Oolon Colluphid

I disagree, but if you say so. So ignore the analogy and address the main point.

Not in the thylacine manner: it’s the creature’s fundament that tapers with the tail.

Yeah, perhaps. But soft tissues such as ligaments attach to bones in characteristic ways, which might be revealed, or not. But you can have that one little point if you like, it’s not worth my time to find out. And the other points?

Oh, go bloody look it up for yourself. Try an epipubic bone (which placentals lack), for starters. And their dentition: marsupials have three premolars and four molars; placentals have three to five premolars and three molars. Not that I expect you to know the difference...

I’ve already covered this. It is not Hopson’s own personal series; it’s the result of work by dozens of specialists.

Blah blah blah, and if we’re descended from monkeys why are there still monkeys...? You do realise that it’s a basic principle of cladistics that we are extremely unlikely to be dealing with the actual specific ancestral species or even genus, don’t you? What we get from the fossil record is examples of the sorts of things that are around at a given time. It’s like, in the absence of wolves, finding jackals before Dobermans. We very probably will only ever find the offshoots from the lineage, not the direct ancestors. This is why the organisms found have their own unique derived characteristics, as well as the ‘transitional’ characters that mark them as related.

Well duh. Uhhh, it may surprise you to learn that humans are members of the Synapsida. Also of the Therapsida, Mammalia, Eutheria, Primates and Catarrhini. Along the way there were lots of dead-ends. Evolution predicted long before they were found that fossils of reptiles with mammalian characteristics ought to exist. They have been found. You said there were no living representatives. You are wrong: you are one. Please explain the barriers to kinds that mean this is not possible.

How is that an ad hom? The definition in my Chambers dictionary of an ignoramus is one claiming knowledge without possessing it. If you do know better than people such as Hopson, it’s up to you to demonstrate it; show that your claims are not the arrogant pronouncements of an ignoramus. In other words, put up or shut up.

So they know it’s nonsense really, but want to keep their jobs. It’s all a cover-up. So do please share your vast palaeontological expertise with us, O Ed. Explain why the therapsids are not exactly what evolution predicts.

Pinning your hopes on future revelations again eh?

So the same basic embryological structure -- the first pharyngeal arch -- going off to make different things according to what genes are present and turned on/off shows what, precisely. Evolution works, remember, but modifying existing embryological processes.

And, uh, different designs show different designers at work? Bat, bird an pterosaur wings are all differently constructed... different designers? No, you’ll say, he can do things differently if he likes. So your ‘explanation’ explains nothing. It’s the same blueprint, except when it isn’t.

Bwahahaha! Ooh, what a revelation! But are you claiming that you can tell a six-week old human embryo apart from the equivalent stage embryo of a rabbit and chick? I’ll find some pics if you’d like to try.

Erm, gradually, from something a little less like legs, and that from something a little less like legs again...? While you’re at it, why not ask “how could something with complicated mammalian lungs evolve from something with so little structural similarity as the lungs of lungfish? And how can a fish develop lungs anyway?” <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

Huh? Where’s the problem? How was evolution undermined? Please explain how adapting one’s theory to fit the facts as new ones turn up is anything except science in action.

Ed, is your wilful pigheadedness just a hobby, or do you use it in some sort of professional capacity?

To everyone else: remind me again why the blue hell I’m bothering...? I think Ed is winning, by simply wearing down the opposition’s will to live...

TTFN, Oolon

[ May 20, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

Duvenoy

To everyone else: remind me again why the blue hell I’m bothering...? I think Ed is winning, by simply wearing down the opposition’s will to live...

This is your first reminder: You are doing it because you have little patience with myth and those who support them.

Me, I'm dropping out of the Ed threads (unless something really good comes up). The guy is a semi-coherent, broken record. His mind is so solidly stuck in a single, narrow groove that he can't seem to see beyond the faded, purple book mark hanging out of his bible. He sees no beauty in the fossil record, no wisdom in it's translation. He finds no joy in the natural world that surrounds him.

I find this sad.

d

lpetrich

And this guy is supposed to be a wildlife biologist!

It is curious that he has not applied his professional knowledge of biogeography to the Noah's Flood story

I wonder if any of you people have ever tried to imagine yourselves visiting the Earth some time in its long past. I'd be surprised if Ed ever has.

