http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-b...0061106a3.html

Are you sure it's an evolutionary throwback? Maybe it's part of the dolphins' plans to reclaim the dry land.

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
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Bah, you just reminded me that I missed the Simpson's halloween episode yesterday 'caus the g/f just had to go out to eat at a resturant that's like 45 min away from home. i live in the stoneage apparently, as everyone else seems to have a DVR. had to program my VCR to auto record, which it apparently decided not to do. oh well.

anyway I read an article on CNN about this, and couldn't help but wonder why they say this is proof that dolphins once walked on land, when genetic mutations are found all the time. (i.e. two headed snakes, people with extra fingers/toes, etc.). *shrugs* i guess that's why those people are called scientists and i'm just some nerd with a computer.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Theory of Zombie Relativity:
1) Everyone Else is a Zombie relative to You
2) Whether or not it matters is related to the inverse square of the distance between their teeth and your brain
(Quoted from Demigrog)

Don't sell yourself short Fazor - I was thinking the exact same thing myself. In some ways this is a slight case of cherry-picking data to supoort a pre-determined hypothesis. Dolphin with 4 fins = used to walk on land, dolphin with extra blowhole (or other mutation) = ??? dolphins didn't used to walk on land???

Usually when an animal is discovered with a mutation people go on about pollution or some other suspected cause, not hail it as proof of the characteristics of its (ancient) descendant.

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LoL thanks for the support (i was just being sarcastic in my first post, btw ). But yeah that's kinda what i was hinting at, they seem to be picking a random mutation to support thier theory. In thier support, the CNN article makes it clear that it's long been known that dolphin embreos show signs of these rear fins but these generally dissapear by birth. But, to use my same analogy, two-headed snakes aren't that rare (relatively) either. That doesn't mean thier ancestors had two heads. To me it looks more like a weakness or deficiancy in that part of thier DNA.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Theory of Zombie Relativity:
1) Everyone Else is a Zombie relative to You
2) Whether or not it matters is related to the inverse square of the distance between their teeth and your brain
(Quoted from Demigrog)

That is sort of the idea; if a species has made a particular adaptation fairly recently in its evolutionary history, it is logical that a minor mutation could reverse that adaptation.

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Mutations are not all created equal. The "duplicated part" mutation is a completely different mechanism from the "whole extra part that doesn't belong on the organism at all" mutation. In other words, two heads or extra fingers is one kind of mutation on a species that's supposed to have a head and fingers, but rear limbs on a species that isn't supposed to have rear limbs at all is something else.

Think of the answer to the question "Where did the mutated feature come from; what's the original form it was derived from?". With duplication of established parts, the answer is simple: the system for growing the correct number glitched and produced an incorrect number. But then what about parts that aren't supposed to be there at all? There's no original form to be modified and messed up, no original data to have a glitch in, is there? But there has to be in order for the mutation to happen; something had to mutate; you can't have a mutation of what doesn't exist.

So that means that a species that lacks the organ(s) in question (in this case, rear limbs) contains some information for growing it/them anyway, and that information is just not used, cancelled out, suppressed, something like that. Then the answer to the question of where the mutation came from, or what original normal feature got mutated, is that it's that hidden, unused information and/or whatever normally keeps it from manifesting itself physically; that's what got mutated in the mutant's case.

So, the existence of such a mutation tells us that even though the species normally lacks the given feature physically, there's some stifled ability to grow it anyway, some hidden information that normally goes unexpressed. Now, why would a species contain any such hidden template for growing (an) organ(s) it (normally) doesn't actually have?

Because its ancestors did have it/them.

The debate over cetacean origins was over a long time ago, I thought. They've found a pretty long length of the whale family tree in the Himalayas from what used to be the Sea of Io between India and Asia. Covering a good chunk of the transitory species between modern whales and their lupine ancestors.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

Not to mention that, IIRC, there are whale species today that still have vestigial pelvic bones, deeply embedded in their bodies.

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But the argument of vesitgial organs says you had more organs in the past, so you are going from more complex to the simple. Is this not the wrong direction for evolution to go?

A number of alleged vestigial organs in the human have uses today, including the apendix which IIRC is part of the immune defence system in a young child.

Could this dolphin just be another subspecies?

Do these extra limbs aid or hinder it's life in the wild if it is a mutation

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You're mistaken about the way evolution works if you think so.

Evolution moves in the direction of greater survival, not in the direction of greater complexity.

If survival is greater by removing features, there's a tendency for the features to go away.

You should remember that greater survival is always relative to the current environment, so features added earlier because they at that time gave greater survivability may be a liability now and thus gets removed again.

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"God bless thee, my son; I will give thee the greatest jewel I have ...
"The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible."Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

And it's a very common mistake.
I think every biology teacher who teaches evolution should spend considerable time discussing parasites. Most if not all internal parasites lack some features necessary for free-living animals. Many have no eyes; some have no digestive system. Yet all of them had free-living ancestors at some point! (You can't be a parasite until there is something to parasitise.) These are perfect examples of evolution removing features.

It also makes a hash of "irreducible complexity" argument: "A mousetrap can not function without any one of its parts, so it could never evolve". Here are examples of mousetraps evolving from essentially nothing to modern mousetrap -- both adding and removing parts along the way:

http://www.fidelibus.com/mousetrap/01.htm

http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mousetrap.html

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You make CNN because your VCR fails? *WOW*

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I, for one, welcome our new dolphin overlords ...

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