Practical Biology (Not)

_{December 20, 2007

Biology, Humor, Just For Fun}

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Yet another ancestor to modern whales is hypothesized. It’s hard to believe people get paid to produce stuff like this.

Whales may be related to deer-like beast

By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer
Wed Dec 19, 6:55 PM ET

WASHINGTON – The gigantic ocean-dwelling whale may have evolved from a land animal the size of a small raccoon, new research suggests. What might be the missing evolutionary link between whales and land animals is an odd animal that looks like a long-tailed deer without antlers or an overgrown long-legged rat, fossils indicate.

The creature is called Indohyus, and recently unearthed fossils reveal some crucial evolutionary similarities between it and water-dwelling cetaceans, such as whales, dolphins and porpoises.

For years, the hippo has been the leading candidate for the closest land relative because of its similar DNA and whale-like features. So some scientists were skeptical of the new hypothesis by an Ohio anatomy professor whose work was being published Thursday in the journal Nature.

Still, some researchers have been troubled that hippos seem to have lived in the wrong part of the world and popped up too recently to be a whale ancestor.

Newer fossils point to the deer-like Indohyus. The animal is a “missing link” to the sister species to ancient whales, said Hans Thewissen, an anatomy professor at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine.

Comments

I'm not totally convinced, Dave, inasmuch as I see appeals to statistics without supporting details. But, having not yet read the books you suggest, I will assume they contain the exhaustive mathematical treatment. So, for the sake of advancing the discussion, let's assume that modern evolutionary theory has been destroyed (I know. I know. It already is. Let's assume the Weekend at Bernie's charade has played out). The question still remains regarding how front loading explains the fossil record. So, now that I cannot default to evolution, why should I be compelled to acceptfront loading? Advancing front-loading as the new default hasn't seemed to move the argument beyond where Dr. Davison left it.specs_{December 27, 2007
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Specs Gradualism is the only game in town for evolution by chance & necessity and even in then it's been amply demonstrated that even with millions of years and billions of opportunities to effect small changes that add up into novel cell types, tissue types, organs, and body plans the statistical likelyhood is unreasonably remote. To take away gradualism as Gould did in an attempt to reconcile the fossil record with the modern synthesis only exacerbates the statistical problems with evolution by chance & necessity. Please read Sanford's "Genetic Entropy" and Behe's "Edge of Evolution" for a more complete discussion of the problems with gradual and non-gradual evolution by chance alone. DaveScot_{December 27, 2007
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If you dispute the evidence in the fossil record as one of abrupt emergence of fully defined species followed by long periods of stasis and then extinction without any change in form then we have nothing further to discuss.
If I may interject, it does not seem to me that dcost is rejecting the evidence in the fossil record, so much as expressing skepticism of your interpretation of it. You seem to be tilting at gradualism and hoping no one notices that gradualism is no longer synonymous with the Theory of Evolution (tm), as Gould has so eloquently shown vis-a-vis punctuated equilibrium. So, the question on the table is not answered by knocking down gradualism dressed up to look like evolution, but rather (1)why front-loading is a better explanation and (2)the empirical support for it. In this expansion of your thoughts lies the opportunity to advance beyond Dr. Davison's prescribed evolutionary hypotheses.specs_{December 27, 2007
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Michael Tuite said (comment #23)--
At a saltation event, does a new species emerge de novo from an egg/womb/seed? If so, this must occur nearly simultaneously for many members of a parent species in order that the new species has potential mates. As you describe, an external environmental trigger could provide the necessary coordination.
I pointed out in Comment #26 that mutually beneficial co-evolution may require simultaneous changes to occur in two different kinds of co-dependent organisms and not just in one kind of organism --
