Charles Darwin proved right again

[uncleyap]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience...Ec2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yeQRzbGsDZm9zc2lsc3JldmVh

Fossils Reveal Truth About Darwin's Theory

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<!-- end: .tools --> <cite class="vcard"> Robin Lloyd
LiveScience Senior Editor
LiveScience.com robin Lloyd
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<!-- end: .hd --> <cite class="caption"> AFP/File – A copy of Charles Darwin's book "Origin of Species" is pictured in front of a stone bust … </cite>

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<!-- end .related-media --> With the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin this week, people around the world are celebrating his role as the father of evolutionary theory. Events and press releases are geared, in part, to combat false claims made by some who would discredit the theory.
One frequently cited "hole" in the theory: Creationists claim there are no transitional fossils, aka missing links. Biologists and paleontologists, among others, know this claim is false.
As key evidence for evolution and species' gradual change over time, transitional creatures should resemble intermediate species, having skeletal and other body features in common with two distinct groups of animals, such as reptiles and mammals, or fish and amphibians.
These animals sound wild, but the fossil record - which is far from complete - is full of them nonetheless, as documented by Occidental College geologist Donald Prothero in his book "Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters" (Columbia University Press, 2007). Prothero discussed those fossils last month at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, along with transitional fossils that were announced since the book was published, including the "fishibian" and the "frogamander."

 

[uncleyap]

At least hundreds, possibly thousands, of transitional fossils have been found so far by researchers. The exact count is unclear because some lineages of organisms are continuously evolving.
Here is a short list of transitional fossils documented by Prothero and that add to the mountain of evidence for Charles Darwin's theory. A lot of us relate most to fossils of life closely related to humans, so the list focuses on mammals and other vertebrates, including dinosaurs.
Mammals, including us

• It is now clear that the evolutionary tree for early and modern humans looks more like a bush than the line represented in cartoons. All the hominid fossils found to date form a complex nexus of specimens, Prothero says, but Sahelanthropus tchadensis, found in 2001 and 2002, threw everyone for a loop because it walked upright 7 million years ago on two feet but is quite chimp-like in its skull size, teeth, brow ridges and face. It could be a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, but many paleoanthropologists will remain unsure until more fossils are found. Previously, the earliest ancestor of our Homo genus found in the fossil record dated back 6 million years.
• -Most fossil giraffes have short necks and today's have long necks, but anatomist Nikos Solounias of the New York Institute of Technology's New York College of Osteopathic Medicine is preparing a description of a giraffe fossil, Bohlinia, with a neck that is intermediate in length.
• Manatees, also called sea cows, are marine mammals that have flippers and a down-turned snout for grazing in warm shallow waters. In 2001, scientists discovered the fossil of a "walking manatee," Pezosiren portelli, which had feet rather than flippers and walked on land during the Eocene epoch (54.8 million years ago to 33.7 million years ago) in what is now Jamaica. Along with skull features like manatees (such as horizontal tooth replacement, like a conveyor belt), it also had heavy ribs for ballast, showing that it also had an aquatic lifestyle, like hippos.
• Scientists know that mastodons, mammoths and elephants all share a common ancestor, but it gets hard to tell apart some of the earliest members of this group, called proboscideans, going back to fossils from the Oligocene epoch (33.7 million years ago to 23.8 million years ago). The primitive members of this group can be traced back to what Prothero calls "the ultimate transitional fossil," Moeritherium, from the late Eocene of Egypt. It looked more like a small hippo than an elephant and probably lacked a long trunk, but it had short upper and lower tusks, the teeth of a primitive mastodon and ear features found only in other proboscideans.
• The Dimetrodon was a big predatory reptile with a tail and a large sail or fin-back. It is often mistaken for a dinosaur, but it's actually part of our mammalian lineage and more closely related to mammals than reptiles, which is seen in its specialized teeth for stabbing meat and skull features that only mammals and their ancestors had. It probably moved around like a lizard and had a jawbone made of multiple bones, like a reptile.

