Evidence of "Macroevolution" - Examples 616 - 635

616.
http://tinyurl.com/89xae
Abstract: The phylogeny of Crocodylia offers an unusual twist on the
usual molecules versus morphology story. The true gharial (Gavialis
gangeticus) and the false gharial (Tomistoma schlegelii), as their
common names imply, have appeared in all cladistic morphological
analyses as distantly related species, convergent upon a similar
morphology. In contrast, all previous molecular studies have shown them
to be sister taxa. We present the first phylogenetic study of
Crocodylia using a nuclear gene. We cloned and sequenced the c-myc
proto-oncogene from Alligator mississippiensis to facilitate primer
design and then sequenced an 1,100-base pair fragment that includes
both coding and noncoding regions and informative indels for one
species in each extant crocodylian genus and six avian outgroups.
Phylogenetic analyses using parsimony, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian
inference all strongly agreed on the same tree, which is identical to
the tree found in previous molecular analyses: Gavialis and Tomistoma
are sister taxa and together are the sister group of Crocodylidae.
Kishino-Hasegawa tests rejected the morphological tree in favor of the
molecular tree. We excluded long-branch attraction and variation in
base composition among taxa as explanations for this topology. To
explore the causes of discrepancy between molecular and morphological
estimates of crocodylian phylogeny, we examined puzzling features of
the morphological data using a priori partitions of the data based on
anatomical regions and investigated the effects of different coding
schemes for two obvious morphological similarities of the two gharials.
(Syst Biol. 2003 Jun;52(3):386-402)

617.
Why do humans start out life with a tail?
http://www.nurseminerva.co.uk/tailbud.htm

618.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v249/n5453/abs/249128a0.html

"Seafloor spreading theory seems to explain why the ancestors of a
green turtle (Chelonia mydas) subpopulation which now travels 2,000 km
from Brazil to breed at Ascension Island, were induced to swim
oceanwards for increasing distances during the gradual separation of
South America and Africa in the earliest Tertiary."

What does this have to do with macroevolution? Well if creationists
are going to narrowly and cluelessly define macroevolution to mean a
lizard gives birth to a bird, I have no problem defining it the other
way to include migratory species like the marine turtle C. mydas. Even
though they did not speciate, they were still evolving, and their
lifestyle certainly underwent a macroevolution. The evidence shows
that as the ocean floor spread, a phenomenon we can see at work today,
the turtle was forced to migrate further and further.

The only alternative to this (to put this in the standard
creationist/ID dichotomy) is for an intelligent designer (aka the
"loving" god of the Christian Bible) to deliberately make life hard on
the turtles rather than create them with breeding grounds close to
where they live, or better yet, enable them to breed in the ocean
without ever coming ashore. What went wrong with *that* "intelligent"
design?

The only explanation that makes sense is the Theory of Evolution, which
shows that turtles didn't have to go far from their breeding grounds
originally, but as the contients were forced apart, the distance they
were required to travel became greater and greater.

619.
Birds repopulate the continent from which they originally spread:
http://girlscientist.blogspot.com/2005/11/backtracking-birds-show-islands-are.html

The birds' progress was traced with DNA from island to island and back
to repopulate the original continet from which they left.

There is no explanation for this from the ID crew except "Godidit
because Godwantedit". The only *science* in this comes from the
evolution camp.

620.
http://www.origins.tv/darwin/dinobirds.htm#Birds
Dinosaur to bird transitional information

621.
http://www.tim-thompson.com/trans-fossils.html
Macroevolution and transitional fossils from Roger J. Cuffey

622.
Transitional Fossils on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossil
And a take on them by the Beeb:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A4351628
And more evidence on matters already covered:
http://www.agiweb.org/news/evolution.pdf
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/benton2.html#Primer

623.
Anolis lizard;
http://0-www.search.eb.com.library.uor.edu/ebi/article-200476

624.
Human endogenous retroviruses:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/96/18/10254

625.
The tunicate tail:
http://tinyurl.com/avkgc

626.
Seeds of Diversity:
http://tinyurl.com/bbcov

627.
Evolution of the placenta:
http://www.newsroom.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/display.cgi?id=310

628.
Diversification of mammals:
http://www.newsroom.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/display.cgi?id=156

629.
Transitionals confined by geographic location as Punctuated Equilibria
predicted:
http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/evoevidence.html

630.
The human jaw:
http://tinyurl.com/d4aak

631.
Beneficial mutations in humans:
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoHumBenMutations.html

632.
Jurassic brachiopods of the genus Kutchithyris:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq%2Dintro%2Dto%2Dbiology.html

633.
Discussion of phylum-level evolution by an ex-creationist:
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/cambevol.htm

634.
Mosasaur evolution:
http://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-11/smu-mfl111605.php
http://smu.edu/smunews/dallasaurus/

635.
Antibiotic resistance in bacteria:
http://aetiology.blogspot.com/2005/11/evolution-of-resistance-bacteria-win.html

Budikka