<story><title>419-million-year-old fish fossil resolves &apos;missing link&apos; in evolution</title><url>http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-26/fossil-discovery-links-gap-in-evolutionary-knowledge-of-fish/4981652</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>brudgers</author><text>Richard Dawkins&amp;#x27; &lt;i&gt;The Ancestors Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life&lt;/i&gt; is an accessible account of evolutionary biology and goes to great lengths to disabuse even a sloppy reader of the popular [pre-genetic sequencing] notions of &amp;quot;missing links.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Evolution suggests that creatures in similar environments are somewhat likely to develop similar adaptations without one species being the ancestor of the other.  From a scientific standpoint the claim that modern fish are descendents of the extinct Placoderms is neither falsifiable nor for practical purposes verifiable - DNA simply does not survive that long.&lt;p&gt;Sparrows and bats have a common ancestor but it is improbable that it had wings.&lt;p&gt;Or to put it another way, the rationalist&amp;#x27;s notion of a missing link as expounded in the headline is as dependent upon the logic of the Great Chain of Being as that of an Ussherian creationist - their disagreement is large, but mainly resides in what constitutes the relevant details of a teleological account and the criteria for acceptance is the plausibility of the account to the individual and the intellectual communities to which they belong.</text></comment>
<story><title>419-million-year-old fish fossil resolves &apos;missing link&apos; in evolution</title><url>http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-26/fossil-discovery-links-gap-in-evolutionary-knowledge-of-fish/4981652</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>onion2k</author><text>An armoured fish? Like... a fish tank?&lt;p&gt;Thank you. I&amp;#x27;m here all week. Try the placoderm.</text></comment>