Summations Only

Hi TheArtist, and welcome to the fray. Vestigial does not mean without function, it means no longer used for original function. These bones are no longer used for locomotion.Vestigial Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com

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1. of, relating to, or being a vestige
2. (of certain organs or parts of organisms) having attained a simple structure and reduced size and function during the evolution of the species: the vestigial pelvic girdle of a snake

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The reason they still exist -- long after the other bones of the legs have disappeared -- is because they have a useful secondary function. Curiously, that is how evolution works - adapting parts to new functions.See CB360: Function of vestigial organs.

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(PRATT) Claim CB360:
Practically all "vestigial" organs in man have been shown to have definite uses and not to be vestigial at all.

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1. "Vestigial" does not mean an organ is useless. A vestige is a "trace or visible sign left by something lost or vanished" (G. & C. Merriam 1974, 769). Examples from biology include leg bones in snakes, eye remnants in blind cave fish (Yamamoto and Jeffery 2000), extra toe bones in horses, wing stubs on flightless birds and insects, and molars in vampire bats. Whether these organs have functions is irrelevant. They obviously do not have the function that we expect from such parts in other animals, for which creationists say the parts are "designed."

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Vestigial organs are evidence for evolution because we expect evolutionary changes to be imperfect as creatures evolve to adopt new niches. Creationism cannot explain vestigial organs. They are evidence against creationism if the creator follows a basic design principle that form follows function, as H. M. Morris himself expects (1974, 70). They are compatible with creation only if anything and everything is compatible with creation, making creationism useless and unscientific.

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2. Some vestigial organs can be determined to be useless if experiments show that organisms with them survive no better than organisms without them.

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Found in some whales and not in others. Guess that means that the other whales don't have their genital wall strengthened.Gosh what a problem that is for creationists to explain.Enjoy. Edited by Zen Deist, : psEdited by Zen Deist, : clrty

Hi again TheArtist,One of your problems is unreasonable expectations for evidence. You expect evidence to show you every step. Evidence does not just turn up to support your scientific thesis, the scientific thesis is developed from the evidence available.If the evidence were complete it would not be a thesis but a statement of the facts shown by the evidence.If you walked across the US and took a video of every step, then you would have a smooth transition from east to west (or vice versa). If instead you took a series of photos, then you would have a set of stepping stones that could be placed by time and location into a series that travels from east to west (or vice versa). Why should all the intermediate fossils have been preserved in this case?If you want to see a smooth transition, there are examples of that.

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A Smooth Fossil Transition: Pelycodus, a primate
Pelycodus was a tree-dwelling primate that looked A complete fossil much like a modern lemur. The skull shown is probably 7.5 centimeters long.

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The numbers down the left hand side indicate the depth (in feet) at which each group of fossils was found. As is usual in geology, the diagram gives the data for the deepest (oldest) fossils at the bottom, and the upper (youngest) fossils at the top. The diagram covers about five million years.

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The numbers across the bottom are a measure of body size. Each horizontal line shows the range of sizes that were found at that depth. The dark part of each line shows the average value, and the standard deviation around the average.

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The dashed lines show the overall trend. The species at the bottom is Pelycodus ralstoni, but at the top we find two species, Notharctus nunienus and Notharctus venticolus. The two species later became even more distinct, and the descendants of nunienus are now labeled as genus Smilodectes instead of genus Notharctus.

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As you look from bottom to top, you will see that each group has some overlap with what came before. There are no major breaks or sudden jumps. And the form of the creatures was changing steadily.

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This shows a smooth transition from one species of ancestral primate to two daughter species of primate. They diverge further after this speciation event, each evolving within a different ecology, the ecologies overlap initially but later diverge as they evolve.

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A Smooth Fossil Transition: Foraminifera
A "foram" is a single-celled ocean plankton, either free-floating or else bottom dwelling. In the image, "ma" means "millions of years ago". So, the image shows a sequence from 64.5 million years ago, to 58 million years ago.

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The overall sequence is so enormous because the tiny fossils can fit between grains of sand, and escape being crushed. The sequence was very hard to study until recently, when a computerized system was developed. It can identify and classify forams, and it is connected to a microscope.

