500 Million Year Old Fossil Found of Uknown Species Discovered

This is political trolling ("shiftless, lazy, welfare parasites") where you know very well it isn't allowed or appreciated.

You have been cautioned previously about this sort of behavior. This time it's an infraction.

You are free to make positive contributions in SciTech, but leave out the trolling political commentary.

Everyone else: if you think someone is trolling, report it. Accusations of trolling are still against the rules--notify on it and leave it for the mod(s). Thank you.

 

I thought he was just being satirical, not trolling. Seriously.

 

So E.O. Wilson's work on ants has nothing to do with science or sociobiology?

 

Yeah, I was being satirical, as almost every ant study seems to get applied politically.

 

Actually the study of ants would be a good study to get involved with along the lines of evolution.

Ants have been around for a very long time harvesting and moving seeds around the planet to create new gardens. Just like the birds and other species that feed on seeds you could that they are the ones who first planted the flora and fauna on Earth from where it first began to grown in abundance from.

If his centralized source of seed harvesting and spreading of the early seeds of flora and fauna on Earth can be found then perhaps we would be able to then track the foot print of humanities evolution in greater detail.

I guess you could call those of use looking for such beginnings as Source Hunters. Always looking for a singular source and then going in deeper within that source to find another large layer to once again look for said layers source.

Source Hunter's is what they will be called in the future.

 

Actually, ants evolved only fairly recently (at least compared to the history of animal life); the oldest ant fossils are around 100 million years old from amber in France and Burma. That's much older than humans, of course, but ants first evolved substantially later than the first plants. Plants first moved onto land more than 425 million years ago, even before there were animals on land. Wind would have been important for spreading their spores and allowing those early land plants to colonize new areas.

 

As one of Earth's proud and noble Source Hunters, I have to distance myself from what ever the hell Dryson is talking about. We, The Source Hunters, find no logical basis for his ramblings.

If anyone out there would like a Source Hunter T-shirt, please feel free to contact us care of Duncan McCloud at Thesource.com.

 

It's good to know someone is getting a head in this discussion.

 

Oh, I dunno, TNZ woiuld find them... informative. :demon:

Um. Um. Um. Really?

 

I personally find this fascinating. The OP's ideas certainly are strange, but he does at least seem to be sincere in a desire to explore them soI think the thread should be allowed to continue.

 

oooook, I'll bite.

Yes, humans and apes, and elephants and ants, and tigers and snails should have started to evolve from the very beginning and they DID!
it's just that their eventual shapes and forms were never determined back then.
life on this planet (for the most part) is a single unbroken branched chain of ancestors and decendents.
Some branches became dead ends and those species at the end of them became extinct.

but every living organism today can trace it's origin back to the very first living cells and technically even the very first self replicating RNA molecules.
And thus, yes, evolution of every lifeform on this planet started back then.
We just shared a lot of the road with 99.9% of every other lifeform somewhere on the way and looked a lot different back then.

 

I think one of the biggest reasons people misunderstand evolution is this image:


Iconic, and one of the worst examples of science communication there is.

I think it is representative of the fundamental misunderstanding of evolution that most people have; that it is a straight line of progress to an endpoint, and that the endpoint is man. The image imparts the false notion that we evolved from chimps as well, leading to the whole, "If we evolved from monkeys why are there still monkeys?" line. People need to have more familiarity with the cladogram, as it is a much more accurate representation of how evolution actually works.

 

I love cladograms and cladistics in general. MORE, PLEASE.

 

My rap name is MC 5 Million Year Fossil.

 

You might want to check out the work of Tufte--
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/

--but maybe you already did.

I love all those different kinds of maps where the geography is exaggerated as per income, water, etc.

That and the cortical homunculus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus
Shades of Ron Mueck or Evan Penny