"A long, thin rope-like creature standing erect on the sea floor up to 570 million years ago has been identified as the first animal on Earth to have had sex." Read more "Two palaeontologists studying ancient fossils they excavated in the South Australian outback argue that Earth’s ecosystem has been complex for hundreds of millions of years – at least since around 565 million years ago, which is included in a period in Earth’s history called the Neoproterozoic era." Read more
In the article it states "Researchers, who reported their findings in the journal Science, were unable to identify a mouth or any other recognisable anatomy." So if they couldn't how did they they determine it was capable of sex of any type? Just wondering?:shrug:
With a bit of lateral thinking.... The fossils all appeared to be the same age, and had grown up on a sandy seabed at the same time. Therefore they probably resulted from a single group spawning instead of uncoordinated asexual births.
What makes you think an organism needs a mouth for sexual reproduction? Sexual reproduction is seen in unicellular eukaryotes. Chlamydomonas is the best-studied example.
" or any other recognisable anatomy" That is what I'm asking about. If they can't recognize anything at all how can they determine anything?
What isn't? Did you expect they would find a fossilized penis? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Given that, as Hercules points out, sex possibly (almost certainly, in billions of years of competitive evolution) predates multicellularity, and may in fact be a precondition for it, I don't understand the "first to have" claim. First we have evidence of in larger beings, maybe.
Yeah there is always a possibility like the seeds had fallen on a sheet of ice surrounding the tree, and when the conditions were right and the seeds found soil they all sprouted at once. Or you could go with their conclusion - that it was sex. Mine is made up on the spot. Their conclusion has figures and PHDs. You choose which to believe based on a value assumption. The values at stake here are maybe intuition vs. reasoning or science vs. faith. You'll almost always have two smart people on opposite ends of an argument, like capital punishment for instance.
It's grandstanding. They are the first multicellular animals whose fossils have been found, and of course believed to have sex. Sex predates multicellularism by a wide margin. The evolution of sex in the eukaryotes advanced from simple mitotic divisions, to both mitotic and meiotic [sex] divisions of the parent cell. It was not until that stage was reached that those cells became ancestors to all plants, and all animals, all of which have both mitotic [asexual] and meiotic [sexual] division. All eukaryotic sea plants and eukaryotic land plants have the mechanism for sexual division. Some few eventually no longer use it, but retain the mechanism. Likewise, earliest animals were unicellular, and had sex. So of course the subsequent multicellular animals had sex capability.
Speculation is too broad a term. Speculation can mean just a hunch. This is, specifically, reasoning. That qualifies it as a scientific hypothesis.
