Bat Evolution and Intelligent Design

"Give me a bowl of wine. In this I bury all unkindness, Cassius." Brutus from Julius Caesar Act IV Scene III.


"O, for a draught of vintage! That hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim.

John Keats. Ode to a nightingale.

an assertion with some evidence makes a hypothesis
spendi , weve all read those. Search for some new poetry, Might I suggest ,The Breast of the Earth-Kofi Awoonor. or Daniel Hillel's Out of the Earth

There's always Ginsberg's HOWL ... from which comes this splendidly spendi-esque line:
""who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas"

No problem. I'm quite familiar with his tactics.

There are other types of fossils.

Ones embedded in literature.

What % of the 65myo bat is in the fossil (by weight say) compared to what % of the nature of women is in Ovid. And many more. In Homer. In art.

Tickety-boo-ology can be scientific. I'm a tickety-boo-ologist.

You can have your bats and I'll have mine. Mine are better looking as well. And they can cook which is no small thing. Odd jobs as well. The posh ones can be a nuisance though.

Common or garden ones are best for statistical reasons.

Do your sort have any social hierarchies?

If anyone posting here has authority from which to comment upon being bats, it would be spendi.

Obviously timber believes that understanding the nature of the lovely ladies is of no importance compared to understanding the nature of 65myo old bats, the pathetic skeletons of which have been turned to stone.

I am content to allow viewers to decide who has the upper hand at bat freakery.

I like meat on my bones.

Ain't much meat on a bat, spendi - you'd hafta gut and skin a bunch of 'em to get to a decent stew. Nowhere near as tasty as squirrel, either. Not even close to worth the effort, IMO.

Rogue finger gene got bats airborne
· 11:00 13 November 2004
· Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6647
A change to a single gene allowed bats to grow wings and take to the air, a development that may explain why bats appeared so suddenly in the fossil record some 50 million years ago.
Bats have been an evolutionary enigma. That's because the oldest fossil bats look remarkably like modern ones, each having wings formed from membranes stretched between long fingers, and ear structures designed for echolocation. No fossils of an animal intermediate between bats and their non-flying mammal ancestors have been found.
Now Karen Sears, at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, has discovered why intermediate forms may be missing in the fossil record. In a bid to understand where bats' specialised finger digits evolved from, Sears compared their embryological development with that of the finger digits of mice.
In both animals, digits form from cartilage cells which divide and mature into bone in regions called growth plates. But in bats, a key region of the growth plate called the hypertrophic zone is much larger than in mice, which allows their digits to grow much longer. That difference is controlled by a single gene known as BMP2, one of a family of genes important for limb development in mammals.
Elongated digits
Sears found that a protein produced by BMP2 is present in the hypertrophic region of bats, but not in mice. When she applied the protein to the digits of mouse embryos growing in the lab they elongated just like bat digits.
Sears believes that bats began to evolve when this one gene became activated. Although it is a small developmental change, if it allowed the ancestors of bats to grow extended digits it could explain how bats evolved flight so rapidly, Sears told the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Denver. Relatively few transitional forms would have existed just briefly before being displaced by more advanced forms.
"We've never had an adequate explanation" for the sudden appearance of bats, Nancy Simmons of the American Museum of Natural History in New York told New Scientist. "This sounds like a remarkable discovery."
The lack of transitional forms has also led to speculation about the origin of bats, with some believing that primates are their closest relatives. Genetic studies now show they are closest to ferungulates, which include horses and pigs, or to the shrews and moles.

See:
Winged Victory: The Rapid Rise of Bats

http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=winged_victory_the_rapid_rise_of_bats&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

We get it. You like to oggle women and talk about them like objects. You sound like a 16 year old anti-social nerd. Pathetic.

The other explanation could simply be that a bat ancestor fossil simply hasn't been found yet. I don't know how conclusive the DNA information is, but just because we haven't found bat ancestors at 80myago doesn't mean they aren't there.

