Frog-Amander Transitional Fossil Found

Found via Livescience.

A frog-like creature with a stubby tail once paddled through a quiet pond in what is now Texas, snapping up mayflies while keeping an ear out for bellowing mates, new fossil evidence suggests.
That was about 290 million years ago.

In 1995, the amphibian specimen was discovered in fish quarry sediments in Baylor County, Texas, though it wasn't until recently that paleontologists inspected and described the new species. Called Gerobatrachus hottoni after its discoverer Nicholas Hotton, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution, the creature represents a transitional amphibian, sporting features of both frogs and salamanders.

"This amphibian is from near to the point where frogs and salamanders first split," said lead researcher Jason Anderson, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Calgary in Canada. "This is kind of an early frog-amander."

The finding, detailed in this week's issue of the journal Nature, supports the idea that frogs and salamanders evolved from one ancient amphibian group called temnospondyls.

Like modern salamanders, the fossil of Gerobatrachus has two fused bones in its ankle. And like modern frogs, the frog-amander sports a large ear drum, or tympanic ear, which Anderson said the ancient amphibian likely used for hearing calls from mates.

A "Just So" Story About Cultural Evolution

Lately a lot of people have been questioning why humans didn't get together sooner and start a civilization. I have countered this by asking why African tribes haven't independently invented a microwave. I think both of these questions, when seriously pondered, reveal their own answer.

My hypothesis is this:

Imagine thousands of human tribes scattered all over the earth. Each speaks a different language and keeps to itself. Now imagine one "tribe" which can communicate easily within itself, with all people intermingling and exchanging information. Which one is better?

The latter. Think about someone like Thomas Edison, Galileo, or Stephen Hawking. The entire Universal "tribe" benefits from those very, very rare geniuses who come along and share their insight with the rest of us. Instead of a single, small tribe gaining their insight (and possibly losing it or not recognizing its worth!), everyone can benefit. We benefit from countless intellectuals who would belong to another "tribe" if we were more divided.This brings me to the origins of civilization: What happened to us, when we were living in small tribes that made us settle down and begin agriculture? I suggest that primitive tribes had to "wait" - for lack of a better word- for someone who thought indepently enough, could organize others well enough, and was viewed as powerful enough within the tribe to persuade others to settle down for a life of agriculture. Even then there were no guarantees: Several of these proto-farming tribes may have started up and gone extinct before one managed to stay around.

Once the right one managed to survive and handle itself, the intellectual abilities of the tribe grew by leaps and bounds. The population grew, and every generation or two someone would be born who could teach the tribe something; a slightly more complex form of language or a new farming technique, for instance.

This affect is what is responsible for the dramatic boom in technology and science we have seen over the past few hundred years. Two British scientists discovered the key to life, DNA, and shared it with Americans, Russians, Germans, and etc. Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, among other ingenius inventions, and shared this information with the rest of the world.

That's my hypothesis.

The Intellectual Poverty of Pop Science

Something needs to be done. You see, most creationists, most people, in fact, do not have the attention span to watch Carl Sagan's Cosmos, read The Selfish Gene, Why Darwin Matters, or Finding Darwin's God. Yet they do have the attention span to flip through Scientific American on occasion, watch the news, or read any other pop science magazine. The problem with the pop science tabloids-er, I mean magazines- Is that they oversimplify and love to use "buzz words". For instance, I have seen, on at least one occasion, a magazine describe evolution as "long periods of time + chance". This is a gross oversimplification. Anyone who understands evolution knows that while variation might be random, the variations which become common are not. In any population with some genetic variety, evolution is simply bound to take place. Natural Selection is not random.

Even worse is when science news sites have decided to label the platypus as some wild and crazy crossbreed of birds, reptiles, and mammals. PZ Myers has taken the time to fully correct this mistaken position and explain the way it really is. Blogger Chimera Contemplations has even written us a poem about this incident, allow me to quote a few lines:

A chimera is a mythical creature
With breathing fire as a prominent feature
Part lion, part serpent, part goat but all Greek
Bellerophon and Pegasus killed this freak

In conclusion: Does it reflect poorly on creationist for only obtaining a superficial understanding of science through pop literature, or does it reflect even worse on the folks who will dumb down science to the point of distortion just so that a few extra idiots will buy it?

The Evolution of Bats

Stephen Matheson recently wrote a very interesting article on the evolution of bats. It examines the genetic changes which led to the bats gradual transition from tree climbing mammals to night wings.

I do have one thing I'd like to add to the article: It states that "The fossils can't yet show us how paws gave rise to wings". This is true, there is not a sequence of fossils that show this transition (Bats are too fragile to fossilize well). However, there was a fossil reported a few months ago which definitely represented a transitional stage between tree climbers and bats.

Stephen Jay Gould Interview

Youtube has a six part interview with Dr. Stephen Jay Gould:

Part 1

This is a good video to reference when creationists rag on the peppered moth story, as this actually filmed peppered moths on a tree trunk being eaten by birds!!

Ancient Bird is 'Missing Link' To Archaeopteryx

Found @ New Scientist

Avian evolution made important advances between Archaeopteryx and the Yixian birds. "Archaeopteryx was an efficient powered flapping flyer, but lacked many of the adaptations of the skeleton seen in modern birds – especially fusions of bones that support flight muscle and reduce length of the tail," Benton told New Scientist.

Confuciusornis was a strong flyer, with flight muscles anchored on the wing by a large ridge of bone known as the deltopectoral crest, and on the body by a large fused sternum.

With a pair of separate sternal plates and a smaller deltopectoral crest, Eoconfuciusornis is more advanced than Archaeopteryx, and the most primitive, as well as the earliest, member of the Confuciusornis family.

Holocaust Denial and Evolution Denial

I stumbled across a blog debunking evolution denial and look what I found:



"A classic denial strategy is to take a quote from a historian and pretend that the historian is saying what the denier wants him to say. It's a subtle form of lying that we define as quote-mining."



Sounds familiar.



Now take a look at this article:



"Those who argue that the holocaust deniers must be given a fair hearing fail to recognize that the deniers' quest is not a search for truth. Rather they are motivated by racism, extremism, and virulent anti-Semitism."



In other words, deniers demand "equal time" for their views, and their views are based on idealogy (not science). Deja Vu. The article goes on:



"Those who are committed to the liberal idea of dialogue fail to recognize that certain views are beyond the bounds of rational discourse. After all, these views do not emanate from rational or honest inquiry. Thomas Jefferson argued that in a setting committed to the honest pursuit of truth, all ideas and opinions must be tolerated. But he added a caveat, which is particularly applicable: "We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it" (emphasis added). In the case of Holocaust denial, reason becomes hostage to particularly odious ideology. "



So, why don't we give up on fighting the claims of creationists, and focus in on the idealogy? How should we go about this? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.