Are there any "Living Fossil" species with descendants?

fishin wrote:

An article that hits on this very issue from CNN today:

Cool. Thanks for the article.

I'm beginning to get the impression that it's a rare event for a founder species to coexist along side it's descendants.

Although it makes sense; your toughest competitor would always be your well adapted descendants.

This reminds me of the Red Queen Principle; always needing to move forward, to change and to adapt. Or get overrun.

I wonder why "living fossil" species don't produce offshoot species. Is there little variation their DNA, or is their environment stable, or both?

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I think we ascribe too much credit to DNA. The genetic diversity among interbreeding members of a species is perhaps enough "feedstock" to acquire a fitness benefit.
As Darwin stated
"These changes occur in incrementally small amounts"

The rarity of finding an organism that shared the planet with its own "grandpa" is probably bestpreserved in plants.

Your point about Latemeria ros, if you find the "treatise", youll dee that the fossil species and genera of the Coelecanths were as many as 20 (according to Keith Thompson , the US ' leading student of Coelecanths). Today we are down to 2 and these are both "assigned" species because nobody ever noticed whthere they would freely interbreed. Although both of these occupy different biogeographic areas and different niches, who knows, maybe with the right wine and music, theyd pair off.

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spendius wrote:

ros wrote-

Quote:
Please don't pollute this thread.

I was simply making a point Darwin makes many times. If I used a more modern literary technique than you can cope with it does not represent the pollution of the thread. It represents the process which takes place from the anti-IDers point of view.

I can't understand what you're squawking about.

You do realize of course, that scientific understanding changes over time, and that the evolutionary science we have today is likely(I'll admit I'm not an expert in the field, so I can't speak with absolute certainty) vastly different than it was when Darwin was alive.

Just because Maxwell mistakenly believed in the existence of aether did not mean that he couldn't contribute greatly to electromagnetics.

As a side question, why do you always say anti-IDers. It doesn't seem like a very specific term and, assuming you're an IDer yourself, it makes it seem like you have a heck of a persecution complex.

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Show me someone who hasn't a persecution complex and I'll go out and say a prayer for him. Animals evolve all sorts of mechanisms in response to a sense of them soon becoming a feast.

Perhaps you are projecting there. It is odd how the idea of having a persecution complex should seem so special to you when it is a common as having two feet. Perhaps you feel it to be a fault. How often do you look in the rear-view mirror to see what's behind you? And does your heart get a little pitter-patter on if it's the cops with the sirens going even if you have done nothing wrong.

fm wrote-

Quote:

I think we ascribe too much credit to DNA.

I agree for once.

I think pretty feathers strutted magmificently in response to an instinctive persecution complex is much the most important. The DNA will be pretty constant throughout all the range of possibilities and the one emerging from the scrum will be much like most of the ones that didn't. I suppose the incest taboo is an attempt to increase the range of differences but it can only be by a small amount from what I heard about 90 odd % being identical to that of monkeys.

Of course, we Christians have put the pretty feathers on the female contrary to where nature has them which might explain our success. In which case anti-ID is a programme for fops.

Get out of that fm.

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spendi wouldnt be so annoying and trite sounding if only he didnt try to make all his communications read like Bumper Stickers..

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My first thought is humans. Decended from one or other of the ape families.
Perhaps I'm not going far enough back.

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dadpad wrote:

My first thought is humans. Decended from one or other of the ape families.
Perhaps I'm not going far enough back.

None of the animals Humans descended from still exist in their original form (or something close to their original form). The only animals that exist currently are our cousins to the original form.

My original question is a bit questionable in what I'm looking for, because in a literal sense, NO existing organism (animal or plant) can be exactly in the original line, or else it would have to be millions of years old. So in every case we would be looking for something which has descended from the original line with minimal change, something which almost never seems to happen.

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I wonder if by definition evolution removes the ancestor.

Just say an animal develops a trait. This trait allows the animal to survive better in the same niche and animals with this trait are perpetuated by natural selection. Therefore the ancestor is out competed in that niche over a significant period of time.

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It is possible, Ros, that the answer to your question might lie in bacteria. FM would know this better than i, but i believe there are bacterial "mats" which exist in some places in which the bacteria which form the colony are unchanged over hundreds of millions of years.

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I suppose this has to do with (or possibly not) the question of...never mind, I see my mistake.
Ok, so what defines a species, if they can produce offspring? So are a horse and a donkey the same species? Or a lion and a tiger?
Or does the ability to produce fertile offspring ( I meant that the offspring can produce offspring).
So how much change exactly constitutes a new species? Tigers and lions are not the same species but they can interbreed.

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fm wrote-

Quote:

spendi wouldnt be so annoying and trite sounding if only he didnt try to make all his communications read like Bumper Stickers..

You were invited to give us your views on the fact that Christian society switched the pretty feathers to the female of the species which is contrary to what we see in nature, and with a good result, and that anti-ID was attacking Christianity to put them back on the male presumably so that anti-IDers could start wearing the lingerie. I think the incidence of cross-dressing is much higher in urban areas than in the food growing regions and the ID/anti-ID polarity does follow a Rural/City division. And males in cities are much more primped up and concerned with their appearance than the oiks in the sticks. Perhaps anti-IDers have seen the video of the courtship ritual of the bird of paradise. Spengler would have jumped on that as another sign that autumn is here.

Your answer is hardly satisfactory fm.

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dadpad wrote:

I wonder if by definition evolution removes the ancestor.

Just say an animal develops a trait. This trait allows the animal to survive better in the same niche and animals with this trait are perpetuated by natural selection. Therefore the ancestor is out competed in that niche over a significant period of time.

