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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

One of the few instances I recall of being swayed by "intelligent design" theories as a lad was what they called the "lack of transitional fossil records". I forget most of it because I tend to believe organized worship of a figure is probably nothing but a cult for power and control. But it supposed that something like a bat would have to have evolved wings, according to Darwin. Then it must mean that it evolved from a mammal that didn't have wings - so then why are there not fossils of weird bat-rats?

For all I know, there are in fact such fossils, or any of about 15 other explanations, because the book which I was being homeschooled with, "Biology from a Christian Perspective" or similar, also tried to disprove evolution unironically by describing how many monkeys it would take over a few million years to have randomly pounded out the Bible.

Anyway, the cat gap is proof that God hated kittens.

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There's a simpler explanation for the rareness of bat fossils:

"Bat fossils are extremely rare. Ancient bats, like their modern counterparts, were small and fragile, and they tended to live in tropical habitats, where decay occurs very rapidly. Just about the only way a bat can become fossilized is if it dies in a place where it is swiftly covered with sediment that protects it from scavengers and microorganisms alike."

However a transitional bat fossil was discovered around 2000, so probably after your school book was written:

"Onychonycteris, however, has a combination of archaic and modern traits that make it exactly the sort of transitional creature evolutionary biologists have longed for.

"We chose the genus name Onychonycteris (“clawed bat”) because the fossil displays claws on all five fingers, just as its terrestrial predecessors did. The presence of these claws is not the only feature of Onychonycteris that recalls nonflying mammals. Most bats have very long forearms and tiny hind limbs. Onychonycteris, however, has proportionately shorter forearms and proportionately longer hind limbs than those of other bats. Compared with other mammals, the limb proportions of Onychonycteris are intermediate between those of all previously known bats (including Icaronycteris) and those of arboreal mammals that rely heavily on their forelimbs for locomotion, such as sloths and gibbons. These animals hang from branches much of the time as they climb around in the trees. Perhaps bats evolved from arboreal ancestors that used a similar form of locomotion.

"Despite these primitive limb features, other aspects of the anatomy of Onychonycteris indicate that it was capable of powered flight. Its long fingers would have supported wing membranes, and robust clavicles (collarbones) would have helped anchor the forelimbs to the body. Meanwhile a wide rib cage and a keeled sternum would have supported large flight muscles, and a faceted scapula would have secured other specialized, flight-related muscles."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/uncovering-bat-ev...

I was originally just going to link to a Colugo, which I think are still pretty cool, and probably good evidence of what early stages of vertebrate flight looked like. Functionally they're not doing full flight like a bat, but their flight is still quite a bit better than a flying squirrel, a sugar glider, or one of the assorted other gliding mammals can do. You can see them flapping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIgv8Qw--kk

Like the flying squirrel example given by another poster, they're not closely related to bats. Actually quite closely related to us though.

Bats: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@CHIROPTERA=574724 Colugos: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@DERMOPTERA=987673 Flying squirrels: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@Petinomys=43434 Sugar gliders: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@Petauridae=323245

But the bat transitional fossils is also an interesting question. And some Googling finds this, which you might enjoy: https://arstechnica.com/science/2008/02/earliest-bat-fossil-...

In that Colugo video the speaker says “they actually built a show around this shot”. Any idea what show he’s talking about?

Also tiny cameras have come a long way since that video was made.

I don't, sorry, just found it by Googling.

One thing people often miss is that fossils are extraordinarily rare. The general thought is that less than .1% of all species to ever exist have been fossilized. The conditions need to be perfect.

Honestly it's amazing we know as much as we do. It's not easy to preserve something for hundreds of years, let alone millions or billions.

What are flying squirrels if not an in between state rodents evolving to fly?

Flying squirrels evolved gliding independently from bats. Bats aren't rodents and they're not closely related.

Precisely, we are witnessing evolution in a similar direction in real time.

Hundreds of thousands of years in the future, their descendants might actually be flying not gliding.

Exactly, sugar gliders and seals mean we don't need transitional fossils between 'land bats' and flying ones, or between 'land dolphins' and aquatic ones: we can already see that evolution can get a similar organism partway there, and if we find some smoking-gun fossils later, so much the better.

I think that we are finding more and more "transitional" fossils.

Fossils are actually incredibly rare, especially at more than a couple of million years old. For every fossil, there were probably a million dead critters that never became fossils (figure pulled right out of my nethers).

Nowadays, it's a given that birds are dinosaurs (theropods, to be precise). There have been enough transitionals, to establish that. I think the latest Jurassic Park finally has a feathered dinosaur in it. When the first movie came out, the look of the "lizards" was pretty much what everyone thought, so a lot has happened, in less than thirty years.

For anyone who's not seen it, one of the most incredible finds is a dinosaur tail which was preserved in amber: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38224564

And very obviously has feathers.

The new Prehistoric Planet[0] series, on AppleTV, takes the “birdlike dinosaur” to extremes.

It looks like they used bird attributes to “fill in the gaps,” everywhere. For example, all the eyes are bird eyes, and the motion capture seems to be from birds.

[0] https://tv.apple.com/us/show/prehistoric-planet/umc.cmc.4lh4...

This argument is even technically named the "God of the Gaps" argument that some of these believers feel that God can only "live" in the gaps of our knowledge, our scientific studies, our available records, so they are always looking for new gaps and always making cases that those gaps "prove" their idea of God.

The fortunate bit for them is that science is a slow, human discovery process and will always have gaps. For a scientist, this is where the wonder of science is: making hypotheses about things we don't know and then going out and finding it with as much rigor as they can think to apply.

The unfortunate bit for these particular sorts of believers that can't imagine their God living in science, that can't imagine their God wanting people to know as much about the world around them as possible, is that while there are always gaps, they are always shrinking or getting "solved" with new theories or new records/discoveries. At some point the only way to "protect the gaps" and thus protect their idea of God, their God of the Gaps, is to lean hard into ignorance and distrust of science. (Sometimes I almost feel sorry for them and that lack of imagination and/or trust that their God cannot exist in science/beyond just hiding in gaps like a creature of darkness.)

As another example of a "closed gap", in addition to some of the other good ones in sibling comments here, that I appreciate because it is very much an ur-example in that a symbol for atheism in counter to that gap has long been the "evolve fish" with legs, which also long seemed like a gap in the fossil record, especially to the "God of the Gaps" crowd.

Since those days we've closed that gap and found fossils of the Tiktaalik and done all sorts of science around the first land fishes, our lobe-finned ancestors that made the first "steps" onto land, the real life "evolve fish": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik

The plush form is very cute if you want a memento of this scientific discovery. Currently sold out, but some museums may have some: https://pri-gift-shop.myshopify.com/collections/plush/produc...

All fossils are transitional fossils.

Not if the fossil's species then goes extinct before spawning any descendant species.

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