Science News’s Top fossils in 2019 show a diminishing Darwin

8 Replies to “Science News’s Top fossils in 2019 show a diminishing Darwin”

1. 1
   PavelU says:

   January 5, 2020 at 4:33 pm

   What about this?

   Fin ray patterns at the fin-to-limb transition
   https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/12/24/1915983117

   Any explanation from the ID perspective?
2. 2
   jawa says:

   January 5, 2020 at 5:01 pm

   In the mid 2000s several fossils were discovered in northern Canada of a strange fish-like creature dubbed Tiktaalik. The fossils were dated to hundreds of millions of years ago, to a time when there were thought to be fish but no vertebrate land animals, or “tetrapods.” On close examination the fossils were seen to have structures — in particular, bones that resembled wrists — that were thought to make them good candidates for transitional forms between fish and tetrapods. For several years Tiktaalik was hailed as the missing link between fish and land vertebrates. But its moment of fame was cut short in early 2010 with the discovery of fossil footprints in Poland of true tetrapods which were at least ten million years older than Tiktaalik. At a stroke, the Canadian fossil could no longer be a transitional form, since it appeared later in the fossil record than its supposed descendants.

   https://evolutionnews.org/2019/11/johnsons-darwin-on-trial-as-fresh-and-relevant-as-ever/

   The claim in the PBS video (timecode 6:02-6:06) that ancestors of early tetrapods like Tiktaalik and Ichthyostega probably had a swim bladder is complete rubbish. 

   But it gets worse. PBS makes up a completely idiotic scenario where the swim bladder allegedly became bigger in some lobe-finned fish, developed more blood vessels, and then in time transformed the air bladder from a hydrostatic organ into a respiratory organ. This was then split into a paired lung in bichirs and lungfish. Again, this whole scenario is complete nonsense. It is emphatically not proposed by any evolutionary biologist!

   Lungs simply could not have evolved from the swim bladder. Why? Because lungs predate the origin of the swim bladder, while the latter only appears as a parallel development in a subgroup of bony fish that has the lungs secondarily reduced. Alternatively the lungs and swim bladder might have both evolved from the primitive lungs of a common ancestor of lobe-finned and ray-finned fish (Tatsumi et al. 2016), which would be the exact reverse of the PBS fantasy scenario.

   So, could PBS be excused on the grounds that this is all brand-new research they simply did not yet know about? Not really. I learned all of the above at Tübingen University nearly 25 years ago. We were told even then by our fantastic teacher Dr. Gerhard Mickoleit about the “urban legend” that lungs evolved from the swim bladder. (See his book Phylogenetische Systematik der Wirbeltiere, 2004: pp. 82 and 88, Pfeil Verlag.) 

   At their Patreon fundraising site, PBS Eons advertises itself as being “devoted to making sure our content is of the highest possible quality, and that takes a lot of time and resources.” From a self-proclaimed high-class educational program, such crude errors are intolerable.

   https://evolutionnews.org/2019/08/pbs-eons-teaches-nonsense-about-evolution/
3. 3
   jawa says:

   January 6, 2020 at 2:43 am

   Here’s a very pertinent reply to PavelU posted by Martin_r in another thread:

   to be honest, i don’t know how fish-out-water-article is related to this debate, however, by now we all know that you are a very confused guy, and you have no idea what you are talking about.

   Anyway, Pavel, fish-out-of-water …. get this:

   “Fish have evolved the ability to live on land many times, challenging the perception that this extreme lifestyle shift was likely to have been a rare occurrence in ancient times, new UNSW Australia research shows.”

