Posts Tagged ‘fossil record’

In this last week’s issue of Science, researchers present two remarkably complete and well-preserved partial skeletons of a species called Australopithecus sediba discovered 3 years ago in a South African cave. The new report extended a flurry of spinning speculations on the possible human “missing link” status of A. sediba.

National Public Radio (NPR) ran an article entitled “Examining Ancient Fossils for Clues to Human Origins”. The Wall Street Journal chimed in with “Fossil Trove Sheds Light on a Stage of Evolution”. The Boston Globe speculated with the title “Skeleton could be human relative”; TIME with “Rethinking Human Origins: Fossils Reveal a New Ancestor on the Family Tree”. Contniue Reading

On the 2012 presidential campaign tour in New Hampshire, the current Republican front-runner, Texas Governor Rick Perry, set off a media firestorm  responding to a question from a boy as prompted by his mother about the age of the Earth and evolution.

“I hear your mom was asking about evolution,” Perry said. “That’s a theory that is out there — and it’s got some gaps in it.” Continue Reading

After taxing on the runway for years, the fossil record flight is finally off the ground. Over the past 150 years, since the publication of The Origin of Species, paleontologists have passionately searched the planet, and beyond, for evidence in the fossil record to document the evolution life. The flight is now in the air with the all the fossil record evidence available to document the history of life on the Earth safe and secure in the plane’s cargo-hold.

Fossils provide the only relevant evidence validate the history of life on Earth. Nicholas J Butterfield, of Cambridge University explains –

Fossils provide the only direct record of ancient life.

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Gerd B Műller, one of the Altenberg-16 and Professor and Department Head Department of Theoretical Biology, University of Vienna & Konrad Lorenz Institute, in the book entitled Evolution, the Extended Synthesis (2010) published by The MIT Press, explains today’s theoretical evolutionary problem with the evidence from the Cambrian Explosion—extinction, not evolution.

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For Charles Darwin, natural selection was the key natural law driving evolution, as reflected in the title, On the Origin of Species, by Means of Natural Selection. Natural selection was envisioned as the mechanism for the origin of species—evolution.

Darwin declared – “I do believe that natural selection will generally act very slowly, only over long periods of time…. natural selection acts slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations.” In essence, natural selection was simply founded on a belief.

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At the time of the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, the topic of evolution was “in the air”, according to Charles Darwin, all 1,250 printed copies of the book were sold on the first day. The Origin of Species delivered a state of evolution critique on other popular theories.

In the nineteenth century, critiques on theories of evolution raged all the way into the chambers of the British Parliament. To resolve the debate the Parliament commissioned of the HMS Challenger, the largest international expedition ever convened, with the task of finding Darwin’s theoretical “innumerable” transitional links.

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“On the Imperfection of the Geological Record” is the title of Chapter 10 in The Origin of Species. The fossil record has been as a problem for evolution, then and now.

Stressing the importance of the fossil record to the theory of evolution Charles Darwin wrote – “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ exists which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

Evidence for these “numerous, successive, slight modifications” in the fossil record remains a cornerstone to establish scientifically the theory of evolution. Darwin recognized, however, that the fossil record, “not being blended together by innumerable transitional links is a very obvious difficulty.”

Since 1859, the unsuccessful search through the fossil record for the expected intermediate or transitional links has produced a legacy of fraud. Continue Reading

In the December 26^th CBS 60 Minutes news segment, reporter Leslie Stahl in the story “B-REX” interviewed paleontologists Jack Horner in Montana, Mary Schweitzer in North Carolina, and Sean Carroll in Wisconsin on the B-rex discoveries.

B-rex is actually a Tyrannosaurus rex, otherwise known as T-rex, found in Montana and the fossil was re-named after Bob Harmon, the chief preparator of paleontology Museum of the Rockies in Montana. The primary interest in B-rex centered on the discovery soft-tissue and blood vessels in the estimated 68-million-year-old dinosaur.

Since this medullary tissue in the bone marrow is similar to birds, speculations on the evolution of dinosaur to bird once again emerged in the prime time media. The original report was published in the March 25, 2005, issue of the journal Science was entitled “Gender-Specific Reproductive Tissue in Ratites and Tyrannosaurus rex”.

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In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin envisioned that “natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations; it can produce no great or sudden modifications.”

Since 1859, the search for Darwin’s “slight, successive” accumulated actions of natural selection has become a driving scientific and societal phenomenon. In 1872, the British Parliament commissioned the HMS Challenger for first international exploration to discover the “missing links” resulting from natural selection.

Like the HMS Challenger experience, evidence for “slight, successive” evolutionary changes continues to be an elusive pursuit—in the fossil record and now in molecular biology. Darwin’s dilemma deepens with the latest evidence from the Denisova caves in Russia.

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Often called the most important scientific book ever, Charles Lyell‘s Principles of Geology published in three volumes from 1830-33, shook prevailing views of how Earth had been formed.

Lyle challenged the premise that the history of the Earth has experienced supernatural and catastrophes events, including Noah’s flood as documented in Genesis. Ironically, Lyell was a graduate of Exeter College, a Catholic institution.

The frontispiece image illustrates the main point of the book: that evidence of the forces of geological change that have been shaping Earth for millennia is observable today—”the present is the key to the past”. The temple columns, with their high-water marks were the evidence Lyell used to propose that the sea levels had changed gradually several times. Continue Reading