Life's lucky 'kick start'

BBC News ^ | October 13, 2003 | Dr David Whitehouse

[whattajoke]

Now flying fish... there's an interesting theoretical future cladogram.

Fish begat reptiles begat birds, so the path has occurred before. Not sure it could happen without the intermediate step of the reptiles, but why not?

the question is whether there would be sufficient pressures on the population of flying fish to warrant such an evolutionary path, and i can't quite think of any. Maybe is global warming exists, ocean temps do change several degrees, which increases flying fish predation...

... ahh, I could do this all day.

[PatrickHenry]

walking catfish. Living, breathing transitional species.

[PatrickHenry]

See above, for some potentially new body plans. Evolution never sleeps!

[Nebullis]

Finally, if the real cause for so few new body plans (2 or 3) is that the Cambrian explosion gave us development control genes – then I’m still in a quandary as to why such an event has not since recurred, unless of course the regulatory control genes are self-correcting to avoid those kinds of adaptations.

I suspect that the events that took place before the Cambrian were unique. History doesn't exactly repeat itself. Time doesn't move backwards.

[Junior]

I'm no nerd. I am, however, an Alpha Geek.

[Right Wing Professor]

AG, this is a pretty good review of HOX, all the way from single celled organisms to vertebrates.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=18260

There is, in fact a good deal of HOX gene diversity arising after the Cambrian. The vertebrate lineage in general has multiple HOX clusters which arose by gene duplication; thoise of fishes are quite different from mice and humans.

[gore3000]

"We believe that there was a change in the environment - a slow cooling of the system - that caused positive feedback that allowed the conditions for complex life," Dr von Bloh told BBC News Online.

Using a computer model....

Some more evo 'fact free science'. They do not know what the earth was like before, during or after, so that's good, because it makes any nonsense they say possible.

Jeech, can't these people get a real job?

[gore3000]

Science is about evidence.

Yes indeed, and this article is not science, it is fantasy. The fact is that there is absolutely no way that gradual Darwinian evolution can explain the humongous variety of living things which appeared within the short span of less than ten million years or why no new animal living forms have arisen since. The Cambrian completely disproves Darwinian evolution, Gould and Eldredge thought so and no Darwinist has ever been able to refute it or give evidence for the gradual evolution of the Cambrian fauna.

[Alamo-Girl]

LOLOL! Thanks for the chuckle!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for the examples of body plans in transition! I really appreciate it, however I wonder if any such change would be considered a new body plan or another species?

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your reply!

Indeed, "time doesn't move backwards" from our 4D perception, but dimensionality is a whole 'nother subject.

Do you have a preferred view of what the special Pre-Cambrian conditions might have been?

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for the url! I will read that and the others which have been brought to the table sometime over the weekend. I have company and thus my research time is limited. (sniff...)

[MissAmericanPie]

"Wow! The author managed to write that article without mentioning Global Warming even once."

Or God.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

The Cambrian completely disproves Darwinian evolution,

Sequoit 7 <<<<< 47 q36, b17ssd18.

n5 6b 22 j3.

[jennyp]

This-is-the-voice-of-world-control PLACEMARKER.

[Hank Rearden]

So, what horribly-mutated branch of this Tree of Life resulted in the creation of government parasites?

[PatrickHenry]

I wonder if any such change would be considered a new body plan or another species?

A lot of the professional disagreements in this business are about just such issues.

[whattajoke]

A lot of the professional disagreements in this business are about just such issues.

Exactly. And one of the "debates" is actually even more far-reaching. That is, whether trying to guess where evolution will lead is even beneficial or not. I come from the school of population dynamics, where future-casting is commonplace. But that's predicting outcomes of pressures upon populations and how it will affect lifespans and/or densities. When I was doing my thesis, we were careful to discern the difference between, "species x will become species y" and "species x will become a differently selected species x."

Predicting a million years hence is fun, to be sure, but not really beneficial to a greater knowledge. Zoologist Peter Ward published a mass market book on "The future of evolution" a few years ago. But notice; he went straight to a publishing house and skipped that persnickity peer review process. He was having fun, as we are here. (Although, IIRC, it was all rather doom and gloom).

Simply put, as long as there is no need for new body plans, there won't be any new body plans. So the next step is to think about what would cause a need for new body plans. AG, I'd wager you could write up a pretty cool essay parsing your beliefs from the book of Revelation, combining your idea for what the post-Christ's-return environment would look like, think about the new environmental pressures, and go from there. Another world-wide flood? Increased temperatures? Increased volcanism?

The world is your (giant flying) oyster. ; )

[PatrickHenry]

... trying to guess where evolution will lead ...

Difficult, if not impossible, because we don't really know how the environment will change (except in the very long term, when everything dies). The best I could do is predict that as the environment changes, any life that survives will -- of necessity -- be adapted to the conditions in that changed environment. That's not much of a prediction, but it's consistent with the theory of evolution.

[JethroHathAWay]

What about vampires? Their bats that became humans, or their humans that became bats. Their a new life form.