Oolon Colluphid

Ah, I thought it might. From <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/a_brains.html" target="_blank">here</a>:

Hmmm...

You do know that those are just the names the fossils are assigned to, don’t you? ‘Southern Ape’ is just the name, it doesn’t confer any greater ‘apeness’ on the fossils!

Why then the problems with whether Homo habilis is an ‘ape’ or a ‘human’?

Thanks. I’d already checked that, see my post of 23/4.

Haha! You do know what a derived characteristic is, don’t you? So despite the jaw joints, differentiated teeth, palate and posture amongst other things, all of which are mammalian characters, these things are still reptiles?

(split since this seems too long to ba accepted... )

Oolon Colluphid

Go learn some basic cladistics. Here is a good <a href="http://www.nhm.ukans.edu/cc.html" target="_blank">online cladistics textbook</a>.

Sorry, you’ll need to state what Jerison says, because according to André Wyss (‘Digging Up Fresh Clues About the Origin of Mammals’, Science, Vol 292, No 5521 (2001), p 1496-1497):

And Zhe-Xi Luo (‘A New Mammaliaform from the Early Jurassic and Evolution of Mammalian Characteristics’, Science Vol 292, No 5521 (2001), p 1535-1540) says:

So please find what Jerison says, cos these folks don’t seem to regard these critters as all having typical reptile brains. [Edited to add: they don't mention reptile brains at all, which is rather odd if this is the case.]

That’ll do for no, more to follow...

TTFN, Oolon

[ April 30, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

Ed

How could he reach back in time if he didnt exist? You know we are talking about the origin of the universe dont you? So there would not be a hamster to go back in time. Also, hamsters are phyiscal entities and therefore require space but space didnt exist.

Quote:

(cracks that seawater flows through to produce ocean-floor hot springs) Ed: And as I stated earlier I am not a geologist, but possibly geologists will find out that they were bigger in the past. lp: And possibly there was no planetwide Noah's Flood.

Possibly.

Quote:

(lots of nasty pathogens and parasites...) OC: Well you have to remember that after Man rebelled against the king of the universe(Genesis 2) there were immediate repercussions throughout the universe and it started malfunctioning. And things that were once good including man himself became corrupted. So these organisms may have originally been symbionts or may have only parasitized animals because of Man's perfect immune system at the time. But after Man's rebellion they microevolved into more pathogenic versions of themselves and Man became more susceptible to disease after he could no longer eat of the Tree of Life that protected him from death and disease. lp: Ed evades the question of how Noah and his family had carried all these nasty bugs, since they had supposedly been created during the original time of creation. Their trip on the Ark might have been a great opportunity to rid the planet of these diseases. Also, that seems very vindictive of a supposedly loving being. If I sadistically beat you up and broke several of your bones just because you had called me some insulting name, would you say that I am perfectly loving?

See my post to OC. Your analogy is inadequate to explain God's justice. A better analogy would be that I was in the progress of laying the groundwork for something 1000 times worse than the Nazi Holocaust. What kind of punishment would I deserve?

Quote:

OC: So please define 'loving'. Ed: God is loving but also his moral character demands justice. And according to God, rebellion against him can only be justly punished by immediate death, but God in his mercy and lovingkindness did not immediately kill Man but instead the universe became corrupted and abnormal and was no longer a perfect home for Man so that is when these pathogenic organisms began microevolving. But also it allows humans time to repent of their rebellion and then will be allowed to live in the new earth and universe after this universe comes to an end. lp: That is still vindictive. Ed, in the example above, would me letting your live be considered proof that I'm a perfectly loving being?

See my more accurate analogy above.


[b] If it was based on sound hermeneutics then yes I would.

lpetrich

There you go again, O Ed. I don't see how there is supposed to be a time-travel brick wall at the moment of one's conception.


And why is that supposed to be a good analogy, O Ed?

And I notice that you evaded the question of how Noah and his family managed to carry such a big load of pathogens and parasites. Or were they all the result of superfast evolution after the Flood?

That's very generous of you, O Ed.

Oolon Colluphid

Further research and some help from a palaeontologist friend means I have more to report.

Mr Ed, the Talking Creationist, spake:

Says who? In any case, the "therapsid series" is not simply something that Jim Hopson dreamt up. There is a very extensive literature on stem-group synapsids (= ‘mammal-like reptiles’, the group that includes the therapsids, as well as the more primitive pelycosaurs such as Dimetrodon), representing the work of dozens of different scientists, and all agree that these animals form the ancestral line to mammals.

