Again, the press are talking about “the missing link“. Let’s get one thing clear. There is no missing link. Rather, there are an indefinite number of missing branches. To have a missing link, you need to visualise evolution as a chain. If there’s a gap in the chain, then you have a missing link. But evolution, at least at the scale of animals and plants, is mostly a tree. And all we see are individual nodes of the tree, the extant species that form, in Darwin’s metaphor, the leaves of the living tree, and the extinct species that form branching points deeper in the tree.
Evolution: There is no missing link
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(7 Responses)
‘you are the weakest link, goodbye!’ – sorry i couldn’t resist that. Yeah look at the varied shapes and forms of all humans now, why can’t they accept there is no missing link.
Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life – New Scientist
Hybrid humans:
Some researchers are also convinced that hybridisation has been a major driving force in animal evolution (see “Natural born chimeras”, and “Two into one”), and that the process is ongoing. “It is really common,” says James Mallet, an evolutionary biologist at University College London. “Ten per cent of all animals regularly hybridise with other species.” This is especially true in rapidly evolving lineages with lots of recently diverged species – including our own. There is evidence that early modern humans hybridised with our extinct relatives, such as Homo erectus and the Neanderthals (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol 363, p 2813).
A few years ago a piece of snake DNA was found in cows. The most likely agents of this genetic shuffling are viruses, which constantly cut and paste DNA from one genome into another, often across great taxonomic distances. In fact, by some reckonings, 40 to 50 per cent of the human genome consists of DNA imported horizontally by viruses, some of which has taken on vital biological functions (New Scientist, 27 August 2008, p 38).
The tree concept could become biology’s equivalent of Newtonian mechanics: revolutionary and hugely successful in its time, but ultimately too simplistic to deal with the messy real world.
At Ben’s link in comment 2 there was an add for this week’s New Scientist. The cover says, “How Beliefs Can Harm You.”
Ofcourse there is a missing link … that was not missing … humans just did not want to be linked to monkeys … that’s all.
It’s a bit how you want to see missing link I guess … I don’t see a chain .. there can be many links/steps in the theory missing, many more than one.
The origin seems clear though .. plain energy. The way energy works (electricity etc), that’s how humans still work … small .. big ..
Now then … any good mortgage deals overthere? Banks are criminal bastards. Too bad they did not need intelligence to work it. It leaves intelligent people a bit depressed. I dont feel like going primal … and wont need to, thank god. Nonetheless .. annoying. The system behind the screens is too dumb for words … they dont get it theirselves .. that’s the annoying thing.