Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Another rabbit jumps the hat: 419 mya JAWED fish

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Remember we were discussing how current Darwinian evolution theory would not be challenged even if a modern rabbit were found back in the 550 mya Cambrian era (and Darwin followers in the combox appeared to agree).

Hippety hop. A 419 mya jawed vertebrate.

The ancestors of modern jawed vertebrates are commonly portrayed as fishes with a shark-like appearance. But a stunning fossil discovery from China puts a new face on the original jawed vertebrate. [US$18 paywall]

National Geographic News reports*,

“Entelognathus primordialis is one of the earliest, and certainly the most primitive, fossil fish that has the same jawbones as modern bony fishes and land vertebrates including ourselves,” said study co-author Min Zhu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

But in the new fossil, found in China, has a distinctive three-bone system still used by chewing vertebrates today: a lower jawbone called the dentary and two upper jaw bones called the premaxilla (holding the front teeth) and the maxilla (holding the canine and cheek teeth).

“The exciting thing about this fossil is that when you look at the top of it, it looks like a placoderm, but when you look at the side of the fish and the structure of the jaw, it doesn’t look like any placoderm that we know of,” Friedman said.

“This tends to suggest the exciting possibility that these jawbones evolved way deep down in the lineage, so these features we used to hold as being unique to bony fishes may not be so unique.”

In other words, less evolution and more stasis.

The fish seems to lave lived at the end of the Silurian period, 443 mya to 417 mya.

*Reports it, that is, under the curious title,

”Fish Fossil Has Oldest Known Face, May Influence Evolution“

Influence evolution? Baby, if they found it back then, it IS evolution. Unless, of course, you mean Evolution, the Religion. In other words, the fish may shake up your dogmatics a bit, but whose problem is that, besides yours, at this point?

Fish guy, yer gettin’ ta be a rabbit with me.