   “”A fish out of water might seem an extraordinary thing, but in fact it is quite a common phenomenon,” says study first author and UNSW evolutionary ecologist Dr Terry Ord. ”

   HA-HA-HA …

   fish-out-of-water is a common phenomenon ?????

   if this story is true, it sounds to me more like an intelligent design feature :)))))

   https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160622102129.htm

   https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/karsten-pultz-why-random-processes-cannot-produce-information-a-new-argument/#comment-690633
4. 4
   jawa says:

   January 6, 2020 at 2:55 am

   Here’s another very pertinent reply to PavelU posted by Martin_r in another thread:

   if you like fish, also get this:

   “Air bladders or lungs in different groups of fishes evolved multiple times” (independently)

   Pavel, you don’t have to be a genius to see, that all these features (lungs and air bladders) where designed, created, and not evolved (repeatedly) by some random mutations, unless you believe in miracles … :)))

   full article:
   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15547792

   P.S.

   Pavel, did you know that the icon of evolution – the appendix, also evolved multiple times independently in various species ? Scientists say, that it happened at least 30 times independently (go and google it)

   https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/karsten-pultz-why-random-processes-cannot-produce-information-a-new-argument/#comment-690638
5. 5
   pw says:

   January 6, 2020 at 3:12 am

   It seems like PavelU’s comment led to very interesting comments posted by Martin_r and jawa in this interesting OP that was kind of ignored. In a way PavelU contributed to animate this discussion. Maybe we should encourage him to continue posting provocative questions? Anyway, he’s in a den of lions that jump on him right away. 🙂
6. 6
   bornagain77 says:

   January 6, 2020 at 3:40 am

   “A major problem for evolution is that the first mudskipper in the fossil record is morphologically a modern mudskipper.
   Long assumed to be a transitional animal between a swimming fish and a tetrapod (four footed) animal, a recent study by Kutschera and Elliott (2013, p. 1) concluded that, although some walking fishes such as mudskippers “shed light on the gradual evolutionary transition of ancient fishes to early tetrapods … they are not the ancestors of tetrapods, because extant organisms cannot be progenitors of other living beings.”

   Mudskippers. The Strangest Creature ever to Defy Evolution
   December 14, 2016
   Excerpt: No fossil evidence exists for their putative evolution from some pre-mudskipper organism. Scientists are not even able to satisfactorily classify modern mudskippers into a family, leaving their evolution to pure speculation. They were once included in the Oxudercinae subfamily, within the family Gobiidae (gobies), but recent molecular studies do not support this classification. Darwinists are now stymied about their phylogeny, and can only speculate concerning from what and how they could have evolved. A major problem for evolution is that the first mudskipper in the fossil record is morphologically a modern mudskipper.
   Long assumed to be a transitional animal between a swimming fish and a tetrapod (four footed) animal, a recent study by Kutschera and Elliott (2013, p. 1) concluded that, although some walking fishes such as mudskippers “shed light on the gradual evolutionary transition of ancient fishes to early tetrapods … they are not the ancestors of tetrapods, because extant organisms cannot be progenitors of other living beings.” As Polgar, et al. note, more study is required to detail the evolution of the mudskipper (2014, p. 179).
   Many experts have hypothesized that fish fins evolved into terrestrial limbs, a theory that also does not fit the facts (Clack, 2012, p. 136). For example, the earliest tetrapods were not pentadactyl (having five fingers and toes) as are modern tetrapods, and the fossil evidence does not support the fin to limb evolution (Clack, 2012, pp. 136-137).
   Summary
   In short, the mudskipper is not a fish that evolved legs or an amphibian that evolved to look like a fish, but a graceful well designed swimmer in water that gets along so well out of water that they spend most of their life on land and thrive in large areas of the world. We have no evidence of fish-fin to tetrapod limb evolution, and the mudskipper does not help to explain the major missing links that can bridge the two structures. Like the duck-billed platypus, the mudskipper contains a unique mosaic of features found on many different animals. And this situation is bad news for evolutionists.
   http://www.create.ab.ca/mudski.....evolution/

   And to have the following finding, just makes the claim from Darwinists all the more comical

   Repeated evolution: A fish living on land is NOT an extraordinary thing but a common phenomenon
   PUBLISHED 6TH JANUARY 2020

   Fish have evolved the ability to live on land many times, challenging the perception that this extreme lifestyle shift was likely to have been a rare occurrence in ancient times. New research shows 33 different families of fish have at least one species that demonstrates some terrestrial activity and, in many cases, these behaviors are likely to have evolved independently in the different families.