Quite so. It is also possible that your late great-uncle Fred was actually an alien who only looked human but had a completely different biology.
&lt; looks to the audience, shrugs exasperatedly &gt; Seriously, does this guy have ANY understanding of how science works? You have to go by the actual data!

In this particular case, all the known attributes of mammal-like reptiles (preserved hard anatomy, bone histology) indicate unambiguously that they form the ancestral group for mammals. Their soft biology is simply unknown (except in so far as we can draw inferences about it from the skeleton), and there is nothing more that can be said about it. Period. To try to use imagined non-mammalian characteristics, for which there is no direct or indirect evidence at all, as evidence against a mammal-therapsid relationship is simply laughable. Even creationists usually manage to do better than that.

No surprise that Ed has misunderstood this story. It is true that Latimeria proved to have some unexpected features, notably on the physiological front (it achieves osmotic balance with the surrounding sea water by concentrating urea in its blood, in the same way as sharks), but it also has some strikingly tetrapod-like features. Notably, it retains a vestigial lung (now filled with fat and functioning as a buoyancy organ) and a pulmonary vein, which strongly suggests that it had ancestors for whom air-breathing was significantly relevant. Molecular phylogenetic analyses (based on DNA sequences) also place it close to lungfishes and tetrapods.

In any case, ‘rhipidistians’ are actually a lot more tetrapod-like than coelacanths in their skeletal anatomy, and include obviously transitional forms like Panderichthys; their ancestral status is in no sense affected by the physiology or whatever of Latimeria.

So much for this particular missive; but does Ed not realise that he totally contradicts his earlier statement here?

So which is it going to be, Ed? If using evidence from modern organisms to draw inferences about relationships is "a highly questionable practice", then Latimeria is irrelevant to the problem of tetrapod origins. If Latimeria is relevant (as you obviously believe) then your criticism of modern-species data is unfounded. You can't have it both ways.

Of course, it is not at all "questionable" to use information from living creatures to reconstruct the relationships and evolution of a group; on the contrary, it is the very foundation of systematic biology. Fossils give us a direct glimpse into the past, but they can never yield as much information as living organisms because soft tissues, physiology etc are not preserved. Ed is simply demonstrating his ignorance here.

Looking at Ed’s claim in a bit more detail, note that the question of finding intermediates between anurans (frogs and toads) and urodeles (salamanders and newts), and "older amphibians" (what palaeontologists would call ‘early tetrapods’), is only tangentially relevant to the move from water to land (‘fish becoming reptiles’). As should be apparent, the move onto land was something that happened during the evolutionary transition from fishes to early tetrapods, ie at the origin of Ed’s "older amphibians" (which is why they are referred to as "older amphibians", not "older fishes"... simple when you think about it...).

Whether there is a gap in the fossil record between these "older amphibians" and the anurans and urodeles is irrelevant to the question of whether tetrapods evolved from
fishes. Just to give a few more details on these two topics:

Tetrapods evolved from fishes during the Devonian period, about 365-355 million years ago. The fossil record of this transition is rather good, and new discoveries are being made all the time. Key steps in the transition are represented by:

1) Osteolepiform fishes, of which Eusthenopteron is the best known. These are one of the subsets of Ed's "rhipidistians"; they have a normal fish shape and seen to have been entirely aquatic, but have certain tetrapod features in their anatomy such as paired fin skeletons containing equivalents of the limb bones humerus/femur, radius/tibia and ulna/fibula.

Eusthenopteron



2) Panderichthys. This form has all the tetrapod characteristics of osteolepiforms, plus a few more. It also has a crocodile-like head and body form with reduced fins, suggesting that it operated in very shallow water and maybe made short journeys over land. Panderichthyids and all other osteolepiform fish had a hole (choana) between the nasal passage and the mouth, which allowed air to pass from the nose into the mouth which is not present in other lobe-finned fish. Panderichthys also had external nostrils which were in the same position as those of the early tetrapods. The skull bones of these fish are bone for bone equivalents to the skull bones of the earliest tetrapods, and the braincase is so similar to earliest tetrapod ones that they were originally classified as tetrapods until a complete skeleton was found.

Eusthenopteron and Panderichthys



3) A fish similar to Sauripterus (Daeschler and Shubin (1998): Nature vol 391 no 133). Inside its fins are eight ‘fingers’ attached in a similar way to the digits of the earliest amphibians. Note that some early amphibians also had eight digits.



