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419-million-year-old fish fossil resolves 'missing link' in evolution
- narfquat 13y agoDoes that look like a turtle shark to anyone else? Awesome.
- cclogg 13y agoMakes a prediction that there'll be a movie soon involving a group of partiers on vacation who get slowly gobbled up by this fish (It'll be in 3D too)
- anonymous 13y agoYou were thrilled by SHARKNADO. Now get ready. To experience a new terror. Coming from 419 million years ago, it rises one last time to swallow you whole! It's the ANCIENSHARK!!!!!111eleven Yes, I know it's not a shark, but really - who would go to see the ancient not-shark fish that just sits there with a dumb look on its face? In the end they cook it and eat it. Then the sequel is that the people who ate the ancient fish start evolving into Neanderthals (sharkderthals?) IN 3D
- easytiger 13y ago> A team of scientists, including an Australian, Crikey, an Australian scientist. Whatever next
- agilebyte 13y agoIt sounded weird at first, but it is a website from Australia and I guess the news agency feels proud.
- erre 13y agoI assume they specifically mentioned it because it's an Australian website. But upvote, because LOL :D
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mambodog 13y agoThis is an Australian news website (run by the publicly funded national broadcaster), hence the need to tie in with an Australian angle.
- nwh 13y agoWe do this thing quite a lot actually. Most news articles that are positive will try to have some tie in with Australia to make it relevant to the readers. Maybe the bolts used to tie together the worlds highest balloon ride are made by an Australian company; they literally get as tenuous as that at times.
- JacobAldridge 13y agoI'll skip another 'Welcome to journalism' comment, and instead observe that an Australian scientist may actually be surprising news under the new government there! http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/09/20/tony_abbott_nixes_australia_s_science_minister_post_cuts_climate_change.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/09/20/tony_abbo...
- username42 13y agohow many times have we resolved the missing link ? Damn ! I should shut up, I will lose all my karma.
- tetha 13y agoIt's probably like software development. "We fixed that bug, yay!" "But now theres 5 bugs instead of one, what the hell?!" "Well those are different bugs. Do you want them fixed, too?" "AAAAAaah."
- praptak 13y ago99 bugs in our code, 99 bugs in our code. Look one up, mark it as fixed. 103 bugs in our code, 103 bugs in our code...
- lifeisstillgood 13y agowonderful - can we call it the infinite bugs song?
- mcguire 13y agoThis is the advantage of programming over biology: when someone finds a "missing link", they only create two more opportunities to find more missing links. When a programmer fixes a bug, they can introduce an arbitrary number of new bugs.
- redact207 13y ago419-million-year-old fish resolves 'missing link' in evolution. Two new missing links now created. (creationist logic)
- papa_bear 13y agoDoes it make the earliest known organism that had a jaw, or are there instances of jaws evolving independently in other lineages (other than insects)?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mcguire 13y agoI believe jawed fishes are just the ancestors of vertebrates (with jaws). Everybody else is on their own, chewing-wise.
- styluss 13y agoStop me if you think you've heard this one before
- alan_cx 13y agoThis is way, way out of my knowledge, but... Is the term "Missing link" actually useful? Seems to me that what we keep doing is create more "missing links" with each discovery in the chain. We are sort of filling in gaps created each time we, er, find more missing links. In a 1000 years, we'll still be finding missing links until the whole thing is perfectly mapped out, if that is possible.
- quchen 13y agoThere's the Creationist "missing link", and then there's the one used by sane people. A biological missing link would for example be if we didn't have Archaeopteryx. It's true that this of course creates two new gaps in the evolutionary chain, but those aren't as annoying as the big gap before :-)
- rorrr2 13y ago"Missing link" is not a scientific term, there's no such thing in evolution. It's only really used by creationists now. Every fossil and organism is transitional, including us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossil#Missing_links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossil#Missing_lin...
- xophe 13y agoAlso out of my knowledge, but the hypothesized tree of evolution contains only distinct species AFAIK. A true missing link would be an intermediate stage, like catching the first fish with legs as it adapts to land. Fish with wings aren't interesting because they are an (extant) species in their own right. It's like catching someone on a layover -- you're very clearly in the middle of two stable (but distinct) spots. But you don't spend much time there -- which is why it's been so tough to find.
