Fossil Primate Ardipithecus Ramidus Described (Finally) 369
Omomyid writes "I wasn't actually aware that Dr. Tim White of UC Berkeley had been 'sitting' on A. ramidus but apparently he has (I remember the original flurry of interest back in the '90s when it was announced), but now Dr. White and others have assembled a nearly complete skeleton of the 4.4mya specimen and the descriptions being carried by the NY Times and the AP are intriguing. Ramidus is clearly differentiated from the other Great Apes and also more primitive than A. afarensis (Lucy), providing a nice linkage backwards to the last shared ancestor between humans and chimpanzees. According to the NY Times, a whole passel of papers will be published in tomorrow's Science magazine describing A. ramidus."
Update — 10/01 at 22:05 GMT by SS: Reader John Hawks provided a link to his detailed blog post about Ardipithecus, which contains a ton of additional details not covered in the above articles.
Re:Science (Score:4, Informative)
Well, humans come from apes, not monkeys.
Re:It bothers me (Score:0, Informative)
Re:It bothers me (Score:5, Informative)
If you had read the article - you would know that there were pieces of a large number of individuals found.
You can assume carbon testing was done, it's routine.
There's also the issue of associated plant and animal material in the fossil layer - which tends to give credence to the find.
Re:Science (Score:5, Informative)
why is it so interesting to study where humans have come from
How could you NOT be interested in knowing where humans came from?
and why exactly monkeys?
Because both the fossil record and DNA say that chimps are humans' closest relatives, with 96% identical DNA.
intelligently and in other ways they're totally different
The intelligence is only a matter of degree, and in many (perhaps more) ways that matter more than intelligence they are the same as us.
Monkeys have come from somewhere too
Monkeys and apes (including us; we are an ape species) have the same anscestors, for reasons mentioned above.
I'm not trying to troll or anything
If you are, you're doing a poor job of it.
Re:It bothers me (Score:1, Informative)
Re:most surprising conclusion from this (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Science (Score:4, Informative)
Well, humans and apes came from a common recent ancestor.
Ardipithecus FAQ (Score:5, Informative)
I have an FAQ up on my blog [johnhawks.net].
It gives some of the story behind the news, and delves into the anatomy and implications for hominin origins. I'll be updating it as the day goes on to add more information.
Birthers, deathers, and other wingnuts (Score:5, Informative)
Birthers are a group of clueless, angry white people who firmly believe President Obama was born outside the US. Deathers are a group, nearly identical in membership, that believes President Obama wants to enact 'death panels' that will deny needed health care to seniors. Most birthers are deathers, and vice versa. They also tend to believe that they either need to secede from the union, or stage a military coup, as the country has now become a communist dictatorship. Hope that helps.
Re:It bothers me (Score:2, Informative)
Humans are descended from a monkey-like ancestor (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I see what they are trying to piece together, b (Score:5, Informative)
Except that that is not how the evidence points. As a couple of scientists I've talked to have pointed out, the real destruction of your theory isn't genetics itself, it's developmental biology. If all organisms were, as you said, simply examples of copy and paste, why on Earth would, during developmental, would fetal snakes have signals that basically turned off the leg producing genes? Those genes are still there, still pretty close to identical to the genes found in the closest relatives to snakes that do have legs.
In fact, one of the chief arguments against life being engineered, that common genes being an example of procedural code being moved around like it was some sort of biological glibc is that everything about development is made up of hacks of this kind. Whether it's developmental hacks that shut down instructions to grow legs, to the very nature of many organisms physiology (such as a certain bipedal species with spines and knees only halfway adapted to full time upright walking) that would indicate that if your theory is right, the guy that made life is outrageously incompetent or malicious to the extreme.
Besides, it isn't just a matter of some similar genes. It is the differences in genes that are often key as to relatedness. Chimps and humans have a high degree of similarity, but it isn't one-to-one for many genes. Over time the two species have diverged, which means that even the same genes aren't always identical. These differences, particularly in mtDNA, can actually be used as molecular clocks to make estimates as to when the two species diverged.
In short, the evidence does not support your point of view. That view was long ago falsified. We are not the products of copy-and-pastes, but the products of evolutionary forces that work on populations over long stretches of time.
Re:Hypotheticals to muse upon (Score:4, Informative)
Part of the problem is that you're not really explaining yourself. What do you mean here? Do you mean altering of existing genes (1)? Do you mean creating completely new and novel genes (2)? Do you mean inserting kelp genes into humans (3)?
In the first example, that's pretty much an artificial form of normal genetic changes. The second example would be pretty unique, but still, the bulk of the new organism would definitely be human (or whatever species). The third example is very rare in more complex organisms, but horizontal gene transfer can occur here as well. Some part of our genome is, in fact, the product of viral infections (endo-retroviral insertions), which means that nature has already given us examples of my third type; genes that come from completely different lineages.
Now maybe you would have something of a point if we completely constructed an organism from artificial genes, or maybe constructed an organism from an entirely different replication chemistry. In that case, yes, it would be an example of wholly different tree of life. I would argue if its more a spare parts sort of an affair, where they construct a new genome from genes found in existing lineages, while it gets complicated, at its root, it still fits within the tree of life, just at multiple points. But then again, that would apply to any form of horizontal gene transfer. I've listed one pathway; ERVs, prokaryotes like bacteria often move genes back and forth, sometimes between very distantly related lineages.
Re:Birthers, deathers, and other wingnuts (Score:5, Informative)
>as the country has now become a communist dictatorship
You pretty well nailed it with your definition. However, you left out the part where we are not only a communist dictatorship, but Obama is also the reincarnation of Hitler.
Re:Science (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Science (Score:4, Informative)
Summary is slightly misleading... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Science (Score:5, Informative)
Humans and apes come from a common recent ancestor in the same way that Great Danes and dogs came from a common recent ancestor.
That is to say that humans are apes.
Apes are simply members of the superfamily Hominoidea, parvorder Catarrhini, order Primates, class Mammalia, phylum Chordata, kingdom Animalia.
Even more specific, humans are Great Apes (please ignore the narcissism), or members of the family Hominidae, which is restricted to humans, chimps, bonobos, bili apes, gorillas and orangutans.
Humans have:
superfamily Hominoidea, family Hominidae, subfamily Homininae, tribe Hominini, genus Homo.
Chimps, Bonobos, and Bili apes have:
superfamily Hominoidea, family Hominidae, subfamily Homininae, tribe Hominini, genus Pan.
Gorillas have:
superfamily Hominoidea, family Hominidae, subfamily Homininae, tribe Gorillini, genus Gorilla.
Orangutans have:
superfamily Hominoidea, family Hominidae, subfamily Ponginae, genus Pongo.
Re:I see what they are trying to piece together, b (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Science (Score:5, Informative)
"So, yes, chimps certainly must have evolved somewhat, but not as much as humans"
I would contend that they are equally as evolved as humans. They simply evolved in a different way.
Simply because they didn't evolve to be more akin to humans doesn't make them less evolved.
Re:Science (Score:5, Informative)
Flat earthers are no joke (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.google.com/search?q=flat+earth [google.com]
For your entertainment:
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/weekend-web/flat-earth-society.php [somethingawful.com]
Updated - link to the story. (Score:3, Informative)