Missing Link
 

Damn right. Where is that link? Missing. But think, if we have evolved natural you would of though there was a humanoid ape creature that was hairy and walked on two legs. But the closest relative to us are apes, who are still quite different to us. Where did the link go? I think aliens came down, and screwed around with our evolution and DNA, and speeded it right up. Why, I don’t know. Maybe they plan to farm us, maybe they are just using us as an experiment. What do you fellows think? Alien interference, we where frozen for eons…?
Discuss.

Isn't the term "Missing link" supposed to be some sort of PR word and not really of any meaning, scientifically?

EDIT: Wiki'D.

I think they mean that there isn't just one Missing Link, but just more and more pieces in the fossil record to build a neverrending picture, because the species changes ever so slighty with every generation, that only by looking at lots of different examples, we can kinda see where they're the same, but different.

But hey, I'm an idiot, so don't ask me.

Where's Bullet Magnet?

Current apes have evolved a different lifestyle to us. Humans and Chimpanzees shared a common ancestor, and the Chimpanzees have differed more from this ancestor than humans have. The ancestors and missing links are species like Australopithecus (sp?) that have differentiated/become extinct since then, so there are no species alive today that resemble a 'half-man half-ape' creature (though man is an ape...so that makes no sense).

Might want to do some research on wikipedia or something, Skillya. Aliens? Pah.

It's such a ridiculously improbable thing for a creature to die in precisely the right environment for fossilisation that only a small fraction of the species that populated the world have been found as fossils. There were plenty of transitional species but we just have no record of them.

There IS a creature that resembles the Missing Link. And it even posts on this forum!*Stares at Disgruntled Intern*

I wish I had gotten up several hours earlier now.


"Missing links" do not exist as they are so often imagined, and not just because of the self-contradictory term used to describe them (as in, if you find one then it no longer counts, no longer being "missing". Yes, I have encountered this argument before).

Consider this: every species that has ever lived has been a transitional species. Except, perhaps, those who died out and ended their lineage. But since every species is affected by their selection pressures, they will always change over evolutionary time. This raises the interesting problem of defining a species, because its like deciding when black ends and white begins on a grey scale when you've never actually seen either colour before.

That is not so much a problem when discussing prehistoric species, because all we have are brief snapshots of a lineage's evolutionary time, in the form of fossils. Because fossils are individuals, and therefore discrete entities in the otherwise continuous evolutionary gradient, defining one as a distinct species is rarely an issue.

But that means that, having arranged fossil species in an evolutionary arrangement, there are lots of gaps. Again, we're marking of points on a "grey" scale, but a grey scale with billions of primary colours. If there were no gaps, we'd be up to our armpits in fossils, and I, for one, would be extremely suspicious. And probably dead. But I digress.

So, each one of these fossils are transitional forms between their immediate ancestor and their immediate descendants. If they had any. So it is hopelessly unhelpful to refer to them as such, so when we talk about transitional forms we usually mean those representing the transition between major habitat changes and the physiological changes that occur, such as land-dwelling ungulate to sea-dwelling cetacean. Or maybe just the transition of a particular body part that a fossil represents, such as fish fin to tetrapod limb. And by Odd, do we have lots of those.

However, a property of discrete snapshots of a continuous process is that you can never expect to fill in all the blanks, however useful and accurate a picture your snapshots put together. Another shameful argument I have encountered, upon presenting an important transitional fossil, is that I now have two missing links, which was technically true until I presented those as well. The predictable response was that I now had four missing links and was exponentially losing ground. Rather than continue down this path by presenting the others I had ready, I succinctly explained to them the significant difficulties of their logic.

I can present examples of those very transitional fossils I described. Of jawed, bony fish to early amphibians: Osteolepis, Eusthenopteron, Sterropterygion, Tikaalik, Panderichthys, Elpistostege, Obruchevichthys, Hynerpeton, Acanthostega, Ichthyostega, Pholidogaster, Pteroplax.

Of land mammal to whale: Pakicetus, Nalacetus, Ichthyolestes, Gandakasia, Ambulocetus, Himalayacetus, Attockicetus, Remingtonocetus, Dalanistes, Kutchicetus, Andrewsiphius, Indocetus, Qaisracetus, Takracetus, Artiocetus, Babiacetus, Protocetus, Pappocetus, Eocetus, Georgiacetus, Natchitochia, Dorudon, Ancalacetus, Zygorhiza, Saghacetus, Chrysocetus, Ghaviacetus, Pontogeneus, Basilosaurus, Basiloterus.

Can supply pictures later if they are requested.

The problem with fossils are that they are incredibly rare. The sheer number that we have found and are still yet to find is testimony only to the sheer liveliness of planet Earth. But we know why we don't find more than we do, geology predicts that it is a rare occurrence, and never mind all those buried deep in the Earth's crust, under the sea or in other inaccessible locations. Consider that we have eleven fossils that have been identified as Archaeopteryx lithographica (there is some debate over whether some belong in different species, even genera), several of which are only feathers. In the millions of years that A. lithographic existed, there would have been billions of individuals born and died. Yet only eleven fossilised specimens have been found. That is a reduction by a factor of one hundred million, and many other species have even less fossils. Rare? You betcha.

