pandas thumb evolution

Davis argued the giant panda is a bear that adapted to eating bamboo.

The researchers suggest that the thumb may have originally evolved for a different function: grasping branches. But as with Yockey’s paper, the authors’ mathematics is naïve to the point of being silly. Simocyon may have used this skill to escape from bigger, faster predators. Of course, itâs largely thanks to Gould that such overly adaptationist points of view are not so common today. arguments. She created Curious Meerkat in 2009, and has also written for a variety of publications including New Scientist, BBC Earth, Science, Nature, Mongabay, and The Scientist, as well as contributing to several books.. She completed her PhD in 2013 on the social behaviour of dinosaur ants. In 1977, the Journal of Theoretical Biology (JTB) published a paper by Hubert Yockey called A calculation of the probability of spontaneous biogenesis by information theory. The two species share a common ancestor that lived more than 40 million years ago. These studies (such as this one and this one) indicate that giant pandas and red pandas are only distantly related.

Furthermore, the panda thumb is the sixth "finger" on its hand! Instead, it hunted or scavenged prey. TPT 1. The Panda's Thumb is a blog on issues of creationism and evolution from a mainstream scientific perspective.In 2006, Nature listed it as one of the top five science blogs, and Mark Pallen has called it "the definitive blog on the evolution versus creationism debate". Bears are members of the Ursidae family, within the order Carnivora, and as the name suggests, almost all bears are meat-eaters.

Stephen Jay Gould’s wonderful book of the same name. Had an intelligent designer been involved in their creation, surely they would never have ended up with such an uncomfortable arrangement, but instead would have been created with a thumb much more like our own? Bamboo is particularly difficult to grasp without a thumb. It is primarily a bony support for the pad above it, a support the panda's true thumb and fingers can squeeze against to hold bamboo (Endo et al 1996).

In a paper that will be posted was published on-line this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of paleontologists describe Simocyon batalleri, which turns out to be an ancient relative of red pandas.

Many details of its anatomy appear to be strange contrivances that reflect this history. USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1613870114 (2017). Look carefully at the bones in the giant panda's hand. The radial sesamoid was then co-opted to help the panda grip bamboo. Sorry for the short notice, but I received this invitation from March for Science just this morning. The panda's "thumb" is a much enlarged sesamoid bone. The giant panda, however, subsists primarily on bamboo. In the essay, Gould complained that textbooks liked to illustrate evolution with examples of optimal design, such as insects that exquisitely mimicked a dead leaf.

That coincidence may suggest that the same ecological shift from meat-eater to bamboo-eater drove the evolution of a bamboo-processing thumb. There is a relatively large bone in the foot in the same location as the radial sesamoid is in the hand. Itâs also intriguing that these two thumbed creatures also share a taste for bamboo. It then got bigger to help the panda grip bamboo. So I put up a new post about Champneys’ arguments Modified from, The tibial sesamoid of the giant panda is also large. Instead theyâre merely the byproduct of natural selection acting on other parts of the panda body. I’d never really thought about it before, but of course we have 2 species of panda: the big fellas, & the much smaller red panda (Ailurus fulgens). We believe that intelligent design is not in any way a suitable topic for the Journal of Theoretical Biology. One lineage gave rise to bears, including giant pandas. Before a giant panda eats a piece of bambooâits favorite mealâit grabs the shoot between its flexible thumb and finger and strips off the leaves. Itâs the sort of hypothesis that evolutionary biologists can test. And yes, punctuation & grammar skillz, I has them That apostrophe really is in the right place – read on to find out why.

Once again, the creationists are crowing about having slipped some of their dreck into a respectable venue. over time, they are ignoring the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The new Two species of distantly related panda may have adapted to a bamboo-centric diet in similar genetic ways.

The giant panda also has an opposable thumb. I wonder, however, about the reviewing process and specifically about the reviewers: how were they chosen, and were they all suggested by the authors of the paper?

This bone is the tibial sesamoid, and it is larger than the same bone in other bears. And to Gould, the thumb of the giant panda was the epitome of a funny solution.

It makes the case that biological “contrivances,” juryrigged structures made from available parts, provide better evidence - that evolution has occurred natural history in than structures that appear optimized for their function, such as wings or eyes.

Excerpted from "The Panda's Thumb" out of The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould, W.W Norton & Company, New York, 1980.

Inside the thumb pad is the blue "thumb" bone. Another lineage gave rise to red pandas as well as skunks, raccoons, and weasels. Curious Meerkat uses cookies. Written by. To see earlier posts, select the Archives at the top of this page. Biodiversity and genetic information Photo stock.xchng Only the giant panda (see The bamboozling panda) and its possible relative, the red panda (see ‘Panda’ monium), have a ‘thumb’.

The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (1980) is a collection of 31 essays by the Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.It is the second volume culled from his 27-year monthly column "This View of Life" in Natural History magazine. Then wait for the post and then the comments to load. That is, except the panda.

And stay on topic!) … If you turn any knob just a little to the right or to the left, the result is either a universe that is inhospitable to life or no universe at all.” However, whether this constitutes fine-tuning, by some reasonable definition of that term, is going to depend on a lot more than just the number of knobs. by invoking something like the Second Law. For a more extensive and discursive version of the Yet they both have modified a modified wrist bone, the radial sesamoid, that functions as a thumb and allows them to grip & manipulate bamboo – a lovely example of convergent evolution. The radial sesamoid was then co-opted to serve its present role in handling bamboo.

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