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Fossil and Evolution

mijo, in my book, you NEVER need to apologize for using a Simpson's reference.

But yeah, the morphing business isn't so hot. Don't forget, every species dies the species it was born. Natural selection only selects who gets to reproduce and thereby pass on successful traits. Also, these things tend to make the history of life read like a straight line "up" to humans. (Check out Stephen Jay Gould's Full House.)

mijopaalmc said:
Anyway, I would like your opinions on how accurate you think the representation I picked was, how accurate the other representations you have seen are, and how dire a situation it is that popular representations don't match up with academic representations, if they don't. I guess that the representations that I have seen are how I have formed my intuitive understanding of evolution as a filmstrip. This has been the main thrust of my posts throughout the thread and if evolution as laid down in the fossil record cannot be understood as a filmstrip, I should probably stop trying to find analogies for it and accept it as something that is non-analogous and counterintuitive like most of the quantum behavior that I learned about when I took physical chemistry.
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I wouldn't say it's counterintuitive. The theory of evolution is in fact elegant. A few simple propositions explain an amazing array of complexity. I don't see what's the problem with teaching it that way.

I just don't get why the fossil evidence bothers you.

Back to the filmstrip--recognize that each frame is a next generation (of one lineage). Cut the film into individual frames. Randomly destroy most of them entirely, damage most of the rest, then scatter them hither and yon. Later, very smart people find the frames and put them into a rough sequence so we get some idea about the whole story.
 
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articulett said:
Yes...exactly...Look at this dishonesty from creationists printed today!

http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/24270.html
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OH! MY! [rule8]ING! GOD!

That contained more PRATTS per column inch than I thought possible. I don't have time to dissect it tonight, but if mijo doesn't mind, I'll do so here with references showing how the things Babu say don't occur/exist/etc. actually do tomorrow or Sunday.
 
mijopaalmc said:
I know its rarely if ever wise to assume that popular representations of a scientific theory are what the scientists mean when they talk about the theory in question, but I seem to recall evolution being represented in similar videographic form at some well-known science museum, possibly the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, or even the Museum of Natural History in New York City.
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You're right; you can see gross changes, but you have to understand you're looking at changes that took hundreds of thousands or millions of years to happen, over tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals. It's not obvious from that sort of a representation that that's what's happening.

mijopaalmc said:
I think the thread would have taken a much different track if I had opened with the question being about popular representations resembling academic representations and mentioned that my problem in understanding evolution was more in light of how I thought it was being represented popularly. However, not remembering the representation that I had gained through the preparation I received for my degree, I assumed that the above clip accurately represented the academic consensus in reference to the "morphing" organisms. I suppose the emphasis of the genotypic changes in evolution that was presented in my sophomore genetics class should have been a tip-off that morphological changes, while telling, do not tell the whole story of evolution. In other words, the "invisible" changes (i.e., those that cannot be seen by the naked eye) are more important than the visible changes (i.e., those that can be seen by the naked eye).
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Far more; they are decisive, in fact. You won't be far wrong if you think of an animal or person as a very effective wrapper for the delivery of genetic material via sperm to eggs, and the nurturing of infants into adults who can then perform the same functions. From the point of view of evolution, that's what's really going on. It trivializes our experience of life; that makes it counter-intuitive. But the fact is, the more effective a particular creature is at doing precisely that, the more of them there will be later.

The reason people have trouble with it is because it makes them feel small and unimportant, and they don't like that. They prefer the stories about jebus because they make them feel big and important.

