rather quickly.
Specifically, I am now curious if the harmonic distortion of photon emissions may not be as arbitrary as one might think...
One would certainly intepret non-engulfment that way, if one were disposed to find learning in amoebae. The control would be to see if the amoebae were able to engulf other kinds of particles, and therefore had made a specific change in their behavior with respect to the ink particles, and hadn't just been damaged in such a way that inhibited phagocytosis.
As a reductionist, I tend to ask - what is the mechanism for this behavior? Amoebae, depending on the species, have various kinds of G-protein surface receptors that detect chemicals of various kinds, but you'd need a feedback loop that detected the specific chemical in the vacuole, sensed it wasn't food, and then relayed that information to the surface, inhibiting the response of that specific surface receptor. And all within a single cell. I'm skeptical.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.