Though some microscopic organisms produce trillions of individuals at the same moment in time, particularly planktonic organisms. As a result we have a much more comprehensive fossil record of those people have had the patience to study. See here the transitional forms from Globigerinoides trilobus to Orbulina universa.

Models of evolution have yielded evidence that some novel features emerge and refine themselves so quickly (evolutionarily speaking) that it is not surprising that there are no fossils at all. Especially when the part is soft and does not normally fossilise. The eye has evolved at least 40 times independently of each other, and there has been enough time in any evolutionary lineage for it to have evolved from scratch 1,500 times over. A two-dimensional (for feasibility) computer model of the evolution of an eye from skin (Nilson and Pelger, 1994), using all the laws of physics and biology required to model evolution and light, produced a functioning fish eye in less than 400,000 generations. That is, if you'll excuse the pun, a blink of an eye. [linkage]

Remember that a transitional form is not half a creature, but a whole creature in and of itself. It is easy to sea what a feature in a fossil will turn out to be, because we know its evolutionary history. But look at yourself. How much of you can you spot on its way to becoming a new feature? Because, assuming we are not an evolutionary dead-end, much of you is.

And, as is quite obvious from the fact that 99.9% of the Earth's species are extinct, so too are most of the Earth's transitional species, present company excluded of course. We don't expect to find one of our ancestors up and about today, they died out as advantageous genes emerged and spread through their population repeatedly until they either smoothly transitioned into a new species or another population that did came and out-competed them all. Though we do see living representatives of transitional species, those who share that species with us as a common ancestor and have retained some of those landmark features to this day. One of many famous examples are the Sarcopterygii, the lobe-finned fishes, such as the coelacanth and the lung fish. Another major group are all of the amphibians, all of the fish, in fact, every species has retained features from their ancestors and represent them to this day. That is the whole point I've been trying to make.

Oh, and transitional forms from earlier primates to modern humans? Sahelanthropus tchadensis, Orrorin tugenensis, Ardipithecus ramidus, Ardipithecus kadabba, Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus garhi, Australopithecus bahrelghazali, Homo habilis, Homo erectus.

That was too much for me to read, but... Kudos! I mean, REP!

so many words...:fuzzle:

if i give you some rep will you NEVER write an entire eBible EVER again as long as i am active on these forums?:fuzconf:

No promises. If something needs explaining, then it will be explained, and to hell with the reasonable word limit. I get enough of that from YouTube.

However, I am intrigued by skillyaslig's thought process. It seems to me to go:

Observation: There are no ape-men.

Conclusion: Aliens.

BM just won the thread.

No, BM just won the internets.

*tries to remember that post when Forum Awards come around*

He's been winning rep at warp factor 5 since the system was implemented. Hooray for him!

There is absolutely nothing else to contribute now that the wall of text BM wrote (which I read completely, I ass) has been posted.

Skillyaslig, you have been answered.

Found it.








I can't believe noone else did this, already.

I lack the creative genius and am still naive enough to fear the mods.

But thats bloody awesome OANST. :D

Well, the whole 'aliens came down and probed us all when we where apes' would explain alot in my little world...I vote for that one :D Not much for scientific stuff, little old me.

Flamefox, just because you don't look at scientific stuff doesn't mean supporting a completely retarded point of view is a good idea.

Touche, QFT.

Ok, I'm too tiered to read all of this, so I'm sure that it's been said, but to what you're referring to, is to the missing link, but creatures that evolved along side humans, those would be the Nethendrathals and those hobbit like speacies, they both died out, and Hobo sapians were the only ones like us remaining. :)
As for you missing link, they have been found in Africa, but they too died out, our closes living releatives are the apes, but we didn't evolve from apes, we evolved alonged side them, so technically speacking, apes are our "brothers" or "cousins", not our "fathers" or "uncles" (You can turn this into mothers, sisters and auntes if you want to take a feminist approach, but I said them in their mascline form for the sake of a metaphor), we share a missing link, an ancestor with the apes. ;) And I'm pretty sure that's been found aswell, just in fossil form.
But the jungles of Africa (Expecially the Congo), and South America (Expecially the Amazon), are huge, and it is almost certain there are speacies there that we have not yet discovered, like in the ocean, so who knows, there was that Okupai girraffe thing that got discovered only a couple of years ago in the Congo, and they found an undiscovered monkey thing, which was huge, and stood upright, altough it hasn't been proven real, as they shot one. But there is a photo of it. ;)

Two too many to’s.

Couldn't help yourself could you :P
lol

The missing link is Bigfoot. And he is on Mars!

Dude, that's a tusken raider/ Jawa thingy... OMG STARWARS UNIVERSE IS COLLIDING WITH OURS!!111

I thought of it, but it seemed too easy for me...

Here it is.











Oh I'm just hilarious.

At first I just thought, 'the videos been taken down, oh well'. And then it hit me. It's a missing link! Nice one.



And you just die, Mojo.

Oh. And here I was thinking we were just really ugly mutant gorillas. My bad, ladies and germs.



http://www.texasbigfoot.com/bigfoot-lg.jpg

Bigfoot must have a god damned spaceship to get to mars and back here so fast. You know, that would make an awesome movie. BIGFOOT IN SPACE! Beautiful.