'Missing link' gevonden! DarWIN!

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Op dinsdag 19 mei 2009 18:02 schreef Beetlebum het volgende:
[ luie modus ] samenvatting svp [ / luie modus ]

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Op dinsdag 19 mei 2009 18:08 schreef LeeHarveyOswald het volgende:
Die heeft god daar neer gelegd om ons voor de gek te houden

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Op dinsdag 19 mei 2009 18:09 schreef FunkyHomosapien het volgende:

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dat wordt het nieuwe argument inderdaad

is van de duivel om ons voor het lapje te houden en je ongelovig te houden.

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Op dinsdag 19 mei 2009 18:12 schreef Paaskonijn het volgende:
Geil! Kan dat geloof in God ook opgedoekt worden 14.gif.

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Op dinsdag 19 mei 2009 18:13 schreef Triggershot het volgende:

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Want? Het Vaticaan kijkt al tijden niet meer zo zwart-wit als vele creationisten in de vs.

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Op dinsdag 19 mei 2009 18:09 schreef FunkyHomosapien het volgende:

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is van de duivel om jullie voor het lapje te houden en je ongelovig te houden.

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Op dinsdag 19 mei 2009 18:51 schreef Triggershot het volgende:

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Zelfs met evolutie wordt de holocaust betrokken.
Wat de holocaust betreft. Het is geen voorwaarde om in de holocaust te geloven / erkennen om je priesterschap te vervullen. En het bewijst maar weer eens dat de Kerk niet de enige is die je bijna dogmatisch alles oplegt.

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Op dinsdag 19 mei 2009 18:56 schreef sweetlady-o het volgende:
Samenvatting?

Enne geloof niet alles wat je leest. maar een samenvatting zou trouwens leuk zijn.

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Op dinsdag 19 mei 2009 18:10 schreef Gebraden_Wombat het volgende:
Dé missing link? Er zijn talloze missing links. Sterker nog, als je een missing link vindt, creëer je meteen twee nieuwe!

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Op woensdag 20 mei 2009 10:59 schreef JohnDope het volgende:
Darwin is een hoaxert met bloed aan zijn handen.

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Op woensdag 20 mei 2009 11:52 schreef CAPS. het volgende:
LOL@ Google:

[ afbeelding ]

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Op woensdag 20 mei 2009 12:09 schreef CAPS. het volgende:
Wel jammer dat als je op het plaatje klikt, de eerste hits over 'missing link found' niet kloppen of ernstig gedateerd zijn.

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Op dinsdag 19 mei 2009 18:10 schreef Gebraden_Wombat het volgende:
Dé missing link? Er zijn talloze missing links. Sterker nog, als je een missing link vindt, creëer je meteen twee nieuwe!

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Geloof kan naar mijn mening een bepaalde filosofische zeggingskracht hebben in een mensenleven, en een mooie verbintenis leggen tussen mensen. Het moet puur ritueel/cultureel blijven en meer gaan om de rationele ervaring. Ik bedoel niet godsdienstige hallucinaties of iets dergelijks, maar simpelweg de ervaring die je opdoet met mensen door samen te komen in gezelligheid en op zoek naar zingeving.

Het moet ook niet meer zijn dan dat. Dat is mijn mening.

Is dit dan slechts een illusie of jezelf voor de gek houden? In dit verband niet.

Veel atheïsten, ongelovigen die gelovigen in de zeik willen zetten stellen dat je toch ook niet meer gelooft in Sinterklaas.

Laat ik een andere vergelijking met betrekking tot Sinterklaas maken:
Je gaat toch ook niet op pakjesavond de ervaring en rituelen met betrekking tot Sinterklaas rationeel verklaren? Je gaat met pakjesavond toch ook niet vragen naar het empirisch bewijs voor het bestaan van Sinterklaas, als je een cadeautje krijgt?

Nee, net zoals iedereen doe je mee aan het ritueel, aan de culturele traditie. Met andere mensen maak je gedichten, luister je muziek en geef je cadeautjes...

Is dit jezelf voor de gek houden? Is dit slechts een illussie?

Naar mijn mening niet.

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Op woensdag 20 mei 2009 13:20 schreef poldergeist het volgende:
Ik ben blij dat de wetenschap dit ontdekt heeft. Ik word langzamerhand wel moe van de eeuwige discussie tussen felle darwinisten, atheïsten en fundamenteel gelovigen en heb steeds minder behoefte eraan om me te mengen in dit soort discussies.

