With so much activity going on in this thread, much of it
under the garbled new subject line, "Re: EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN NATUR - REVISITED?"
I overlooked this post until now.
[By the way, I wonder how that subject line came to be. I suspect it was to create
a new thread in some newsreaders. Unfortunately, Google Groups still includes it in the same thread, which is inexorably approaching the 1000 post mark
where GG threads shatter into an indeterminate number of pieces.]
On Monday, July 17, 2023 at 8:40:43 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
On Monday, July 17, 2023 at 6:10:42 AM UTC+1, Ron Dean wrote:
Ron Dean wrote:
broger...@gmail.com wrote:
On Sunday, July 16, 2023 at 12:35:42 PM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
On 7/14/23 4:10 PM, Burkhard wrote:
On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 7:15:40 PM UTC+1, Ron.Dean wrote:
On 7/14/23 11:08 AM, jillery wrote:
On Fri, 14 Jul 2023 04:09:02 -0400, "Ron.Dean"
<rondean...@gmail.com> wrote:
<sniP>
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5>
I took the time to research this information. I think It's foolish to accept any information at face value. These Precambrian fossils were
from China, so I decided to learn what I could regarding this
information. As I pointed out before there's nothing beyond challenge.
One should look at both sides. Pertaining to the China find, there is
this observation:
(quote) "Such find might meet some common expectations of small, simple bilatrians emerging after world wide glaciation of the Neoproterozoic.
The interpretation is not well founded, however because it fails to take into account taxonomy (changes of the organism after death) and
diagnosis (changes in sediment after deposit)."
This is in reference to Doushantuo fossils, which are a very mixed bag.
Many have been described as fossils of sponge embryos, and some of
these even predate the Ediacaran period. The controversy about these "bilaterians" is of a different sort, and it is both fascinating and instructive.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1101338
I give additional data on this article below.
I assume you mean taphonomy? And you should have read the whole piece:
"The objects illustrated and described by Chen et al. (1) may well be eukaryotic microfossils, but their reconstructed morphology as bilaterians is an
artifact generated by cavities being lined by diagenetic crusts"
I couldn't find this on the one page linked by Ron. Did you get access
to the later, paywalled page[s], Burkhard?
You missed the rebuttal by Chen. The archival information, which I copied from the source,
leads to a little puzzle below.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1102328
Response to Comment on "Small Bilaterian Fossils from 40 to 55 Million Years Before the Cambrian"
JUN-YUAN CHEN, PAOLA OLIVERI, ERIC DAVIDSON, AND DAVID J. BOTTJER Authors Info & Affiliations
SCIENCE 19 Nov 2004 Vol 306, Issue 5700 p. 1291 DOI: 10.1126/science.1102328
[Correction: the caption at the bottom of the page says 1291b, and the page ends in mid-sentence.]
Strangely enough, the corresponding information on the article Ron linked gives
the same inaccurate page number as well as not mentioning the later,
paywalled pages: [1]
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1101338
Comment on "Small Bilaterian Fossils from 40 to 55 Million Years Before the Cambrian"
STEFAN BENGTSON AND GRAHAM BUDD Authors Info & Affiliations
SCIENCE 19 Nov 2004 Vol 306, Issue 5700 p. 1291 DOI: 10.1126/science.1101338
[Correction: the caption at the bottom of the page says 1291a, and the page ends in mid-sentence.]
But this is as nothing compared to The Rest of the Story, to borrow the title of
a long series of historical surprises broadcast by Paul Harvey. [Ever hear of him?]
You are not to blame for missing it, because the documentation I give below has a secondary source which is generally treated in talk.origins according to the principle,
"You don't need to refute anything a person writes if you can persuade people not to read it."
So the author agrees that these are pre-cambrian fossils,
False, as my documentation will show. "may well be" is noncommittal.
If you didn't pick up on that, it may well be because of a mindset whereby
you smeared me with a trumped-up charge of "plausible deniability"
for sincerely putting such noncommital modifiers into a post later in July.
just disagrees on parts of the interpretation of their internal structure - hardly surprising given that we are talking here about extremely small, extremely simple organisms from a really long time ago.
Sophomoric. Keep reading, it gets worse after the following minor oversight.
The author of your piece btw also is the author of this much more recent piece:
"The author" should read "One of the authors" in both places except for capital/lower case.
Complete authorships of both papers can be found above and below.
[Note the passive voice, a basis for a trumped-up charge elsethread.]
