Summations Only

Hi, AOkid. The moral of the story is that, if you use the word "pelvis" when you do not necessarily mean "every single bone of the pelvis," creationists are liable to make a stupid argument from it.

Hi, AOkid. How about "location" + "gene expression"?In 2006 (a few months before the four-limbed dolphin was found), Thewissen et al. showed that the hind "limb buds" of dolphin embryos display the same morphology as the embryonic limb buds of other mammals: specifically they develop an apical ectodermal ridge (AER), which plays an important role in downstream genomic signals that regulate the development of the bud into a true limb. The AER in dolphins also expresses the developmental gene Fgf8, which is expressed in the same way in mammalian limbs, and helps initiate the process of limb development. They note that the dolphin limb bud fails to develop a proper "zone of polarizing activity" (ZPA), which prevents the bud from developing into a full leg, and triggers its later atrophy.So, let's tabulate the evidence:

1. The location of the putative "limb bud" is consistent with it being the same limb bud that, in other animals, develops into the hind limb.
2. The putative "limb bud" displays anatomical similarities to the limb bud that, in other animals, develops into the hind limb.
3. The putative "limb bud" displays similarities in gene-expression patterns with similar-stage limb buds from animals in which it goes on to develop into the hind limb.
4. Several examples of individual cetaceans showing an apparently atavistic trait that is consistent with the development of hind "limb buds" into rudimentary hind limbs.
5. Similarities in muscle attachment and functionality between a terrestrial mammal's pelvis and a cetacean's "mystery bone."
6. A cetacean pelvic fossil of Miocene age that indicates homology of putative "pelvic" bones of modern cetaceans with the pelvic bones of other mammals.

To me, that seems like a pretty damn good collection of evidence in support of the hypothesis that the putative "pelvis" and "limb buds" actually are the vestiges of the mammalian pelvis and hind limbs.----- As a side note, I share your consternation with the lack of follow-up studies on that four-limbed dolphin (AO-4). I did some poking around, and apparently AO-4 was kept at the Taiji Whale Museum until she died in 2013. Taiji Cove is notorious as the location of the annual mass dolphin slaughters, and the museum has a real shoddy record of deplorable living conditions for its animals. There's not even any mention of what they did with AO-4's remains. So, they effectively spared this dolphin from the slaughterhouse in order to torture her for eleven years in the name of science, and failed to get any scientifically useful data from her. But hey, I assume they at least made money off admissions to the "freak show," so capitalism won in the end! Donald Trump would be proud!

Hi, AlphaOmegakid. You don't assess homology by examining a whole suite of characteristics and deciding what proportion of them match up: you assess homology by examining specific, individual characteristics that indicate an evolutionary relationship. That's literally what the term "homology" is supposed to imply: that a specific characteristic is shared by two species.In whales and terrestrial mammals, the same genes are found to govern hind limb bud formation during the early stages of fetal development, and the bud starts out forming in the same way. Then, at a relatively early stage, it stops forming in whales, and continues forming in terrestrial mammals.The conclusion is that early embryonic stages are homologous, because gene expression is similar. Later stages are not homologous, because gene expression and subsequent bud development changes. Reciprocally granted. This is a really numbskull argument, Kid. Think a little harder about how the word "evolution" relates to the word "difference," and you may suddenly realize why pointing out differences is not a very promising approach for combating evolutionary arguments. Wow, you mean animals that I think evolved in different ways are different from one another? Wait, that sounds internally consistent, doesn't it?What do you propose it is, this thing I've been calling a "hind limb bud"? I say it's a tiny vestige of a limb which ultimately fails to develop into a functional limb because of mutations that have occurred in the patterns of gene expression just prior to the ZPA stage. Before that stage, it seems pretty much indistinguishable from any other limb bud from any old mammal embryo. But, what say you? I'm baffled by your obstinacy on this issue. I used the phrase "apparently atavistic" to signify that these are structures that look like what we think atavistic structures should look like, even if we can't completely demonstrate that they are, in fact, atavisms. Here is a link to the reference list of the short article on AO-4, which contains links to at least half a dozen other reports of cetaceans with rudimentary hind limbs.It's really irritating that nobody took the opportunity to publish any useful data on AO-4, but those are the breaks. The data is imperfect, and it always will be: so we have to look at the forest, rather than the trees. You can nitpick the individual data, but when a few dozen different sets of imperfect data converge on a common explanatory framework, their imperfections matter a lot less than their agreement. Not all uncertainty is controversy, Kid; and not all unknowns signify desperation and chaos in the evolutionary sciences. Upthread, Percy linked to a manuscript that provides much better resolution on the exact identities of the specific bones in the whale pelvis. You may notice that the paper has only been cited one time since 2014, which should give you some perspective on how insignificant this "controversy" actually is.Uncertainty is a constant companion in science: it doesn't mean we're all running around like chickens with our heads cut off, it just means we wish we had more data. But, in regards to this specific topic, there is broad agreement that the putative "pelvis" in a whale is an actual pelvis, and that the muscles that attach to it are homologous to the muscles that attach to the pelvis in other mammals. That's the manuscript Percy linked to in Message 110, "Naming an Innomimate..." And I agree. We have a word for the tendency of animals to break homology with their ancestors. Hint: it starts with "E" and rhymes with "shmevolution."I think you're overestimating the prestige value of evolutionary discoveries. Besides, these weren't scientists who discovered the dolphin: they were fishermen and animal exhibitors.Edited by Blue Jay, : Some clean-up neededEdited by Blue Jay, : More clean-up.

