Missing Link no longer missing

Nonsense, Satan put her there.

Also, I demand to see an even earlier fossil leading up to Ardi.

Also, Evolution is just a theory.

I thought that little Lemur thing they found a few months ago was the missing link?

Ida wasn't a link persay, she was a distant ancestor. Walking on all fours. Ardi here was bipedal, but still clambered about in the trees on all fours. The link between our four legged ancestors and us, the two legged, more efficient variety.

Oh man, that Lucy and Ida exhibit is going to need yet another overhaul!

I found the missing link...

IN MY PANTS.

She's not really the "missing link" so much as she is closer than any other known specimin to the last common ancestor of us and apes. Actually, the "missing link" idea, as I understand it, is a flawed way of looking at things anyway since it implies a linear progression when evolution was anything but linear.

Whatever, Mushnik, she's still a trap set by Satan to tempt us into not believing.

Yeah considering evolution doesn't really take big leaps, there really isn't just one single gap in the "chain" (AKA tree AKA web) of progression. Plus, what winds up fossilized (takes very specific conditions) is actually a small percentage of Earth's past zoology.

Yeah, like others said, not a missing link, just our oldest probable ancestor, and closest yet to our common ancestor with apes. And discovered (in many pieces) ~15 years ago, actually. What's remarkable about Ardi is the totality of this one specific specimen. To get a solid idea of what a creature this old looked like and how it behaved, you basically need a skull, teeth, pelvis, hands, and feet. Ardi had all of those in one skeleton, plus. It took 15 years to not just assemble what's there (which wasn't just in puzzle pieces, but compressed and deformed by weight and time) but to reform it into its original state, accurately. Incredibly careful, technical stuff that in many ways needed technology to catch up or new technology to be created.

What Ardi almost certainly lays out, though, is that not only did we not evolve from ape-like creatures, but that in many ways modern apes like chimpanzees and gorillas are more evolutionarily developed than we are, as far as phenotypical differences with our common ancestor. Homo Sapiens hands and feet are actually more primitive in their development. Our line really just grew larger brains and got taller. Essentially, our last common ancestor with our closest genetic relative the chimpanzee (and bonobos) didn't look much at all like a chimpanzee.

Also fascinating (to some of us science nerds) is that its teeth -- specifically, small canines in males -- negates previous assumptions about early diet and, especially, social behavior/structure. It used to be figured that the canines got reduced to accommodate the larger molars that arose from a rougher, abrasive diet, or that they weren't needed as weapons with the advent of stone tools. But Ar. ramidus already had reduced canines millions of years before "Lucy"s enlarged rear teeth or the advent of stone tools. The male's smaller canines most likely came about via a "generalized, nonspecialized diet."

But still, it developed away from its primary weapon in male-to-male conflict, unlike the ape line. It goes a long way to suggest a major shift in socialized behavior; along with using both the ground and trees for locomotion/habitat, this all points to regular food-carrying (walking upright makes this possible), monogamous (though probably not for life) male-female relationships, and what's called "reproductive crypsis" -- remember this term, men; it's when females don't advertise that they're ovulating, unlike in chimps. All together, these point to "a substantially intensified male parental investment" -- which was an adaptive breakthrough with countless consequences, and probably got the hominids down the path of mostly just growing taller, with larger brains.

Of course, there's skeptics about some these hypotheses. But it's fairly unanimous that Ardi's reconstruction is monumental. Great stuff, I'm really groovin on it (if you can't tell). It's definitely going to rewrite a whole lot of previous ideas about early hominid evolution. Sorry, Kansas, it's real!

Here's the main page at Science, made free for all (with a registration):

http://www.sciencemag.org/ardipithecus/

Also WaPo and NY Times sum-ups.

While I enjoy it whenever someone digs something up and goes 'Aha!' I appreciate the patience given to assembling the disparate elements, carefully evaluating them, research and documentation so that when they finally did reveal it to us, they could pretty much go 'Yep. Here's how it is. Ball's in your court now, bitches!' to all the nonbelievers. Or should I say 'to all the believers'. (Christ, I think I'm getting angrier as I get older.)

