re: Evolution: Missing link found. Fish => Tetrapod

quote:

---

How the hell do fish "evolve" and "mutate" to where they can go from only breathing underwater to being able to breathe oxygen on land?

---

This is what I would like to know. I don't know enough about it.

Other forms of evolution, like natural selection, makes perfect sense.

quote:

---

How the hell do fish "evolve" and "mutate" to where they can go from only breathing underwater to being able to breathe oxygen on land?

It makes no sense.

---

I can actually understand this response.

A few good courses in biology and genetics would make it easier to understand. After that, the pieces of evolutionary biology and paleontology start to fall into place.

I am too exhausted from the other thread to get in to it very deeply today.

quote:

---

How the hell do fish "evolve" and "mutate" to where they can go from only breathing underwater to being able to breathe oxygen on land?

It makes no sense.

---

Alright, I just did a little research. This is what I came up with:

We all know about natural selection. No need to get into that.

The big differences when species evolve are caused by mutations. Mutations can be beneficial, neutral, or harmful for the organism, but mutations do not "try" to supply what the organism "needs." Meaning, it's not like a fish needs legs to go on land and will eventually sprout legs because he "needs" legs. These things happen through a random mutation.

Some mutations are harmful to a species.

Mutations that occur in non-reproductive cells are NOT passed on to offspring.

Large-scale mutations are those that occur in reproductive cells and can be passed on to offspring.

How do mutations happen? DNA fails to copy accurately. When that happens, weird shite can happen.

**** Now, here is the most important part that is applicable to this article *****



Explaining Major Evolutionary Change


Changes in the genes controlling development can have major effects on the morphology of the adult organism. Because these effects are so significant, scientists suspect that changes in developmental genes have helped bring about large-scale evolutionary transformations.

Developmental changes may help explain, for example, how some hoofed mammals evolved into ocean-dwellers, how water plants invaded the land, and how small, armored invertebrates evolved wings.

quote:

---

How the hell do fish "evolve" and "mutate" to where they can go from only breathing underwater to being able to breathe oxygen on land?

---

Ask this guy:



Periophthalmodon schlosseri, the Giant mudskipper, is a species of mudskipper native to the tropical shores of the eastern Indian Ocean and the western Pacific Ocean where it occurs in marine, brackish and fresh waters. It is most frequently found along muddy shores in estuaries as well as in the tidal zones of rivers. It lives in a burrow in the mud and emerges from the burrow at low tide on sunny days. It can move quickly across a muddy surface and is capable of breathing both in and out of water. The giant mudskipper can grow to a length of 27 centimetres (11 in) TL. This species is of minor importance to local commercial fisheries.[1]

Basically if there is a mutation that gives an organism an environmental advantage, his offspring will out compete those that do not have the advantage.

Don't over-complicate Natural Selection, it's very straight forward.

quote:

---

How the hell do fish "evolve" and "mutate" to where they can go from only breathing underwater to being able to breathe oxygen on land?

It makes no sense.

---

You can watch an underwater breathing tadpole grow into an air breathing frog just in his lifetime, yet you can't imagine the same process happening over hundreds of millions of years and countless generations?

While I believe in evolution, I also believe in intelligent design.

The complexity of the most basic biological entity or even the complexity of atoms absolutely could not come to be in a vacuum. It's defies logic more vehemently than the existence of a higher entity that these incredible functions figured themselves out.

I believe evolution is the result of secondary characteristics created by genetic mutations that gave recipients of the mutation an advantage which over the course of hundreds of thousands of years or millions of years eventually led to the weeding out of those in the species that did not possess the mutation.

quote:

---

How the hell do fish "evolve" and "mutate" to where they can go from only breathing underwater to being able to breathe oxygen on land?

---

I'm guessing that over time, the fish developed strong limbs that it could crawl out of water to escape from predators, and over time they became more and more adapted to staying out of the water longer, and evolved lungs in order for it to match it's environment.