Toch wil ik een het bericht dat ik op de Frontpage gaf met jullie delen. Wil het even kwijt op het forum.
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Op woensdag 20 mei 2009 13:45 schreef MyIllusion het volgende:
Oke, ze hebben het fossiel ontdekt en onderzocht maar wat weten ze er al meer van ? Het is een half aap en half lemur , maar daarom is toch nog niet bewezen dat de mens van dat diertje of de apen afstamt?

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Op woensdag 20 mei 2009 13:42 schreef poldergeist het volgende:
Waar ik eigenlijk op doelde is dat bij ieder bericht over evolutietheorie gelovigen en ongelovigen de neiging hebben om felle discussies te houden om elkaars gelijk te halen. Daar maak ik mezelf eigenlijk ook schuldig aan en ik begin daar langzamerhand genoeg van te krijgen. Ik vind dat je gelovigen ook een bepaalde vrijheid moet geven, op louter particuliere basis.

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Op woensdag 20 mei 2009 13:45 schreef MyIllusion het volgende:
Oke, ze hebben het fossiel ontdekt en onderzocht maar wat weten ze er al meer van ? Het is een half aap en half lemur , maar daarom is toch nog niet bewezen dat de mens van dat diertje of de apen afstamt?

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A Discovery That Will Change Everything (!!!) ... Or Not

Late last week I received a rather curious e-mail. It read;

WORLD RENOWNED SCIENTISTS REVEAL A REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING

Ground-Breaking Global Announcement

What: An international press conference to unveil a major historic scientific find. After two years of research a team of world-renowned scientists will announce their findings, which address a long-standing scientific puzzle.

The find is lauded as the most significant scientific discovery of recent times. History brings this momentous find to America and will follow with the premiere of a major television special on Monday, May 25 at 9 pm ET/PT chronicling the discovery and investigation.

Who: Mayor Michael Bloomberg; International team of scientists who researched the find; Abbe Raven, President and CEO, A&E Television Networks; Nancy Dubuc, Executive Vice President and General Manager, History; Ellen Futter, President, American Museum of Natural History

"The most significant scientific discovery of recent times", eh? What could it be? Life on Mars? Time-travel? Teleportation? The Higgs Boson? A diet cola that doesn't taste absolutely awful? Well, no. It's all about a little primate from Germany.

Last week periodicals like the Wall Street Journal and the Mail Online heralded the discovery of a 47-million-year old adapid primate from the famous Messel deposits in Germany. These deposits are well-known for containing exceptionally well-preserved mammals, and this particular lemur-like primate fossil contains soft tissue impressions and gut contents.

An exceptionally preserved fossil primate is pretty exciting, but that's not why the publicist for tomorrow's AMNH event wrote one of the most overblown press releases I have ever seen. No, the paper, which will be released in PLoS One tomorrow, claims that this particular primate is of vital importance to the origin of anthropoid primates (or monkeys and apes, with our species being included in the latter category). As might be expected during this significant year, it is going to be called Darwinius masillae and you can get a "sneak peek" at it here. According to the authors of the paper Darwinius supports the hypothesis that anthropoid primates evolved from lemur-like animals.

I have yet to see the paper, but I am skeptical of this conclusion. First, one of the main authors of the paper is Philip Gingerich, who has been maintaining the evolution of anthropoid primates from adapids for years despite evidence to the contrary. (See Chris Beard's The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey for a good review.) This is directly related to the second problem, which is that adapids were strepsirrhine (popularly called "wet-nosed") primates more closely related to modern-day lemurs, lorises, and bush babies. Instead anthropoids and the stock from which they arose are haplorrhines ("dry-nosed" primates), with tarsiers and an extinct group of tarsier-like primates called omomyids being much closer to them than the adapids.

According to preliminary reports Gingerich et al. link Darwinius to anthropoids by saying that it lacks a tooth comb and a toilet claw, two characteristics of strepsirrhine primates. As the author of A Primate of Modern Aspect writes, though, the lack of these two features does not automatically make Darwinius a transitional form from adapids to early anthropoids. It could be, and may be more likely to be, a unique part of the adapid family tree, and I will be very interested to see if the new paper contains a cladistic analysis. (I was a bit disappointed that Gingerich's last major descriptive paper on the early whale Maiacetus did not contain a cladogram).