In mutually beneficial co-evolution — i.e., the mutual evolution of two co-dependent kinds of organisms, e.g., bees and flowering plants — the “cues” (”triggers”) may have to act at the exact same time and in the exact same place in both kinds of organisms, because both of the organisms may have traits requiring the existence of corresponding co-dependent traits in the other organism.
DaveScot said (Comment #29) --
"What was the environmental trigger?" There are many possibilities. Oxygen concentration in the atmosphere is one. Radioactive isotope levels which change over deep time due to long half lives and constant decay is another. Length of a year, or of a day, or of a lunar month, all of which change over deep time are yet other possibilities.
These changes may be too gradual to trigger simultaneous changes in large numbers of the same kind of organism or different kinds of organisms (in co-evolution).Larry Fafarman_{December 27, 2007
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dcost If you dispute the evidence in the fossil record as one of abrupt emergence of fully defined species followed by long periods of stasis and then extinction without any change in form then we have nothing further to discuss. You reject the best evidence we have of the history of life because it doesn't agree with your preconceptions.DaveScot_{December 27, 2007
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peace If you're looking for hypothetical fossils showing gradual evolution from one species to another and you fail to find them there are two possibilities: the first is you didn't look hard enough and the second is that which you seek never existed. It's been 150 years since Darwin predicted that further exploration of the fossil record would reveal the supportive evidence for gradualism. It hasn't been found yet. How long are we doubters supposed to wait before we are allowed to reasonably say that the transitionals are missing because they never existed?DaveScot_{December 27, 2007
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Darwinism explains why some animals lose things in some special cases but not much else. dcost wrote: A scientific hypothesis must be predictive and falsifiable. gradualism is falsifiable and falsified which is why Gould likes Darwin so much. Darwin makes all your dreams come true. given enough imagination.ari-freedom_{December 27, 2007
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DaveScot, call me crazy, but you seem to be committing the "lack of evidence = evidence of lack" fallacy in regards to the fossil record. Each of my genealogical lines ends with a person for whom there is no extant evidence of parents, but I don't take that as evidence that my ancestors were parentless.Peace_{December 27, 2007
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DaveScot writes:
Do you have any empirical evidence of such a de novo new species appearing? Yes. It’s in the fossil record as already stated.
Fossilization is a rare event. Given the amount of time spanned by specimens in a particular lineage, the assumption of de novo appearance is unsupported. There is no empirical evidence for de novo appearances of new species since the widespread use of the scientific method (please point to any if you disagree) but there is significant evidence of tiny, incremental changes. The fossil record is therefore better explained by modern evolutionary theory than by the front loading hypothesis.
The answers to your other questions are either obvious or already given as well.
It should be no problem for you to provide those answers, then. This is the kind of interaction that takes place when doing science. A scientific hypothesis must be predictive and falsifiable. The questions that Michael Tuite and I have raised attempt to identify the predictions of the front loading hypothesis to determine if it is supported by any empirical evidence. If you want your hypothesis to be considered scientific, you need to provide those answers. By the way, your Gould quote continues:
We believe that Huxley was right in his warning. The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. In fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what we see in the fossil record. It is gradualism we should reject, not Darwinism.
Note that Gould's punctuated equilibrium still requires tens to hundreds of thousands of years to take place. He never suggested that new species appeared de novo.dcost_{December 27, 2007
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dcost Do you have any empirical evidence of such a de novo new species appearing? Yes. It's in the fossil record as already stated.
"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."

"Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin’s argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study."

