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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 11/20/2009 : 15:57:31
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This stupid!
Seems that a couple of fossil-hunters came across a bit of amber containing a part of a spider web. This is quite an extraordinary find because, at 140 myo, at the time flowering plants first appeared, it is the oldest web known. ICR is having orgasmic fits of joy over it because a dearth of flowering plants means that there would be no food for an ancient orb-weaver to eat, they think. Therefore the Flood Story is true. So there! 
Amber-Trapped Spider Web Too Old for Evolution
Share this Articleby Brian Thomas, M.S. *
Amateur fossil hunters Jamie and Jonathan Hiscocks were looking for dinosaur remains in East Sussex, UK, when they instead found tiny spider webs trapped inside a piece of ancient amber. Oxford University paleobiologist Martin Brasier inspected the amber, which was assigned an age of over 100 million years. He concluded that spiders back then were able to spin webs just like today’s garden spiders.
The amber-encased webbing formed concentric circles like those that contemporary orb-weaver spiders manufacture. Also evident were “little sticky droplets along the web threads to trap prey,” Brasier told the Daily Mail. He added, “You can match the details of the spider's web with the spider's web in my garden.”1 In a paper recently published in the Journal of the Geological Society, he wrote that these webs are “comparable with those of araneoid spider webs studied by us in modern cherry tree resins.”2
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I was going to take this bilge apart but, well, it's just too freakin' easy. Too easy = no fun.
So, did orb-weaving spiders evolve in response to a greater diversity of insects#8213;which supposedly evolved in response to plants#8213;or did the spiders evolve prior to these insects?
If the evolutionary age-deposit correlation is made, this amber-encased spider web not only falsifies the theory that spiders “radiated” in response to the “explosion” of insects, but it also glosses over the fact of the interdependence of these three groups—spiders, insects, and flowering plants—in ecosystems. Most orb-weavers depend entirely on flying insects for food, insects are responsible for pollinating most flowering plants, and the plants provide the necessary food for most insects.
For Brasier and his colleagues to maintain that even a single generation of these spiders evolved prior to insects, they must also insist that spiders came up with silk glands, spinnerettes, and the instincts required to build symmetrical webs even to the degree of coating them with sticky insect-trapping droplets—all with no flying insects around to trap as prey. With no lunch as a payoff, wouldn't that generation of spiders have gone extinct?
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Oh please....
What this insufferable twit fails to understand is that flowering plants are a relatively recent development. Plants themselves have been around a lot longer.
How plants conquered the land
Fossils tell the story
About fourhundred and fifty million years ago, at the end of the Ordovician and in the beginning of the Silurian, the land was desolate and empty. Barren, hardly wethered rockgrounds, empty sand-, gravel- and clayplains, no green. Maybe some lichens. And at wet spots some algae with a couple of spider-like little creatures creeping around. In the neighbourhood of the mouth of rivers, where the water regularly flooded the land, it was probably green with algae. At such places, e.g. in Australia, traces of big seascorpions have been found. There was not much happening on the land. Life enacted itself nearly completely in the water.
The oldest indications for the existence of real land plants have been found in cores from boreholes in Oman. They contained fours of mutually connected spores (tetrads) enveloped by remains of the spore sac in which they had been formed. Research on the spore walls point to a relationship with the liverworts. The fossils have been found in the Middle Ordovician and are about 475 million years old.
Cooksonia
The first fossils of macroscopic land plants have been found in the Middle Silurian of Ireland. They are about 425 million years old. They consist of small bifurcations some centimeters in size. Only in the very last part of the Silurian fossils of land-plants become more common and also more complete. The best known plant from that time is called Cooksonia. It is named after Isabel Cookson, who occupied herself with intensive collecting and describing plantfossils.
The little plant looked very simple: a stem which bifurcated a couple of times topped with small spheres in which the spores were formed. Thus sporangia. No leaves, no flowers, no seeds. And roots? Probably horizontal growing stems, connected with the soil by root hairs, took the function of roots. But this is not sure for fossils proving this have not been found yet.
