The jaw of Teinolophos trusleri catches the ear bones in the act of separating from the jaw.
Posted on 02/11/2005 6:49:09 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Triple bone structure arose independently in platypus and humans.
Listen up: mammals seem to have evolved the delicate bone structure of the middle ear at least twice. The surprising discovery comes from a fossil, found off the southern coast of Australia, that belongs to an ancestor of the platypus.
Modern mammals are unique among vertebrates for possessing three tiny bones in the middle ear. The malleus, incus and stapes (commonly known as the hammer, anvil and stirrup) work as part of a chain that transmits sound towards the skull. Birds and reptiles have only one bone to perform this function.
Because the mammalian arrangement is so complex, scientists believed that the set-up had evolved on just a single occasion, in an ancestor that gave rise to placental animals (including humans), marsupials and monotremes (such as the duck-billed platypus).
All this changed when James Hopson, a vertebrate palaeontologist at University of Chicago, Illinois, took a trip to Australia. There he met a team of researchers including Thomas Rich of Museum Victoria in Melbourne.
The jaw of Teinolophos trusleri catches the ear bones in the act of separating from the jaw.
Rich and his colleagues had recently unearthed a fossil of Teinolophos trusleri, an ancestor of modern monotremes that lived 115 million years ago. "He said he had some new Teinolophos specimens and when he showed them to me I almost fell off my chair," says Hopson, an author of the study, published this week inScience [Rich T. H., et al. Science 307, 910 - 914 (2005)].
Hammer time
Palaeontologists believe that the middle-ear bones of modern mammals once belonged to the jawbone and later separated to adopt their present location. This is supported by the fact that the middle ear's bones associate with the jaw in the early development of modern mammalian embryos.
What makes theTeinolophos specimen surprising is a large groove in its adult jawbone, which indicates that the smaller bones had not yet detached.
Teinolophos lived after monotremes split from the placental and marsupial mammalian groups. Its jawbone structure, along with its place in the evolutionary tree, hints that a common ancestor to all these mammals lacked the special three-bone ear structure.
This means that natural selection must have driven the same rearrangement in independent groups, after the monotreme split. "Some embryologists had the idea that it might be convergent but nobody really believed this," says palaeontologist Thomas Martin of the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. "I was quite shocked when I heard that such a complex morphological transformation happened twice."
The discovery will compel many experts to rethink their appreciation of mammals' common evolutionary heritage. "Until now it was considered to be one of the most important shared derived characteristics of modern mammals," says Martin.
"Some define faith as 'belief that isn't based on evidence'.
[Macroevolutionist, Richard] Dawkins calls it the "principal vice of any religion"
[Biblical] Christians realize that this definition of faith is a caricature.
Instead of viewing faith as belief that is not based upon evidence, we view faith as that which is a pre-condition for gaining any other knowledge; faith itself is not irrational or unscientific, but that which must be in order to gain other knowledge through science and logic.
For instance, confidence in the law of non-contradiction could be said to be faith.
There is no direct way to prove the law of contradiction except that it must be presupposed in order to learn anything or differentiate anything from anything else.
Likewise, the principle of induction, which states that the future will be generally like the past, is what makes possible the formulation of scientific laws and theories.
We cannot test the truth of this principle scientifically, for we would be assuming the truth of induction to try and prove it.
We cannot test the truth of the principle logically, for logic has as its subject matter static propositions.
Thus, induction and the law of contradiction, two of the bedrocks upon which all the rest of Richard Dawkins' knowledge is based, are both things he must accept on faith." ~ Jonathan Barlow
Macroevolutionist zealots really do embrace the blind-faith dogma of what mathematician Dr. David Berlinski called "the last of the great 19th century mystery religions"
Ha ha ha.....
Evidence is what lies on the table in a courtroom.
Telling the jury what it MEANS is the aim of the Prosecution and the Defense teams.
Decideing the 'truth' is up to the jury.
(It's still out.....)
I've never been impressed with "data anomaly soup" presentations to overthrow a prevailing viewpoint. Before I had spent much time arguing with creationists, I had a buddy who was a Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist. He still sometimes helps a U. MD professor research books on the subject. I have read that stuff realized these guys have no story and no theory, only a list of things they offer as "problems."
There's a bullet that didn't deform enough. (How do we really know we have the right bullet, or that one particular bullet out of N fired had to do exactly this and that?) There's a picture of a guy in a parking lot in Mexico who supposedly ought to look like Oswald but looks more like Dick Butkus. (Are we sure it's even the right picture?)
The same buddy of mine likes the theory that aliens built the Gaza complex in 10,000 BC. The main evidence for that one is that we apparently can't explain the amount of water erosion visible on the Sphinx if we are limited to just 5,000 years.
It has turned out over the decades that he likes anything that overthrows everything we think we know in a given area. He likes Velikovsky. He likes Ancient Mapmakers who knew modern geography. All of these fringe "theories" operate on the idea that you can build a new theory by compiling lists of things the other theory does not explain, all the while loudly proclaiming your own persecution. I'm thus pretty sure the only thing which has steered him clear of creationism is that he's too radically liberal. (Liberalism being just another militant nutcase thing he's bought into.) Otherwise, he's the stereotypical creationist. But then, creationists are that anomaly, conservatives who "reason" like liberals, which is to say, very little.
You see, creationism is a cancer within conservatism only. If I could find a way to give it to the liberals, I would. It would make it that much more obvious that liberals are the problem in our society. Let's put all the idiot relativists in one barrel and shoot it!
