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Author | Topic: Supporting life aboard the ark | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Mangetout Inactive Member |
It seems to me that a great many animal species would not be able to survive a prolonged stay in the ark unless very special arrangements were made to accomodate them; one example I would like to discuss is Chalcid Wasps.
Many species of Chalcid wasps have a symbiotic relationship with a single species of fig tree; the breeding and larval stages taking place inside the fruit and often providing a service of pollination for the plant.They need living, developing fruit in which to complete their life cycle. Some of these fig species are large trees before they come into bearing. How could the Chalcid wasps have survived the flood? [This message has been edited by Mangetout, 05-02-2003] {Fixed formating by swapping positions of bracketed b and bracketed i (UBB code) - Adminnemooseus} [This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 05-06-2003]
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Mangetout Inactive Member |
OK, and why didn't my formatting work?
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Quetzal Member (Idle past 6192 days) Posts: 3228 Joined: |
Well, as to the formatting, just like math you have to put the i-b and /b-/i in the right order - which is what got messed up, I think (i.e., end with what you started with).
As to the wasps, the creationist explanation is a) neither insects nor plants were required to be on the Ark in the first place - viable seeds surviving their immersion and insects surviving on floating vegetation mats, and b) if they were, it was obviously a generic "wasp kind" and "fruit kind" that later microevolved into the host-specific insect and insect-specific pollinator symbiosis. Why can't you evos understand how easy it is? ![]() [This message has been edited by Quetzal, 05-02-2003]
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Mangetout Inactive Member |
Sheesh, is it just me or does this 'kind' thing get a bit bbroader every time I blink?
How long before kind==phylum?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1787 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Ultimately I think the problem is that creationists fail to recognize that any system of taxa is inherently approximate; the boundaries between "adjacent" taxa tend to be fuzzy. A lot of the time it's lingusitic - we call some animals "cats" but that doesn't mean that they have some unique cat nature that separates them from their close non-cat cousins.
Lingusitically I don't think we really have the leeway anymore to make up a radical new name for an incipent species radically different from its ancestors. In that sense, the creationists are right - we'll never see a cat give rise to non-cats simply because in our langauge, cats could never change enough that we would stop calling them cats. It's a problem with our words, not biology. This makes it almost impossible to communicate, and I'm sure I've failed right here. ![]()
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Mangetout Inactive Member |
Sure, it is also true that the taunt "haha!, speciation is one thing, but show me the evolution of a new genus!" is a tall order because the taxonomy that exists below the level of species/subspecies/varieties (that is changing now, albeit slowly), is legacy.
Expecting a cat to evolve into a dog is like expecting Apple to start producing Wintel PCs - somewhere back in the mists of time, there was a point where there was no Apple, Intel and Microsoft; they all branched off from common roots, but they are stuck with the legacies of those branch events. Anyway, we're getting off topic. Are there any literalists here?
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Rrhain Member (Idle past 327 days) Posts: 6351 From: San Diego, CA, USA Joined: |
You're absolutely right that higher taxonomic levels are legacy, but that doesn't mean we still can't see new ones showing up.
Paraliobacillus ryukyuensis gen. nov., sp. nov., a new Gram-positive, slightly halophilic, extremely halotolerant, facultative anaerobe isolated from a decomposing marine alga. J Gen Appl Microbiol. 2002 Oct;48(5):269-79. PMID: 12501437 [PubMed - in process] Oleomonas sagaranensis gen. nov., sp. nov., represents a novel genus in the alpha-Proteobacteria. FEMS Microbiol Lett. 2002 Dec 17;217(2):255-261. PMID: 12480113 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] Fudou R, Jojima Y, Iizuka T, Yamanaka S. Haliangium ochraceum gen. nov., sp. nov. and Haliangium tepidum sp. nov.: Novel moderately halophilic myxobacteria isolated from coastal saline environments. J Gen Appl Microbiol. 2002 Apr;48(2):109-16. PMID: 12469307 [PubMed - in process] Oleiphilaceae fam. nov., to include Oleiphilus messinensis gen. nov., sp. nov., a novel marine bacterium that obligately utilizes hydrocarbons. Int J Syst Evol Microbiol. 2002 May;52(Pt 3):901-11. PMID: 12054256 [PubMed - in process] [A new family of Alteromonadaceae fam. nov., including the marine proteobacteria species Alteromonas, Pseudoalteromonas, Idiomarina i Colwellia.] Mikrobiologiia. 2001 Jan-Feb;70(1):15-23. Review. Russian. PMID: 11338830 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] Description of Bogoriellaceae fam. nov., Dermacoccaceae fam. nov., Rarobacteraceae fam. nov. and Sanguibacteraceae fam. nov. and emendation of some families of the suborder Micrococcineae. Int J Syst Evol Microbiol. 2000 May;50 Pt 3:1279-85. PMID: 10843073 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] It seems we've got not only new genera but also new families. ------------------Rrhain WWJD? JWRTFM!