Let's go through this again.Your claim comprises the title of your post: atavisms is Cetacea don't exist.My claim is that atavisms do occasionally happen in cetaceans.The evidence available to us is a number of reports that look like atavistic limbs.You have so far rebutted this evidence with the following:

• One report was too old to verify from visual reproductions
• One report didn't specifically use the term "atavism" in its title
• Three other reports were provided by an institution that has been heavily criticized for its morality (but not, as far as I am aware, for its scientific rigor)
• And, when people had an opportunity to study a four-limbed cetacean, nobody tested the alternative hypothesis that it was actually a freak birth defect that just happens to look like an atavism

Again, I plead with you to stop missing the forest for the trees.Why do whale embryos develop structures that look and behave like hind limb buds if they are not going to develop hind limbs?
Why do aberrant whales sometimes have superfluous appendages that look like partially developed hind limbs?In my mind, my options are:

• Accept that these are atavisms
• Deny that they are atavisms through some combination of anality, conspiracy theory, and/or deliberate obtuseness

Of the two, the first seems the more rational option.

Hi, AlphaOmegakid. How do I know that these reports look like atavistic limbs?It's an organism that displays a trait (four limbs) associated with its purported evolutionary ancestors. That's the epitome of "looks like an atavism," isn't it?Or, did you mean to ask, "How do I know it is an atavism?"I didn't say, "I know it's an atavism," did I?Look, we both agree that four-finned cetaceans do exist and have existed in the past. You don't seem to be arguing that the reports were falsified: you seem to only be arguing that I can't prove that they're atavisms. Nevertheless, the alternative explanations are pretty absurd.My explanation for this evidence is that cetaceans retain some elements of the genetic infrastructure for producing hind limbs, and that this infrastructure can sometimes be partially activated by mutations or developmental aberrations, resulting in an animal with the rudiments of hind limbs.Your explanation is... well, I'm not actually clear on this. Upthread, you mentioned polymelia, but polymelia is a phenotype, not a mechanism. Polymelia can be caused by a variety of genetic and developmental mechanisms, and isn't mutually exclusive with atavism; so that's not really an alternative explanation. Your only real recourse for an alternative is going to have to invoke some remarkable coincidences in one way or another: either limbs coincidentally appear where hind limbs would have appeared in the putative evolutionary ancestors, or abnormal growths coincidentally look like limbs, or embryonic buds coincidentally resemble hind limb buds, etc. This does not bode well for the parsimony or falsifiability of whatever your alternative explanation turns out to be.Here's a quick run-down on my reasoning. Extra limbs develop when pre-existing genetic infrastructure is activated in an atypical region of an embryo. When that atypical location is recurrent, and not arbitrary (i.e., the extra limbs consistently grow in the same location), it's difficult to argue that the location isn't part of the pre-existing genetic infrastructure. It's that location-specific genetic infrastructure that points to atavism as the best explanation.When you also observe that cetacean embryos develop temporary hind limb buds, it doesn't take a genius to connect the dots: gee, maybe these pre-existing buds, which are usually deactivated early in cetacean embryonic development, can be reactivated by a mutation or developmental abnormality, and caused to develop into rudimentary hind limbs.It seems pretty obvious that this is the most rational explanation for the data. Your rebuttals about reports not using the word "atavism" or coming from an agency associated with shady whaling practices* do not dethrone atavism as the most reasonable explanation for this data. Combined with the fossil evidence mentioned upthread, and the many other evidences allying whales with mammals, atavism seems like a no-brainer.But, like I've been saying, you can't let yourself see the forest for the trees. And nothing I say is apparently going to change that.----- By the way, the three reports of four-finned cetaceans came from the 1950's and 1960's, decades before the controversial Institute for Cetacean Research even existed. What existed in Japan at this time was a bunch of private commercial whaling fleets and the Whales Research Institute, which was an agency that compiled statistics from commercial records. In the mid-1980's, when commercial whaling was outlawed internationally, there were no longer any commercial records to compile; so, WRI folded, and the private whaling fleets merged to form ICR as a "research" operation.