Gould, Stephen Jay, "Evolution's Erratic Pace," Natural History, vol. 86 (May 1977), page 14
The answers to your other questions are either obvious or already given as well.DaveScot_{December 27, 2007
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DaveScot wrote:
At a saltation event, does a new species emerge de novo from an egg/womb/seed? I’m not sure it’s a necessity but there’s nothing in principle to make it impossible.
This would distinguish the front loading hypothesis from modern evolutionary theory. Do you have any empirical evidence of such a de novo new species appearing? Modern evolutionary theory predicts tiny changes over long periods of time.
If so, this must occur nearly simultaneously for many members of a parent species in order that the new species has potential mates. True. That’s one of the first questions that arises when considering saltation. It certainly ocurred to me right away.
Is there any evidence for such simultaneous de novo appearances in any species, ever?
As you describe, an external environmental trigger could provide the necessary coordination. Yes, that’s one possible way. Two other possibilities I know of are parthenogenesis and retroviruses. Parthenogenesis I hope is self explanatory. Retroviruses aren’t so straightforward. There are thousands of endogenous retroviruses resident on (for example) the human genome. Most if not all of them are deactivated. It’s quite conceivable that any one of them could become reactivated in a single organism which would then start manufacturing the retrovirus and transmitting it in its active form to others of its species. The function of the retrovirus could be as a vector to insert a genetic instruction that triggers a saltation in the modified (infected) genome. This could server to coordinate a large number of saltation events such that a viable population size of the new species is attained.
Endogenous retroviruses are explained by modern evolutionary theory and directly contradict the front loading hypothesis. Even assuming that one ERV were to be activated in one individual organism, what evidence is there that the very same ERV has ever been activated in an entire population simultaneously?
How large a morphological gap to you suppose a saltation can span? I think this has to be considered on a case by case basis. Obviously a cold blooded water breathing egg laying fish isn’t going to give birth to a kangaroo. There appear to be some physical constraints that restrict the steps. I think this is where the fossil record is useful as a guide.
Why not? What specific predictions does the front loading hypothesis make in this regard? On what specific basis does it make those predictions?
New tissues, new organs? As long as there are no physical contraints… sure.
What empirical evidence is there for this ever having occurred?
Is it likely that if we observe closely enough we might see a new species emerge from an existing one? That’s a very interesting question. Evolution very well may have terminated except for the generation of sub-species.
Why? Is there a limited amount of front loading allowed? If so, how much and why?
If that is the case there is no reason to presume that any future potentiality for further macro evolution was retained by any living species today. But there’s no good reason to presume that isn’t the case and that there are some, perhaps many, species living today with the unexpressed potential to evolve further. Indeed this even makes sense as a disaster recovery mechanism. This an excellent question that further exploration of the genomic diversity on the planet and understanding what all the sequences actually do may very well answer.
What evidence is there for such species to be currently extant?
Could we artificially trigger a saltation? That’s quite possible if there are saltations still in the wings waiting for a trigger.
What empirical evidence is there for such saltations either ever having existed or currently "in the wings"?
Any thoughts as to what types of environmental change might trigger saltations and how those changes are communicated to the genome? See my previous comment as types of triggers. How they are communicated - reverse transcription and methylation come to mind. A number of mobile elements. The DNA molecule isn’t tht passive read-only source of information that Crick orginally proposed. It’s quite dynamic and we’re still discovering new ways that information flows into it rather than from it.
Your previous comment listed possible changes but did not discuss detailed mechanisms. What empirical evidence is there for any of this ever having taken place? What evidence does the front loading hypothesis purport to explain? How does it explain that evidence better than modern evolutionary theory?
Finally, is the unfolding of the frontloaded genome dependent upon a specific earth history or do you imagine that it was designed with sufficient flexibility to adapt to the exigencies of four billion years of complex interactions between the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere? It appears to me that there was contingency response but moreso that life purposely changed the earth’s history rather than adapted to it. It’s called terraforming - engineering changes to whole planets to make them suitable to support human habitation and industry.
What empirical evidence is there for this "terraforming"? Does the front loading hypothesis predict that lifeforms will modify the environment in such a way as to be compatible with future genomic capabilities? Isn't this contradicted by the fact that so many species have gone extinct?dcost_{December 26, 2007
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DaveScot wrote:
