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Author Topic:   How did Monkeys get to South America?
bluegenes
Member (Idle past 2477 days)
Posts: 3119
From: U.K.
Joined: 01-24-2007


Message 14 of 137 (499092)
02-16-2009 4:44 PM
Reply to: Message 12 by AdminNosy
02-16-2009 2:54 PM


Re: Please watch the topic
Continental drift and the timing of the separation of Africa, South America and possibly Antartica have to come into it. The probable reason for the question is that the timing of separation is considered to be before the date of ~ 40,000,000 yrs that genetics gives to the divergence of New World Monkeys from the rest of us. So, rafting across a much narrower South Atlantic is often suggested, and animals are known to raft in other cases (studies of newly formed volcanic islands).
It's rare in mammals, but rodents do it, usually inadvertently hitch-hiking on our boats!

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bluegenes
Member (Idle past 2477 days)
Posts: 3119
From: U.K.
Joined: 01-24-2007


Message 17 of 137 (499096)
02-16-2009 5:29 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Engineer
02-15-2009 10:09 PM


Engineer writes:
Edited by Engineer, 02-16-2009 10:14 PM: added addendum 1
Edited by Engineer, 02-16-2009 10:16 PM: No reason given.
Edited by Engineer, 02-16-2009 10:19 PM: No reason given.
Engineer, when people have replied to an O.P., does it really make sense to change the content? Why not continue further down the thread?

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bluegenes
Member (Idle past 2477 days)
Posts: 3119
From: U.K.
Joined: 01-24-2007


Message 22 of 137 (499105)
02-16-2009 6:50 PM
Reply to: Message 20 by Engineer
02-16-2009 6:08 PM


Re: OP changed because people are misquoting assumptions
Engineer writes:
I have some doubts about the ark theory, especially with animals crossing oceans to get to their present habitat after leaving the ark. Evolutionists assume they can raft however, and solve one of my most perplexing issues with ark theory.....
No it doesn't help your perplexity. That amount of rafting in the last 4,500 years would mean that we'd be witnessing successful inter-continental crossings regularly now.
We don't really have to assume that much for the occasional event, though. Your water problem isn't such a big one when you realise that there's water in the vegetation that they're eating and riding on. Individual animals making such a crossing may be much more frequent, but it depends on there being a pair, and the pair finding a niche when they get to their new habitat. Animals being washed to sea in flash floods and clinging to whatever's available probably happens a lot. But crossing an ocean means the right currents, some nourishment from whatever they're riding on, and the shorter the distance (and it was shorter), the better.
I remember once seeing a pair of crabs clinging to a piece of driftwood in the deep Indian ocean (about 20km from land).
So, it's a bit like tossing a coin and getting ten heads in a row. It's unlikely to happen often, but it's unlikely that it would never happen.
Sloth's walking across many different habitats from Ararat to western Africa, and then rafting, all within a few hundred years, then evolving rapidly into many different species of sloth over a few thousand years is like tossing a coin and getting heads 100,000 times consecutively.
Edited by bluegenes, : speling!
Edited by bluegenes, : wrong word

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bluegenes
Member (Idle past 2477 days)
Posts: 3119
From: U.K.
Joined: 01-24-2007


Message 65 of 137 (499202)
02-17-2009 8:08 AM
Reply to: Message 63 by RAZD
02-17-2009 7:16 AM


Islands unnecessary and unlikely
RAZD writes:
But if you can show the concept is feasible without hypothetical islands (that there are no record of), the argument is stronger. What happened to the hypothetical islands?
I'm with you on the Islands. Being washed to sea clinging to a raft of vegetation two or three times and making lengthy ocean voyages in the same direction for a couple of monkeys (minimum) is less likely than a pair making the complete voyage.
Now, to aid the imagination, and for the irresistible cuteness factor, let's use these.
The smaller the creatures, the better their chances. These are about 6" long (excluding the tale), and weigh less than 5 ounces. Their raft was a tree draped in vines uprooted in a flash flood roaring down a river valley which washed it (and its clinging occupants) into the estuary and out to sea.
This might happen quite often, but our little pair have the right prevailing currents and the right prevailing winds, so they do the 2,000 miles in about 40 days. There are leaves for food, water in the leaves, and it rains several times during the voyage, so they can lick fresh water out of cracks in the bark, etc.
Their final problem is establishing a healthy population on arrival, and it's known that a single pair of mammals can do that, a problem that will lead us into the genetics of incest, and which I'll cover in another post if anyone's interested.
Then follows niche filling and speciation which is no problem for what would be the most intelligent and culturally adaptive animals on the new continent.

