July 25, 2019 Thursday
Bedtime Story
Why "Transitional Forms" Are So Rare and Few
The sisters of my mother (there are five of
them alive) would also be “transitional forms” between me and my grandmother as
they also carry the shared traits of mine and my grandmother’s.
And yet even though my mother and her sisters
are “transitional forms” between my grandmother and me as an individual they
are not meaningful in the way we wish to assign meaning to it in this
three-generational span.
Remember this is a very difficult concept
for our brains to get around to as it is not used to dealing with such large
spans of geological times where evolutionary changes become meaningful and show
their impact (except in microbiology and medicine where we keep observing the
phenomenon of microbial drug resistance).
The true-Believers or the creationists have
so badly failed to grasp this concept (I have a feeling that they sincerely do
not have any intention to understand anything that goes against their
fundamental religious axioms) that they expect the intermediate forms to be
either half-way between two species, or “partially formed” or “incomplete”
creatures.
Their favorite question “where is the
missing link between human apes and the other great apes?” not only shows their
ignorance but reflects the inherent difficulty of the concept of “intermediate
forms” or “transitional forms”.
They probably expect a mythical creature
like a Greek Minotaur which is a mosaic of a bull and a man because it is their
core belief that God can create whatever he wants but that sadly is not the
case with the mechanism of evolution by natural selection.
Nature cannot go back to the drawing board
and start from a blank slate; it has to tinker with the existing biological
models or forms.
It is a well known fact that more than 99%
of all species (the total is roughly estimated to be about five billion of
which the “lucky ones” to be currently alive being around 14 million and out of
which a mere 1.2 million have been documented and 86% remaining out of our
knowledge) that have ever lived on this planet have died out and become
extinct.
Cataclysmic extinctions (apart from gradual
background extinctions) are a recurrent theme in our evolutionary history that
wipe out a vast segment of existing species and are a necessary and integral
part of the Darwinian theory of evolution.
Yet the traces of most of the extinctions
are lost from the annals of evolutionary history simply because the likelihood
of even bones or any hard part of organisms becoming fossilized is very low.
Even in the best of circumstances rarely do
organisms end up getting fossilized.
This is so because fossilization requires a
series of complex chemical and geological mechanisms such as permineralization
(empty spaces getting filled in with mineral rich ground water), casting and
molding, replacement and recrystallization, adpression, carbonization,
bioimmuration among others.
These processes are so highly exacting in
terms of paleontological and geological requirements that fossilization of most
organisms becomes an extremely speculative affair.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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