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There is no reason to apply the controversies regarding ICR to the records compiled by WRI: they are separate entities, served completely different purposes, and were founded under different pretenses.Edited by Blue Jay, : "denying": tee-hee, wrong word

Hi, Cat Sci. ...in multiple different individual whales....and none have ever been reported with dorsal fins growing in other locations on the body, as polymelia would typically do.

Hi, Dr A.Oh hey, that one wasn't even on the list!But. the black stuff in that photo kind of looks like fibrous material to me.Or, even if it is bone, how do you know it isn't just polymelia (the non-atavistic kind) of the forelimbs?And, how do you know that the photograph is actually of the hind limb? If you ask me, it looks like an x-ray of the forelimb of a juvenile whale, and they just said it was a hind limb so they could prove evolution. Evolutionists do that, you know. Their faith is too strong to let them be honest about things like that.In fact, that could be anything: misshapen vertebrae, a remarkably smooth compound fracture of the not-pelvis... maybe it's actually a tribal taboo describing the whale's exploits in battle, or possibly the dog tags of a Russian marine the whale swallowed back in 1956. If you kind of... cross your eyes a little, it could even be the face of a bad guy from an old Mario Bros video game. It doesn't prove a thing.

Hi, Kid. Well, it was a parody, which means it was a mean-spirited hyperbole. But, I thought it was an effective expression of my main point, which is that you're going to absurd lengths to find any explanation for the evidence other than evolution.I rather arrogantly thought my masterful parody could convince you to engage in some introspection and realize how your pursuit of evolution's downfall has become entirely obsessive. I mean, you take issue with literally every single piece of evidence that anybody talks about. It's like you think all scientists everywhere are so incompetent or brainwashed that none of them has ever done anything right, and we're all in need of your expert and genius guidance to put us all right. That might just qualify as a Messiah complex.And you're still doing the same thing: when the evidence goes against you, you just dig in deeper. You put out polymelia as a possible explanation (even though, as Cat Sci pointed out, it's a pretty flimsy hypothesis), and you talked about lacking x-rays and probably having no bones. Dr A showed a case where an x-ray existed and bones were found. Now, you've got some other idea to discredit this one.You've got no consistent narrative here except, "I will keep looking for alternative explanations, no matter how obscure, because I refuse to accept that evolution is the most rational explanation." So, something that looks like a limb bud may not actually be a limb bud because it doesn't develop into a full limb, something that looks like a pelvis may not actually be a pelvis because scientists can't decide exactly what pieces of the pelvis it is supposed to be, and now an atavistic hind limb may not actually be an atavistic hind limb because something (that I am supposed to figure out on my own) is missing.What are the chances, Kid, that all of these different things would line up with the evolutionary explanations, but actually be caused by a convoluted assortment of unrelated explanations that have no mutual cohesiveness?You're missing the goddamn forest for the trees. Well, I can see a lot of things that are missing. There don't seem to be any phalanges or metatarsals, and there doesn't seem to be differentiated tibiae and fibulae, patellae, etc. This doesn't really surprise me, because the hypothesis is that some elements of the ancestral genetic infrastructure remain sufficiently intact in the whale genome to be partially reactivated. So, an atavistic feature is never really expected to be a complete product.Beyond that, I have no idea what you think is missing from this x-ray, and I eagerly await your the grand enlightenment you can bestow upon me, oh wise guru. No, I don't underestimate that. Autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder run in my family, so I am very familiar with obsessive behavior, and in fact I know not only what it looks like, but also what it feels like. You get an idea in your head, and you can't look away from it, and you read literally everything you can get your hands on in an effort to prove your side of the story. I've done that exact thing with dozens of different topics of personal interest to me. Whenever somebody challenges me on one of those topics, it becomes a matter of personal pride or personal stress. The main reason I've historically been one of your most tenacious opponents on EvC is because I have an obsessive-compulsive personality, and have a difficult time recognizing when a debate is pointless.You're obsessed with disproving evolution: if there's any tiny, obscure fact that may exist at the slightest cant from the expectations of some evolutionary hypothesis, you're the man who's going to find it. You're a man on a mission, and there is no possible way that I'm going to be able to match your determination, because you are absolutely hell-bent on being the one who knows more about cetacean atavisms than anyone else on the planet; while I just find it somewhat interesting.But, you're obsession is also going to blind you to your own stupidity. Something about evolution just "feels wrong" to you, and you're going to keep digging until you find that obscure, but crucial bit of information that nobody else is seeing.You cannot see the forest for the trees. You're too obsessed with burning the forest down to ever see it clearly.

