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intelligent design is a broad term and could include evolution as being subject to the powers of GOd.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/st...747926,00.html
Discovered: the missing link that solves a mystery of evolution
Alok Jha, science correspondent
Thursday April 6, 2006
The Guardian
Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago.
Palaeontologists have said that the find, a crocodile-like animal called the Tiktaalik roseae and described today in the journal Nature, could become an icon of evolution in action - like Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that bridged the gap between reptiles and birds.
As such, it will be a blow to proponents of intelligent design, who claim that the many gaps in the fossil record show evidence of some higher power.
Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, said: "Our emergence on to the land is one of the more significant rites of passage in our evolutionary history, and Tiktaalik is an important link in the story."
Tiktaalik - the name means "a large, shallow-water fish" in the Inuit language Inuktikuk - shows that the evolution of animals from living in water to living on land happened gradually, with fish first living in shallow water.
The animal lived in the Devonian era lasting from 417m to 354m years ago, and had a skull, neck, and ribs similar to early limbed animals (known as tetrapods), as well as a more primitive jaw, fins, and scales akin to fish.
The scientists who discovered it say the animal was a predator with sharp teeth, a crocodile-like head, and a body that grew up to 2.75 metres (9ft) long.
"It's very important for a number of reasons, one of which is simply the fact that it's so well-preserved and complete," said Jennifer Clack, a paleontologist at Cambridge University and author of an accompanying article in Nature.
Scientists have previously been able to trace the transition of fish into limbed animals only crudely over the millions of years they anticipate the process took place. They suspected that an animal which bridged the gap between fish and land-based tetrapods must have existed - but, until now, there had been scant evidence of one.
"Tiktaalik blurs the boundary between fish and land-living animal both in terms of its anatomy and its way of life," said Neil Shubin, a biologist at the University of Chicago, and a leader of the expedition which found Tiktaalik.
The near-pristine fossil was found on Ellesmere Island, Canada, which is 600 miles from the north pole in the Arctic Circle.
Scientists from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University led several expeditions into the inhospitable icy desert to search for the fossils.
The find is the first complete evidence of an animal that was on the verge of the transition from water to land. "The find is a dream come true," said Ted Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Sciences.
"We knew that the rocks on Ellesmere Island offered a glimpse into the right time period and were formed in the right kinds of environments to provide the potential for finding fossils do enting this important evolutionary transition."
When Tiktaalik lived, the Canadian Arctic region was part of a land mass which straddled the equator. Like the Amazon basin today, it had a subtropical climate and the animal lived in small streams. The skeleton indicates that it could support its body under the force of gravity.
Farish Jenkins, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University said: "This represents a critical early phase in the evolution of all limbed animals, including humans - albeit a very ancient step." Tiktaalik also gives biologists a new understanding of how fins turned into limbs. Its fin contains bones that compare to the upper arm, forearm and primitive parts of the hand of land-living animals.
"Most of the major joints of the fin are functional in this fish," Professor Shubin said.
"The shoulder, elbow and even parts of the wrist are already there and working in ways similar to the earliest land-living animals."
Dr Clack said that, judging from the fossil, the first evolutionary transition from sea to land probably involved learning how to breathe air. "Tiktaalik has lost a series of bones that, in fishes, covers the gill region and helps to operate the gill-breathing mechanism," she said. "The air-breathing mechanism it had would have been elaborated and having lost the series of bones that lies between the head and the shoulder girdle means it's got a neck, it can raise its head more easily in order to gulp the air.
"The flexible robust limbs appear to be connected with pushing the head out of the water to breathe the air."
H Richard Lane, director of sedimentary geology and palaeobiology at the US National Science Foundation, said: "These exciting discoveries are providing fossil Rosetta stones for a deeper understanding of this evolutionary milestone - fish to land-roaming tetrapods."
A cast of the fossil goes on display at the Science Museum in South Kensington central London today.
intelligent design is a broad term and could include evolution as being subject to the powers of GOd.
I kind of believe that evolution is God's work into play as a survival tool he gave species to survive but I don't get how Adam and Eve appeared out of nowhere if we evolved from ape creatures supposedly.