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Virtually every species of foraminifera that lived in the last 65 million years is represented. That's a lot of species, a lot of speciation events, and a lot of smooth transitions. Curiously, science does not argue that each one evolved directly from the other, just that the known fossils show an overall pattern that is consistent with evolution, it shows descent from a common ancestor by the nested hierarchy of hereditary traits that relate one group to the next, and the existence of certain traits that are not shared with other animals.There are many smooth transitions known to science, but not all the evidence of past life is available, so we don't expect smooth transitions to show up in all cases.Instead what we expect to find are stepping stones that show the path of the development of the diversity of life on this planet, stepping stones that may diverge into different paths, but which lead back in time in a pattern of nested hierarchies of hereditary traits.This is precisely what the whale fossils show. Species A is adept at living in a shallow sea environment, occasionally climbing out on a shoreline.Species B is more adept at living in the sea than A, but less adept at using the shoreline, and can venture into the deep sea.Species A becomes extinct (it survived for a while but the ecology challenges and opportunities changed, in part due to the new existence of species B).Species C is more adept at living in the deep sea than B, and has no need to use shorelines at all.Species B becomes extinct (it survived for a while but the ecology challenges and opportunities changed, in part due to the new existence of species C).Enjoy.

Hi dan4reason, herebedragons, etc. Another thing to point out is that evolution predicts an increase in evolution of diversity where survival pressure is low, such as when a species moves into a new ecosystem with little opposing forces, or after a massive die-off. This is because there is less selection overall and this allows a greater diversity in phenotypes. It also leads to rapid speciation when pockets of parent populations breed more within a subpopulation than the whole population due to dispersal into the ecology -- distance is a barrier to breeding from one side of the population to the other.Is there any evidence of this actually happening? Yes. The foraminifera experienced an "explosion" in new species following the Y-T extinction event.Then there is the issue of diversity within a species, and whether or not two fossils could overlap in phenotype variation given the dates and locations and the differences in the fossils.See Dogs will be Dogs will be ??? for a discussion of what I mean here. In essence the variation known in dogs today, while still being one species, shows a large degree of variation in phenotypes that can then be used to compare the degree of differences between fossils (horses are used in the thread cited) to see if that is the same degree of difference or not.You can also look at the variation at each level and how much they overlap the variations of each previous generation in pelycodus (previously discussed): We see that the average change from generation to generation is less than the variation in the population, but by the time you get from Pelycodus ralstoni to Pelycodus jarrovii the whole population has shifted.Enjoy.

Hi again herebedragons, I agree that we don't have the resolution in the Cetacean record that we do in Pelycodus, the Cetacean record is more like stepping stones along a path, while Pelycodus is more like a paved stone walkway. The question is whether new fossils (paving stones) fill in the walkway or branch off the path. One thing to remember about evolution is that the time metric is measured in generations, rather than years, and that average offspring per generation can condense one lineage compared to another by introducing more variation per generation. This would likely mean that pelycodus has more opportunity for diversity than the cetaceans on both counts.The other thing to remember is that selection is in response to ecological opportunities and challenges. In the mature ecosystem of pelycodus there is less opportunity and more challenge for added diversity, so this slows down the process. It is only as the whole population moves gradually towards larger individuals that an opportunity is made for a smaller species to survive. Looking closely at the pelycodus chart there are a couple of short branches towards smaller species, but they die out: not sufficient opportunity to survive. The opportunity for a smaller species only occurs once the main population is pretty much all larger than the ancestral (P. ralstoni) species was.In an open ecosystem there would more opportunity and less challenge. Yes, reduced selection pressure means that more of the population survives to breed, including more of the ones with diverse variations compared to the parent population, thus resulting in greater diversity in the whole population. As population size increases it also becomes more difficult for all genes to spread equally through the population, so you develop varieties in different areas, especially when subpopulations live in slightly different ecologies (shallow vs deep ocean).The fossil evidence of foraminifera (another case where we have a paved walkway vs stepping stones) shows us that this in fact happened after the K-T extinction event:

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A Classic Tale of Transition

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It may be in what the foram record suggests about how life copes with Mother Earth's periodic bouts with annihilation that eventually draws the most attention to Arnold's and Parker's work. The geologic record has been prominently scarred by a series of global cataclysms of unknown, yet hotly debated, origin. Each event, whether rapid or slow, wreaked wholesale carnage on the planet's ecology, wiping out countless species that had taken nature millions of years to produce. Biologists have always wondered how life bounces back after such sweeping devastation.

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One of the last great extinctions occurred roughly 66 million years ago, and according to one popular theory it resulted from Earth's receiving a direct hit from a large asteroid. Whatever the cause, the event proved to be the dinosaurs' coup de grace, and also wiped out a good portion of Earth's marine life -- including almost all species of planktonic forams.

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As revealed by the ancient record left by the foram family, the story of recovery after extinction is every bit as busy and colorful as some scientists have long suspected.

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"What we've found suggests that the rate of speciation increases dramatically in a biological vacuum," Parker said. "After the Cretaceous extinction, the few surviving foram species began rapidly propagating into new species, and for the first time we're able to see just how this happens, and how fast."