Nerds.

Except for Darkmite, who posted a picture of a hilarious giant weener!

That is a pretty cool looking monkey. Imagine a fight between a T Rex and that thing! Kind of wish it had a better name though. I can't say I blame them for not giving it a western name, given where it lived, but 'Lucy' is much snappier.

I'm not usre why the media is still hyping the fossil record aspect of this dialogue. Now that we've started mapping the genomes of primates, isn't the genetic evidence much more complete and compelling than the fossil record?

But we can't see a genome!! We demand proof, and proof that it wasn't just you liberal scientists falsifying evidence as an afront to God! We need to see this fossil and the one before that and before that until we get to the beginning, darnit!

Okay, I'll stop.
No, I won't.
Well, maybe...

Yes, but to the crowd that visits museums that put saddles on the dinosaurs, visual evidence is much more compelling than "science".

o_0

I thought it was supposed to be God/ Jesus who was putting the "fake" fossils in the ground to test our faith. Although if he/she/they are are subcontracting such work to Satan - that's fine too.

Come on Christians, make up your mind! or at least have it made for you by some kiddie-fiddling psycho.

Also, i like the way that idiots use the "no transitional forms found" argument to refute evolution, even though there's clearly hundreds of transitional fossils - by refuting each example of the transitional form there are no transitional forms. Genius. It's as if I refuse to acknowledge all the defeats of my team - therefore my team is undefeated.

Personally, my favorite creationist argument--outside of the ones you have given examples of, which are almost comprehensive--is that the scientists weren't there to witness Creation and God was, so questioning the account of Creation in Genesis in any way is tantamount to calling God a liar. Of course, this ignores the fact that Genesis purposefully questions itself by including two different accounts of Creation from two different traditions that are written to in two different styles of Hebrew and feature completely different sequences of events and depictions of God and the universe prior to Creation.

Also, they kind of forget that absolutely nobody interpreted the canon literally until after the Enlightenment and that Biblical literalism and inerrancy were probably the two most retarded approaches to take towards the challenges the Enlightenment and its impact on the standards we use for truth and defining what knowledge consists in posed for the text.

Yeah.... /frowns at shoes /kicks pebble

The genomic map is a big element, but there's way more to understanding not just the biology but the developmental biology of a species than just the map itself. The map gives a framework, but there's a LOT of pieces to the puzzle. There are the countless details of the cell signaling pathways, and proteins that act on and are controlled by the genome; what's inhibiting what, what's promoting what. The molecular chemistry of it all is still a big fuzzy blur that's going to take a shitload of time and data to bring into any kind of focus. Not even going into mitochondrial development.

And that's just what we can learn about the species of today, a blurry snapshot. They won't tell us anything about how or when these evolutionary divergences happened, which goes a long way toward explaining why. The fossil record is extremely important in not just reading the past, but bringing the present into clearer focus, in everything from biology to climatology.

Ohhh...so that's what he was doing for those 40 days out in the desert. IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW!

And as stated, the genomes are great to trace ancestry no doubt, but the fossils can give us a picture, however small, of what it was like. Why did this evolve? What does this tell us about the fossil's society, the surrounding soil can be used to determine the climate, which in turns impact how the bones are used. Because obviously, there is more to human evolution (or indeed any evolution) than just the biology. It can further illuminate why things happened the way it did. Everything is a force on everything else and all that.

Edit: that reminds me, check out this book Evolution for Everyone which helps to bring evolution out of the lab and into some of the other, softer sciences. Good read, too.

Satan is largely a creation of tradition and odd interpretation. The only time I can recall that he shows up as an unambiguous figure in the entire canon is in Job. In that book, however, he's less an enemy of God than he is the guy in God's court making the case against humanity. The meaning of "satan" itself is "adversary," which describes a prosecutorial figure pretty well.

Not all Christians are young earth creationists and fundamentalists, keeping that in mind can be helpful.

I call shenanigans.

The fuzzy bitch doesn't even look half Cylon.

^True Dat!

I am interested to see that with each new major discovery, we learn that man's history stretches back much further than we thought.