Parable maybe into how humans evolved into getting a consience. Remember the earlier primates spoke like babies, and had hardly any real form of communication. ALso their brains werent developed like they are now.
The adam and eve thing could be a parable of how mankind used came around to think for itself.
Your thinking is unnecessarily linear. But most people are linear thinkers, I guess.
Wait... I don't see mudskippers trying to make the 'jump' to live on land permenantly..... they are who they are... amphibious... that is their niche - that is what they were created for.
If 'science' finds the power behind 'life' then they will find GOD... but because their search is void of His presence it will be futile.
You would so pwn me on any debate about such matters, I admit that.
I just cant stand your complete disregard for science. Please, dont tell anyone else your opinions, youre smart, they might believe your bull .
You would so pwn me on any debate about such matters, I admit that.
I just cant stand your complete disregard for science. Please, dont tell anyone else your opinions, youre smart, they might believe your bull .
I don't have a disregard for science, it just so happens that I don't hold 'Science' as my personal religion... it is only a tool that helps us understand our universe's natural processes but it does not exclusively explain everything. One must remember that other tools such as math, probability, and physics also help describe our suroundings.
So yeah I don'tto Science... but to say I disregard it would be way off base.... I use its concepts everyday at work.
Science is the same one's who tell us: eggs are bad, eggs are good, coffe is bad,
coffee is good. The earth is warming, the earth is cooling, it's going to rain tomorrow,
unless the sun is shining. We can clone this, well except when we lie, well, this or
that, or maybe, but well we just aren't sure.......give me a break. Go protect your
dumb spiders in a cave or wild rice or protect the creatures that were killed during
the stone ages.
Is it so hard to grasp that people who believe God created EVERYTHING believe he created EVERYTHING - including the rules of nature and physics those objects/beings and substances are bound to obey?
In the beginning there was nothing - as in NO THINGS, nada, zilch....
In fact we have a law which describes our powerlessness to describe even this simplist of cir stances: How is there anything in the 1st place
Matter can neither be created nor destroyed.
Yet, there is matter; lots of it. Where did it come from? How was it created? Science has theories (the big bang, etc) to describe why that matter is arranged the way it is, how WE ended up with water on our planet - how life in that water evolved, ultimately, into David Robinson....
but where did the material in that original, impossibly tightly packed sphere come from?
In the beginning, there was nothing...
"there was nothing"
Depends on whose cosomology you subsribe to. Vedanta/Vedic thought has the universe as oscillating (not infinitely expanding), and even that we are in the 40th oscillation.
It is their niche because the environment dictated their genes (via selection on their phenotypes) to make it so.
The discovery changes nothing.
.... because the process that allows this phenomena to run its course was instated in that species' original genome by the Designer Himself. Ergo, different combinations of a highly diverse 'blueprint' have manifested themselves and succeeded the original genome, but new species have not been created because of it...
If you give the people on earth the choice of whether:
A) we are the product of a huge series of random events and happenstances and that our tiny existence matters not one Iota in the grand scheme of things.
B) we are the chosen race created by the most powerful being in the universe and will have eternal life once our bodies expire.
95% of them are going to immediately gravitate to choice B.
It is just human nature.
.... because the process that allows this phenomena to run its course was instated in that species' original genome by the Designer Himself. Ergo, different combinations of a highly diverse 'blueprint' have manifested themselves and succeeded the original genome, but new species have not been created because of it...
Okay i get it, God created DNA and designed it's tendencies as a self replicating molecule--hey! "designed it's..."--Design! God--Intelligent! Intelligent...Design...!!! I get it now!
Last edited by Cant_Be_Faded; 04-06-2006 at 11:02 PM. Reason: chode overload--error
If someone believes the Big Bang, Evolution, or any other scientific theory is the work of God - then I can certainly understand that. But if one is going to challenge science, say that God put dinosaur bones on Earth to test our faith, say that the great flood carved out the Grand Canyon, and evolution can't be real because there are still monkeys (my all time favorite evolution criticism)... then you are pretty much fighting an uphill battle. Check that, you are climbing up Everest in flip flops with a rubber band gun against the 101st.
I just dont get how people cant look at what we have done with dogs in the last 4,000 years and see how evolution happens.