Imagine yourself motorboating on Lake Missoula in Pleistocene Montana 15,000 years ago or so. You are surrounded by mountains, and to your north is a vast ice sheet. But you hear crackling and roaring to the west and you start noticing a strong westward current -- a current that takes you over what remains of the western glacial dam and over the plains of eastern Washington and Oregon, into the Columbia River Valley at something like 60 mph (100 kmh). After half a day or so of horrendous currents, whitewater nightmare, and evading huge boulders and outcrops, you finally find yourself in still water -- well into the Pacific Ocean.

Or you decide to go scuba diving at some Mesozoic reefs, and you find instead of many fish a lot of ammonites, which look rather nautilus-like. And near the surface, what looks like some dolphins turns out to be some ichthyosaurs.

Or you decide to go on the ultimate road trip late in the Permian, from one end of Pangaea to the other. Or a slightly lesser one in the Jurassic, from one end of Gondwana to the other.

Or you go scuba diving again in the Cambrian seas, seeing all its un-present-like fauna, like all the trilobites and some lobster-sized Anomalocaris swimming by, gracefully waving their gills on their sides.

Or to see Earth look like Hoth a few hundred million years earlier, in an iced-over "Snowball Earth" phase.

Or wade through a lot of green muck in the waters of 1.5 billion years ago -- masses of blue-green algae.

Or to try to survive on Earth 3 to 4 billion years ago -- you'd need an air supply because there is very little free oxygen in the air, and the most prominent life is microbes that do iron-oxidizing photosynthesis (a plausible alternative to oxygen-releasing photosynthesis for early microbes).

And the continents would look totally unrecognizable; there would be lots of small continents, with much of the future continents yet to be formed. You could visit places like central Canada, eastern South America, southern Africa, and so forth -- but you could only identify those places by following continental drift bacwkard in time.

Valentine Pontifex

A request: this thread is now 16 pages long. It might be a good idea to continue any discussions in new threads.

Ed

I was exaggerating but only slightly. The missing area (blue) is a huge chunk of the upper jaw and side of the skull. This could affect the amount of protrusion of the jaw and the cranium size, two key areas in determining humans and apes. And given the age of it, there could be a bias toward reconstructing it to be more apelike.

Quote:

Ed: As I stated before, many of the habilis fossils are actually probably apes. OC: Please say which ones. And you still haven’t said why you think so. Why do you think you know more about hominid anatomy than those who, studying this stuff professionally in the glare of peer review, think that they are all Homo habilis?

Read the chapter on H. habilis in Marvin Lubenow's "Bones of Contention", he gives detailed reasons why.

Quote:

OC: In other words, the differences are subtle morphology. Stuff that can be the result of 'microevolution', as with the dog skulls -- only to a much lesser degree than with those. Ed: If we had the soft tissues and were able to watch their behaviors the differences would be far more than subtle. OC: Sure, we don’t have the soft tissues. But these can be substantially reconstructed from the skeleton: See Aiello & Dean (1997): An Introduction to Human Evolutionary Anatomy. Behaviour, of course, is entirely speculative. But we are not talking about soft tissues etc. Are you saying we can know nothing about a creature from its skeletal remains? We cannot know about the details of its endocrine systems or how its brain was wired up. Here is what we can and do know: the differences between the skeletal anatomy of these creatures is a matter of subtle morphology. This is PRECISELY what evolution expects. Since the skeletons ARE what evolution predicts, claiming that the major differences are in something that we can’t know about is an irrefutable hypothesis, a pathetic rebuttal and a remarkably stupid dodge, even for you.

But the problem is that subtle differences in skeleton is also predicted by creation. Because being created by one creator and designer would mean that much of the same "blueprints" would be used.

[ref the differences being subtle morphology]

Quote:

OC: And you did not say why there is a line to be drawn. Ed: The reason why a line is to be drawn is to obtain an accurate picture of ancient life. OC: No, dingbat, why there is a sufficient difference between something like STS 5 or STS 71, and KNM-ER 1813 and OH 24 (or wherever it is you do want to draw the line), that you can be certain they are not related, and so divided into separate ‘kinds’. I can’t believe you didn’t understand that, so your comment is anther stupid dodge. Once again: what are the differences that constitute the reason for putting these things in separate kinds.

Well as I stated above, because we dont have soft tissues we cannot be absolutely certain they are not related. But the differences are basically the same ones that taxonomists use to separate Pongidae from Hominidae and the genus' Australopithicus from Homo.

[b] You already did, but that is somewhat irrelevant given that species within families sometimes vary greatly and sometimes appear almost identical.

[ May 21, 2002: Message edited by: Ed ]</p>

lpetrich

If it can reasonably predict anything at all. One needs some hypothesis about the creator's (or creators') intentions or capabilities. Notice that I included the plural, because there could be more than one creator!