Dinosaurs and birds

• The classic fossil of Archaeopteryx, sometimes called the first bird, has a wishbone (fully fused clavicle) which is only found in modern birds and some dinosaurs. But it also shows impressions from feathers on its body, as seen on many of the theropod dinosaurs from which it evolved. Its body, capable of flight or gliding, also had many of dinosaur features - teeth (no birds alive today have teeth), a long bony tail (tails on modern birds are entirely feathers, not bony), long hind legs and toes, and a specialized hand with long bony fingers (unlike modern bird wings in which the fingers are fused into a single element), Prothero said.
• Sinornis was a bird that also has long bony fingers and teeth, like those seen in dinosaurs and not seen in modern birds.
• Yinlong is a small bipedal dinosaur which shares features with two groups of dinosaurs known to many kids - ceratopsians, the beaked dinosaurs like Triceratops, and pachycephalosaurs, known for having a thick dome of bone in their skulls protecting their brains. Yinlong has the thick rostral bone that is otherwise unique to ceratopsians dinosaurs, and the thick skull roof found in the pachycephalosaurs.
• Anchisaurus is a primitive sauropod dinosaur that has a lot of lizard-like features. It was only 8 feet long (the classic sauropods later on could be more than 100-feet long), had a short neck (sauropods are known for their long necks, while lizards are not), and delicate limbs and feet, unlike dinosaurs. Its spine was like that of a sauropod. The early sauropods were bipedal, while the latter were stood on all fours. Anchisaurus was probably capable of both stances, Prothero wrote.

Fish, frogs, turtles

• Tiktaalik, aka the fishibian or the fishapod, is a large scaled fish that shows a perfect transition between fins and feet, aquatic and land animals. It had fish-like scales, as well as fish-like fin rays and jaw and mouth elements, but it had a shortened skull roof and mobile neck to catch prey, an ear that could hear in both land and water, and a wrist joint that is like those seen in land animals.
• Last year, scientists announced the discovery of Gerobatrachus hottorni, aka the frogamander. Technically, it's a toothed amphibian, but it shows the common origins of frogs and salamanders, scientists say, with a wide skull and large ear drum (like frogs) and two fused ankle bones as seen in salamanders.
• A creature on the way to becoming a turtle, Odontochelys semistestacea, swam around in China's coastal waters 200 million years ago. It had a belly shell but its back was basically bare of armor. Odontochelys had an elongated, pointed snout. Most modern turtles have short snouts. In addition, the roof of its mouth, along with the upper and lower jaws, was equipped with teeth, which the researchers said is a primitive feature for turtles whose mugs are now tipped with beaks but contain no teeth.

• Charles Darwin's Legacy
• Gallery: Drawing Dinosaurs
• All About Evolution

 

[imperialarms]

christians now all commit sucidie

 

[Toronto]

Darwin Theory of Evolution has been proven scientifically


Data from whole genome sequencing could not be refuted by Intelligent Design advocates:
[video=youtube;GyDOTjp__F0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GyDOTjp__F0[/video]

 

[Toronto]

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9136200/#.URPBe64jqhN

Analysis of the genome was published in Nature on September 1, 2005, in an article produced by the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, a group of scientists which is supported in part by the National Human Genome Research Institute, one of the National Institutes of Health.

Scientists unleashed a torrent of studies comparing the genetic coding for humans and chimpanzees on Wednesday September 1, 2005, reporting that 96 percent of our DNA sequences are identical. Even more intriguingly, the other 4 percent appears to contain clues to how we became different from our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, they said.

"We're really looking at an individual evolutionary event, and this is spectacular," said University of Washington geneticist Robert Waterston, senior author of a study in the journal Nature presenting the draft of the chimpanzee genome.

The achievement should lead to discoveries with implications for human health, including new approaches to treating age-old diseases, said Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.

"As we build upon the foundation laid by the Human Genome Project, it's become clear that comparing the human genome with the genomes of other organisms is an enormously powerful tool for understanding our own biology," he said in a written statement.

The chimpanzee genetic blueprint is the result of a multimillion-dollar effort involving 67 researchers from the United States, Israel, Italy, Germany and Spain. In addition to that blueprint, more than a dozen other related reports are being published this week in Nature and two other scientific journals, Science and Genome Research.

 

[Toronto]

East Asian Physical Traits Linked to 35,000-Year-Old Mutation

http://www.amren.com/news/2013/02/east-asian-physical-traits-linked-to-35000-year-old-mutation/

Nicholas Wade, New York Times, February 14, 2013

Gaining a deep insight into human evolution, researchers have identified a mutation in a critical human gene as the source of several distinctive traits that make East Asians different from other races.

The traits—thicker hair shafts, more sweat glands, characteristically identified teeth and smaller breasts—are the result of a gene mutation that occurred about 35,000 years ago, the researchers have concluded.