3) Ichthyostega and Acanthostega. These are the earliest tetrapods known from complete skeletons. They have limbs (with seven or eight digits apiece, rather than five), but retain tail fins, lateral line canals (sensory organs that only work in water) and a number of other fish characteristics. Both have external nostrils and choana; Acanthostega also has internal gills.





After the Devonian, the tetrapods (Ed's "older amphibians") lost their last few fish characteristics and diversified rapidly into a number of groups. One of these was the reptiles. The origin of reptiles is fairly well understood; the earliest reptiles (such as Hylonomus) are Late Carboniferous in age (about 300my) and very similar to some of
the "older amphibians" such as gephyrostegids and seymouriamorphs. The origin of lissamphibians (= anurans, urodeles and caecilians) probably occurred during the Permian, about 280 million years ago. The anurans are very similar to an "older amphibian" group called the temnospondyls, and almost certainly derives from these; there is a Triassic fossil from Madagascar, Triadobatrachus, that is neatly intermediate between temnospondyls and early anurans. The origins of the urodeles and caecilians ("worm amphibians") are less well understood. These groups are structurally very modified, and also have a poor fossil record (essentially because they are small animals), which makes them more difficult to position. However, they have a lot of characteristics in common with the anurans, and are clearly related to them, so most probably they too have a temnospondyl ancestry.

All plus more of which can be found here:
<a href="http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/transit.htm" target="_blank">http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/transit.htm</a>

And most of it was covered in the <a href="http://www.mdgekko.com/devonian/intro.html" target="_blank">Devonian Times</a> link I gave previously. Which shows that Ed isn’t reading what we offer him, and that he has no excuse for not knowing what the hell he’s talking about.

DNFTT & TTFN, OC

Quetzal

Oolon: <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

&lt;The hooligans in the cheaps seats throw popcorn and start chanting: OOLON! OOLON! OOLON!&gt;

Oolon Colluphid

A couple of missed points:

(Emphasis added to, well, emphasise that we’re not just talking about normal variation between individuals, but rather, inheritable variation that can lead to speciation and beyond -- remember that Ed defined a ‘kind’ as ~ Family.)

Nonsense. Please show where the bible says so. Creation has been forced to accept such ‘microevolution’ because to say otherwise is perverse even by their standards. Hence the old joke:
Macroevolution: Evolution that no reasonable person can deny.
Microevolution: Evolution that not even creationists can deny.

Don’t be ridiculous. What would be the point of simply showing a connection between erectus and apes, when this is utterly uncontroversial except for people such as yourself. As the abstract (Nature (2001), 414(6864):628-31) says:

It’s noting differences, not suggesting a connection. The connection is thoroughly established as far as palaeoanthropologists are concerned.

You know this how? Simply by coexisting, they cannot be occupying exactly the same niche. That’s basic -- very basic -- ecology. Except of course if one is driving out the other over a (possibly large) number of generations.

How does that follow? You do know how speciation occurs, don’t you? And anyway, the ones coexisting wouldn’t be ancestral, by definition, any more than fox terriers and Jack Russells would be ancestral one to the other. Let me spell it out. Recent. Common. Ancestor.

Please explain the logic underlying that conclusion.

Mind you, if you consider KNM-ER 1813


to be just a different-looking Homo sapiens, then I guess the more subtle differences between erectus and sapiens are mere nit-picking.

TTFN, Oolon

Oolon Colluphid

And while I’m in the mood to eat up bandwidth...

Just wondering, Ed... if this:



is human, is this human too?











Please don’t concern yourself with what’s damaged, nor with the absent soft tissues. Based on what there is, is it human? Might they be related?

Oh, and to save me having to ask, please say why, specifically, you think so.

Oolon

Ed

Calm down Rim. I exaggerated a little about being "forced" to another thread, but if you check the EOG thread you will see that absolutely NONE of the discussions about the flood were initiated by me. And please specify any logical fallacies and refusing to deal with counter arguments. I have a hunch though you won't do it because they are not there.

[b] Go ahead and let them judge.

[ April 30, 2002: Message edited by: Ed ]</p>

GunnerJ

That is a fair enough point. However...

I have a hunch that you are yet again not willing to practice what you preach, because if you check the thread yourself, you will see the falicious nature of your argument specified quite explicitly.

So far, we have one theist who agrees with me. Not many others were interested.