Any practical use for Universal Common Ancestor?

The Ediacaran animals disappear from the fossil record at the end of the Vendian (544 million years ago). In their place we find representatives of almost all the modern phyla recognized today: sponges, jellyfish and corals, flatworms, mollusks, annelid worms, insects, echinoderms and chordates, plus many "lesser" phyla such as nemertean worms. These "modern" organisms appear relatively quickly in the geological time scale, and their abrupt appearance is often described as the "Cambrian explosion" however, bear in mind that the fossil record of the "explosion" is spread over about 30 million years.

I can say with authority that he (Dredge)makes it up to suit his belief. I have been known to do the same thing in regards to NT Theology, but I never mess with Biblical Creationism. I will challenge him one on one in regards to Biblical meaning any day, but I care little about Creationism...if God did indeed do it that way He is fooling everyone. Now, why would an omnipotent Being need to do a silly thing like that?

Indeed.

Having just been doing some reading about Cambrian fossils (to make sure my correction of Dredge was actually accurate), I have a few nitpicks with the above.Flatworms are not known from the Cambrian - flatworms have almost no fossil record at all (presumably because they don't fossilise well).Molluscs, sponges, annelids and echinoderms may all have pre-Cambrian representatives (but all are controversial cases where the identification of the fossils is not clear).Insects are terrestrial organisms that don't appear until much later, in the Silurian.

Excuse me if every now and then I have to interject the Floodist point of view into a discussion like this. I can't understand why dredge agrees with any of the time definitions of the rocks, which aligns him with the evos instead of the creos, but my YEC floodist position simply says the fossils in all the rocks were creatures killed in the Flood and buried in successive layers of sediment all in the same event in the same basic time period. So there's no such thing as an "Ediacaran" time period or Devonian or Silurian or Permian or Jurassic etc etc etc. --- unless of course you understand them as having been laid down perhaps days or weeks or months apart instead of millions of years. So burial of the flatworms under discussion may have preceded burial of the dinosaurs by a few months at most.But please, carry on with the ridiculous evo stuff.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

A team of scientists from Spain and the UK has determined that a certain curiously primitive group of flatworms are the oldest living ancestors to all "bilateral" animals-that is, those with a right and left side. These worms were previously thought to belong to a much younger group of organisms, and their newfound identity also implies that bilateral organisms began making their debut on Earth earlier than previously thought. The finding was reported in the March 1999 issue of Science. The study by Jaume Bagu, of the University of Barcelona, and his colleagues supports this theory by identifying a group of contemporary flatworms called the Acoela as the living descendants of an early lineage from this pre-Cambrian time. (Flatworms, several of which are parasites, are only distantly related to, and much simpler than, the familiar earthworms.)

Which doesn't alter which fossils are in which rocks, which you consistently get wrong.

Do I get it wrong? I haven't much discussed that have I? Or at all? In any case it is irrelevant to the Floodist position although I agree that it would be nice to get the order correct.

Just to be clear, the flatworms you guys are talking about Genus Planaria, Phylum Platyhelminthes, correct?

Which, I might add, is exactly what we would expect of transitional fossils. It's not clear exactly what they are.

That's a typically appalling journalistic mangling of evolutionary concepts. Things that are living today are not our ancestors.What the article you're quoting is referring to is the new animal phylogeny that's developed over the past couple of decades, in which the basal split in living bilaterian animals is between a small group consisting Xenoturbella and acoelomate 'flatworms' (inverted commas to indicate that Acoela are not closely related to most flatworms); and a big group consisting of everything else. They are making the plausible but unevidenced assumption that the common ancestor was more like the acoelomates than the 'everything else'. In reality we don't know if that's true - acoelomates could represent a simplification of the ancestral body plan, rather than an unchanged, living example. Lots of organisms once considered to be primitive due to their simplicity have turned out to be nested within more complex organisms (like Trichoplax in the case of animals). The idea that this changes the dating is based on the divergence time estimates they found between acoelomate flatworms and other bilaterians - not because they found fossil flatworms.I'm not arguing that there were no flatworms in the Cambrian. There probably were things we would call flatworms if we were looking at them today. I'm just saying there are no fossils. This is not just true of the Cambrian - there are basically no flatworm fossils at all - they just don't fossilise well. I think this was the central point of another post earlier in this thread.

What would be a lot nicer is an explanation of the fossil order that is consistent with the principles of physics, chemistry, geology, biology and all other relevant science.Our observations and theories provide a coherent explanation for the fossil order and, in fact, for the whole fossil record and our knowledge base is being improved continuously.The stuff you have told us you believe about your fantasy flood can only be true if time is suspended, and gravity is suspended, and hydrology is suspended, and sedimentology is suspended, and thermodynamics is suspended, and chemistry is suspended, and biology is suspended, and geology is suspended, and all of physics is suspended.

There are loads of genera of Platyhelminthes, not just Planaria.What FLRW was quoting was an article about the realisation that Platyhelminthes of tradition is not monophyletic - it forms two distinct clades. Most Platyhelminthes (including Planaria) belong in the same part of the animal family tree as molluscs and annelids. Some of the more primitive-looking flatworms (the 'Acoela', so named because they lack a coelom - the main body cavity of bilaterians where the important organs are all housed) turn out to not be Platyhelminthes at all. They don't belong to any of the three main groups of bilaterians, but are the first bilaterians to branch off from the others.

Yep, I realized that as I read a bit more. Thanks for the info.

Yes an explanation of the fossil order would be nice but the evidence for the Flood is compelling without it. Also, I don't think the fossil order itself is all that compelling anyway, it's more of an illusion than a reality. There is not really anything objective that defines why one living form should precede the others over millions of years, it's all imaginative. AND the idea of millions of years belies the fact that variation in one species is quite extensive over merely a few hundred years in reality. AND that nobody has offered a pathway for getting genetic changes from one species genome to that of another species although I've asked and asked. These questions are far more important than the supposedly fossil order.