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A tiny sea creature is the earliest known step in humans’ evolutionary history
- bluetwo 10y agoThe cynic in me has doubts whenever Chinese scientists claim China is home to the missing link.
- eliben 10y agoI imagine if this was discovered in, say, Argentina, then there'd be a good chance of some Argentinian scientist participating in the discovery. Call it the anthropic principle of archeology :)
- handedness 10y agoI can't speak for the GP, but one might make a reasonable distinction between the reliability of findings that come out of Argentina as they compare to those from China. Edit: Someone doesn't appreciate this comment. Astute professional analysts the world over know that official figures that come out of China are among the least reliable on the planet. And while scientific misconduct is not unheard of anywhere, China's hardly a shining example in that regard. Lastly, good Chinese research agencies themselves are having a difficult time keeping up with numerous bad actors who are doing their best to fraudulently publish papers. This isn't xenophobia, it's a fair appraisal of the sometimes inconsistent qualities of the world's societies.
- jsnathan 10y agoWhat kind of misconduct? There is a big difference, for example, between plagiarism and fabricating results. And which percentage of the researchers are involved in this? 1%? 0.1%? 0.01%? Do you have any studies you could link to that in any way quantify this? China's research spending and number of research articles produced today is second only to the U.S. There are always going to be some bad apples among that many researchers. That should in no way discredit the rest of the profession.
- webmaven 10y agoLast year, 80% of the applications for new pharmaceuticals in China were found to contain fabricated, flawed, or inadequate clinical trial data: http://www.sciencealert.com/80-of-the-data-in-chinese-clinical-trial-is-fabricated http://www.sciencealert.com/80-of-the-data-in-chinese-clinic...
- bluetwo 10y agoWell put.
- lyle_nel 10y agoI don't see them claiming to have found the missing link. In any regard, biologists are unlikely to use the term 'missing link' since it implies evolution is discontinuous, which is a common mistake the layman makes.
- coldtea 10y agoYay, 'Murica!
- NamTaf 10y agoWhat I find fascinating about this is that humans and many other branches of the tree are Deuterostomes[1], which means that when the cells first divide the first 'hole' goes on to form the anus [2], rather than the mouth. This is in contrast to the Protostomes where the first hole forms the mouth. I mean obviously it makes sense that a single-holed animal used it as a mouth - the anus has no use without the mouth - but (in my naive understanding) it means that somewhere beyond this ancestor, certain groups of vertibrates split and went in opposite directions despite both being (presumably) decended from this thing. It fascinates me that there was some mechanism to cause this, rather than all animals forming in the same order, if we did indeed share a common ancestor that only had one entry/exit hole. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterostome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterostome [2]: The clever observer will note that this means that technically, very early on, each of us is little more than an arsehole ;)
- kkylin 10y agoI presume that by "vertebraes" you mean "vertebrates"? All vertebrates are actually deuterostomes (see the Wikipedia page [1]), as are echinoderms (sea urchins, sea stars, etc). Insects, etc., are protostomes, meaning "mouth first" (though apparently there is some debate about that, see references at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protostome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protostome ). Vast majority of animals fall into one of these two groups, though not all, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnidaria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnidaria . Anyway, quite agree this is a fascinating discovery!
- NamTaf 10y agoYes I did, sorry. Thanks! Edited to fix that. I was of the understanding that some vertibrates were protostomes, but it appears I'm mistaken! Maybe this wasn't a common ancestor then, though it still begs the question how it went from one hole being a mouth/anus combo to a deuterostome.
- kkylin 10y agoProbably no way to know if this critter is an ancestor of ours. Though I'm not a biologist, as far as I know the question you pose remains a mystery...
- abbiya 10y agoIt looks like chest breaker from alien
- astannard 10y agoA heard about this, it has a large mouth that it excretes though. I know a lot of humans that still do that