Is there a single species right now that has this repressed DNA in it? None have been positivively demonstrated but we understand very little about very few genomes at the present time. We can’t explain what the function of a vast majority of DNA in the human genome is there for despite extraordinary efforts to figure it out.
What, then, is the objective, empirical evidence that suggests "front loading"?
What was the environmental trigger? There are many possibilities. Oxygen concentration in the atmosphere is one. Radioactive isotope levels which change over deep time due to long half lives and constant decay is another. Length of a year, or of a day, or of a lunar month, all of which change over deep time are yet other possibilities.
What predictions does the front loading hypothesis make that would allow one to define an experiment that could determine which of these environmental changes could result in a saltation event?
How did it cause these chromosomal rearrangments? More basically, what kind of chromosomal rearrangments - formation of new ones, fusion of existing ones, modification of histone deposition, acetylation, methylation, etc? These are all possibilities.
What is the specific mechanism or mechanisms that trigger these rearrangements?
Why would a transitional fossils form and then go extinct in this system? It wouldn’t be practical for a lizard to lay a mouse egg. There appear to be some restrictions imposed by physics on how much morphological change is possible in a single generation. I suggest instead of guessing about it we employ the fossil record as a guide to the steps that life traversed in changing from one form to another. But perhaps you’re asking is if life was designed why wasn’t it just designed in modern form from the beginning. The answer to that is because the earth was not suitable for habitation by many modern forms in its deep past.
Does the front loading hypothesis therefore restrict the nature of the intelligent designer such that it could not have constructed the earth to be compatible with human life from the beginning? Does it inherently accept the evidence for an old earth?
Are these supposed to be more primitive machines that were supplanted by better designed machines? No. That wouldn’t make sense in terms or front loading, because all plans are pre-loaded, so why not just make the bacteria (or whatever loaded organism it was) turn directly into a whale if all the plans were in the organisim in the first place? Because whales could not have survived on the young earth. It took billions of years to build up enough oxygen in the atmosphere for large air-breathing animals.
What empirical evidence is there that the genetic material for whales existed in the earliest forms of life?dcost_{December 26, 2007
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michael tuite I'll be brief where answers are very similar to those given in my previous comment. At a saltation event, does a new species emerge de novo from an egg/womb/seed? I'm not sure it's a necessity but there's nothing in principle to make it impossible. If so, this must occur nearly simultaneously for many members of a parent species in order that the new species has potential mates. True. That's one of the first questions that arises when considering saltation. It certainly ocurred to me right away. As you describe, an external environmental trigger could provide the necessary coordination. Yes, that's one possible way. Two other possibilities I know of are parthenogenesis and retroviruses. Parthenogenesis I hope is self explanatory. Retroviruses aren't so straightforward. There are thousands of endogenous retroviruses resident on (for example) the human genome. Most if not all of them are deactivated. It's quite conceivable that any one of them could become reactivated in a single organism which would then start manufacturing the retrovirus and transmitting it in its active form to others of its species. The function of the retrovirus could be as a vector to insert a genetic instruction that triggers a saltation in the modified (infected) genome. This could server to coordinate a large number of saltation events such that a viable population size of the new species is attained. How large a morphological gap to you suppose a saltation can span? I think this has to be considered on a case by case basis. Obviously a cold blooded water breathing egg laying fish isn't going to give birth to a kangaroo. There appear to be some physical constraints that restrict the steps. I think this is where the fossil record is useful as a guide. New tissues, new organs? As long as there are no physical contraints... sure. Is it likely that if we observe closely enough we might see a new species emerge from an existing one? That's a very interesting question. Evolution very well may have terminated except for the generation of sub-species. If that is the case there is no reason to presume that any future potentiality for further macro evolution was retained by any living species today. But there's no good reason to presume that isn't the case and that there are some, perhaps many, species living today with the unexpressed potential to evolve further. Indeed this even makes sense as a disaster recovery mechanism. This an excellent question that further exploration of the genomic diversity on the planet and understanding what all the sequences actually do may very well answer. Could we artificially trigger a saltation? That's quite possible if there are saltations still in the wings waiting for a trigger. Any thoughts as to what types of environmental change might trigger saltations and how those changes are communicated to the genome? See my previous comment as types of triggers. How they are communicated - reverse transcription and methylation come to mind. A number of mobile elements. The DNA molecule isn't tht passive read-only source of information that Crick orginally proposed. It's quite dynamic and we're still discovering new ways that information flows into it rather than from it. Finally, is the unfolding of the frontloaded genome dependent upon a specific earth history or do you imagine that it was designed with sufficient flexibility to adapt to the exigencies of four billion years of complex interactions between the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere? It appears to me that there was contingency response but moreso that life purposely changed the earth's history rather than adapted to it. It's called terraforming - engineering changes to whole planets to make them suitable to support human habitation and industry. DaveScot_{December 26, 2007