My take on religion is that it's a public mental health problem. I'm looking around my country, I'm seeing people lead us into wars and ignore huge public disasters and pretend they never happened and pervert the law and the forms and usages of our government in ways that won't be fixed for decades, over this fantasy about a dude with a beard in the sky who supposedly tells everyone what to do, and I'm thinking that it's getting to be about time we started seeing to it these individuals get the mental health care they deserve from our society. I mean, seriously, this is a mental health problem of incredible proportions.

mijopaalmc said:
Anyway, I would like your opinions on how accurate you think the representation I picked was, how accurate the other representations you have seen are, and how dire a situation it is that popular representations don't match up with academic representations, if they don't.
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I don't think it's any problem at all, I didn't see a problem with how you described it, and frankly I'm not sure what all the hoopla was about. I think some people overreacted and are having trouble with that; and I think you're having some trouble giving up the fantasy. It's OK; given the society we live in, where the majority of people believe in a dude with a beard in the sky who tells everyone what to do, and a dude underground with a pitchfork who tortures dead people, I don't blame you, and you seem to me to be doing a pretty good job of getting over it. You're going the right way. Keep going that way.

mijopaalmc said:
I guess that the representations that I have seen are how I have formed my intuitive understanding of evolution as a filmstrip. This has been the main thrust of my posts throughout the thread and if evolution as laid down in the fossil record cannot be understood as a filmstrip, I should probably stop trying to find analogies for it and accept it as something that is non-analogous and counterintuitive like most of the quantum behavior that I learned about when I took physical chemistry.
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Ever hear the one about the five blind dudes who encounter an elephant and are trying to describe it to each other? The filmstrip is, oh, I dunno, maybe the trunk?
 
mijopaalmc said:
To answer you directly, articulett: no, I don't believe that any aspect of life was intelligently designed.

As much as I would really like to continue to explain what I meant in my OP, I feel that I would be digging myself in deeper. I guess the problem is that there is no proper analogy to describe what I was trying to describe and the very act of analogizing was confusing me.

I guess the question would be: for those of you who have taught evolution, how did you explain to your students in a comprehensible way that the seemingly large gaps between transitional forms were not in fact large at all at least in relation to the time periods over which evolutionary changes were observed to occur? Or is there something I am missing in the very definition of an evolutionary time period?
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Hiya Mijo,

Uh the deal is that you look like a creationist.

Now that doesn't mean you are one, but it explians that you are mistaken for one.

People are rude on this forum, and people are polite on this forum.

I apologise again for my side remark to you.

I really don't care what your motives are, you have asked questions.

the deal is this, we know what we think is correct and will throw out supporting statements. being critical thinkers we will look at other people statements and try to figure out why they think they are meaningful and then decide if we agree criticaly or not.

So often the debate gets put into a few brief statements or links because there is an assumption that people will think about the statemenst and judge them criticaly as they will the links.

Now there are many other ways that people think, that is the way the board is however.

You can't apparently help the way your posts look, but what i would suggest is to try to make your statements more brief and to the point.

People here will think that you look like a creationist because you couch your statements in terms that creationists use. Not on purpose I assume.

And really it should not matter at all.

But to your question:

The gaps in the geologic record are gaps in preservation they are not nessecarily gaps in the process of natural slelection.

Why should the gaps matter?

In high energy physics there are ratios of thousand of runs for a relevant interaction. That is a lot of a gap as well.
Is observing evolution through the fossil record like observing continental drift through the geologic record? We can match up different strata on the different continents to see where they were when each stratum was laid down and we can observe the actual drift happening now using GPS and other methods. Therefore, we can extrapolate where the continent have been in the past. Even though, we can see continents drifting by standing at the Straight of Gibraltar and seeing Morocco get closer to Spain, we can predict that on day the two will meet and, conversely, at some point in the past, the two were farther apart.
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Pretty much, but analogies are fraught with error.

It is also a matter like this:

To have preservation requires a number of elements.
-lack of disintergration of the living organism
-preservation of the organism
-not being destroyed by geology

So often what we have for things like the land based mega fauna is that a bunch of critters died, they were the deposited in an envoroment lacking oxygen, they had hard parts, they got covered in sediment and they weren't destroyed later.

each step of the way is a crap shoot, the chances of preservation are low.
I realize that we can't at least in any meaningful way predict what the next evolutionary change will be, so at least that part of the analogy is incorrect, but the part about the past position of the continents is what I'm trying to emphasize. Since I at least think I understand continental drift, an affirmation of this analogy will help me understand the relationship between the fossil record and evolution.
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Please understand, there are many more fossils of sea shells than there are of land based megafauna, the foramifera posted by Dr. A. are just a small sample. because of the nature of preservation there are huge amounts of data for sea dwelling creatures that have hard shells.

people like to ignore that. they just aren't as cool as a T. Rex.
 