Hi, AOkid. There's certainly nothing wrong with examining individual data points. In that respect, your crusade is at least partially reasonable. But, from what I can tell, your search has turned up little more than an eclectic assortment of excuses to dismiss evidence that's inconvenient for you. From my perspective, your excuses so far have amounted to misunderstanding or misapplication of scientific concepts like homology, exaggeration of the disagreements within the scientific community, completely superfluous alternative hypotheses, and aspersions cast on the wrong whaling research institution. There's no cohesive picture at all: it's just a grab-bag of excuses to deny that there's a real pattern there.Your metaphor of choice is that you are making trees in the forest fall down, and thereby destroying the illusory forest of evolution that's casting a shadow that blocks the light of Truth from reaching the world. It's a rather heroic depiction of your valiant efforts to defeat evil.My metaphor of choice is that you are pedantically trying to argue that the trees are not in fact trees, because they don't meet this or that criterion of an obscure technical definition of "tree." It's a rather comical depiction of your pathetic efforts to not be wrong about anything.

Hi, Kid.I'm still working through this, but here's a couple immediate thoughts.First, I was expecting something a bit bigger than "a museum displays the bones the wrong way." It's not the first time a museum has gotten something wrong, and it won't be the last. Send them an email, and maybe they'll fix it. While you're at it, send these guys an email too, and explain to them that displaying humans and dinosaurs co-existing when there is no evidence of such co-existence constitutes "fraud."Second, in response to your ongoing comments about the corpus cavernosum, I would like to draw your attention to the temporalis muscle of primates. In humans, the temporalis's origin is in the temporal fossa (on the side of the head). In most other mammals, however, the origin of the temporalis is at the sagittal suture (on top of the head). This example is only to make it clear that muscle attachment sites are not always conserved: they can move around between different taxonomic groups. So, you can't rule out an ilial homology just based on corpus cavernosum attachment sites.That said, I'm still not entirely clear why this is such a sticking point for you, and I'm not entirely clear how this specific issues is supposed to relate to evolution at all.I'll keep going over your posts and I may have more to say at some point later.

I'm happy to see you(r words), Faith!The point I was making is that the orientation of the bones doesn't make a difference: they look like legs no matter which way you display them, and that particular museum's display mistakes have no bearing on my appraisal of the evidence.That said, I would personally prefer it if they were displayed properly, so I would be happy to contact the museum myself and request the change, if you think it's necessary.

Hi, AOkid.I've had a little chance to look over the paper, and I still think you're inflating the significance of your find. The only thing you've uncovered is that a museum displayed its bones in the wrong order: the rest is complete conjecture and conspiracy theory on your part. Nonsense. It's just a depiction of the bones extended for better viewing, no more egregious than this:

This pose might actually be rather uncomfortable for a living butterfly

And it isn't the orientation of a museum display that led people to think these bones were homologous with the hind limbs. Even after your correction, it's still pretty clearly a hind limb. Here's Struthers' description from the paper you cited:

quote:

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If the ordinary mammalian femur, much shortened, be flexed, adducted, and rotated outwards, it will be brought into the position of the femur in Mysticetus. More exactly, if the pelvis and femur of a seal be taken in the hands and so manipulated, the correspondence becomes evident, and it is seen that this tubercle is the trochanter major. It is situated generally at about the junction of the proximal and middle thirds of the bone, but may be somewhat to either side of that point.

