And modern whales posses vestigial hip bones from that land dwelling ancestor.
Your own POST contradicts itself. If only part of the skull was found, why were they talking about “all the postcranial bones”?
Your God is, frankly, stupid. He had to make every ant, sand grain, and star. Most Christians and Jews see that the Big Bang, abiogenesis, and evolution are, for now, pretty good explanations of how things came about, and all their God had to do was take a bunch of energy and add a few simple rules, then sit back and watch how it played out. Which was pretty marvelous on its own, but he had 14 billion years to kill so he couldn’t help fiddling with it. Your God is great. Their God is Awesome.
Very wrong again.
Do you have parents? Why? Couldn’t God have created you without needing parents?
I thought symbiote was what they stuffed in the haggis.
Nah, that’s the parasite!
Which also includes knowledge inferred from observation via a consistent falsifiable theory.
For example, we can’t actually see the nucleus of a carbon atom, but we know that it contains six protons. How do we know there are six if we can’t even see them, much less count them? Well, we can observe results of certain tests on things like wavelengths of X-rays, and use those results plus atomic theory to infer that the carbon nucleus has six protons.
Similarly, even if we haven’t directly observed the entire process of evolution of a particular symbiotic relationship, we can use observations of its current state plus fossil forms and related organisms to infer, via the theory of evolution, how it developed.
There’s nothing unscientific about that. In fact, what’s profoundly unscientific is your insistence that science tells us nothing about any natural phenomena except those we can observe directly.
On the contrary, figuring out what our observations tell us indirectly about natural phenomena is the core mission of science.
What’s your point?
[QUOTE=reef shark]
I noticed you (and everyone else) still have not cited any obligate symbiotic relationships, despite my several requests.
[/QUOTE]
You haven’t actually asked us to provide examples of obligate symbiotic relationships. I was the one who first brought up the term, and you didn’t even seem to know what it was when you started the thread. As I’ve already pointed out, facultative symbioses are much more common than obligate ones.
I’m not going to do your work for you. Since you know so much about them, how about you give us an example of an obligate symbiotic relationship, and then we can discuss it.
And despite my requests, you still haven’t answered several of the questions I’ve asked you before:
-
Define exactly what you mean by symbiosis. (In your own words. No Wikipedia cites)
-
Explain how symbiosis differs from mutualism.
-
Do you accept that non-obligate mutualistic relationships evolved over time?
In actual fact, all you are doing is regurgitating talking points from some creationist website or other source, without any real understanding of what any of the words mean.
I don’t believe you are as ignorant of the methods used by scientists to estimate evolutionary time. They include stratigraphy, radiometric dating, the fossil record, and genetic analyses. But since you don’t believe in science, what’s the point of explaining scientific methods to you?
Interesting study. One of the coauthors is a close friend and colleague of mine.
I would however point out that the fig/fig wasp relationship is an example of an obligate mutualism, but is not a symbiosis in the usual meaning of the word.
FWIW, I mentioned the fig and fig-wasp symbiosis. In some species of fig, the fruit cannot be pollinated without the wasp. It’s a specific case that has had a lot of work and study done, a rather fascinating example. Stephen Jay Gould wrote on it, more poetically than technically, in one of his essays. It’s particularly useful here because the dependency varies by different species, so we have “snapshots in time” of the process as it changes.
But I guess that’s evolution…
Did you observe this beholding? On what evidence do you conclude that it occurred?
ZOOM
Whoa, did anyone get the number of those goal posts? They nearly took off my head as they flew past.
This is a ridiculous false dichotomy. We have certainly never observed two species spring into existence out of thin air, already dependent on each other for survival. So to claim that you are rejecting the evolutionary theory because of a supposed lack of observed evidence is nothing more than basest hypocrisy.
My point was that although it’s an obligate mutualism, it’s not a symbiosis in the sense that a lichen or a coral/zooanthellae relationship is. Also, it’s a service-resource mutualism, rather than a resource-resource mutualism like the latter.
reef shark keeps using the words symbiosis and mutualism as if they were synonymous, which they are not. He doesn’t really know what they mean. That doesn’t keep him from making assertions about them, though.
Those two tiny bones are used for reproduction. Snakes have them too. They are not vestigial, nor remnants of legs…
HOW are they used in reproduction? They’re not even external in whales!
The post i was replying to cited a website. That referred to part of the skull. The cite i mentioned refers to new findings, it is up to you to determine whthere those findings are legitmate or not, if you care. If theyt are legitmate, they contradict the orginial claim regarding whales. If those new findings are fake, then all we have is part of the skull. You do the math.
You’re saying a horse evolved from…a horse???
He/she keeps repeating this claim, completely unsupported, and thinks that it means something. Not sure what you can do when someone argues that way.
Sorry, im not wrong. The books dont lie. The burden of proof is on you to show that the public science books dont state the big bang and primordial soup as fact. Good luck.