This is all nonsense!
God made us all in the year 0000 and nothing else. If you don't believe you will be castigated and shunned by all.
Boffins find RAT-SIZED bug-muncher links man to beast
The missing link between man and beast is a ancient rat-like creature that preceded all placental mammals - a group that encompasses both whales and humans. Artist's rendering of placental mammal ancestor Boffins have figured out that primates and dinosaurs did not co-exist, as the mammal ancestors didn't start …
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Monday 11th February 2013 02:48 GMT Grikath
Re: So,,,
It didn't evolve from thin air, nor does this research suggest so. It shows that our "genetic record" shows independent from palaeoarcheology that there was a *massive* pinch in genetic diversity just after the dinosaurs went extinct, and that all placental mammals in existence nowadays are most likely descended from a single species that happened to survive that particularly brutal mass-extinction.
It is not unlike hunting down your family tree just mapping the male line: Eventually you will find that someone used the name first, and as such is your first ancestor. That doesn't mean he was alone in the world, and appeared out of thin air. It simply means there was an event at that time that caused that particular family name to come into existence.
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Friday 8th February 2013 19:17 GMT Lars
Re: No peaceful co-existence...
Did you forget Sarah Palin, with her status in the GOP, you are wrong forever.
"figured out decades ago" true, but if we never repeat was was figured out decades ago we would soon be back in the stone ages again. Think of all the children. 2 + 2 = 4 why repeat such an obvious thing.
Trying to be a bit serious, however, this report only tries to add support, scientific support, If you like, to what we have, based on archeology.
What makes me happy, however, is that those poor souls, who had such a problem in their soul with the idea that we are ancestors to apes, can now relax (for ever, I hope).
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Tuesday 12th February 2013 14:42 GMT P. Lee
Re: No peaceful co-existence...
Evolution and Maths are not anywhere in the same league of scientific thinking.
The point about 2+2 is that you get the same result, no matter the scenario in which you make the calculation. Maths is repeatable and predictable, so you can use that property in many disciplines.
Evolution (as the article notes), is non-repeatable and its based on randomness. That means that 2+2 doesn't exist in evolution. Unlike 2+2=5, evolution isn't falsifiable because you can never repeat the operation. The "Tree of Life" provides no tools for determining from the roots what will appear closer to the leaves and no tools for determining what was at the roots from looking at the leaves.
I'm not sure what the point of calling evolution "science" is. In physics you can calculate how much force you need to move a lever. You can use the same calculation to determine the result from lever-usage in a wide variety of applications. In chemistry you can blow things up by mixing particular chemicals and with biology you can see what happens when you run an electric current through frogs legs, or how to do a quadruple heart-bypass. I'm not sure how evolution helps us, perhaps it is a "leaf" on the "Tree of Science." Massive numbers of variations on theories, few predictable results... sounds as scientific as psychology to me!
I understand that reading out the paper from the article in a British school may now be illegal, since it is the law that you must teach that evolution is "well evidenced" and the paper points out that the fossils are missing. I'm not sure if Maths benefits from an actual law that says that Pythagoras' theorem is true or if students are allowed to work out the proof for themselves. In my day, "proof by contradiction" was an established procedure, but it appears that its now illegal to even consider such things. This isn't science, this is religion.
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Saturday 9th February 2013 04:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Boffins have figured out that primates and dinosaurs did not co-exist,"
http://creationmuseum.org/
See people, co-existing side by side with vegetarian tyranasaurus rex dinosaurs......
It's a brilliant bullshit scam.
http://creationmuseum.org/whats-here/exhibits/#dinosaur-den
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Museum
Among its exhibits, the museum features life-size dinosaur models, over 80 of them animatronic (animated and motion-sensitive). Model dinosaurs are depicted in the Garden of Eden, many of them side-by-side with human figures.[34] In one exhibit, a Triceratops and a Stegosaurus are shown aboard a scale model of Noah's Ark.[1][35]
Satan: "Damn - they forgot to invent me."
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Monday 11th February 2013 04:24 GMT P. Lee
Re: "Boffins have figured out that primates and dinosaurs did not co-exist,"
I take it you didn't read the actual article.
That's a rat-like thing that "scampers," a small vertebrate which eats insects, that you are looking at in the pictures. I'd be somewhat surprised if they didn't find that in the fossil record.
Oh wait, they *didn't* find it in the fossil record. In fact, they said that although the fossil record for their area is relatively good, it doesn't support the hypothesis and expectations of more "scientific" methods, so they are going to use "big data" to create an animal. It probably took them more than 6 days, but they didn't say.
Contrary to what el reg says, the notes (fig 2 for tl;dr) make it quite clear that they made it all up. The skeleton, the reproductive system, the brain in the diagrams are all fake.
You may wish to check the supports for your mockery before, er, going out on a limb...