In the majority of cases I think that is exactly what happens. Life, for the most part flows steadily from one form to another erasing its tracks as it goes. We tend to focus on extinction events because they are dramatic, but they are not the primary cause of extinction; descendants are probably the primary cause.

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Remember that "common ancestry" does not have to imply direct linneage.Therefore, having the common ancestor still about may be in conflict with one of the drives of evolution, namely adaptation.
Extinction and preservation in the fossil record, is the grand record keeper of how lines split or bud off from a common ancestor.
Sets point about bacteria is reasonable in that , if any of the ancestors remain, Id think the plant world would be most likely to retain them. I was thinking of the "dawn redwoods" or "Ginkos".
Cycads, horsetails and ferns also are hard to tell fossil giants from present day mini-versions.

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Quincy wrote:

I suppose this has to do with (or possibly not) the question of...never mind, I see my mistake.
Ok, so what defines a species, if they can produce offspring? So are a horse and a donkey the same species? Or a lion and a tiger?
Or does the ability to produce fertile offspring ( I meant that the offspring can produce offspring).
So how much change exactly constitutes a new species? Tigers and lions are not the same species but they can interbreed.

It is more complex than that, actually. I did a long post, with links to other material in another thread on this topic. The thread is entitled "Don't tell me there's no proof for evolution." If you click here, it will take you to a copy of an article in which Ernst Mayr discusses what should define separate species. Sexual isolation (i.e., two groups of a species cease to be able to physically reach one another to breed) and morphological changes matter, too. The article is rather "dense" (as in difficult to read and understand), but it is worth the effort to read it. One problem is that most species cannot interbreed to produce sexually viable offspring (mules are sterile, "ligers" are sterile), so it has long been a lazy, short-hand definition that species are defined by the ability to interbreed to produce sexually viable offspring. Read the article, it is a good one.

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farmerman wrote:

I was thinking of the "dawn redwoods" or "Ginkos".

I knew that ginkos were ancient--but are there descendants of that tree which survive today, which adapted to other environments and "speciated?"

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Setanta wrote:

Quincy wrote:
I suppose this has to do with (or possibly not) the question of...never mind, I see my mistake.
Ok, so what defines a species, if they can produce offspring? So are a horse and a donkey the same species? Or a lion and a tiger?
Or does the ability to produce fertile offspring ( I meant that the offspring can produce offspring).
So how much change exactly constitutes a new species? Tigers and lions are not the same species but they can interbreed.

It is more complex than that, actually. I did a long post, with links to other material in another thread on this topic. The thread is entitled "Don't tell me there's no proof for evolution." If you click here, it will take you to a copy of an article in which Ernst Mayr discusses what should define separate species. Sexual isolation (i.e., two groups of a species cease to be able to physically reach one another to breed) and morphological changes matter, too. The article is rather "dense" (as in difficult to read and understand), but it is worth the effort to read it. One problem is that most species cannot interbreed to produce sexually viable offspring (mules are sterile, "ligers" are sterile), so it has long been a lazy, short-hand definition that species are defined by the ability to interbreed to produce sexually viable offspring. Read the article, it is a good one.

Thanks for the link Very Happy

. Skimmed the beginning, I'll go over it properly later.

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Quote:

The article is rather "dense"

That figures.

But no doubt Settin' Aah-aah mastered it otherwise it wouldn't have got a mention.

You are having your precious attention diverted to writers who will soon be in the dustbin and away from those that won't.

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Quincy wrote:

Setanta wrote:
Quincy wrote:
I suppose this has to do with (or possibly not) the question of...never mind, I see my mistake.
Ok, so what defines a species, if they can produce offspring? So are a horse and a donkey the same species? Or a lion and a tiger?
Or does the ability to produce fertile offspring ( I meant that the offspring can produce offspring).
So how much change exactly constitutes a new species? Tigers and lions are not the same species but they can interbreed.

It is more complex than that, actually. I did a long post, with links to other material in another thread on this topic. The thread is entitled "Don't tell me there's no proof for evolution." If you click here, it will take you to a copy of an article in which Ernst Mayr discusses what should define separate species. Sexual isolation (i.e., two groups of a species cease to be able to physically reach one another to breed) and morphological changes matter, too. The article is rather "dense" (as in difficult to read and understand), but it is worth the effort to read it. One problem is that most species cannot interbreed to produce sexually viable offspring (mules are sterile, "ligers" are sterile), so it has long been a lazy, short-hand definition that species are defined by the ability to interbreed to produce sexually viable offspring. Read the article, it is a good one.

Thanks for the link . Skimmed the beginning, I'll go over it properly later.

Thanks. I was hoping this thread would stay away from definitions of species, since that's been done before as Set noted.

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farmerman wrote:

Sets point about bacteria is reasonable in that , if any of the ancestors remain, Id think the plant world would be most likely to retain them. I was thinking of the "dawn redwoods" or "Ginkos".
Cycads, horsetails and ferns also are hard to tell fossil giants from present day mini-versions.

So I guess we're saying that there are no (known) animals who are presently contemporaneous with their ancestors (ancestors greater than at least a 'species' difference).

Plants, Fungi, Bacteria, those are different kingdoms. Why do we feel that those kingdoms would be different in probability of having contemporaneous ancestor/descendants? Is it just because we are less familiar with them? Or is there a specific difference that makes it more likely? (The reason I ask is that the 'specific difference', whatever it may be, is what I'm actually interested in).

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How about dassies? I understand they're in the elephant family.

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Are there any "Living Fossil" species with descendants?

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