The discovery explains a crucial juncture in the evolution of East Asians. But the method can also be applied to some 400 other sites on the human genome. The DNA changes at these sites, researchers believe, mark the turning points in recent human evolution as the populations on each continent diverged from one another.

The first of those sites to be studied contains the gene known as EDAR. Africans and Europeans carry the standard version of the gene, but in most East Asians, one of the DNA units has mutated.

Seeking to understand if the gene was the cause of thicker hair in East Asians with the variant gene, a team of researchers led by Yana G. Kamberov and Pardis C. Sabeti at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., decided to test the gene in mice, where its effects could be more easily explored.

Mice already have EDAR, an ancient mammalian gene that plays a leading role in the embryo in shaping hair, skin and teeth. The Broad team engineered a strain of mice whose EDAR gene had the same DNA change as the East Asian version of EDAR.

When the mice grew up, the researchers found they did indeed have thicker hair shafts, confirming that the changed gene was the cause of East Asians’ thicker hair. But the gene had several other effects, they report in Thursday’s issue of the journal Cell.

One was that the mice, to the researchers’ surprise, had extra sweat glands. A Chinese member of the team, Sijia Wang, then tested people in China and discovered that they, too, had more numerous sweat glands, evidently another effect of the gene.

Another surprise was that the engineered mice had less breast tissue, meaning that EDAR could be the reason that East Asian women have generally smaller breasts.

East Asians have distinctively shaped teeth for which their version of EDAR is probably responsible. But the mice were less helpful on this point; their teeth are so different from humans’ that the researchers could not see any specific change.


East Asians are sometimes assumed to have evolved in a cold environment because of their narrow nostrils, which conserve heat, and the extra eyelid fat that insulates the eye. But the Broad team calculates that the EDAR variant arose about 35,000 years ago in central China and that the region was then quite warm and humid. Extra sweat glands would have been advantageous to the hunter-gatherers who lived at that time.

But Joshua Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said he thought the more likely cause of the gene’s spread among East Asians was sexual selection. Thick hair and small breasts are visible sexual signals which, if preferred by men, could quickly become more common as the carriers had more children. The genes underlying conspicuous traits, like blue eyes and blond hair in Europeans, have very strong signals of selection, Dr. Akey said, and the sexually visible effects of EDAR are likely to have been stronger drivers of natural selection than sweat glands.


The Broad team is studying EDAR as part of a larger plan to identify all the genetic variants responsible for recent human evolution. {snip}

A team led by Dr. Sabeti and Sharon R. Grossman of the Broad Institute has now refined the usual scanning methods and identified 412 sites on the genome that have been under selection. Each site is small enough that it contains at most a single gene.

Each race has a different set of selected regions, reflecting the fact that the human population had dispersed from its African homeland and faced different challenges that led to genetic adaptation on each continent. About 140 of the sites affected by natural selection are in Europeans, 140 in East Asians and 132 in Africans, the authors report in another article published Thursday in Cell.

Inserting some of the other selected genes into mice might help explain why they were favored, and point to critical turning points in recent human evolution, Dr. Sabeti said.

 

[Toronto]

Church of England Declares Evolution, Faith Are Compatible
Read more at http://www.christianpost.com/news/s...ith-are-compatible-43737/#GLXbmyUWcSRyj7TF.99

The Church of England's governing body on Friday approved a motion that emphasizes the compatibility of belief in both God and science.

Dr. Peter Capon, a former computer science lecturer, introduced the motion arguing that "rejecting much mainstream science does nothing to support those Christians who are scientists ... or strengthen the Christian voice in the scientific area."

He urged Christians to take scientific evidence seriously and avoid prejudging science for theological reasons.

The vote comes as more than 850 congregations throughout the globe are celebrating Evolution Weekend with the aim of demonstrating that evolution poses no problems for their faith.

Religion and science are not adversaries, they say. Rather, the two fields should be seen as complementary, they maintain.

Evolution Weekend, which kicked off Friday, is supported by those of various faith traditions including Christians, Jews, Muslims and Unitarian Universalists.
Read more at http://www.christianpost.com/news/s...ith-are-compatible-43737/#eCpP6v8fIPJQT4tU.99

 

[Sinkie]

So what does all these lead us to?

 

[Toronto]

So what does all these lead us to?

Many many things and conclusions. The Earth is more 6,000 years old. Our common ancestors were not Adam and Eve. Human beings existed before Adam and Eve.