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Coragyps Member (Idle past 1055 days) Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
Hey Rrhain! A most hearty welcome to you! Are you to the point where you just can't take any more *frank*?
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wj Inactive Member |
quote: Or Bloopers. Or Newt. Or 4truth denier. Or Bob the boob. There seems to be a diminishing supply of creationists lately. Are they being converted or becoming scare to have their beliefs challenged? You'll find more intelligent, but equally wrong, creationists here. However they tend to avoid the topics with too much science.
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Mangetout Inactive Member |
Sure, but aren't those 'new' in the sense of them just being new discoveries, rather than 'new' in the sense of them having arisen as a result of branching off from something else while we're watching.
Like that organism froma 'new' phylum (the one that lives on lobster mouthparts) - it isn't really new, we just took a long time to notice it.
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Rrhain Member (Idle past 327 days) Posts: 6351 From: San Diego, CA, USA Joined: |
Mangetout responds to me:
quote: No, not really. The problem, as we all agree, is that higher taxonomic levels are legacy. That is, you don't normally have a speciation event and have that new species really be a new genera. Instead, you have a bunch of speciation events and upon examination of all of the new species that come around, you realize that a new grouping needs to take place. This is what is described in the last reference. A quote from the abstract:
quote: As a professor of biology once told me, evolution is not a tree. It's a bush. New things happen at the tips. As the bush grows larger, those tips move back to become branches of their own but at the moment that they're tips, you wouldn't be able to see it.
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Mangetout Inactive Member |
Indeed; had there been human observers at the time when the split between chordates and [whatever else there was], they would almost certainly have classified the new organism Somethingia Chordata - i.e. they would have viewed it as a speciation event, even though it looks from here like a branch at phylum level.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1787 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Indeed; had there been human observers at the time when the split between chordates and [whatever else there was], they would almost certainly have classified the new organism Somethingia Chordata - i.e. they would have viewed it as a speciation event, even though it looks from here like a branch at phylum level. The current thought, as I understand it, is that chordates are decended from an invertebrate species that, as juveniles, have a primitive spinal cord which they then lose as adults. This is an example of Neoteny, I understand - the phenomenon where adult members of one species posess traits that are found only in the juveniles of a closely related species. (Certain human characteristics display the same neoteny to chimp juveniles.) This, if a creationist had been observing the event along with the scientist, he or she would have likely countered "Not speciation at all, but rather a degenerate form of this invertebrate. It stubbornly refuses to become an adult." Or something similar. I think this example shows how creationist demands for evidence of new taxa is a kind of loaded question.
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truthlover Member (Idle past 4379 days) Posts: 1548 From: Selmer, TN Joined: |
I know you were just giving a creationist explanation, Quetzal, but the issue was the insect needing the fruit. So neither the insect nor the tree was on the ark; I can understand the insect being on a floating vegetation mat, but was the tree alive and growing on a floating vegetation mat? Maybe that would explain how the dove got an olive branch so fast after the waters receded!
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Mangetout Inactive Member |
But if there were floating vegetation mats of such size that they were able to sustain entire ecosystems (including large mature fruitiing trees) for the duration of the flood, these would be quite suitable for occupation by humans.
Furthermore, if the floating mats were able to remain intact through conditions at the onset of the flood, there seems to be no good reason why humans also wouldn't survive, clinging to large pieces of floating debris (until they could get to one of these floating island ecosystems). Really, I think the floating mat hypothesis has no merit whatever; the vast majority of trees cannot tolerate waterlogging at the roots. (edited for typos) [This message has been edited by Mangetout, 05-06-2003]
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