Myth of "Missing Links"
source: http://www.livescience.com/health/etc/090520-myth-the-missing-link.html
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- DeliaTheArtist
- added this
http://www.livescience.com/health/etc/090520-myth-the-missing-link.html
This piggybacks off a conversation I was having on the thread about Ida, the fossil everyone is buzzing about- the term "Missing Link" may be familiar to you, but is inherently flawed and false. Find out more!"News reports have buzzed about about the discovery of a 47-million-year old, cat-sized fossil dubbed Ida, whose amazingly detailed and well-preserved remains have shocked and delighted scientists around the world. The news has been heralded by many in the media as the long-sought "missing link" in the chain of humans' ancestry and primate evolution.
Though the term "missing link" has currency with the public and pundits (not to mention creationists), to professionals and paleontologists, it is a myth.
The fact is that there is no such thing as "the missing link" between different stages of evolution. Many, many transitional fossils have been discovered, for example showing bone and lung development from one species to another. Of course, any given fossil (including the much-celebrated Ida) is simply one example caught in time, one snapshot of the transition process, not a missing piece that completes the chain.
Picture fossils like visual images of a horse race, and scientists as people trying to understand what happened between the start and end of the race.
Because fossilization is relatively rare, the record is incomplete, and scientists do not have a continuous film or video documenting every single step of the finish. But they do have a series of dozens or hundreds of individual photographs of the final stretch taken at differen times, giving a very complete picture of the transition between the start and finish of the race.
There is not one identifiable missing photograph or "missing link" in the process, and the transition will never show an exact halfway point between two anatomically different forms. Ida may be one of the most important links in the transitional fossil record, but she is not "the missing link."
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JamesAJanisse
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Awesome post Delia, I wish people didn't just want things so simplified and basic. It's like people just can't accept an idea or concept that is complex enough to have to think about to understand.
- 3 years ago
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JamesAJanisse
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jh64487
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beauty delia
- 3 years ago
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jh64487
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wayseeker
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This is interesting.
- 3 years ago
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wayseeker
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pjacobs51
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Maybe they are looking for links in all the wrong places.
Here is a bit of Terrence McKenna's "Stoned Ape" theory:
To summarize: McKenna theorizes that as the North African jungles receded toward the end of the most recent ice age, giving way to grasslands, a branch of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors left the branches and took up a life out in the open -- following around herds of ungulates, nibbling what they could along the way.
Among the new items in their diet were psilocybin-containing mushrooms growing in the dung of these ungulate herds. The changes caused by the introduction of this drug to the primate diet were many -- McKenna theorizes, for instance, that synesthesia (the blurring of boundaries between the senses) caused by psilocybin led to the development of spoken language: the ability to form pictures in another person's mind through the use of vocal sounds.
About 12,000 years ago, further climate changes removed the mushroom from the human diet, resulting in a new set of profound changes in our species as we reverted to pre-mushroomed and frankly brutal primate social structures that had been modified and/or repressed by frequent consumption of psilocybin.
McKenna's theory has great appeal and intuitive strength, but it is necessarily based on a great deal of supposition interpolating between the few fragmentary facts we know about hominid and early human history. In addition, because McKenna (who describes himself as "an explorer, not a scientist") is also a proponent of much wilder suppositions, such as his "Timewave Zero" theory.
- 3 years ago
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pjacobs51
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SamuraiDave
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pjacobs51:
McKenna must have been stoned when he penned that but lets load up some chimps to the gills with mushrooms and see if they start doing poetry slams in a couple of years.
- 3 years ago
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SamuraiDave