*Is "fake" a bit harsh? Ok, the diagrams and the creature is real, but only in the same way that the tall, blue aliens on Pandora are real.
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Monday 11th February 2013 00:19 GMT Steven Roper
The thing I find most fascinating about evolution
is this: I look at my Dad and see a man similar to myself. Then there's his father - my grandfather, who was a sergeant-major and tank commander in North Africa in WWII. Then his father, who was a coal miner who lived in Wales.
And so on, and so on, following father to father, back through the centuries. Ask yourself this: Who was your direct line ancestor at the time of Shakespeare? Or the time of William the Conqueror? Charlemagne? Julius Caesar? Hammurabi? During the times of each of these historical figures, there existed a man who had a son who had a son which eventually led directly to me. Who was he? What was he like? What did he do with his life? These are questions we've all asked at some point in our lives.
Now keep going back - into the time of the Cro-Magnons, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Australopithecus. 3 million years ago, there existed a hominid ape who had a son who had a son which eventually led directly to me.
Finally, as we go back through the millions of years, this patrilineal trail leads to completely non-human creatures - cynodonts like the "ratlike" creature described in the article, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and finally stromatolites and pond slime. Somewhere in Earth's distant past, billions of years ago in the warm salty waters of the Proterozoic, there existed a stromatolite who had an offspring who had an offspring which eventually led directly to me.
I'd love to travel back in time and meet one of these creatures and say to it, "Hi great-something-granddad, how's the nesting these days?" The idea that the vast majority of my lineage, from the first organisms on Earth, is non-human, is something I find absolutely fascinating.
It makes me wonder: At what point did my ancestors "become" human - human enough for, say, a modern woman, to mate with them and conceive a child? Obviously this wouldn't be possible with an australopithecine man-ape, most likely not even with H. erectus or habilis, so at what point would it become possible?
It leads to an interesting paradox; evolution occurs so slowly that, if you can mate with the offspring, you can mate with the parent - yet at some time in the past, there existed an ancestor with whom mating would no longer produce offspring. Where does this "break" occur?
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Monday 11th February 2013 03:45 GMT Charles Manning
Those caught up in pondering...
People often think of evolution acting gradually and linearly. I really does not happen that way at all.
One of the interesting things that came out of genetic algorithms (eg. see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcAq9bmCeR0 at 8:08) is that the evolution tends to work in "ages" during which there is slow evolution and transition between the ages during which there is fast evolution.
During an 'age" you could likely reproduce with a near relative (eg. you could happily reproduce with someone from 5000 years - 250 generations - back), but at the transitions you would not be able to go back so far (eg perhaps only 20 or 50 generations).
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Monday 11th February 2013 04:42 GMT P. Lee
Re: The thing I find most fascinating about evolution
My understanding is that the empirical evidence suggests the break is so close as to pretty much preclude inter-species mating.
The offspring from a male donkey and female horse is sterile. Sheep and goats don't really work either.
Lions and tigers can (in a zoo due to habitat), but they are both big cats.
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Monday 11th February 2013 04:55 GMT cortland
Re: The thing I find most fascinating about evolution
I recall reading that species biologists draw the species line not at species that >cannot< reproduce with each other, but at species that *do not* reproduce with each other.
Which explains some species of fanatics, bigots ... and politicians.
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Monday 11th February 2013 18:40 GMT Michael Wojcik
Primates and dinosaurs did not coexist?!!
I shall never be able to watch Land of the Lost Again.
Of course, I was never able to watch it prior to reading this article, either.
On another note: I quite like the phrase "radiation of placentals". The next time someone asks me how I acquired my superpowers, I'll tell 'em I was exposed to unsafe levels of placental-mammal radiation.
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Tuesday 19th February 2013 15:28 GMT YetAnotherBob
Article Has Problems
So, the ancestor of all placental mammals arose around 36 Million Years after the end of the dinosaurs. Lets see now. dinosaurs ended around 65 Million years ago. 65-36 = 29 Million Years ago for the common ancestor of all placental mammals. That puts it at roughly the same time as the origins of the horse, the elephant and the whales in the fossil record. Primate skeletons that date to roughly 60 Million years ago have been found. Were these not then placental mammals?
Nope, sorry, don't buy it. Something is wrong with their model. Perhaps they are using the same model that the climate people are are using. You know, the Hockey Stick one that proves we all cooked to death last year.
If their model is true, what am I to make of the fossil teeth of rats and opossums that are found in layers with dinosaurs? Perhaps they were sneaked in by the folks in the Kentucky museum?
This whole fascination with computer models and reliance on them to the exclusion of evidence is very troubling for me. I remember the late 1960s when power company employees routinely told customers with errors on their bills that 'Computers don't make mistakes'. We learned that in reality computers make every mistake they are told to make.
The folks who did this are in error. Time to find the error in the program. Am I the only one who finds debugging a real pain?
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