Comments
@ Mung 242: Check out this raving lunatic at Mike's blog > http://blogs.christianpost.com/science-and-faith/distinguished-uc-berkeley-paleontologist-reviews-meyers-book-darwins-doubt-a-book-too-important-to-ignore-18187/equate65
October 3, 2013
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Meyer:
His is the first critical review ("When Prior Belief Trumps Scholarship," September 20, 2013) to grapple with the book's main arguments about the inability of standard evolutionary mechanisms to explain the origin of morphological novelty in the Cambrian period.
Mung
October 2, 2013
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Elizabeth Liddle:
I also recommend this paper by Charles F Marshall (cited by Meyer):
Marshall seems to have read the book, unlike so many of the "skeptics" over at your blog. When Theory Trumps Observation: Responding to Charles Marshall's Review of Darwin's DoubtMung
October 2, 2013
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wd400:
It is absolutely an unequivocally the case that phyla and other taxa are defined as lineages, and must include all members of that lineages.
And I think that's false. Your tactics are similar to those that Elizabeth employs. Just toss stuff out without any supporting quotes or references. But that only gets you so far, as Elizabeth has discovered. But you're not in her class, heck, you're not even in the same phylum! wd400:
It is absolutely an unequivocally the case that phyla and other taxa are defined as lineages, and must include all members of that lineages.
Presumably all the way back to the universal common ancestor. Else a lineage must exclude the most recent common ancestor if it's shared by any sister taxa. I'm not stupid. So where do you draw the circles, if you disagree with Meyer?
I give up.
Hopefully it's a temporary condition and one not indicative of a desire to cease to exist. Now, if you could just offer your opinion of Elizabeth's emendations to Meyer's drawing. Talk about a howler.Mung
October 2, 2013
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Right, this has been fund and all, but I have to do some proper work. KF, I still have no idea what your challenge is. If you want to express it in simple English with no two dollar words and acronyms go for it. Otherwise I don't know why I'd bother. Mung, I give up. I really have tried to explain this as clearly as I can. It is absolutely an unequivocally the case that phyla and other taxa are defined as lineages, and must include all members of that lineages. (That's why, for instance "Fish" is not a taxonomic group, since some fish are more closely related to tetrapods that ray-finned fish). This is relevant to considering the origin of groups, as they will necessarily be hard to trace at the very base of the tree (indeed, that is almost universly the case when try to find the origin of a group like birds, humans or animals in general).wd400
October 2, 2013
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wd400:
Not all the ancestor. Everything that descends from the most recent common ancestor of the living members. That’s what Meyer get’s wrong, and it applies to all taxa, not just phyla.
No, that's what Elizabeth got wrong. Did you look at her modifications to Meyer's diagram? for her, it's phyla all the way down! This is why I asked both of you to state where you would have drawn the circles. Because now we can see what a red herring the whole discussion was.Mung
October 2, 2013
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Are humans a species?wd400
October 2, 2013
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WD400: you full well know that observational warrant is the touchstone and test of scientific reasoning. In this case I think if you cannot show actual populations and observationally ground the blind watchmaker processes held to have originated a phylum from an ancestral species, then the tree pattern is a fantasy, and the classification scheme redefined in terms of imaginary species -- as opposed to actually observed ones -- becomes an exercise in ideological question begging. So, if you demand that classifications must go back to root node ancestral species, you need to show observational warrant. absent such warrant, EL's demand that Meyer's diagrams loop around imagined ancestral species in a situation where such are hypothetical, is an exercise in question begging. KFkairosfocus
October 2, 2013
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Mung, I haven't read Meyer's latest book. I read some of one he wrote on a topic I know a lot more about (Signature in teh Cell) and it was so misinformed I wouldn't bother with another. I've only tried to correct people's misapprehensions in this thread. The term "diversity" means... a lot of things to a lot of people. The degree to which some set of thngs contains differences is the closest you'll get. Disparity is a kind of diversity, what "neontologists" like me would call beta-diversity, or the presence of multiple higher-level taxa or crudely morphologically distinct organisms in the same stratum.wd400
October 2, 2013
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Q: But every new species is potentially a new phyla, correct? wd400:
More or less. Every new lineage has it’s own evolutionary future, and may in time become so distinct they are given a new rank.
But would that new rank be "phylum" right off the bat? What's the next rank "above" species and why? wd400:
Every new lineage has it’s own evolutionary future, and may in time become so distinct they are given a new rank.
How "distinct" must they be before they are classified as separate phyla? Different body plans? Here's Elizabeth:
“Higher” taxa must precede “lower” according to the theory.
Another claim I consider to be factually false. Darwinism is a bottom up theory. What say you? Elizabeth Liddle:
You can’t get subdivisions of a set before you have the set.
You can't get classes before you have phyla. And you can't get orders before you have classes. And you can't get families before you have orders. And you can't get genera before you have families. And you can't get species before you have genera, and families, and orders, and classes, and phyla. And the reductio ad absurdam serves it's purpose. Maybe she'll listen to you, but she seems pretty invested in her position.Mung
October 2, 2013
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Do you always need to erect and knock over a strawman, then use it to try to denigrate the “enemy” as irrational and/or dishonest? If you wish to be understood then please write clearly. Can you please explain your "challenge" in simple English.wd400
October 2, 2013
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WD400:
Do you really mean that you’ll only accept common descent if you are shown and organism-by-organism series that connects something like a choanoflagellate to an extant phylum?