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As foram survivors rush to occupy their new habitats, they seem to start experimenting will all sorts of body shapes, trying to find something stable, something that will work, Arnold said. Once a population in a given habitat develops a shape or other characteristic that stands up to the environment, suddenly the organisms begin to coalesce around what becomes a standardized form, the signature of a new species.

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As the available niches begin to fill up with these new creatures, the speciation rate begins to slow down, and pressure from competition between species appears to bear down in earnest. The extinction rate then rises accordingly.

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There is no reason to think that this is an isolated incident applicable only to foraminifera. They were moving into a new ecosystem that was also impacted by, and still recovering from, the K-T extinction, and they had few competitors amidst an ecosystem of opportunity. Whale evolution would logically have diversified rapidly into a variety of forms that then gradually honed in on specific adaptations to different aspects of the ecosystem, baleen vs toothed, etc.Enjoy.

Just so you know, the beginning of an answer to one aspect of your proposed A holistic understanding on the evolution belief system has been posted at Explaining the pro-Evolution position , and that it addresses the issue of what evolution science IS -- a science, not a belief system.Curiously I read your proposed topic and was struck by how little it pertained to evolution science, and rather was attacking a creationist straw man that characterizes all science and humanistic or materialistic beliefs under the banner of "evolutionism" as if calling it an 'ism' makes it a belief system that unites these different elements. It doesn't.For instance morals and what is "good" and what is "bad" -- science studies what happens in the physical testable world, and does not make judgements like that, rather that falls under philosophy (like humanism or materialism), and if you want to discuss this further I can open another new thread to that effect. Or you can proceed as admin suggests.No reply here please, you can message me.Enjoy

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A Possible Break in One of Evolution's Biggest Mysteries

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How they got there, transforming from four-legged, landlubbing also-rans, patrolling Pakistani riverbanks, to the globe-spanning marine colossus of earth’s history is the sort of question that gets people to pursue Ph.D.’s in paleontology in the first place.

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Among mammals, whales really stand out to me for having to have met the most obstacles in their evolution, says Marx. They’re really a poster child of evolution.

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... To get a foothold on this dizzying sweep, UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Larry Taylor has decided to probe something smaller. Not the whales themselves, but the barnacles that cling to the animalshitching rides around the planet. As Taylor realized, oxygen isotopes in barnacle shells act as a chemical passport of a whale’s travels, filled with stamps from the world’s various oceans. And humpback-whale barnacles go back millions of years in the fossil record. Taylor hopes to find ancient whale journeys coded in these fossil shellsjourneys that could illuminate the evolution of whales and, perhaps even, why some got so preposterously large.

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The atomic inscriptions in other humpback barnacles accurately captured an animal moving from California to Baja. But these measurements (undeniably clever as they are) merely confirm what we already know about whale migration. For Taylor, though, this is just a proof-of-concept. He wants to know where whales were traveling hundreds of thousands, even millions of years agoif they were even traveling at all. Using the isotopes of fossil barnacles stretching back millions of years, and mapping them onto the ancient ocean, Taylor hopes to find out just what the whales of a bygone Earth were up to.

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Gigantism isn’t necessarily something that only occurred in the last 3 million years or so, says Monash University paleontologist Felix Marx. But what did change, as far as we can tell, is that all of the little ones suddenly start to disappear. You’ve got a whole range of whales that don’t even exist today.

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You’ve got all sorts of stuff that’s just a lot smallerlike, three, four, five meters. And about 3 million years ago or so, as far as we can tell, they all disappear.

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If this story is right, it might not have been the only time that the peculiar influence of plate tectonics has guided whale evolution. More than 30 million years ago, when South America divorced Antarctica and the sea spilled over between the two continents, the profound changes to ocean circulation supercharged the ocean with nutrients and plankton, and might have prodded the split between baleen whales and toothed whaleswhich curiously occurs around the same time. Even further back, 50 million years ago the extremely warm climate of the Eocene might have helped ease the whales’ wolf-like ancestor into the tepid water in the first place (according to Michigan paleontologist Philip Gingerich). And, before that, 56 million years ago, it might have been deep-sea volcanoes burning through fossil fuels under the North Atlantic seafloor that released enough methane and carbon dioxide to the atmosphere to set off an extreme spike in global temperaturesa heatwave that spawned a new group of animals that today includes deer, camels and giraffes, but that also included the ancestor of all whales. Understanding biology without geology is impossible, and vice versa.

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Enjoy

The impression I got was that the Gigantism" occurred due to the environmental conditions of the later ice ages and that most of the smaller whales went extinct.Enjoy