
Half-Billion-Year-Old Heart Found More Complex than Today’s - yiransheng
http://www.biosciencetechnology.com/articles/2014/04/half-billion-year-old-heart-found-more-complex-today%E2%80%99s
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tokenadult
Some of the first comments submitted in this thread suggest to me that it may
be helpful to review the various convergent lines of evidence for
macroevolution, which along the way will help explain how biological evolution
works and why very old "complexity" is not a surprise in the fossil record.
(One problem is defining "complexity" adequately in this context.) See the
very informative collaboratively edited website _29+ Evidences for
Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent_ [1] for the broad
overview, and specifically the sections responding to "complexity"[2][3] for
more details on that issue.

[1]
[http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/](http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/)

[2]
[http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CI/CI101.html](http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CI/CI101.html)

[3]
[http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html](http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html)

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Dn_Ab
Arthropod was supposed to be the next word of the title, but understandably,
the author of the piece was short on time. The article's about the fossil of
an ancient great ancestor of shrimps. The fossil has spectacularly well
preserved impressions of soft tissue.

Evolution is not a relentless forward march, and if it could have
inclinations, streamlining its productions would not be one of them. Doing so
only when necessary, in cases where replication is also somehow advantaged.
Usually...
[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ItAintBroke](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ItAintBroke)

~~~
cristianpascu
I'm always surprised how people describe evolution as from a source
information independent from fossil evidence. When, in fact, we tell what
evolution was, up until now, from the evidence we have and not something else.
The evidences shapes the theory (the sum of theories). If complex organisms
become simpler, than that's how evolution works. If simple organisms become
more complex, than that's how evolution works.

Epistemically, what's going on, I think, is that evolution is pretty much
assumed to be true and from the evidence it's only concluded what results it
had.

~~~
EzraVinh
I call this "Science of the Gaps". Where there is insufficient evidence to
reach a conclusion, or to provide a mechanism for a process we know occurs,
one is just made up (by non-experts seeking to bolster the image of science).

My understanding is that no one knows how life originated, but that doesn't
stop many people from prematurely invoking the Anthropic Principal.

On complexity, logically, we cannot say that evolution has no tendency towards
complexity, and also that evolution explains the complexity of modern
organisms. Not that the OP was making the latter claim, but it's not an unfair
assumption.

Also, your post seems to suffer from "feigned surprise" :-)

~~~
cristianpascu
Good points! Being an historical science, evolution inherently suffers from
several limitations.

>> Also, your post seems to suffer from "feigned surprise" :-)

Ha! Good one. :) I admit, it was a bit like that.

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bmurphy1976
In case anybody is wondering, more complex != more better. Also, please apply
this to your software design.

~~~
contingencies
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy)

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gottebp
Interesting and weird! It's similar when studying the evolution of the horse!
The legs went from quite a few complex moving parts down to a much smaller
number in a simpler configuration in the present day.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Horseevolution.png](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Horseevolution.png)

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contingencies
This is from the
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maotianshan_Shales](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maotianshan_Shales)
at Fuxian Lake, Yunnan, China, which is where I live. In fact, I have friends
who work in the geopark. If anyone's ever out here it's well worth a visit,
with 3D models of various bygone critters and loads of fossils to look at,
complete with magnification equipment. The lake which the fossil is named
after (despite the temporal disparity!) is the second or third deepest in the
country at 400m, 20km long, and resting at an altitude of around 2000m, and
surrounded by pine forested mountains and archaeological sites of the
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dian_culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dian_culture).
Not a bad spot to ponder timespace.

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stretchwithme
Evolution allows unneeded features to fade away. My gills, for example, are
almost completely gone. Specific complexities evolve when they serve a purpose
and recede when no longer needed.

~~~
jjallen
Agreed, just like how languages evolve to become simpler (faster and easier to
speak), evolution should cause anatomy to simplify and become more robust to
adversity over time.

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quasque
Headline and article are misleading - the paper actually doesn't make any
claim to the relative complexity of the cardiovascular system.

There's a better summary from the NHM press office about what the research was
really about: [http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2014/apr/earliest-
heart-a...](http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2014/apr/earliest-heart-and-
blood-discovered129710.html)

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cing
"We also used the Adobe Photoshop CS5 to manipulate the images in order to
extract further information." Can't believe they admitted to tampering with
their scientific results in an image editing program ;)

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thrwaway33
Lots of evolutionary explanations suffer from tautology.

and it keeps getting parroted as you can sound smart.