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This really doesn't seem like a real difficulty here. Basically, the whale femur, in its correct orientation, looks like a typical mammalian femur tucked up and turned slightly.I think your intense desire to see evolution go down in flames has made you see things that aren't there. In what way am I "full of bull"? Are you disputing the well-known fact that other mammals, such as gorillas and tigers, have a sagittal crest, which serves as the origin for the temporalis muscles? Or, are you disputing the well-known fact that the human temporalis muscle attaches to the temporal bone on the side of the skull, with a maximum extent at the temporal line?I agree that the temporalis muscle is completely homologous in all mammals (all amniotes, actually). But, it clearly moves around a little bit with evolution. That's kind of the theme of evolution: evolution changes things, and we don't get to decide a priori what things it might change.This is probably one of the reasons why cetologists have not yet reached full consensus on the homologies of the cetacean pelvis: because they aren't sure exactly what types of changes are possible or most likely. Struthers seems to have thought that the entire pelvis was an ischium with an unusual shape, but the other paper Percy cited proposed that all three pelvic bones are present.---After this, you still haven't presented any credible reason to doubt that these bones are actually pelvic and hind-limb bones. All you have is overblown accusations and confirmation biases.

Hi, AOkid. Where do you think the naturalists got their whale specimens from? Every naturalist interested in marine mammals would have maintained a network of contacts among commercial whalers and fishermen. That's considered normal scientific practice. No, I don't detect any anxiousness, and nobody talked about publishing before examination of the evidence. Roy Chapman Andrews (an expert on whale anatomy) heard about this unusual whale from his friend, the whaling boss Sidney Ruck, and asked Francis Kermode (not an expert on whale anatomy) if he could examine the bones and publish a paper on them. This sort of thing happens all the time in museums: it's kind of like asking "are you going to finish that?" For someone with no qualifications, you're awfully picky about other peoples' qualifications, aren't you? I actually find this argument to be at least somewhat compelling. The photographed bones seem to be consistent with humpback phalanges in size and shape, and the leg seems shorter than the claimed 4' 2". Still, I have little doubt that Roy Chapman Andrews was significantly better qualified than I to identify whale bones, and I imagine he would have recognized phalanges if he had seen them; so, until I have good reason to doubt him, I will defer to his professional judgment.And, I do have a few quibbles with your methodology.First, you have a CG expert on hand? That sounds suspicious to me, so I'm going to do a little forensics on the work of your alleged "expert."To begin, if you look at the photograph, the putative leg appears to be longer than your friend's scale bar: the baseline he seems to have measured from is a shadow line, not the actual juncture of the leg with the body. It's difficult to tell how much of the leg is in the shadow, but the line at the end of the light section is definitely not the base of the leg.Then, I also notice that your "expert" seems to have reconstructed the limb as pointing mostly backwards (toward the right side of the photo), at no more than 20 relative to the whale's body. But, the stark contrast in lighting between the limb and body, suggests that the leg and body are much closer to perpendicular than that.Also, the shadows on the man's face and underneath the whale suggest that the main light source is coming from above and to the left side of the photo. So, the leg would have to be sticking out at quite a significant angle to be so brightly illuminated while the body is not. So, your "expert" probably underestimated the foreshortening of the leg.That said, I wouldn't guess that this "leg" is much longer than three feet. It's possible that the 4' 2" was not measured from the body, but from the base of the "leg" that was buried inside the body; in which case the claimed measurements would be perfectly consistent with the reported measurements from Roy Chapman Andrews; but it's pretty much impossible to verify that.The photo also shows a protrusion on the opposite side of the whale's vulva, and I’m curious to know what you make of that. I think your standards for "knowing for sure" are too low, but I certainly agree that "hoax" is a valid hypothesis for this evidence. I tend to lean away from "hoax" at this point, but my mind isn't fully made up yet.

Hi, AOkid. Touche. I should have said, "I looks like a misshapen mammalian femur tucked up and turned slightly." It was supposed to be a restatement of Struthers' words, not an original claim of my own. So, muscles migrating across a head are not comparable to muscles migrating across a pelvis. I'll try to remember that for future discussions.I only brought it up as an example of the strange and unexpected things that sometimes occur in animals, which mean you don't get to just say things like, "Gee, this seems a bit hard to explain, so we might as well just give up on Evolution." Since that's the entire basis of your arguments that deal with pelvic-bone homologies, I hoped it was a pretty good illustration of why your argumentation is weak and pathetic. Obviously, I went wrong somewhere. My claim was that they can't figure out how the modern cetacean pelvis evolved from a terrestrial mammal's pelvis, because something weird happened there. You've basically just restated that in a condescending and accusatory way.

Hi, AOkid. You have evidence for this claim, of course.