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bies.201600120
From the abstract: "Furthermore, despite challenges provided by incomplete preservation, a paucity of phylogenetically informative characters, and uncertain expectations of the anatomy of early animals, a number of Neoproterozoic fossils can reasonably
be interpreted as metazoans"
You are way out of your depth here. The article does not even mention the controversial fossils
argued about in the two 2004 references above. It only says this about the strata on which they were found:
"Though a stem-group animal interpretation cannot yet be ruled out, affinities with other eukaryotic lineages, including algal and protist clades, are at least equally likely and require further investigation 27, 71, 73, 74."
That was written in 2016, by John A. Cunningham, Alexander G. Liu, Stefan Bengtson, and Philip C. J. Donoghue,
three of whom figure in The Rest of the Story, in the smoking gun, a paper four years earlier by
John A. Cunningham, Alexander G. Liu, Stefan Bengtson, and Philip C. J. Donoghue.
It focuses on the controversial alleged bilaterian of the 2004 papers linked above.
The title of the following article tells gives you some idea of the contents.
"A merciful death for the `Earliest bilaterian' *Vernanimalcula*," by
Stefan Bengtson, John A. Cunningham, Chongyu Yin, and Philip C. J. Donoghue, Evolution and Development 14, no. 5 (2012), 421-27.
Note the first listed author, shared with Ron's linked paper. Note also the following
name, from the "rebuttal": DAVID J. BOTTJER. As my secondary source says,
"the authors were anything but merciful in wielding their arguments. They upbraided David J. Bottjer, the main paleontologist who has promoted the interpretation of *Vernanimalcula* as a bilaterian ancestor, for seeing what he wanted to see and
disregarding the clear evidence of nonbiologcal mineralization."
You can judge for yourself how appropriate that last long sentence was by the direct quote
my secondary source took from page 426 of the paper:
It is likely that the fossils referred to [as] *Vernanimalcula* were interpreted as bilaterians because this was ... the explicit quarry of its authors. If you know from the beginning not only what you are looking for, but what you are going to find, you
will find it, whether or not it exists. As Richard Feynman (1974) famously remarked, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool." ... Once you have fooled yourself you will fool other scientists.
Now back to that 2016 paper:
The entire paper, which also starts with the Darwin quote, argues that the problem is really not as massive as it has been made out to be.
It did not hint at the existence of the 2012 paper that three of them co-authored, probably because
they could afford to be merciful at this later date: their criticism had apparently stood the test of time.
also I found this" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.330.6012.1740
And this:
https://www.gsoc.org/news/2020/5/12/fakefossilsarticle
These have nothing to do with the paper(s) above.
FWIW.
Sure, wherever there are private collectors, there will be fakes - with fossils as with art, or for that matter old whisky https://scotchwhisky.com/magazine/in-depth/26048/fake-whisky-how-worried-should-we-be/
But they affect pieces that appeal to private collectors: big, dinosaur-type ones. There is no market for the microscopically small pre-cambrian organisms that we are discussing here.
This is another example of how far out of your depth you are. Rocks bearing beaucoup d' microscopically small
precambrian organisms are in high demand. I'll have to ask my Aussie brother-in-law
how much he paid for his stromatolite fossils, and how far back they go in earth's history.
More:
https://fakefossils.webs.com/fakechinesefossils.ht
Now Lucy:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27325-baboon-bone-found-in-famous-lucy-skeleton/
Smithsonian says no to Lucy:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/smithsonian-says-no-to-lucy-21338295/
I'm not sure why you think this has any bearing on the issue? This is (probably, the paper does not say so explicitly) about the interpretation of the ICOM Code of Ethics for Natural History Museums, part of the ongoing debate about the treatment of
human remains in a museum context. There is now widespread agreement to repatriate human ancestral remains to their countries of origin if the local culture requires this. In 2011 e.g. 2011, the Natural History Museum in London repatriated skulls and a
jawbone from the Torres Strait archipelago to their “originating community” - that required at the time a clever bit of lawyering, as UK Museums are prohibited by law to give up permanently parts of their collections, and in this case the Human
Tissue Act 2004 was used as legal basis to create an exception. Similar repatriation efforts are ongoing globally, and part of the new regulatory framework also proscribes that human remains that have not been moved to foreign museums already should stay
in their country, and also not normally travel in exhibitions.
The question then became if something as old as Lucy, i.e. species other than Homo Sapiens, are also covered by this framework. Most US Museums at the time said no, the Smithsonian and a few other that yes and refused to host the exhibition. Why you
think this has any bearing on the discussion in TO I have absolutely no idea.
Typical "pot...kettle" closing sentence there.
Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of So. Carolina in Columbia, SC
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos
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