   A fish out of water might seem an extraordinary thing, but in fact it is quite a common phenomenon,” says study first author and UNSW evolutionary ecologist Dr Terry Ord

   full article is here:

   https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160622102129.htm
   https://stuffhappens.info/repeated-evolution-a-fish-out-of-water-is-not-an-extraordinary-thing-but-a-common-phenomenon/

   ‘Convergent evolution’ is simply a hard and devastating failure for Darwinists:

   The Real Problem With Convergence – Cornelius Hunter – May 25, 2017
   Excerpt: 21st century evolutionists are still befuddled by convergence, which is rampant in biology, and how it could occur. This certainly is a problem for the theory.,,,
   a fundamental evidence and prediction of evolution is falsified.
   The species do not fall into the expected evolutionary pattern.
   The failure of fundamental predictions — and this is a hard failure — is fatal for scientific theories. It leaves evolution not as a scientific theory but as an ad hoc exercise in storytelling.
   https://www.evolutionnews.org/2017/05/the-real-problem-with-convergence/

   The “Shared Error” Argument – Cornelius Hunter – April 17, 2017
   Excerpt: the evolutionist’s contention that common descent is needed to explain those shared mutations in different species contradicts the most basic biology. Simply put, similarities across species which cannot be explained by common descent, are rampant in biology. The olfactory system is no exception. Its several fundamental components, if evolution is true, must have evolved several times independently. The level of independent origin which evolutionists must admit to (variously referred to as convergent evolution, parallel evolution, recurrent evolution, cascades of convergence, and so forth depending on the pattern) is staggering and dwarfs the levels of similarities in the olfactory receptor genes. To cast those relatively few similarities as mandates for common descent, while ignoring the volumes of similarities that violate common descent constitutes the mother of all confirmation biases.
   http://darwins-god.blogspot.co.....prove.html

   Problem 7: Convergent Evolution Challenges Darwinism and Destroys the Logic Behind Common Ancestry – Casey Luskin February 9, 2015
   Excerpt: Whenever evolutionary biologists are forced to appeal to convergent evolution, it reflects a breakdown in the main assumption, and an inability to fit the data to a treelike pattern. Examples of this abound in the literature,,,,
   Biochemist and Darwin-skeptic Fazale Rana reviewed the technical literature and documented over 100 reported cases of convergent genetic evolution.126 Each case shows an example where biological similarity — even at the genetic level — is not the result of inheritance from a common ancestor.
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....91161.html
7. 7
   jawa says:

   January 6, 2020 at 3:41 am

   BA77,

   Thanks for posting your insightful comment here.
8. 8
   OLV says:

   January 6, 2020 at 7:29 am

   Repeated evolution of amphibious behavior in fish and its implications for the colonization of novel environments (2016)

   We know little about on how frequently transitions into new habitats occur, especially the colonization of novel environments that are the most likely to instigate adaptive evolution. One of the most extreme ecological transitions has been the shift in habitat associated with the move from water to land by amphibious fish. We provide the first phylogenetic investigation of these transitions for living fish. Thirty?three families have species reported to be amphibious and these are likely independent evolutionary origins of fish emerging onto land. Phylogenetic reconstructions of closely related taxa within one of these families, the Blenniidae, inferred as many as seven convergences on a highly amphibious lifestyle. Taken together, there appear to be few constraints on fish emerging onto land given amphibious behavior has evolved repeatedly many times across ecologically diverse families. The colonization of novel habitats by other taxa resulting in less dramatic changes in environment should be equally, if not, more frequent in nature, providing an important prerequisite for subsequent adaptive differentiation.