Lawyers with too much integrity? Somebody call a biologist; a new species has been discovered.

this is, indeed, another work by theo jansen. it's call the 'animaris rhinoceros transport.' for those who don't know, all of mr. jansen's creations are 'kinetic sculptures' that use wind power to make them move. he believes he is making new species of animals and speaks quite lovingly of them.

from jansen's website strandbeest.com: "The Animaris Rhinoceros Transport is a type of animal with a steel skeleton and a polyester skin. It looks as if there is a thick layer of sand coating the animal. It weighes 2. tons, but can be set into motion by one person. It stands 4.70 meters tall."

In terms of human evolution there is a great discrepancy between what scientists mean when they say "missing link" and what most uninformed people mean when they say missing link.

The common conception seems to be that a "missing link" means the form which is needed to prove a connection between two species. For scientists while a missing link can indeed help prove the connection between two species, but it often just further evidence. Meaning they already assume there is a connection between two species from other evidence they have but a new 'missing link' only further strengthens that assumption.

In human evolution there are many many missing links that have been found. If you compare the bones of early homo erectus to modern homo sapien the difference are pretty outstanding, but if you compare the bones of late homo erectus to those of very early homo sapien those differences become much less distinguishable. In fact many anthropologists seem to have a hard time deciding whether, based on morphology, to classify the bones from that particular point in time as homo sapien or homo erectus. So in that sense there is a very clear connection between our species and another human species.

On another note I think something that often causes people to misunderstand how evolution works is that we homo sapiens are the only human species currently on the planet. I often think this leads people to think evolution occurs in a progressive chain, where once a new species forms the parent species dies off. This is an incorrect assumption (at least if you look at what we know about evolution). A parent species can still exist even after there's been an off shoot, there can even be multiple off shoots. We Homo sapien have shared the planet with other species of human before, Neanderthal, homo erectus (the assumed parent species) and homo floresienses which some people believe died out only 13k years ago. There really is a wealth of information out there on the subject, all people need to do is look. And not just wikipedia, as much as I love it, it is not the definitive source of all information.

I wonder if the Neanderthal may have been the result of a similar 'ring

The Neanderthals are like a shorter "twig" on the evolutionary tree. twigs like Chimps and humans have reached the current top of the tree (the here and now) while the neanderthals was a twig that managed to go it own way, far enough to be called a twig, but not far enough to survive up to this point. In the strictest sense, we individual humans (and all other animals) are all soon-to-be aborted twigs on the tree of life,(atleast the vast,vast majority of us) Theoretically, we could, each and every one of us branch off as a new species.. if you isolate yourself from everyone else and breed only your own genes, (we cant do it as individuals, you need atleast 2 for humans) and keep it in the family the very wrong way, you'll soon branch off as a new species, creating a small twig of your very own.

Real life doesnt work like that, but the lesson is that you only need "islands" to separate and evolution will do the job of divirging the species, this is the tale of the next video in these series, the Giant tortoises Tale:
http://www.videosift.com/video/Richard-Dawkins-The-Giant-Tortoises-Tale

. . . . It's painful to read that site. My heart sinks when I think that people really believe that dinosaurs and humans coexisted only 6,000 years ago and that dragons are real (didn't know dinosaurs breathed fire) and that evolution is debunked because my kid didn't pop out as a new species or that monkey's aren't giving birth to 6 foot tall humans. Or, yes, that the asteroid had NOTHING to do with the decline of dinosaurs even though they admit that the period afterwards shows a serious decline in fossils but I guess it shouldn't matter because technically, most of them don't believe in carbon dating. But hey, I don't believe in popcorn.

Pff... diarrhea of the mouth.

I like the closing argument; "it is clear that natural selection cannot make new species, and that all species are therefore created by god". What kind of hocus-pocus argument is that?

To pharaphrase something Richard Dawkins writes in "The Ancestor's Tale" that I'm currently reading, "Island migration" animals that, by a freak occurrence drifts across the sea to colonize islands, is such a rare event that animals evolve into new species before the next raft arrives, and thus the variation that Darwin discovered and, presumably was inspired by, on the Galapagos islands, as he puts it, such raft journeys of, say a pregnant iguana is so rare that the possibility that it will happen in a year is one to ten thousand or so, but on a million year scale (evolutionary and geological time) its unavoidable. The same applies to nuclear war: it may be statistically improbable , but it only has to happen once.

Will we be able to set aside our petty, insignificant religious and cultural differences and move on to bigger and better things before that time comes?

Tags changed from "new species, genetic testing, pretty" to "new species, genetic research, pretty" by gold star member pho3n1x.