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Dancing David said:
Please understand, there are many more fossils of sea shells than there are of land based megafauna, the foramifera posted by Dr. A. are just a small sample. because of the nature of preservation there are huge amounts of data for sea dwelling creatures that have hard shells.

people like to ignore that. they just aren't as cool as a T. Rex.
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And they tell us much more about conditions at the time than T. Rex does, too, and are thus more valuable.
 
Evolution is a continual line--from humans back to protists--but there are tons of branches on that line--and we have to figure out where the fossils we are lucky enough to find go.We are only piecing together the branches still--we used to think Neanderthals were primitive humans...we didn't know there were other bipeds that were evolutionary cousins--branches...when we find primate fossils we have to guess where they go using similarities to what we have and radiometric dating--UNLESS we can get DNA--

So, the Homer cartoon is a good summary of the basics of evolution from a human perspective--but it leaves a lot of branches off the tree and probably includes branches that we're in the direct lineage.

Mammals all have a common ancestor--but it wasn't a conglomeration of mammals as we know them--it was a possum-like thing--and behind that possum-creature all mammals share the exacts same line back in time until we meet up with the common ancestor (concestor) we share with either birds or reptiles (I forget which)...and so on--

Here are some trees--and remember--you are a point on a family tree which is a twig on the human tree which is on a bigger twig called the primate tree which meets up with a small branch called the mammal branch...

And ever life form has a line which converges at some point with every other life form somewhere on the tree.

http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/dept/d10/asb/anthro2003/origins/selection/bush
http://www.zo.utexas.edu/faculty/antisense/DownloadfilesToL.html
http://www.nsf.gov/bio/pubs/reports/atol.pdf
http://biochem218.stanford.edu/12Phylogenies.html
http://www.ontarioprofessionals.com/weird3.htm
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/IIAFamilytree.shtml
http://www.mbscientific.com/PlacentalTree.gif
http://www.nature.com/omics/organisms/index.html
http://www.souldish.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/tolwithleaves.jpg

It's complicated--every creature has a straight line back in time--and other creatures join in...when we find a fossil, we don't always know where it goes exactly...we are still piecing it all together, but we know that it fits somewhere on the tree of life.
 
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articulett said:
Mammals all have a common ancestor--but it wasn't a conglomeration of mammals as we know them--it was a possum-like thing--and behind that possum-creature all mammals share the exacts same line back in time until we meet up with the common ancestor (concestor) we share with either birds or reptiles (I forget which)...and so on--
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Point of pedantry: Marsupials are well into the mammal lineage. What would be the first mammal was more of a hairy reptile-like being. It is from that concestor that the three order - Monotremes, Marsupials and Placentals -arose.
 
UnrepentantSinner said:
Point of pedantry: Marsupials are well into the mammal lineage. What would be the first mammal was more of a hairy reptile-like being. It is from that concestor that the three order - Monotremes, Marsupials and Placentals -arose.
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You are right...and that makes sense...montremes--the few and the weird--they must be the most like the first proto-mammals--do you know more...or a good place where I can find out more? Also, I had been reading that many people have concluded that dinosaurs were likely to be warm blooded...or at least some of them--there appears to be some evidence for that--have you heard anything on this? I'm sure we'll be finding out a lot as we refine ways of getting nucleic acid info from old fossils. The tree of life is filling in very rapidly--

It's exciting.
 