And I know you are going to throw the "they arent a different species" thing at me but... duh?
yeah they are.
Great Dane is not the same species as a Chihuahua.
"Well yes it is"
Technically yes.
But a wolf is not the same species as a dog and they can breed with chihuaha's.
An african hunting dog is not the same species as a wolf and they can have fertile offspring.
Don't use science against science to try to disprove evolution.
It doesn't work.
You can say that there is a huge invisible Gorrilla in the room, and Science can't disprove that. That's faith.
But you can't overcome the huge amount of evidence that supports evolution.
That being said, this discovery changes nothing in the debate. It does nothing but give people who believe in evolution a window into how some vertibrates came to live on land. It does nothing for invertibrates.
Plus... you can't argue with faith. Why bother?
I agree.
Plus... as soon as we find Extra Terrestrial Life, Strict Creationism is ed.
So be patient.
It's coming, probably in our lifetime.
Why? Extraterrestrial life doesn't preclude intelligent design, a supreme being, or creationism.
You notice I said "Strict Creationism".
And yes it does. There is no account of it. There isn't a day alloted for it.
2 days at the end are dedicated to creation of life ON EARTH.
I'm betting that when the saucers descend from the sky - more people going to be praying to their god, than running from him; they AIN'T gonna be parsing Genesis.
Source: University of Oregon
Posted: April 6, 2006
Evolution Of 'Irreducible Complexity' Explained
Using new techniques for resurrecting ancient genes, scientists have for the first time reconstructed the Darwinian evolution of an apparently "irreducibly complex" molecular system.
The research was led by Joe Thornton, assistant professor of biology at the University of Oregon's Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and will be published in the April 7 issue of SCIENCE.
How natural selection can drive the evolution of complex molecular systems -- those in which the function of each part depends on its interactions with the other parts--has been an unsolved issue in evolutionary biology. Advocates of Intelligent Design argue that such systems are "irreducibly complex" and thus incompatible with gradual evolution by natural selection.
"Our work demonstrates a fundamental error in the current challenges to Darwinism," said Thornton. "New techniques allowed us to see how ancient genes and their functions evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. We found that complexity evolved piecemeal through a process of Molecular Exploitation -- old genes, constrained by selection for entirely different functions, have been recruited by evolution to participate in new interactions and new functions."
The scientists used state-of-the-art statistical and molecular methods to unravel the evolution of an elegant example of molecular complexity -- the specific partnership of the hormone aldosterone, which regulates behavior and kidney function, along with the receptor protein that allows the body's cells to respond to the hormone. They resurrected the ancestral receptor gene -- which existed more than 450 million years ago, before the first animals with bones appeared on Earth -- and characterized its molecular functions. The experiments showed that the receptor had the capacity to be activated by aldosterone long before the hormone actually evolved.
Thornton's group then showed that the ancestral receptor also responded to a far more ancient hormone with a similar structure; this made it "preadapated" to be recruited into a new functional partnership when aldosterone later evolved. By recapitulating the evolution of the receptor's DNA sequence, the scientists showed that only two mutations were required to evolve the receptor's present-day functions in humans.
"The stepwise process we were able to reconstruct is entirely consistent with Darwinian evolution," Thornton said. "So-called irreducible complexity was just a reflection of a limited ability to see how evolution works. By reaching back to the ancestral forms of genes, we were able to show just how this crucial hormone-receptor pair evolved."
The study's other researchers include Jamie T. Bridgham, postdoctorate research associate in evolutionary biology and Sean M. Carroll, graduate research fellow in biology. The work was funded by National Science Foundation and National Ins utes of Health grants and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship recently awarded to Thornton.
Laughable at best....
'Irreducible complexity' challenges the arrival of the DNA itself moreso than the genes...
Yeah... I like how the article claims to have answered the irreducible complexity question when in fact it is only addressing just one facet of the problem.
It's this type of article that gives people in your camp a smug feeling of 'there ya go top that'.... but it really doesn't address the underlying problem that is posed by IDers... or the overwhelming statistical odds.
Last edited by hegamboa; 04-07-2006 at 08:57 AM.
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