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Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchCreationists love to refer to alleged gaps in the fossil record. Usually, this is out of ignorance of the vast number of different fossils found. What they claim to be missing are intermediate stages of evolution of some supposedly "unevolvable" (today "irreducibly complex" - intelligent design) trait.
If then one such intermediate is found (as is often enough the case, a prominent recent one being Tiktaalik), it obviously doesn't close the gap, but creates two new ones where before there was only one! So the more fossils we find, the more gaps we create - according to some creationists.
Recently there has been one more increase in the number of such gaps in the fossil record. One prominent of these traits which are deemed "irreducibly complex" (however that complexity is supposed to be quantified escapes me) is the eye (therefore the logo of the brembs.net evolution section). Australian paleontologists have just published a paper in "Biology Letters" where they describe not just one but a group of fossils closing... errr, I mean splitting yet another gap. They found fossils of 400-million-year-old Devonian placoderms – jawed ancestors of modern fish. Unlike modern vertebrates, the placoderm fossils had a different arrangement of muscles and nerves supporting the eyeball, evidence of an intermediate stage in the evolution between jawless and jawed vertebrates.
Check the whole story out in the various news reports (PhysOrg, Brisbane Times, 9msn, The Australian) or better yet, read the peer-reviewed orginal journal article.
Posted on Thursday 13 December 2007 - 15:17:07 comment: 0
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