During many millions of years it was mainly this kind of plants that grew on humid places on the land.
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And when plants appear, they are soon followed ravenous stomachs. This link has a time line.
The oldest insect fossils so far discovered are tiny imprints of wingless insects found in sandstone rocks of the mid-Devonian period (c. 380 million years old). These earliest fossils closely resemble modern springtails (Collembola) and even by this time they show most of the specialised evolutionary features that characterise the present-day members of this insect order (e.g., the reflexed 'tail' used for jumping). This would suggest that the insect-stock from which they arose must have been already very old in Devonian times, and that the first primitive wingless insects probably appeared much earlier, at least in the Silurian, around 410-440 million years ago.
The earliest fossils of winged insects come from the coal-measures of the mid-Carboniferous (c. 320 million years old). These include the remains of cockroaches (Dictyoptera), some of which are little different from present-day species. It would seem that this group have survived more or less unchanged perhaps from Devonian times (i.e., for about 360-400 million years). The same coal deposits also contain the fossils of diverse archaic insects belonging to ancient lines that, unlike the cockroaches, gradually disappeared before the end of the Paleozoic era, leaving no modern descendants. Many of these archaic forms are huge dragonfly-like insects, with a wing-span of 20 cm or more, like the Palaeodictyoptera and Protodonata illustrated below - true 'dinosaurs' of the insect world.
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So, there were lots of bugs to benefit an enterprising orb-weaver, far longer ago than a mere 140 mil.
I'm having difficulty believing that Mr. Thomas is such a sloppy researcher that he would publish such an easily refuted piece of drivel. I'd really not want to call him an outright liar, but...
I mean, either way, STUPID! is the only conclusion.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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Edited by - filthy on 11/21/2009 04:56:40
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 11/21/2009 : 22:55:14 [Permalink]
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Sometimes these guys just deserve to be punched in the face. The Creo you mention, Fil, is one such.
Even if there were no flowering plants, and thus no flying pollinators, the world was jam-packed with crawling, leaping arthropods and even flying insects. The advent of flowering plants only opened up a much larger food supply to the spider clan, fueling yet another of its continuous "radiations" into new niches.
This Thomas guy, like most Creo spokesmen and "experts," is probably 95% a liar, and the rest a fundy fool. He knows better. As George Orwell explained, you need to employ someone who knows the truth to craft your lies, if you are to make them sound credible.
The reprehensible Thomas is deliberately preaching ignorance to his already-ignorant choir, using "sciency" terms to combat reason. He needs a bloodied nose. |
“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 11/22/2009 : 02:23:48 [Permalink]
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Yeah, but really, the level of boneheadedness on this one surpasses even ICR's less than exacting standards. On the low side, I might add. I could take that dreck down and never bust a link in research. What, do they think it all appeared by magic with nothing preceding it?
Oh wait; that's exactly what they think. Or [cynicism] at least that's what they want everyone else to think. [/cynicism]
I hate to say it, but I could get a more satisfying intellectual breakfast at Happy Ham's House of Hooey. At least there, you get a show with your serving of fried balderdash.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
 Posted - 11/23/2009 : 01:52:13 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by filthy
Yeah, but really, the level of boneheadedness on this one surpasses even ICR's less than exacting standards. On the low side, I might add. I could take that dreck down and never bust a link in research. What, do they think it all appeared by magic with nothing preceding it?
Oh wait; that's exactly what they think. Or [cynicism] at least that's what they want everyone else to think. [/cynicism]
I hate to say it, but I could get a more satisfying intellectual breakfast at Happy Ham's House of Hooey. At least there, you get a show with your serving of fried balderdash.
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Yeah, I get that. It's bad enough they're peddling idiocy, but boring idiocy is beyond the pale. |
“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
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How stupid can they get, you ask?