I have the feeling that this fossil, while spectacular, is being oversold. This raises an important question about the way scientific discoveries, particularly fossil finds, are being popularized. Darwinius is just the latest is a string of significant fossils to be hyped in the media before being scientifically described (or at least before that information is released to the public). Other recent examples include "Dakota" the Edmontosaurus, the pliosaur "Predator X", and "Lyuba" the baby mammoth. I am glad that these finds are stirring excitement, but I am a bit put off by the way they are presented.

Companies like National Geographic and the History Channel are taking a larger role in how these discoveries are being presented. Each of the fossils I mentioned above have had books, feature articles, documentaries, or some combination thereof produced about them before any scientific description of them has been published. These promotional materials make grand claims but are vague on details, which are reserved for later academic publications. This can potentially create problems for effective science communication.

Consider, for example, the grand claims made about finds like Darwinius. It is being heavily promoted but scientists have not yet had a chance to see the fossil or read the paper describing it. When they get a call from a journalist or are asked their opinion on it, then, it can be difficult to discuss the find because they do not know the details. This can be harmful as it can not only lead to the spread of overblown assertions but it can also make us look foolish if these finds do not turn out to be all they were cracked up to be. This could especially be the case with Darwinius. Though heralded in documentaries and in the news as one of our direct ancestors, it is probably a very interesting lemur-like primate on a different evolutionary branch. I can only imagine the field day creationists are going to have if this is the case, and I am frustrated by the way mass media outlets manage to bungle genuinely interesting scientific discoveries.

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Op woensdag 20 mei 2009 13:52 schreef ShaoliN het volgende:
Wat ik wel grappig vind is dat het ding dus al een aantal jaar geleden gevonden is door een prive verzamelaar die het nu verkoopt. Je vindt een 50 miljoen jaar oud fossiel wat ons zeer veel kan vertellen over onze oorsprong, maar denkt hey leuk voor thuis.

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So the big day is finally here. "Ida", a 47-million-year-old primate skeleton from Messel, Germany has finally been unveiled on PLoS One and in a flurry of press releases, book announcements, and general media hubub. Under different circumstances I would be happy to see an exceptional fossil receiving such treatment, but I fear that Ida has become a victim of a sensationalistic media that values audience size over scientific substance.

Before I jump into my criticisms of the paper describing Darwinius masillae, Ida's scientific name, I do want to stress how spectacular the fossil really is. The primate fossil record is extremely fragmentary, and if you want to know anything about fossil primates you are going to have to know your teeth. That's usually all that is left of them. Ida, then, is a paleontologist's dream come true. Not only is it a complete specimen but parts of the primate's last meal were preserved inside its stomach and its body outline was marked by bacteria that fed on the decomposing carcass during fossilization. This is the first time a fossil primate has been found exhibiting such extraordinary preservation.

Most of the media reports about Darwinius have only mentioned this point in passing, though. What they are most interested in is its status as a "missing link" between anthropoid primates (monkeys and apes) and their ancient ancestors. As John Wilkins has pointed out the phrase "missing link" is woefully inaccurate, conjuring up images of life ranked in an unbreakable Great Chain of Being put in place by God, but that has not stopped media outlets from running with the idea. Even though the authors of the paper deny making any such statement, the promotional materials they are associated with (most notably the "Revealing The Link" website) play up this angle to a ridiculous degree.

So what is all the hubub about? Why is the History Channel falling all over itself to promote this fossil? It all goes back to a long-standing debate over the origins of anthropoid primates that, until now, has mostly gone on in academic journals and scientific meetings.


Scientists have long debated the question of what earlier primates the earliest anthropoids evolved from. There have been a number of hypotheses proposed, but they have generally centered around three groups: the adapids (an extinct group of lemur-like primates to which Darwinius belongs), the omomyids (an extinct group of tarsier-like primates), and the tarsiers (strange, large-eyed primates with living representatives). Each of these groups has been favored as the progenitors of anthropoids, but which one is the right one?

In order to solve his problem paleo-primatologists have been trying to figure out which of these groups is closest to the anthropoids. It might be impossible to identify a true anthropoid ancestor with certainty, but by figuring out the next closest related group (or sister group) scientists can create and test hypotheses about what an anthropoid ancestor might look like. These determinations are based upon shared derived characters, or particular traits shared by two groups and their common ancestor to the exclusion of other groups.