- xophe 13y agoAlso inb4 Futurama fans start complaining about the endless "chain" of evolution. It's not that simple -- similarity does not imply inheritance.
- onion2k 13y agoAn armoured fish? Like... a fish tank? Thank you. I'm here all week. Try the placoderm.
- millerm 13y agoThanks for the chuckle. :-)
- sjwright 13y agoAha, but they haven't found any fossils that bridge the missing link between this new Placoderm and the ones we already knew about. If evolution were true, we'd have found those fossils as well! All science can do is continually and conclusively prove that science doesn't have all the answers. My holy book has the correct answers, I know because the book tells me it does. Therefore it trumps science. Sadly, there will be millions of people who will think exactly this.
- lostlogin 13y agoI hope it is only millions...
- bigfoot13442 13y agoThe last thing I want to do is start a flame war, but I don't see anyone on here criticizing you for putting your faith in science. I would like to have thought that the Hacker News community would be above unwarranted comments such as this.
- sjwright 13y agoShort of actually taking the first two paragraphs literally, I don't think you could have misunderstood the point of my post more. And no, I don't put faith in science. Faith means belief without evidence. I accept science. I acknowledge that scientists are human, and that humans can be fallible, corrupt, egotistical and plain old stupid. And I admire the Scientific Method for doing an excellent job of counteracting most of our human failings.
- bigfoot13442 13y agoThe definition of faith is, "Complete trust or confidence in someone or something". It has nothing to do with whether or not there is evidence supporting the thing you have faith in.
- sjwright 13y ago
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- twox 13y agoIs your religion compatible with evolution? I'm curious to know what makes intelligent developers believe in the religion.
- ehsanu1 13y agoI think Islam is compatible with evolution, though many Muslims would beg to differ. There is some notion of God having a hand in designing humans, but that is worked around easily enough by assuming either extremely high precision in initial conditions of the universe or allowing for strategically placed genetic mutations and such. Clearly unfalsifiable, but it this isn't science, or any sort of proof, but just a lack of contradiction with science. Note, this doesn't mean I believe everything in Islam is the one and only truth.
- gjm11 13y agoPretty much any religion is compatible with evolution. Some of them have needed (appropriately enough) to adapt a bit, but there are (e.g.) lots and lots and lots of people who accept both Christianity and evolution. (The US is very unusual in having so much creationism despite a reasonable overall level of scientific literacy.) But could we please not turn this thread into an argument about religion? There are plenty of those on the internet already. The science is interesting enough in its own right.
- twox 13y agoYou are right. I should not start talking about the topic. Thanks.
- bigfoot13442 13y agoI'll assume your question was not meant to sound condescending (because I don't think it was). Christianity, in its purest form, is not compatible with evolution. Christianity believes that the Bible is the infallible word of God and therefore is complete truth. The Bible says the world and everything in it was created in 6 days and so is incompatible with evolution. That being said, there are lots of denominations of Christianity that have accepted evolution by "reading between the lines" of the creation story and assuming things that are not there. Catholicism, for example has made an official statement (by the Pope) that there are no incompatibilities between the two. But, your question and the statement that follows are not related. I am not a Christian because I don't believe in evolution. The converse is also true; the reason I don't believe in evolution is not because I am a Christian. I am a Christian simply because I believe there has to be something more to this life. I am a Christian because having hope that someday everything that has happened here on Earth will someday be worth it is what makes me get out of bed in the morning. I couldn't imagine going through life believing that this is all there is. IMO it would be a miserable and mundane existence if there was no purpose to life. (And yes, I do consider myself an intelligent developer)
- joshuahedlund 13y ago> the fossil's jaw looks a lot like those of modern fish... She says this shows the Placoderm to be the ancestors of modern fish. Admittedly skeptical layman here... but is that really enough evidence to draw that conclusion with that much certainty? Or is there more unreported context?
- sigzero 13y agoNo, not really. Since it isn't observational it is best guess.