VonNeumann, looking at the stars with one device (our eyes, for instance) we get one set of information. Looking at the stars with a "frame shift" (in this case, a shift in frequency) we get an entirely new set of data. We do not assume that the stars are "made" by an intelligent being simply because information from them exists in different forms which tell us novel things. We assume that it is we who are limited in processing specific information.
In your example of the novel Contact, the information would not be assumed to be of intelligent origen due to its complexity, but due to the fact that it was so easily seen to be transposable to our sphere of intelligence. Newton did not discover something which, ever after, high-schoolers looked at bemusedly as being bleeding obvious. Rather, he squeezed his brain into the complexity of the cosmos, and had to invent an entirely new (apolgies to Liebniz) math to make it remotely comprehensible.
What I am getting at here is your insistance that any complexity which you feel is not presently explained by mechanistic means is therefore either only explicable by magical ones, or is not within the realm of natural philosophy (science, says my thesaurus). This, I feel, is a fundamental mistake, although not one to which great scientists are immune (Rutherford and atomic "moonshine").
If you truly believe that science will never bridge the gap between what we have learned and what we may learn in the future, please have the honesty to say so, instead of indulging yourself in vauge and less than honest "questionings" on the state of human knowledge, and how it may be advanced.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings"
 
Point of pedantry: Marsupials are well into the mammal lineage. What would be the first mammal was more of a hairy reptile-like being. It is from that concestor that the three order - Monotremes, Marsupials and Placentals -arose.
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And whats a Platypus. It has a beak like a bird, webbed feet like a duck, lays eggs and is covered in fur. I am sure I read somewhere that reptiles evolved into birds
 
MG1962 said:
And whats a Platypus. It has a beak like a bird, webbed feet like a duck, lays eggs and is covered in fur. I am sure I read somewhere that reptiles evolved into birds
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The Platypus and Echidnas pretty much have their own branch.

Mammalia
Monotremata

The Tree of Life Website is a work in progress, however, so they don't claim to have it all down pat yet.
 
MG1962 said:
And whats a Platypus. It has a beak like a bird, webbed feet like a duck, lays eggs and is covered in fur. I am sure I read somewhere that reptiles evolved into birds
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Actually it doesn't have a beak, it has a bill, and it in fact is duck like in appearance only. The Platypus bill is soft and leathery and has teeth, something lacking in a birds bill/beak. They do have webbed feet, but so don't otters, seals and Purtuguese water dogs. Again, they're duck like in appearance only. They do possess a cloaca and lay eggs (reptile characteristics) but they have mammary glands and are covered by fur (mammal characteristics). And, as skeptigirl pointed out, within Order Monotremata, they are joined by the Echidna.

They are not "the transitional species/order" between reptiles and mammals, that species probably existed 250,000,000 years ago. But they do represent a perfect mix of characteristics between two taxa (reptiles and mammals) that is similar to what we'd expect in transitional species and is exactly what evolutionary theory would predict. In a bizarroworld twist, Creationists actually claim that evolution is baffled by the Platypus, whereas it's existance is actually a powerful confirmation of evolution.

Oh, and yeah, birds did evolve from reptiles. A subgrouping called dinosaurs.
 
Ichneumonwasp said:
An Echidna once bit my sister.

No, really.............
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They're very cute...but I didn't know they bite. I know the male duckbill platypus has some kind of nasty stinger. Echidna's look sort of like porcupines, right? Can they throw their quills?
 
Well, according to Ralph, the Wonder Llama, they do............

The Echidna was in line. After the moose.
 
Ichneumonwasp said:
An Echidna once bit my sister.
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With that tiny little mouth? Did it do any damage or was it more of a shocking incident?

articulett said:
They're very cute...but I didn't know they bite. I know the male duckbill platypus has some kind of nasty stinger. Echidna's look sort of like porcupines, right? Can they throw their quills?
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Male Platypus's have venomous spurs in their hind feet and it turns out they're not the only mammals that have venom (citations on request, but you can Google yourself you know ;)). Echidna's look more like big hedgehogs and an anteater-like snout. Their quills are less like a porcupine and more like the business end of a writing quill.
 
Oh, yes, they are very dangerous.

So, if you see them where people are swimming, you shout, "Look out, there are Echidnas!"*



*Sorry, don't think I can still reproduce that in Spanish
 
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