Also, even if this genetic change was in play, it certainly didn't happen in a single generation, there are still going to be intermediate forms, the only question is the timeframe. Did it take a hundred thousand years, or million years or ten million years?

You know, tha "punctuated Equilibrium" model that Pauligirl posted could have some reality when using continental drift . During the mid to late Cretaceous, the entire worlds post Milankovitch-Croll cycle "Ice age" had ended and continents were spreading like crazy. Africa and S America were separated from their N orthern Hemisphere counterterranes . Consequently we had a "Super Greenhouse Effect" Where a tropical mid latitude Current (due to a worldwide E/W gyre) had warmed up the areas from say Northern Europe to Mid South America (remember S America was floating 1000 K or more South of its present location. )
SO where do we find bats first ? (I really dont know so could someone look this up?) Maybe we can sort this out by global tectonics and not Paleo.

If proto bats originated from a common ancestor in the Triassic, all the worlds bats should be deroven from it. If (as I suspect) the derivation of bats became more an example of homolgous structures (like cactii in the new world and bromeliads in the old world) then they developed freom different stock later 9like the Jurassic) . ORRR They developed in one area and then radiated when a few of the continents came back together 30mya.

Farmerman, I love it when you talk like that!

Im doing my end of year expenses, so I needed a break to TALK WI MY HOMIES NOMESAIN?

Ha! I hate budgets. Plate tectonics is much more fun.

Not to give fuel to the creationists, but Pauligirl's article talks about lengthened fingerbones, but there's much more to bats - like their lightweight stature....

ros wrote-



It's not my fault ros. I'm not quite ready for a monastic life yet and a monastery is the only place where women are not allowed to disport themselves in temptation mode. Some monasteries are a bit lax as well on that score. Media is obsessed with the subject. Just compare the triviality of Mr Clinton's odd moments with the inordinate fuss made about them. When in Rome you know.

Perhaps you should dress more stylishly and adopt conversational skills which avoid assertions and then you might not have to act like a little lad with his nose pressed up against the candy shop window.

Anyway, evolution programmed me this way. Do you come from a long line of gate-posts? I wish I did- it would have saved me from a lot of trouble and I daren't think about the money side.

But individuals are of no importance I'm afraid.

I wonder what the social consequences would be if your attitude became the normal one like it partially is in Iran, Saudi and N.Korea.

Women's magazines would have to go for a start. Fashions and beauty products as well. You could have movies about climbing the North face of the Eiger or motor mechanics.

You should start a Clean Up America campaign like Mrs Whitehouse tried to do here. She made a living at it.

You could start by training yourself not to look at the girls.

I'm not clear on how this "long finger" gene works. Something doesn't make sense. How does the activiation of one gene cause the fingers to slowly elongate over many generations?

MicroBats (sonar adapted) and MacroBats (fruit bats) are considered to be from different lines. Some people seem to think that they are actually convergent forms from different starting points, although I'm not convinced of that.

ros wrote-



Intelligent design maybe. Who knows?

But that's an easy one ros.

Imagine you are in a pub quiz.

Right?

An intellectual one in a posh area. £2.75 a pint is minimum in posh areas.

Got that?

A question is asked.

Now- you have to answer out loud.

Your answer is a vibration in the air which the quizmaster can decode.

It is an object. A thing.

Right? Got that? It's simple enough.

So here's the question.

Who is the President of the USA.

Where was the answer before I asked.

I could have asked the % of the earth's surface covered by water. But that's too difficult for most.

Now- was the answer stored?

As an object, as the materialist theory of mind insists. An arrangement of bions, ions, prions,frions, drions, piconanocticals and whatnot totally redundant until the question reflexes it back into operation.

Or was it something immaterial as IDers allow for without being dogmatic about it.

Once it's an object the question arises can a head get so full of useless objects such as when Auntie Bessie's birfday is, like a filing cabinet, that there's no room for any more.

Or is it limitless?

Would a limit result naturally in stubborness.?

I don't see finger elongation as being all that difficult to explain.

Sexual selection seems the obvious suspect.