The only kind of design reuse that could give the kinds of treelike patterns that we see is psuedo-evolutionary design reuse -- design reuse that happens in an evolution-like pattern. I suggest that Ed study some molecular evolutionary biology some time -- he'll be amazed.

Also, there is an abundance of evidence of kludgy design; consider my recent discussion of aphids. I'm surprised that Ed has not weighed in on aphids, their nutritional needs, and how they manage to survive on the junk food that is their preferred diet.

Ed has given no justification for identifying "created kinds" with the Linnean level of "family". Could it be that he is unable to do so?

Also, mainstream biologists have yet to find a big difference between evolution inside of families and evolution between families -- however families are to be defined.

I think that it is worthwhile to review differences in classification philosophy.

One school is cladistics, which focuses on identifying branching patterns. Groupings are defined by whatever new features their members have relative to ancestral groupings. This kind of classification is most closely related to what one can reasonably expect from evolution, and the success of cladistic approaches is strong evidence for evolution.

Another school is phenetics, which classifies by degree of resemblance. Degree of resemblance can be made precise by making lists of characters and scoring organisms on them -- and then using some type of cluster-analysis algorithm on them.

The traditional sort of classification, whose first big exponent was Linnaeus, is a hybrid of phenetic and cladistic approaches -- a hybrid that is sometimes rather subjective.

So when Ed means that a created kind equals a Linnean family, does he mean a precise Linnean family or some cladistic grouping that approximates some Linnean family?

aspidistra

This Australian lungfish has pretty good sized fins--
<a href="http://www.whozoo.org/fish/primbony/lungfish/AusLung25jn01fwzd32.jpg" target="_blank">http://www.whozoo.org/fish/primbony/lungfish/lungfish.htm</a>
and I believe it is considered to be more primitive than the African and South American species, which have the wispier fins.
As I understand the genetic evidence, the lungfish are currently proposed to be closer to the tetrapods than the rayfinned fish -- although the angler in the pic above is a startling example of what you can do with a fin! The idea of a relationship of lungfish to the land vertebrates is a little less bizarre if you think about salamanders, whose larvae look very like those of lungfish.

[ May 23, 2002: Message edited by: aspidistra ]</p>

Quetzal

Hi aspidistra: Welcome to II!

Rereading my (overly-quick) reply to Ed the Great, I can see where I mis-stated my case. Actually, the direct tetrapod ancestors were rhipidistian crossopterygians (lobe-fins) like Eusthenoptera. You're right that genetically the modern lungfish are the closest living relative of Eustheno. . However, that's 'cause there are only two living families left: the Coelocanthomorphs (one genus) and the Dnopterans (three genera). The Australian lungfish (Neoceratodus), although suffering from IMO the same fleshy fin base problem as the rest of the sarcos, does have flexible rays to the end of its fin - a holdover from its crossopterygian origins. The other lungfish have apparently lost it completely and their front fins are mostly muscle.

What I think is really cool is that there are a lot of actinos that have adapted their much sturdier fins to bottom and/or shallow-water locomotion and support. Gee, sort of like what must have happened 400 mya. Not only our angler, but several genera of actinos like mudskippers (Periophthalmus and Batheopthalmus spp.), walking catfish (Clariidae), etc. I use them to show how common an adaptation it really is... And besides, there are lots of great pictures on the 'net.

BTW: I use salamanders a LOT in arguments with creationists. Neotenic Ambystoma are a seriously neat modern analog for proto-amphibians because they have almost ALL the necessary adaptations in a real-live modern organism that is itself more-or-less evolving from water to land. Plus, they look cool.

Thanks for your post!

[Edited to add: Wonder why Ed didn't catch that one...]

[ May 22, 2002: Message edited by: Morpho ]</p>

aspidistra

I have watched that little fish (actually THAT little fish -- I took the picture you posted) "walk" in the water. He looks like a little hippo -- simply amazing. Here is a pic of him in "hippo" mode. <a href="http://www.whozoo.org/fish/teleosts/Other/Anglefish27JL01FWZB71.jpg" target="_blank">Angler fish as Hippo</a>

Thanks for the clarification on fish phylogeny. Common ancestry is difficult to convey -- it often seems to wind up in the "humans come from chimps" corner. Yes, you and your cousin are relatives. No, your cousin is not your grandfather.

Duvenoy

What a charming, little fish! Thanks for the look-see.

For another example of fins being used as 'legs', check out the mud skippers. Alas, I don't have any pics of them, but a quick google should turn something up.

d