- Jugurtha 13y agoIt looks like a 'shurtle': The product of breeding a shark with a turtle. I can see the ad campaign right there: "Darwin's Whiskey, one night stands before it was cool". Or "Influencing evolution since way back". (With a picture of a shark and a turtle the morning after, with a "What have I done" expression).
- celias 13y agoLook for Shurtlenado on the Syfy network this fall
- JonFish85 13y agoNo matter how many "missing links" are found, the die-hard fundamentalists will find a way to ask for more. I've grown up in that environment. There are discrete jumps in fossils; unless you can find a complete lineage from "a rock to a walking-talking human", no True Christian will even waver for a minute. On top of that, I hate the term "missing link" because it immediately means that science is catering to these fundamentalists. It's another fossil, it fills in some previously extrapolated part of the graph. Great! But let's not play on religious turf, because there's no way to win there.
- NN88 13y agoWell you really can't blame them. They literally don't know what they're talking about. If I have 5 items, there are 4 spaces between them. If I add a 6th item, then there are...5 spaces between them. They'll always move the goal posts because they don't understand the mechanism you're trying to explain.
- bitwize 13y agoNo matter how many "missing links" are found, the die-hard fundamentalists will find a way to ask for more. I've grown up in that environment. There are discrete jumps in fossils; unless you can find a complete lineage from "a rock to a walking-talking human", no True Christian will even waver for a minute. Nope. instead it will cement his beliefs that there is a sinister plot to weave a web of lies concealing the fact that Gawhd the Awlmighty created heaven and earth in seven literal twenty-four hour days. I remember seeing a lecture by a Creationist "biologist" who said that in the late 1970s he looked at the old edition of an "evolution textbook" and the brand-new edition. In the old edition it said they didn't know what the link between modern cetaceans and their land-based ancestors was; the new edition claimed to have found such a link. And this was PROOF that they were lying. I went onto Wikipedia and looked up when the fossils of early flippered cetaceans were discovered. Sure enough, it was 1979, in Pakistan. In short, because Christian "knowledge" is circumscribed and explains everything, it is obviously correct. Because science is incomplete and has gaps that haven't yet been empirically filled in, it's obviously Satan's lies.
- JRobertson 13y ago
- taybin 13y agoNow there are two missing links.
- jcmoscon 13y agoAll you guys are developers and you know how hard it is to develop a computer system. Our body has multiple systems running in perfect harmony. And all the animals has it too. The solar system with all the massive planets spinning with an unbelievable precision that we can calculate where a planet will be in 10.000 years from now. And they are travelling around the universe and you think now body is in charge? Somebody very very intelligent designed all this. And most of you hope that God does not exists because He left commandments that we not follow and He will judge each and everyone of us and because of that men hate God.
- vinceguidry 13y agoHe sure took his sweet time.
- vinceguidry 13y agoAddendum: There's an argument here about Intelligent Design that I thought I should elaborate on. High intelligence tends to slow down your perception of time, in a manner of speaking. Low intelligence humans can persist at drudge jobs long enough to make a career out of them, but high intelligence people will eventually find something more interesting to do. So Intelligent Design states that something incredibly smarter than us front-loaded a ginormous amount of design work such that after the big bang, billions of years later, we'd emerge, like clockwork, no continuing intervention required. Where'd it go? What's it doing? If you want to dislodge evolution as a directionless force, and avoid Occam's Razor, you need to account for this intelligence somehow, because evolution already describes a reality in which it's not necessary.
- jlgreco 13y agoYou might as well say "bored teenagers like to light things on fire. Teenagers bored for very long times like to start very large fires. Therefore the fact that the sun is a massive nuclear inferno is evidence that it was created by an incredibly bored teenager." Of course there is no evidence for this bored teenager, so making guesses as to the circumstances, motivation, and mental functioning of this teenager that could cause him to light up a nuclear inferno is just silly.
- leokun 13y agoToday on HN: posts about missing links in evolution and rants about global warming reports. Wonderful.