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bluegenes
Member (Idle past 2477 days)
Posts: 3119
From: U.K.
Joined: 01-24-2007


Message 98 of 137 (499319)
02-18-2009 10:19 AM
Reply to: Message 94 by Dr Adequate
02-18-2009 8:50 AM


Re: A Monkey On A Raft
Dr Adequate writes:
The first google hit I got on rafts of vegetation was Charles Sutherland Elton's "The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants", which states that "a green monkey was noticed on floating timber near Java in 1883".
Where do green monkeys come from? Sub-Saharan Africa. And Java, of course, is in Indonesia.
I think an actual observation trumps an argument from incredulity.
Nice work, and it certainly does the trumping. Earlier in the thread I said that I thought that individuals making inter-continental voyages might be relatively common. So, it's going to happen to a pair sooner or later. I also mentioned seeing a pair of crabs clinging to a piece of driftwood in deep ocean, and that was, coincidentally, off the coast of Java.
Here's the evidence that mammals can produce a healthy population from a pair once the voyage is made.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/2007/06/070620154911.htm
Those discussing the drinking water problem should never forget that common phenomenon called "rain", and that there can be a lot of it in some months.
None of this is any comfort to young earth creationists looking for ways that animals can disperse after the ark, because that would require rafting in pairs to be so common that we would see it happening successfully all the time.

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bluegenes
Member (Idle past 2477 days)
Posts: 3119
From: U.K.
Joined: 01-24-2007


Message 99 of 137 (499332)
02-18-2009 11:20 AM
Reply to: Message 78 by Engineer
02-17-2009 10:03 PM


Re: again what is your alternative theory
Engineer writes:
The only trouble is that green wood sinks. Dried out wood with no water in it floats rather well for a short time, then it sinks.
Really? You seem to be desperately making up problems that don't exist.
quote:
The "Old Man of the Lake" in Crater Lake, Oregon is a full-size tree that has been bobbing vertically in the lake for more than a century. Due to the cold water of the lake, the tree has been well preserved.
Driftwood - Wikipedia
What has buoyancy in fresh water has more in salt water. And our monkeys certainly don't need more than a month or two of buoyancy.

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bluegenes
Member (Idle past 2477 days)
Posts: 3119
From: U.K.
Joined: 01-24-2007


Message 105 of 137 (499476)
02-18-2009 7:38 PM
Reply to: Message 103 by Engineer
02-18-2009 7:14 PM


Re: again what is your alternative theory
Engineer writes:
I don't believe monkeys rafted across 40 million years ago and survived, though it's astronomically improbable.
A strange sentence. Why is it "astronomically improbable"? They're there in South America, aren't they? They can't fly, they couldn't have walked, and their physiology and genomes show that they share ancestry with the old world primates, all of which makes it astronomically probable, when you think about it.

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bluegenes
Member (Idle past 2477 days)
Posts: 3119
From: U.K.
Joined: 01-24-2007


Message 109 of 137 (499485)
02-18-2009 8:12 PM
Reply to: Message 107 by Engineer
02-18-2009 7:54 PM


Re: A Monkey On A Raft
Engineer writes:
It probably was from africa, but wouldn't last more than about 10 days without fresh water.
I've been on the Indian ocean when it was pouring with rain at least three times that I can remember.
The distance from the east coast of Africa to Java is greater than the distance from the west coast to South America, incidentally.
It would take several monkeys without any competitors to establish a new population. This would take several trans-atlantic rafting expeditions before one of them finally succeeded in establishing a population.
A pair of mammals is sufficient, as I pointed out further up the thread.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/2007/06/070620154911.htm
Placental mammals tend to do well when arriving on continents with only marsupial mammals, so there are no great problems preventing them from founding a population.
The strongest evidence for the event is the fact that they are there. All we're doing on this thread is pointing out that it's perfectly feasible in the face of your irrational incredulity.

