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Amber-Trapped Spider Web Too Old for Evolution
ICR News ^ | November 20, 2009 | Brian Thomas, M.S.

Posted on 11/20/2009 8:37:04 AM PST by GodGunsGuts

Amateur fossil hunters Jamie and Jonathan Hiscocks were looking for dinosaur remains in East Sussex, UK, when they instead found tiny spider webs trapped inside a piece of ancient amber. Oxford University paleobiologist Martin Brasier inspected the amber, which was assigned an age of over 100 million years. He concluded that spiders back then were able to spin webs just like today’s garden spiders.

The amber-encased webbing formed concentric circles like those that contemporary orb-weaver spiders manufacture. Also evident were “little sticky droplets along the web threads to trap prey,” Brasier told the Daily Mail. He added, “You can match the details of the spider's web with the spider's web in my garden.”1 In a paper recently published in the Journal of the Geological Society, he wrote that these webs are “comparable with those of araneoid spider webs studied by us in modern cherry tree resins.”2

Brasier and his colleagues suggested that this “amber was arguably deposited shortly before the emergence of the earliest flowering plant communities circa 140 million years before present.”2 The Daily Mail reported, “The discovery suggests that orb-shaped web spinning spiders existed far earlier than had been previously thought, at a time before flowering plants appeared on the planet and triggered an explosion in flying insects.”1

This is a reversal of the standard story of spider evolution, which was based on spider fossils from Florissant lake deposits and Baltic amber. Paleobiologist Donald Prothero wrote in 2004, “From these deposits, it is apparent that carnivorous, web-spinning spiders had radiated since the late Mesozoic, probably in response to the explosion of insect diversity in response to the diversification of flowering plants.”3 Florissant insect fossils are considered to be 35 million years old , and the oldest Baltic amber is considered to be about 40 million years old. Thus, by evolutionary reckoning, the new UK amber shows that spiders were around 100 million years earlier than previously thought.

So, did orb-weaving spiders evolve in response to a greater diversity of insects―which supposedly evolved in response to plants―or did the spiders evolve prior to these insects?

If the evolutionary age-deposit correlation is made, this amber-encased spider web not only falsifies the theory that spiders “radiated” in response to the “explosion” of insects, but it also glosses over the fact of the interdependence of these three groups—spiders, insects, and flowering plants—in ecosystems. Most orb-weavers depend entirely on flying insects for food, insects are responsible for pollinating most flowering plants, and the plants provide the necessary food for most insects.

For Brasier and his colleagues to maintain that even a single generation of these spiders evolved prior to insects, they must also insist that spiders came up with silk glands, spinnerettes, and the instincts required to build symmetrical webs even to the degree of coating them with sticky insect-trapping droplets—all with no flying insects around to trap as prey. With no lunch as a payoff, wouldn't that generation of spiders have gone extinct?

However, if the contradictory web of long-age assignments could be decoupled from rock layers, as the Flood model maintains, then the spider conundrum vanishes. Spider, insect, and flowering plant fossils are near the top layers of Flood-year strata not because they evolved in later eras, but because they were part of mid-continental ecosystems that were the last areas to be inundated by the Flood.4

Genesis is correct that spiders, insects, and flowering plants have always existed in interdependent ecosystems from the beginning.

References

  1. Creepy crawlies from the dawn of time: Newly-discovered prehistoric spider’s web is world’s oldest. Daily Mail. Posted on dailymail.co.uk November 1, 2009, accessed November 3, 2009.
  2. Brasier, M., L. Cotton and I. Yenney. 2009. First report of amber with spider webs and microbial inclusions from the earliest Cretaceous (c. 140 Ma) of Hastings, Sussex. Journal of the Geological Society. 166 (6): 989-997.
  3. Prothero, D. 2004. Bringing Fossils to Life: An Introduction to Paleobiology, 2nd ed. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, 266.
  4. Wise, K. 2003. The Pre-Flood Floating Forest: A Study in Paleontological Pattern Recognition. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism. Pittsburgh, PA: Creation Science Fellowship, 371-381.