Do you always need to erect and knock over a strawman, then use it to try to denigrate the "enemy" as irrational and/or dishonest? FYI I have said utterly nothing about common descent per se, universal or limited. I instead made a point to underscore the significance of the need to ground taxons in OBSERVED populations. And, that this naturally produces a pattern at especially body plan level where the hypothesised chain of nodes and branches will intersect the actually observed populations in a way that will not normally come down to a root node. Thus the song and dance above over the horrid thing Meyer is imagined to have done is yet another ad hominem laced strawman game. However, I must thank you for inadvertently underscoring that the origin of phyla is lacking in a pattern of observational grounds. That is, there is not actual observational warrant for the claim that the dozens of body plans originated by a process of macroevo tracing to blind watchmaker chance and necessity. I multiply that by the wider but just as warranted point, that no one has empirically shown that blind chance and mechanical necessity can make the FSCO/I that would b4e required for such body plan origin. In short, ypou have not demionstrated the causal force requirted to say that such traces as we see are best excplained on these factors. What I can say quite freely is that (i) the only empirically warranted source of FSCO/I is design, and (ii) life forms, from unicellular to the dozens of major body plans, are chock full of FSCO/I. I am therefore well in my scientific, inductive logic, epistemic rights to conclude that the forms that manifest that FSCO/I are best explained on design. KFkairosfocus
October 2, 2013
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And now we’re back to how to define a phylum, and the claim that a phylum must by definition include all the ancestors of all the living members of the phylum, which is simply false Not all the ancestor. Everything that descends from the most recent common ancestor of the living members. That's what Meyer get's wrong, and it applies to all taxa, not just phyla. If you want to make arguments about disparity then you need to embrace the "fuzziness" at the root of the animal tree, at least when it comes to fossils (as I say, the molecular data is more clear, but we cant get molecules from the fossils, unless Sal still thinks the world is 10k years old and there is a conspiracy to prevent C14 dating on them...).wd400
October 2, 2013
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wd400, of course she and I are arguing at cross-purposes here. :) She thinks Meyer is a special creationist who denies common descent and that his book as an attempt at refuting common descent. I strongly disagree with her. Her belief leads her to make claims that I think are factually false. Here's an example:
Meyer is defining “disparity” as “lots of higher taxa”.
Now, I'd like to think you've read the book, but I don't have any reason to believe that you have. So how do you define disparity and how do you define diversity. And if you'll tell me that I'll try to quote Meyer enough to convince you as to whether Meyer defines if the way you define it or the way that elizabeth claims he defines it? Fair offer?Mung
October 2, 2013
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wd400:
That arthropods and velvet worms are sister taxa is not an assumption – it’s a conclusion based on morphological and molecular data.
When you say, "sister taxa," are you limiting the definition strictly to biological classification? Since taxa are classified based on morphology, it would certainly make sense that being "sister taxa" is not an assumption. But your post didn't sound like you were limiting your definition in this way. When you start talking about lineages splitting, you've stepped outside arthropods and velvet worms simply being classified as "sister taxa" based on morphology and have started making some assumptions. According to the fossil record, what evidence is there to support these assumptions? And how can morphology be evidence toward lineages splitting without making all sorts of assumptions? Equivocating between these two ways of thinking about "sister taxa" is just the sort of sloppy thinking that Mung is calling out.Phinehas
October 2, 2013
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RE 223: It's a rhetorical question. A new phylum is not created every time there is a new species. Not every species diverges from it's sister species to the point where they are classified as separate phyla. And if two sister species do diverge they would first be classified as separate genera, not as separate phyla. All one has top do is look at current classifications of living species to see that this is so. And then if they diverge further they would be classified as separate families. And this would be LONG before they were classified as separate phyla, even assuming they continued to diverge such as they became so fundamentally different that even the body plan was not the same. And now we're back to how to define a phylum, and the claim that a phylum must by definition include all the ancestors of all the living members of the phylum, which is simply false. And then there's the absurd claim, by implication, that Meyer excludes from membership in a phylum the organisms in the Cambrian! Seriously, that's where the logic takes you if you follow it (if you believe it). btw, wd400, Meyer's 2.11 doesn't even include phyla. Are you saying it should have identified these groups as phyla? That's what Elizabeth did, in her version of the diagram.Mung
October 2, 2013
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But every new species is potentially a new phyla, correct? More or less. Every new lineage has it's own evolutionary future, and may in time become so distinct they are given a new rank. The herichical nature of taxonomy means "new" lineages are unlikely to be called phyla anytime soon (new lineage are twigs in the tree of life, an higher ranks go to the boughs from which twigs spring. Which is why it's amusing to hear some creationists complain that no new phyla have sprung up lately)wd400
October 2, 2013
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Onlookers, observe no response on the issue that to get to a body plan you are credibly looking at increments of 10 - 100+ mn bits of additional genetic info to provide the cell types for tissues, etc. That is going to take considerable time to emerge on any gradualist mechanism -- indeed it is highly doubtful that any blind watchmaker chance and necessity process can do it on the gamut of our solar system. That highlights the significance of what we have seen for 150 years. KFkairosfocus
October 2, 2013
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wd400, But every new species is potentially a new phyla, correct? I mean, in 1 million years, maybe homo-sapiens are the first of the hominid-cyborgs.Collin