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leo Do you have any evidence that this happened, or is this one of those “just so” stories that are so often mocked by most on this site? Yes. The evidence is the fossil record which is one of abrupt emergence of fully differentiated species followed by long period of stasis where the species doesn't change followed by abrupt extinction. Is there a single species right now that has this repressed DNA in it? None have been positivively demonstrated but we understand very little about very few genomes at the present time. We can't explain what the function of a vast majority of DNA in the human genome is there for despite extraordinary efforts to figure it out. What was the environmental trigger? There are many possibilities. Oxygen concentration in the atmosphere is one. Radioactive isotope levels which change over deep time due to long half lives and constant decay is another. Length of a year, or of a day, or of a lunar month, all of which change over deep time are yet other possibilities. How did it cause these chromosomal rearrangments? More basically, what kind of chromosomal rearrangments - formation of new ones, fusion of existing ones, modification of histone deposition, acetylation, methylation, etc? These are all possibilities. Why would a transitional fossils form and then go extinct in this system? It wouldn't be practical for a lizard to lay a mouse egg. There appear to be some restrictions imposed by physics on how much morphological change is possible in a single generation. I suggest instead of guessing about it we employ the fossil record as a guide to the steps that life traversed in changing from one form to another. But perhaps you're asking is if life was designed why wasn't it just designed in modern form from the beginning. The answer to that is because the earth was not suitable for habitation by many modern forms in its deep past. Are these supposed to be more primitive machines that were supplanted by better designed machines? No. That wouldn’t make sense in terms or front loading, because all plans are pre-loaded, so why not just make the bacteria (or whatever loaded organism it was) turn directly into a whale if all the plans were in the organisim in the first place? Because whales could not have survived on the young earth. It took billions of years to build up enough oxygen in the atmosphere for large air-breathing animals.DaveScot_{December 26, 2007
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Michael Tuite asked:
At a saltation event, does a new species emerge de novo from an egg/womb/seed? If so, this must occur nearly simultaneously for many members of a parent species in order that the new species has potential mates. As you describe, an external environmental trigger could provide the necessary coordination. How large a morphological gap to you suppose a saltation can span? New tissues, new organs? Is it likely that if we observe closely enough we might see a new species emerge from an existing one? Could we artificially trigger a saltation? Any thoughts as to what types of environmental change might trigger saltations and how those changes are communicated to the genome? Finally, is the unfolding of the frontloaded genome dependent upon a specific earth history or do you imagine that it was designed with sufficient flexibility to adapt to the exigencies of four billion years of complex interactions between the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere?
Excellent, excellent questions, Michael. Mr. Scot, I would also be very interested in your response. Answers to these, and any following questions, would go a long way to demonstrating that ID explains the available empirical evidence and makes falsifiable predictions.dcost_{December 25, 2007
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I don't claim to be an expert on this, but from what I gather, it's likely that Indohyus is not an ancestor of whales per se, but rather a sister group that had a common ancestor with the direct ancestors of whales. Nonetheless, with regards to the size issue...it would be a problem if one were to try and have whales evolving from rodent-sized creatures in the space of a few thousand years. Consider the variation in size present in modern cetaceans - contrast the Commerson's Dolphin and the Blue Whale. I don't know if there's a consensus amongst design proponents, but most do not deny common ancestry. I think skepticism is a good thing, and I agree that there may be some exaggeration of this discovery in the popular press. Nonetheless, I do not see this as a case of Darwinian brainwashing, but rather just another case of hyperbole and sensationalism of scientific findings. If we are to truly understand the implications of this discovery, it would perhaps be best to take a look at Thiewassen's paper rather than a media article. Of course, the downside is that some of us do not have an adequate background in paleontology, comparative anatomy, etc. Anyway, I'm interested to know how design proponents would interpret the Indohyus fossils. Would you agree that they represent close relatives of the ancestors of modern cetaceans, and only differ from the "Darwinian" explanation by claiming that aliens/God/"The Designer" must have been responsible in guiding their transformation into newer creatures? If ID were the reigning paradigm, what would the headlines say?xcdesignproponentsists_{December 24, 2007