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To: ElectricStrawberry
Shhhhhh....they have a false argument to kick around. ....never you mind all other flying insects....they are irrelevant to the bogus argument.

Crud!, and I was all ready to throw the 360 million year old mayfly genus into the mix.

41 posted on 11/20/2009 11:06:30 AM PST by The_Victor (If all I want is a warm feeling, I should just wet my pants.)
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To: GodGunsGuts

There is no shortage of things that science should quit teaching as conclusions and instead should start acknowledging as only theories.

Scientific analysis is not harmed by such a change.

To do any scientific analysis a well grounded theory, recognized as a theory - not a conclusion - is enough.

The life scientists have previously held theories and beliefs about the conditions necessary for life, any life; theories that suggested where life could and could not exist.

In the past few decades though, they have found unanticipated life forms at ocean depths and under extreme temperature and pressure conditions once believed impossible for life, any life, to survive.

Recently they have discovered living, and fossilized remnants of living, organisms in rock formations deep in the earth; suggesting that “life” (in some sense) can exist even in an environment where the entire life cycle related to sunlight (not just a life-form but all the life-forms related to it’s existence) has never existed.

Now, as far as theories go, you can expect the evolution theory to not rebuke these new findings but to accept them, in an unanticipated shift, appending the evolution theory with the possibility that whenever the “water-sun” climate on earth became established in earth history that “life”, pre-existent life, gradually migrated “out of the rocks”.

The extreme extension of that theory, in the future, may be that “life” arrived in the rocks, the very “rocks” from which the infant earth was “born”.

Full disclosure. I am not advocating any of the above theories. I’m only providing an armchair view of where they all may be going.


42 posted on 11/20/2009 11:10:57 AM PST by Wuli
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To: metmom

Both male AND female mosquitoes feed on “plant juices”, including nectar AND the photosynthate in phloem....and can quite easily pierce the skin of plants to the phloem to extract the photosynthate...especially soft-sided tropical plants.

As in, they are not nectar exclusivists like you want them to be....in any manner.....and even if they were today like you want them to be, that would not mean they were 300+ million years ago...it would mean that they are taking advantage of an easy food source.

Entomology is your friend.


43 posted on 11/20/2009 11:16:33 AM PST by ElectricStrawberry (Didja know that Man walked with 100+ species of large meat eating dinos within the last 4,351 years?)
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To: GodGunsGuts
Kind of a waste of time to set up a net and wait for insects before insects became a plentiful dinner item, don't you think

Plenty of flying insects ranging back to 300 million years.....long before flowers.

FAIL!

44 posted on 11/20/2009 11:21:02 AM PST by ElectricStrawberry (Didja know that Man walked with 100+ species of large meat eating dinos within the last 4,351 years?)
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To: GodGunsGuts

So what are you saying, that God created spiders 100 million years ago? Does it mean that the number 6,000 does not apply anymore?


45 posted on 11/20/2009 11:33:01 AM PST by Behemoth the Cat
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To: Jason Kauppinen; GodGunsGuts
“It’s based on epistemology that recognizes the primacy of reality—not the primacy of an explanation (regardless of the source).”

Really?

“..... If one’s representation of reality takes evolution to be irrelevant to understanding biology, then it is one’s representation, not evolution, whose relevance should be questioned!” A New Biology for a New Century
Carl R. Woese*

Question reality if you must but never evolution!

46 posted on 11/20/2009 12:03:24 PM PST by count-your-change (You don't have be brilliant, not being stupid is enough.)
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To: GodGunsGuts; stormer
Where's the beef?!!! ahhh....wings?