October 2, 2013
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So first I have to be a “population-thinker” and when I try that I’m told I have to be a “tree-thinker.” Yes, more or less. Population thinking helps us to understand how genes and traits behave over generational time scales. When those same forces combine with barriers to gene flow we move from populations to trees. Population genetic models, especially the coalescent, help up bridge the gap. If every new species is a new phyla, why are there so many species and so few phyla? No one said every new species is a new phylum. Every new species is a lineage, every taxon is a lineage. The ranks we give to lineages above species are arbitrary, and usually reflect differences that have accrued since the split that created the linage.wd400
October 2, 2013
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Phineas, That arthropods and velvet worms are sister taxa is not an assumption - it's a conclusion based on morphological and molecular data.wd400
October 2, 2013
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So first I have to be a "population-thinker" and when I try that I'm told I have to be a "tree-thinker." If every new species is a new phyla, why are there so many species and so few phyla?Mung
October 2, 2013
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wd400:
Ming, higher taxa are “real” in the sense they are a linage (which is what Myer got wrong in his diagrams, btw). So when the velvet-worm lineage split from the arthropod lineage a phylum was born.
jerry:
I think reasonable evidence would suffice. But my experience is that the whole thing is begged. That it is assumed a priori.
Mm-hm. And Meyer is then blamed for not understanding because he isn't making the proper a priori assumptions.Phinehas
October 2, 2013
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Dr. Liddle, thanks for your explanation in 184.Collin
October 2, 2013
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I think reasonable evidence would suffice. So, the question becomes what amounts to reasonable evidence...wd400
October 2, 2013
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KF, A question: Do you think mitochondrial eve (i.e. the most recent matralineal ancestor of humanity) existed? What observation do you base this belief on?wd400
October 2, 2013
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Mung an Elizabeth, You guys seem to be arguing at cross purposes here. Ming, higher taxa are "real" in the sense they are a linage (which is what Myer got wrong in his diagrams, btw). So when the velvet-worm lineage split from the arthropod lineage a phylum was born. Of course, if someone was there to witness they wouldn't have given the sister species the rank of phylum. It's the ranks we place on the lineages that are more or less arbitrary. The problem is the "tree-thinking" the modern definitions of taxa require are difficult for human minds to deal with. We prefer to think typologically. This really hits the wall when we look at something like the Cambrian, where we look for the "first undisputed arthropod" or chordate or whatever. And lo and behold, as soon as we find something that definitely fits our modern definition of arthropod it's very distinct from molluscs or annelids or whatever. There is "disparity". But if you are a tree-thinker you know this has to be the case, because the arthropod ancestors that share traits will other protostomes will obviously be harder to differentiate from their close-cousins. Indeed, there are endless debates about how the Ediacaran and early Cambrian animals relate to modern ones. That's often presented as a weakness of evolutionary biology, but it's in fact a prediction of tree-thinking. There is no doubt that the 'root' of the animal tree is pretty fuzzy at the moment (though molecular phylogenies and evo-devo have taught us a huge amount about among-phylum relationships). Or even that the cambrian represents an elevated rate of evolution. But the idea it's a show stopper for evolution, or needed direction from a god, is really not justified.wd400
October 2, 2013
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If you require impossible evidence, then it’s impossible t change your mind. So why would anyone bother?
I think reasonable evidence would suffice. But my experience is that the whole thing is begged. That it is assumed a priori. As an aside to this whole debate, James Valentine was interviewed on the Cambrian Explosion several years ago. It is available through ARN. He is certainly no friend of ID but is quite honest in his answers. He assumes naturalistic processes accounted for all the Cambrian and that the multicellular cell type process probably started about 680 million years ago. Essentially he says the Cambrian represents the point in time when there were enough cell types available to build the complex body plans. He says Darwinian processes can not explain the Cambrian. He thinks other naturalistic processes are the source of everything. But no evidence, just his speculation. The introduction to his new book is online. It is about 10 pages. The book itself is only available as a hard back and not as an ebook.jerry
October 2, 2013
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I simply repeat the challenge: demonstrate, preferably from a unicellular root, OBSERVED origin of a phylum of the Cambrian from actual fossil forms This so challenge is so disconnected from the reality of biology or geology that it's hard to imagine it's presented in good fait. Do you really mean that you'll only accept common descent if you are shown and organism-by-organism series that connects something like a choanoflagellate to an extant phylum? If you require impossible evidence, then it's impossible t change your mind. So why would anyone bother?wd400
October 2, 2013
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Elizabeth B Liddle:
I do not dispute, as I have said, clearly, that “darwinist theories will lead to incrementally increasing stem and crown diversity across time”. What I do dispute is that this will lead to increasing “disparity” if “disparity” is defined as the number of “higher” taxa”. That would be a simple contradiction in terms. “Higher” taxa must precede “lower” according to the theory.
Simply. Priceless. EL:
You can’t get subdivisions of a set before you have the set.
No one is dividing sets into subdivisions, Elizabeth. So yet another straw man. And poor logic to boot. Phyla do not come before species. Standard Darwinian theory holds that over time populations diverge and new species emerge. So if there is any "set" things are added to it. What subdivision? Higher taxa, as I was careful to point out above, do not actually exist, so there is no event that can cause some "set" of a higher taxa to subdivide. You are simply confused.Mung
October 2, 2013
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