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DaveScot said (Comment #16) --
This is the front-loaded ID hypothesis. Phylogenesis mirrors ontogenesis in that both are a series of derepressions of existing genomic information. Both occur according to a set plan where chance plays little if any role and the environment supplies cues (triggers) for proceeding (or not) from one phase of the plan to the next.
In mutually beneficial co-evolution -- i.e., the mutual evolution of two co-dependent kinds of organisms, e.g., bees and flowering plants -- the "cues" ("triggers") may have to act at the exact same time and in the exact same place in both kinds of organisms, because both of the organisms may have traits requiring the existence of corresponding co-dependent traits in the other organism.Larry Fafarman_{December 21, 2007
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But isn’t the point of the paper that researchers actually found transitional elements in land-living animals.
Really, the only major fact is this line of thinking started with the bearded buddha. If Darwin had not come up with his bear story I doubt today's scientists would be attempting to cobble together such a disjointed explanation. The starting premises became cemented, even though these beginnings had no positive evidence. The oddest part about the Indohyus story is that it seems this new creature is even further removed from whale ancestry than the other major candidate, hippopotamids. It was very small, the size of a racoon. Its bones show it was not an adept swimmer and most likely did not have a major aquatic lifestyle (unlike hippopotamids). It fed on land, eating plants (whales have a very different diet). I'm not automatically denying the the typical land-creature-to-aquatic-creature story for the whale--I consider it an open question, not irrefutable dogma like those who came up with this story--but your statement presumes what is yet to be proven. Convergent evolution as an explanation is lobbed around all the time for other features. Why couldn't this be the case here? Also, convergent evolution would be much more likely to occur with front-loading. So, even assuming this story is true, I'd say that would just strengthen ID as the best explanation.Patrick_{December 21, 2007
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It should also be noted that in a front-loaded scenario the whales need not acquire their mammalian features through land-based ancestry; they could have intelligently evolved entirely in the water and scientists are looking for common ancestry in the wrong place.
But isn't the point of the paper that researchers actually found transitional elements in land-living animals. So it seems they are looking in the right place. Who knows, maybe they found one of those animals that just 'turned on' their internal conversion program given to them by front-loading. I still don't really understand the scorn heaped on this paper. It seems like nobody has any specific points to criticize, other than the fact that DaveScot thinks that this line of research has no practical use.hrun0815_{December 21, 2007
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Hello Dave, Thanks for the brief explication of a very interesting hypothesis. At a saltation event, does a new species emerge de novo from an egg/womb/seed? If so, this must occur nearly simultaneously for many members of a parent species in order that the new species has potential mates. As you describe, an external environmental trigger could provide the necessary coordination. How large a morphological gap to you suppose a saltation can span? New tissues, new organs? Is it likely that if we observe closely enough we might see a new species emerge from an existing one? Could we artificially trigger a saltation? Any thoughts as to what types of environmental change might trigger saltations and how those changes are communicated to the genome? Finally, is the unfolding of the frontloaded genome dependent upon a specific earth history or do you imagine that it was designed with sufficient flexibility to adapt to the exigencies of four billion years of complex interactions between the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere? Thanks, MichaelMichael Tuite_{December 21, 2007
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It should also be noted that in a front-loaded scenario the whales need not acquire their mammalian features through land-based ancestry; they could have intelligently evolved entirely in the water and scientists are looking for common ancestry in the wrong place.Patrick_{December 21, 2007
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A cross between a pig and a dog? LOL! So the whale is a descendent of the schweinhundt.tribune7_{December 21, 2007
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The laughable part is that the whale’s ancient ancestor is still in dispute. Prehistoric evolution is nothing but guesswork and the guesses change as often as women’s fashion. You write 'still in dispute'. How would we determine the actual ancestor and figure out how the front-loaded genomic information was unfolded other then by studying the transition that occurred? So I would expect that in that respect the paper would be very interesting to anybody who supports front-loading.
What’s wrong with the paper is that it’s useless. What practical difference does it make what creatures whales descended from?