Now, for all I really know, there may actually be something fishy in the JFK murder and the Warren Commission investigation. That's where my buddy--we're indeed still buddies after all this--has the best chance of vindication. However, all he and his fellow conspiracy nuts have done is stomp all over the evidence trail and generally discredit further inquiry as a tinfoil hat activity. Most of them consider themselves engaged in war with the CIA. If you have to keep appealing to the actions of a conspiracy of evil dumb people trying to stop you, you don't have a theory. You have a delusional system.
Note that creationism has the same problem. Cheap and easy evasions to dismiss 146 years of accumulated evidence. "Fakes and lies by the evil dumb materialist Marxist Satanist atheist evolutionists!"
There are no alternate Egyptologies that offer 1/1,000th the enriching information content of the real thing. While it is theoretically possible to tear down the real thing while having nothing with which to replace it, the odds are against. It's hard to have an "irrefutable refutation" of a history while having no clue what did happen.
Evolution has made tons of successful predictions and there's an enormous body of evidence for it. A bunch of religious hysterics trying to wish it all away by cataloging every dispute, uncertainty, unexpected result, or gap in the detailed history has no hope ever of influencing the progress of science. They can only go after the teaching of same, and that is what they are doing. If you can't lie to the peer-reviewed journals, lie to the ninth-graders.
It's quite a sad little lying science, this Creation Science. It even has to lie about its name these days. I'm always catching it using the alias of "Intelligent Design."
I didn't assume it. Paleontologists assign it based on diagnostic features.
You probably don't object to Archaeopteryx having been classified as a bird based on its having feathers, back when nothing with feathers could be anything but a bird. (Yes, the diagnostics have to be revised when obvious exceptions come to light. And we do it when that happens.)
If this animal isn't a monotreme but some dead-end branch unrelated to anything, the problem for evolution goes away just as any problem for creation goes away. However, only a creationist would use such a cheap cop-out.
You have no science, Ahban. You don't give a damn about science. You aren't trying to learn, but only to unlearn. You are the enemy of knowledge.
Go back to your damn cave, but leave the rest of us in modern times, OK?
Ding, ding, ding!! One of your finest posts. You might consider using that little bit for a tagline.
I've tried to explain myself in these terms in the past to no avail. To the zealots on Darwin's ping list, if you are not fully persuaded that mollusks are in your family tree, you are initially branded as ignorant.
For the ignorant, they recommend reading basic bio books and talk origins articles. If you have a specific question and the article they reference does not actually address the specific question or is otherwise unpersuasive to you then you move into bucket #2, you are duped.
For the duped, the good ping-doctors of Darwinian zealotry assume you are under the sway of evil creationist liars. The prescription for such is to insist that your question is nothing but the rehashed tripe of creationist liars dating all the back to the 19th century (nothing new here). They loudly pronounce the proven idiocy of known creationists and try to get you to denounce them as well. If you fail to repent and recant then you are then proven to be evil because you are siding with the lie.
Once branded as evil, they know you lie, so they tell you what you really believe and scourge and mock you and spit upon you for the sins they know you commit even though you haven't done so on a particular thread.
Their closed system requires that there is no such thing as honest intelligent scientific debate about the adequacy of mainstream evolutionary theory. If there were such thing as an honest scientific debate about whether the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis is true, it would belong in schools as science. This they cannot abide.
Of course not all are zealots but there is a substantial population of this particular species.
I have observed this behavior among zealots. My primary difficulty is in remembering which side is which.
I woke up this morning and the PC's on
Logged onto FR to start my day
I got wrapped up in a crevo thread
A paradigm shifts and it slips my way.
It's more for the Lurkers (more for the Lurkers)
Hear the old canards the creos say (more for the Lurkers)
I begin posting (more for the Lurkers)
Till I feel a paradigm shift my way
I feel a paradigm shifting my way.
So many threads have come and gone
So many more await their turn;
Yet I recall as I battle on,
We do it so the lurker's learn.
Chorus
[Guitar Solo]
When the creo's canards are getting old
I grab some links and post away,
And think of a lurker reading this.
A paradigm shifts and it slips my way.
It slips my way.
Chorus
Thenk yaw! Thenk yaw!
If you think the evidence for evolution is not convincing, it is because your haven't examined or don't understand the evidence.
Do you have any evidence for your position?
What is your position anyway? Just providing snide quips is not debate.
"If there were such thing as an honest scientific debate about whether the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis is true, it would belong in schools as science."
What the heck are you talking about?
Evolution is the foundation for all biology. It has withstood 150 years of investigation by legitimate scientists and about the same from loonies who have a cultish religious view.
What doesn't belong in science classes is nonsense promoted by the fundamentalist sects.
Red wine or white?
And don't say "Boone's Farm" or "Thunderbird"!
Was it that bad?
Agreed. But can the scientific community (such as it is) tell the difference?
Let's use you as an example. What are the two are three biggest weaknesses of the modern evolutionary synthesis?
Speaking of fundamentalist sects:
Excerpt:
"...Indeed, Wayne Carley, executive director of the National Association of Biology Teachers acknowledged as much, saying the change was made because they wanted "to avoid taking a religious position."
That is an admission that demonstrates the truth of what Christian critics have been claiming all along: The association's original platform - like Darwinism itself - exceeds purely scientific conclusions, and embraces distinctly religious ideas.
The NABT decision to change its statement is widely seen as a retreat from the secularist worldview of the "scientific" community.
"That perception may cause the Darwinists some worry... because they cannot afford to look as if they are losing confidence."
So the Platypus and modern humans evolved from the same ancestor? Gee, I always was told it was humans and apes who evolved from the same ancestor.
Whaddya know.
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