Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

The story changes re how fish moved to land

Denyse O'Leary
September 6, 2017
Evolution, Intelligent Design
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From Colin Barras at New Scientist:

The evolutionary story we have written to explain our ancestors’ move from sea to land may need a rethink. A fossil fish from this era has been discovered with several of the features of land animals – yet it was only distantly related to them.

Roughly 360 million years ago, one group of lobe-finned fish began evolving into four-legged, land-living animals that resulted in reptiles, amphibians and mammals like us.

…

However, a fossil discovered in a quarry in Ningxia, north China, now threatens that stability.More.

Yeah. Real history is a bitch. Just a bitch.

See also: Our favorite: The leaping blenny

Comments
ET, the mechanism is Natuaral selction, and is backed up by Sexual Selection, and other (horizontal gene transfer) less important mechanisms. The 'selective pressure' is provided by the environment. You, don't have a 'mechanism' for ID, unless it is God, and we all know it is God. Not really scientific is it?rvb8
September 8, 2017
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rvb8- You don't have a mechanism capable of turning fish into tetrapods. Heck given starting populations of prokaryotes you don't have a mechanism capable of producing anything but more prokaryotes. So forget about the fossils as yours cannot explain the organisms that produced them.ET
September 8, 2017
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And the comment from NEWS following the extract: "Yeah. Real history is a bitch. Just a bitch." Now, can anyone, and I mean any person on the planet, please explain to me, what the hell this means? Is she suggesting the subjects of Paleontology, and History are related? They are both investigations into a past time, but there the similarity ends. One deals largely with human endeavours and begins roughly with the start of the Bronze age, and the cultural marks left by humanity, roughly nine to twelve thousand years ago, or so. The other looks at evidence that can date back to micro fossils, evidence of the first microbes, which have been dated in the billions of years. But more commonly fossils dating back as far as the pre-Cambrian. What does she mean? Because these fossils display characteristics of both land and sea creatures, and because they are not exactly in the predicted geological strata, they disprove evolution? What would these unexpected fossils prove instead? ID?rvb8
September 7, 2017
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polistra @ 2 "If there’s no firm line between fish and four-leggers, a lot of religious dietary rules go down the drain." Um, "a lot"?? Perhaps "a tiny few". For Jews, if it lives in the water and does NOT have scales (like lobster, or dolphins, catfish), then it is Unclean. This has NOTHING to do with species or phyla. I don't see any impact. For Catholics (the only Christian group I know of with dietary restrictions), European beavers were considered "fish" for centuries. So you could eat them on days when "meat" was forbidden. The "fish on Fridays" thing was an ENTIRELY American restriction, created by the senior American bishop for the SOLE purpose of making Catholics disclose themselves to their Protestant neighbors and fellow workers. The Catholic church in the US finally dropped the Friday Fish thing a couple decades ago. There are still special days of fasting and abstinence where no Catholic should eat meat. The only other restrictions are things like "if it crawls on its belly (i.e., a snake)" it is unclean. And if it has an EVEN number of toes (like a dog or a camel), it is unclean. Again, nothing changes. I'm not sure about laws for Hindus, but I'm guessing that cows are SPECIFICALLY forbidden as food with no regard for what species they be get filed under.vmahuna
September 7, 2017
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If there's no firm line between fish and four-leggers, a lot of religious dietary rules go down the drain.polistra
September 7, 2017
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"The missing ingredient in evolution is the living organism that is marked by purpose and desire. Without that missing ingredient, modern evolution is just a magnificent contrivance, the wooden bird in the cuckoo clock that is no more alive than the cogs and springs and bellows that move it." — J. Scott TurnerOrigenes
September 7, 2017
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