“The impression is about three inches long and is imprinted on the flat side of a rock. The impression does not contain direct evidence of the insect having wings but Knecht and Benner say evidence suggests that it was a winged insect. According to Benner, the insect's anatomy and body plan are consistent with those of primitive flying insects. He also points out that “there are no walking tracks leading up to the body impression, indicating that it came from above.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081014134015.htm

Right. No wings so the insect flew on a set of “suggestions”.

47 posted on 11/20/2009 12:31:36 PM PST by count-your-change (You don't have be brilliant, not being stupid is enough.)
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To: count-your-change

You don’t have be brilliant, not being stupid is enough.


48 posted on 11/20/2009 12:34:28 PM PST by stormer
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To: urroner

You gentlemen should read up on Hox genes. Both arachnids and mammals share the same Hox genes. This means there is a common ancestor older than both families which had Hox genes.


49 posted on 11/20/2009 1:51:12 PM PST by Citizen Tom Paine
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To: GodGunsGuts
More speculative clap trap from Thomas et. al. What you and he don't seem to understand that these articles are actually reinforcing the theory evolution. The article confabulates a theory that because flowering plants did not exist flying insects did not exist so the need for webs did not exist.

All one needs to do it to make a few simple checks to arrive at the truth. Flying insects, such as mosquitoes were prevalent were so web spinning (something you do seem to know a lot about) spiders occupied a niche. With the explosion in the numbers and kinds of flying insects that resulted from the "evolution" of flowering plant species, web spinning spiders were poised to dominate. As natural selection also points out had flying insects disappeared web-spinning spiders would have disappeared with them.

50 posted on 11/20/2009 3:43:45 PM PST by Natural Law
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To: Jason Kauppinen
I am so going to use that...

Science is based upon an epistemology that recognizes the primacy of reality - not the primacy of an explanation.

I might also add that it is also in no way dependent upon the personal beliefs or character of the ex plainer. Science is not carried out by saints or prophets, but men and women.

The sicko who figured out that Mad Cow Disease came from eating brains may have been in New Guinea for immoral purposes, but his finding is 100% correct.

The widely debunked, yet still frequent trotted out, deathbed renunciation of evolution from Darwin, is untrue; but immaterial to the science even if it was true.

If Newton on his deathbed had screamed out “it is Force equals mass times acceleration CUBED!” it wouldn't have changed the fact that it is actually force equals mass times acceleration squared.

51 posted on 11/20/2009 3:49:58 PM PST by allmendream (Wealth is EARNED not distributed, so how could it be RE-distributed?)
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To: allmendream; GodGunsGuts
"If Newton on his deathbed...."

The skeptic in all of us needs to take the publications of Brian Thomas with a very small pinch of salt. He is predisposed to taking a legitimate paper, mining a nugget from it, stating that it then "suggests" an alternate meaning or purpose to the paper and then concluding with a classical "if-then" recitation of his agenda. He is the YEC version of Erich von Däniken.

Then, to our detriment, process is then repeated on Thomas' article by GGG.

52 posted on 11/20/2009 4:19:05 PM PST by Natural Law
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To: Natural Law

“There’s cleverness here somewhere...” as she searched for her pony...


53 posted on 11/20/2009 4:31:45 PM PST by Old Professer (The critic writes with rapier pen, dips it twice, then writes again.)
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To: GodGunsGuts

Evolution was scientifically discredited LONG ago. But the “faithful” continue to believe.


54 posted on 11/20/2009 4:46:30 PM PST by USALiberty
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To: rae4palin

I’m gone for a week or so ... See you all next month ..


55 posted on 11/20/2009 4:57:04 PM PST by OldNavyVet
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To: stormer
Either you don't read what you cite as a source of hope no one else will. and thanks for higlighting my tag-line, You don't have to be brilliant but you still should read your own sources.
56 posted on 11/20/2009 4:57:39 PM PST by count-your-change (You don't have be brilliant, not being stupid is enough.)
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To: USALiberty
"Evolution was scientifically discredited LONG ago."

Has anyone notified the scientists?

57 posted on 11/20/2009 6:00:02 PM PST by Natural Law
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