Oh, you just don't care about the transition because it has no practical application/value? That seems to be very common for basic research.hrun0815_{December 21, 2007
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Sure. The genetic code of modern whales existed in a repressed form in the cell line leading to whales. An environmental trigger in the distant past caused a chromosome reorganization to occur which in turn led to a saltation. This is in complete accord with the indisputable testimony of the fossil record which of course is a record of abrupt emergence of radically new phenotypes followed by long periods of stability in the new phenotype and in the vast majority of cases extinction of the new phenotype after an average of 10 million years with all but a small fraction of these leaving no successor species.
Do you have any evidence that this happened, or is this one of those "just so" stories that are so often mocked by most on this site? Is there a single species right now that has this repressed DNA in it? Which one? How have you shown it? What was the environmental trigger? How did it cause these chromosomal rearrangments? More basically, what kind of chromosomal rearrangments - formation of new ones, fusion of existing ones, modification of histone deposition, acetylation, methylation, etc? Why would a transitional fossils form and then go extinct in this system? Are these supposed to be more primitive machines that were supplanted by better designed machines? That wouldn't make sense in terms or front loading, because all plans are pre-loaded, so why not just make the bacteria (or whatever loaded organism it was) turn directly into a whale if all the plans were in the organisim in the first place?leo_{December 21, 2007
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hrun The laughable part is that the whale's ancient ancestor is still in dispute. Prehistoric evolution is nothing but guesswork and the guesses change as often as women's fashion. What's wrong with the paper is that it's useless. What practical difference does it make what creatures whales descended from?DaveScot_{December 21, 2007
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Sure. The genetic code of modern whales existed in a repressed form in the cell line leading to whales. An environmental trigger in the distant past caused a chromosome reorganization to occur which in turn led to a saltation. This is in complete accord with the indisputable testimony of the fossil record which of course is a record of abrupt emergence of radically new phenotypes followed by long periods of stability in the new phenotype and in the vast majority of cases extinction of the new phenotype after an average of 10 million years with all but a small fraction of these leaving no successor species.
If this is actually what happened, then what is so laughable about this publication? It seems that even with a front-loading hypothesis there needs to be some sort of a transitional period... unless you expect that at some point a land-living animal gave birth to something that turned into a giant whale. So, if you expect transitional species, what's wrong with this research paper?hrun0815_{December 21, 2007
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Michael Tuite Can someone here offer an ID-based hypothesis for the origin of cetaceans with at least as much explanatory power as the comparative anatomical approach described in the article? Sure. The genetic code of modern whales existed in a repressed form in the cell line leading to whales. An environmental trigger in the distant past caused a chromosome reorganization to occur which in turn led to a saltation. This is in complete accord with the indisputable testimony of the fossil record which of course is a record of abrupt emergence of radically new phenotypes followed by long periods of stability in the new phenotype and in the vast majority of cases extinction of the new phenotype after an average of 10 million years with all but a small fraction of these leaving no successor species. Perhaps when we understand more about genomes we'll find these hidden potentials in extant genomes, learn how they are stored and conserved for the future, how they are eventually expressed in saltation events, and what external or internal triggers cause the saltations. This is the front-loaded ID hypothesis. Phylogenesis mirrors ontogenesis in that both are a series of derepressions of existing genomic information. Both occur according to a set plan where chance plays little if any role and the environment supplies cues (triggers) for proceeding (or not) from one phase of the plan to the next. Both are self-terminating when the preprogrammed path of diversification has completed. Nothing in the fossil record makes sense except in the light of front-loading.DaveScot_{December 21, 2007
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Dr. Dembski: "...don’t really really big animals (like whales that can weigh 200 tons) need all sorts of different homeostatic mechanisms to control body heat, etc. compared with much smaller deer/rat-like creatures?..." Darwin said* it's no problem for bears to become like whales, so, with just a little more imagination, it's also no problem for deer or even rats to do it. * Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (1st Edition):
In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.
j_{December 20, 2007
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Judge Jones had a good expression for applying to the idea that this "deer-like" creature is a "missing link" between land mammals and whales -- "breathtaking inanity."Larry Fafarman_{December 20, 2007
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Jehu: now that's a rare find! HA HAEndoplasmicMessenger_{December 20, 2007
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