- jlgreco 13y agoIt is unfortunate that biology news has the capacity to cause such a shitstorm. Imagine if this sort of thing happened every time there was a new article about NASA discovering some new property of Saturn or something. I guess we should be thankful that most religious have only chosen biology as a good place for a last stand in defense of a "God of the Gaps". Science discussion would be far shittier if they did this to every biology and chemistry discussion...
- npsimons 13y agoArguably, the religious have chosen to pick on other sciences. Climate science, for instance. Hence, the GP's comment.
- jlgreco 13y agoMaybe, is that really a religion thing though?
- nitrogen 13y agoSadly, yes. I've heard of some who believe that nothing man can do can possibly damage or destroy Earth before it's time for Armageddon, because man is unimaginably weaker than Earth's creator. Or, who believe that Earth was made for man, and thus will always have enough resources and never become inhospitable.
- brudgers 13y agoRichard Dawkins' The Ancestors Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life is an accessible account of evolutionary biology and goes to great lengths to disabuse even a sloppy reader of the popular [pre-genetic sequencing] notions of "missing links." Evolution suggests that creatures in similar environments are somewhat likely to develop similar adaptations without one species being the ancestor of the other. From a scientific standpoint the claim that modern fish are descendents of the extinct Placoderms is neither falsifiable nor for practical purposes verifiable - DNA simply does not survive that long. Sparrows and bats have a common ancestor but it is improbable that it had wings. Or to put it another way, the rationalist's notion of a missing link as expounded in the headline is as dependent upon the logic of the Great Chain of Being as that of an Ussherian creationist - their disagreement is large, but mainly resides in what constitutes the relevant details of a teleological account and the criteria for acceptance is the plausibility of the account to the individual and the intellectual communities to which they belong.
- the_watcher 13y ago>>Sparrows and bats have a common ancestor but it is improbable that it had wings. Isn't this a required truth of evolution (not necessarily these animals, but the concept) - that humans and centipedes (or sharks, or dogs, or pigeons, or mushrooms, etc.) all have a common ancestor if you could trace evolution with perfect accuracy back to the beginning of time? Sparrows and bats, being birds and mammals, respectively, would likely have a common ancestor with less in common between the two than sparrows and pigeons or bats and ferrets, correct? I'm no expert in evolutionary science beyond the basics, so correct me if I am wrong. I read your comment to suggest that evolution does not require any sort of "missing link," which I don't know enough to talk about.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> Isn't this a required truth of evolution (not necessarily these animals, but the concept) - that humans and centipedes (or sharks, or dogs, or pigeons, or mushrooms, etc.) all have a common ancestor if you could trace evolution with perfect accuracy back to the beginning of time? No, its not a "required truth of evolution". Evolution works just fine if you have life arising independently in multiple places. Universal common descent was among the hypotheses Darwin proposed in The Origin of Species, but its certainly been challenged many times without the basics of evolution being challenged; I think it is part of the current scientific consensus based on the available evidence, but its not at all necessary to evolution.
- _of 13y agoThe actual paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12617.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
- contingencies 13y agoThis was discovered in Yunnan, the southwesternmost province of China that is already well known for its fossil record, both in terms of early ocean life and humans. Just last year they discovered what appears to be an entirely new species of hominid[1]. I lived in Yunnan for 5 years and really fell in love with the place, which is surrounded by Tibet, Burma, Laos and Vietnam and is China's most biologically, climatically, culturally, historically and linguistically diverse province. Despite a near total lack of credentials, I'm currently writing a long form history of Yunnan for a general audience from prehistory through near-present in English, as a fun long term side project. I'm also an Australian. Australians have been involved in many other studies in the area, such as historical water level studies of the region's impressively large alpine lakes. Kew Gardens in London also collaborate with the province on a shared long term global seed bank project. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Deer_Cave_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Deer_Cave_people
- snowwrestler 13y agoIt resolves a missing link in the history of life, not evolution. The latter term is often used to mean the former, but I think that's a bad idea. It's confusing to people without a good understanding of the distinction. Evolution, the scientific theory of how life changes over time, does not depend on the fossil record for its validity. It's trivially easy to study with living animals; thousands of undergraduates do it every semester with fruit flies.