The missing link

A

amishmafia

Registered Member
not considering man, what are the missing links of all other animals from their peak condition thus far to where they supposedly began? What about the progression from the primordial soup to a triceratops or a trex, or an elephant or maybe a chipmunk.
 
amishmafia said:
not considering man, what are the missing links of all other animals from their peak condition thus far to where they supposedly began? What about the progression from the primordial soup to a triceratops or a trex, or an elephant or maybe a chipmunk.
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there are no such thing as missing link, all that came before us, made us.
 
amishmafia said:
not considering man, what are the missing links of all other animals from their peak condition thus far to where they supposedly began? What about the progression from the primordial soup to a triceratops or a trex, or an elephant or maybe a chipmunk.
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A good way to see evolution in time-lapse photography is to look at photos of a human fetus at various stages in its development, say one week apart for the first six months. It progresses from the original one-celled creature of the fertilized ovum, through various stages of the evolutionary process: simple multi-celled creature all the way up through amphibian and then primitive mammal. At one point it has gills, at another point a tail. It's a powerful illustration of the reasonableness of evolution over several billion years, that it's being recreated in nine months with every human birth.

If you want a more detailed, but still not too technical, account of the entire process of evolution from the beginning, get the DVD for the "Life on Earth" BBC/PBS series from the 1980s, produced and narrated by the fabulous David Attenborough. It's not just about evolution, but it covers the subject very well.
 
A good way to see evolution in time-lapse photography is to look at photos of a human fetus at various stages in its development, say one week apart for the first six months. It progresses from the original one-celled creature of the fertilized ovum, through various stages of the evolutionary process: simple multi-celled creature all the way up through amphibian and then primitive mammal. At one point it has gills, at another point a tail. It's a powerful illustration of the reasonableness of evolution over several billion years, that it's being recreated in nine months with every human birth.
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Sorry, Fraggle, but that particular hypothesis has long been discounted as a hoax. It was based on wishful thinking when Haeckel was drawing his embroyos. What he drew doesn't really match reality, in other words. Funny how long it took for people to actually stop and look at real embroyos and compare them to Haeckel's drawings to figure out that Haeckel was a crackpot. Haeckel, by the way, was also a believer in Lamarkian evolution.
 
invert_nexus said:
Sorry, Fraggle, but that particular hypothesis has long been discounted as a hoax. It was based on wishful thinking when Haeckel was drawing his embroyos. What he drew doesn't really match reality, in other words. Funny how long it took for people to actually stop and look at real embroyos and compare them to Haeckel's drawings to figure out that Haeckel was a crackpot ...
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It is particularly disconcerting that someone as "learned" and "scientific" as our komrade Fraggle Rocker would perpetuate this fraud. Surely he knows it is a hoax. That just goes to show how zealous the evolutionism faithful are in blindly following crackpot pseudoscience.

Of course, to be fair to our most noble comrade, perhaps Fraggle Rocker imputes a different spin on the topic or believes that Haeckel's fraud was miscast.

"... Unfortunately, many of the zealots preferred to let fraud exposures die out quietly rather than vocally admit that many scientists unquestioningly accepted and science writers wrote textbook chapters based on fraudulent information. Because science text writers typically pass on matter already well publicized in previous texts and are not within the inner circle of those conversant in the field, Haeckel's frauds and evolutionary concepts based on these frauds are still unfortunately included as fact in many science textbooks in U.S. school systems ... "

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Haekel.html
 
Or, more likely, Fraggle just doesn't know that recapitulation theory has been discredited since his time in the education system. It was once quite popular.
 
amishmafia said:
not considering man, what are the missing links of all other animals from their peak condition thus far to where they supposedly began? What about the progression from the primordial soup to a triceratops or a trex, or an elephant or maybe a chipmunk.
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Read first a book on evolution, then rephrase your question, because it is bogus.
 
About the links between extant and extinct forms:

http://www.tolweb.org/tree/

http://www.fmnh.helsinki.fi/users/haaramo/Index_tree.htm

These sites provide "trees of life" which one can navigate and find the "intermediate" relatives between present-day organisms and ancestors/representative close relatives of ancestors. The first site has some text about the groups you're reading, while the other has only the names of the groups and species, and scarce text, but as far as I remember, it's more complete extinct groups and species, which one can then note and look on some web search mechanism, if it really interests.


In defense of embryological/developmental evidence of evolution, but not necessarily of any Haeckel theory, despite of being strictly wrong, the development of most species gives somewhat of an intellectual/intuitive aid to help to see how the evolution between all these groups, distant or more closely related, has been possible or has occurred. Even thought the development, by no means the literal"record" of the evolution of a species playing in "fast forward".

There are, however, some specific parts which are somewhat like this, such as the evolution of heart between fishes and other vertebrates:
Cardiac Chamber Formation: Development, Genes, and Evolution

But as an counter-example, butterflies are not descendants of caterpillar-like organisms.

As "intermediate" examples, there are things like the vestigial tails of humans and great apes, and hind legs of cetaceans, which start to develop in their embryos, only to degenerate later. There are birds, like Hoatzin, which were able to "bring back" the development of actual fingers in the wings of immature birds, showing that the "genetic program" of the dinosaur's fingers is still there; similarly, it was possible to induce the growth of teeth in chickens, without making any genetic change on them, also showing that the "genetic program" for teeth is there, a remnant from toothed birds and dinosaurian ancestors, but presently deactivated.
 
By the way, while "peaks" applies to adaptive peaks, it loses some sense in a macroevolutionarily broader sense.

That is, sabre tooth cats are extinct right now, dinosaurs, and other organisms, but their extinction is the product of a complex history, not from "pure" natural selection against the ancestors of their extant relatives. It does not mean that today's big cats are more on "the peak" than sabre tooth cats, or that birds are "higher" than dinosaurs.

Meaningful adaptive peaks exist between more closely related species or even within species, which more likely would have evolved divergently from direct competition, in a simpler history.



We could compare in terms of adaptive landscape analogy distant things like dogs and fishes, and say that the dog is at an adaptive abyss when hypothetically put to live in the niche of fishes and vice-versa, but that's just silly.
 
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