As outlined in the paper "Evolving Perspectives on Anthropoidea" (among others) included in the recent Anthropoid Origins volume, it presently appears that tarsiers and omomyids are the closest groups to anthropoids. This is based upon a combination of fossil, genetic, and morphological evidence. This makes the adapid primates, including Darwinius, a more distant side branch more closely related to living lemurs and lorises.

Not everyone agrees with this, however. Some researchers have long maintained that adapids are better candidates for the ancestors of anthropoids, with Philip Gingerich (one of the authors of the Darwinius paper) being a vocal proponent of this view. It is not terribly surprising, then, that the authors of the Darwinius paper posit that adapids are more closely related to anthropoids than tarsiers and omomyids, and they rely on two tactics to make their case.

The authors of the paper try to frame their hypothesis in a historical manner. They claim that adapids have been barred from a close anthropoid relationship on the basis of soft-tissue characteristics that do not fossilize. This would mean that the association between omomyids, tarsiers, and anthropoids would hang by a nose, but this is not true. As reviewed in popular books like Chris Beard's The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey and technical volumes like Anthropoid Origins, the relationship between omomyids, tarsiers, and anthropoids is based upon a wide array of fossil and neontological data. I can't imagine why the authors of the new paper would suggest otherwise unless they were trying to construct a false historiography in order to show their fossil in a better light.

This shoddy scholarship is matched by a weak attempt to show that Darwinius has more anthropoid-like traits than tarsiers or omomyids do. In order for the authors of the paper to make a convincing case they would have to undertake a careful, systematic analysis of the anatomy of Darwinius in comparison to other primates, yet they did not do this. Instead they combed the literature for 30 traits that might help ascertain the placement of Darwinius in the primate family tree and filled in whether each trait was present or absent in Ida's skeleton.

From what has been presented in the popular press, the authors claim that there are two primary traits that more closely link Darwinius to anthropoids. It appears that Ida did not have a tooth comb (a set of forward-facing incisors) or a grooming claw (a special claw on the foot), two characteristics of living lemurs and lorises (strepsirrhine primates). Since anthropoids lack these traits, too, the authors suggest a close connection, but they have not sufficiently shown that Darwinius is not just showing a case of convergence.

What the authors do, then, is a little tricky. They say that Darwinius (and hence other adapids) are haplorrhine primates, the group that presently contains tarsiers and anthropoids. By moving the adapids into the haplorrhine group they can then make the claim that anthropoids evolved from the adapid stem and not tarsiers or omomyids. The problem is that they are using just one genus, Darwinius, to change the placement of an entire group without using any cladistic analysis! This is not good science.

The bottom line is that the hypothesis that Darwinius is closer to anthropoids than tarsiers or omomyids does not have strong support. Even though the authors of the paper constructed a very simple cladogram they did not undertake a full, rigorous cladistic analysis to support their claims. I am baffled as to how they could stress the significance of this fossil without undertaking the requisite research to support their hypothesis.

Is Darwinius important to understanding primate evolution? Of course! It is an exceptionally preserved specimen that could do much to aid our understanding of adapid evolution and paleobiology. The grand claims about it being our ancestor, though, can not be upheld as true. The researchers simply did not do the work to support their case, and even if their language was more reserved in the technical paper they have gone hand-in-hand with the History Channel to create an aura of sensationalism around the fossil. I hardly think this is a responsible way to conduct or communicate science, flooding the media with poorly supported claims, but as reported in the New York Times some of this paper's authors care more about marketing than about good science;

"Any pop band is doing the same thing," said Jorn H. Hurum, a scientist at the University of Oslo who acquired the fossil and assembled the team of scientists that studied it. "Any athlete is doing the same thing. We have to start thinking the same way in science."

This is a shame. I would have hoped that this fossil would receive the care and attention it deserves, but for now it looks like a cash cow for the History Channel. Indeed, this association may not have only presented overblown claims to the public, but hindered good science, as well. As Karen James has suggested, the overall poor quality of the paper and the disproportionate hyping of the find make me wonder if this research was rushed into publication so that the media splash would occur on time. The paper tried to cover so much, so quickly, and contained so many shortfalls that I honestly have to wonder why it was allowed to be published in such a state. Perhaps we will never know, but I am sickened by the way in which a cable network has bastardized a legitimately fascinating scientific discovery, with the scientists themselves going along with it every step of the way. I can only hope that Darwinius will eventually receive the careful analysis it deserves.