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bluegenes
Member (Idle past 2477 days)
Posts: 3119
From: U.K.
Joined: 01-24-2007


Message 123 of 137 (499542)
02-19-2009 6:37 AM
Reply to: Message 118 by Engineer
02-18-2009 10:17 PM


Rafting certainly happens!
Engineer writes:
Here's a recent press release:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/2005/03/050329134437.htm
A lot of African animals came from North America. The raft went the other way. ;-)
You're presenting evidence against the point you seem to be trying to make. Of course the rafting can go both ways, and across any oceans. While mammals being washed out to sea and clinging to some kind of flotsam would be common, voyaging from one continent to another would be fairly rare. This is because it requires a combination of circumstances, each individual one being common or likely, but getting them all together statistically rare, but arguably almost inevitable at some time given the time scale.
Let's look at some likely requirements.
(a) The current being in the right direction.
(b) The prevailing winds being in the right direction.
(c) Two mammals of different sex being on the same raft.
(d) The raft/tree holding together for the duration or not sinking for the duration.
(e) Food available on the raft (leaves and possibly fruits).
(f) Enough rainfall during the voyage for our travellers to be able to lick water off their raft and keep from dehydrating.
Now, you can see that all these occurrences individually could be common, two mammals of opposite sex clinging to the raft being probably the least frequent event. So, as I said in an earlier post, it's like tossing a series of heads once you've got the two monkeys on a raft. It might only take several hundred pairs of monkeys on a raft off the coast of Africa to get the other 5 requirements at the same time.
I see no reason for incredulity at all. I'm sure that even less likely events have happened. And Dr. Adequate's green monkey rafting a greater distance seems to make it clear that it's probably the "two monkeys of different sex" requirement (and the establishment of a breeding population through a bottleneck) that limits the frequency of such historical events more than the actual rafting.
Edited by bluegenes, : spelling

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bluegenes
Member (Idle past 2477 days)
Posts: 3119
From: U.K.
Joined: 01-24-2007


Message 127 of 137 (499577)
02-19-2009 9:00 AM
Reply to: Message 125 by Engineer
02-19-2009 7:13 AM


Re: Rafting certainly happens!
Engineer writes:
I think there is a better case for rodents than monkeys.
On the basis of numbers alone, they have an advantage, and we know that they raft easily on our ships.
What time window do you propose?
A big one. Are you talking about estimating a time for the actual monkey event?
Why is a parallel evolution of monkeys from creatures of similar origin so unacceptable in two different locations?
The genomes should give us an approximate time of divergence, and even allowing for maximum error, this would be long after the separation of the continents.
This is one of the issues I have against the theory of evolution in it's current form.
The things that we're talking about are details of natural history, not the theory of evolution, which would just indicate that all primates have common ancestry and have diverged by processes involving mutation, selection and genetic drift. ToE doesn't have an opinion on rafting.
If an event can happen once then it can happen again. It should be repeatable. If monkeys can live quite well in both South America and Africa even today, then they should be able to evolve as such from a common ancestor.
Those groups did have a common ancestral species. What you seem to be suggesting is that an early primate existed when the continents were conjoined, and then evolved separately into convergent monkey like species on both continents after the divide. Convergent (and parallel) evolution happens, but not to a very profound extent, and genetics and the fossil record would tell us if that was the case. The dates are wrong, hence the rafting hypothesis.
Think of convergent evolution like this. The USA could have another civil war, and you could call that history repeating itself. But the nature and details of the civil war would inevitably be profoundly different from the last one, as history cannot literally repeat itself in any complex way.
You need more evidence to support that this is indeed happening, not just with monkeys but with other species as well including humans.
To support that what is happening? Could you be more precise?

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bluegenes
Member (Idle past 2477 days)
Posts: 3119
From: U.K.
Joined: 01-24-2007


Message 135 of 137 (499710)
02-19-2009 11:43 PM
Reply to: Message 133 by Blue Jay
02-19-2009 9:13 PM


Re: Rafting certainly happens!
Bluejay writes:
A pregnant female with a long enough gestation period might suffice.
It might, yes, but I was giving our travellers a bit more genetic diversity to kick start the population. Also, so far as evidence is concerned, I happened to know about the example I gave earlier in the thread of a healthy wild population of mammals starting from a pair.
Island sheep flock

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