Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Who chooses these titles? The Scientist on the ear

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From The Scientist::

The form and function of the ears of modern land vertebrates cannot be understood without knowing how they evolved.

Excuse me, excuse me, we can know everything there is to know about hearing today simply from examining life forms today.

Darwinism forces on people the belief that they must know about the “evolution” of such a function – somewhat like thinking you have to know a lot about Henry Ford in order to drive or fix a car.

Hey! Who pays for this stuff anyway? Meanwhile:

Although fish can hear, only amphibians and true land vertebrates—including the aquatic species that descended from them, such as whales and pinnipeds—have dedicated hearing organs. In land vertebrates belonging to the group Amniota, including lizards, birds, and mammals, sound usually enters through an external canal and impinges on an eardrum that is connected through middle-ear bones to the inner ear. There, hundreds or thousands of sensory hair cells are spread along an elongated membrane that acts as a spectral analyzer, with the result that each local group of hair cells responds best to a certain range of pitches, or sound frequencies. The hair cells then feed this information into afferent nerve fibers that carry the information to the brain.

Thus, remarkably, these complex events led independently to all modern amniotes possessing a middle ear that, at frequencies below 10 kHz, works equally effectively despite the diverse structures and origins. There is also evidence that the three-ossicle mammalian middle ear itself evolved at least twice—in egg-laying mammals such as the platypus, and in therians, which include marsupials and placentals—with similar outcomes.More.

Just an accident, for sure.

Comments
"During the Triassic period, some 250 to 200 million years ago, a truly remarkable thing happened. Independently, but within just 20 million to 30 million years of one another, all three amniote lineages evolved a tympanic middle ear from parts of the skull and the jaws" Yep, remarkable. Truly. Maybe it became really noisy back then? Important noises that random mutations enabled listening to. Concurrently in all three lineages. Hello?ppolish
September 30, 2015
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