Evolution: Reflections on the way Thinking about thinking Patagonia
In the past month of September, starting from Cordoba, my wife traveled roads of Patagonia Argentina. Multiple scenarios paraded before us, who, as viewers, enjoy every moment of the trip: to contemplate horizons linear blue-green sea, to hear the silence of the solitude of the desert, feeling the damp cold of the eternal snows, to suck the resinous fragrance Valdivian forest, by dipping their hands in the clear waters of mountain range, the children wonder as to the stationary fossil museum, to be aware of territorial and cultural debt of our country with indigenous peoples. Travel experiences enrich the intellectual baggage of their own, encourage thinking and new ways to imagine the reality emerge.
Puerto Madryn
In Puerto Madryn, Chubut province, in the new Gulf Coast where the Peninsula Valdés was born in a place called "The Doradillo" high tide, we saw a score of Southern Right whales, some with their young.
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| Self-Image: Southern right whale |
Standing in the sand of the steep stony beach watching the huge and peaceful mammals spend a short, 10 to 20 meters. Their comings and goings, with twisting, rolling and pushing, playing with her "babies" enormous, are a wonderful spectacle of wildlife in its natural state. Adult measured 15 m weighing 40 tons average. whales come to Peninsula Valdes and especially protected Nuevo Gulf in late May, an event broadcast by TV and the Internet, to mate or give birth to her cubs. Latest remain until December before heading to the cold Antarctic waters. The females return every three males in most years, because of needs of men.
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| Self-Image: panel Feruglio Museum |
Trelew In Trelew, Chubut a major city, 60 km Madryn, visited the Paleontological Museum Egidio Feruglio, the largest of its kind in South America according to experts.
explain that in that place between 360 and 250 million years ago in Patagonia was separated from the South American plate and a dense forest covered the entire region without damaging the cold weather that prevailed at that time in Gondwana.
There is Paraphysornis the fossilized skeleton of a bird than 2 m in height and weighing nearly 300 kg. A Titanosaurus, vegetarian, huge body and long neck with a small head. It also exposes a femur of the latter to 2m long.
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| Self-Image: Argentinosaurus, panel. |
Desert
De Madryn on the Atlantic to Esquel, the foot de los Andes, 600 km of a road with two or three villages lost in the middle of nowhere (including "Cajón Grande Geneva and Geneva Drawer Boy).
However, the landscape is moving, with hills cut stone of pure peak, as the place "Altars" or cause of the Chubut river that snakes to sun glare from barren sand with some others that are beginning to turn green twigs in spring. guanacos, rheas (ostrich small, tiny ostrich), maras (Patagonian hare), foxes crossing the road and sheep to occupy the road require completely stop the car (truck).  |
| Self-Image: Peninsula Valdez guanacos |
The newborn lambs are bleating after their round and woolly mother and thought-induced hunger traveler linked to a defenseless animal to a flame grill or a plate of steaming stew .
Esquel
Esquel is, among snowy mountains, the gateway to the "Parque Nacional Los Alerces.  |
| Image own: Chubut River |
Among cold-water lakes and deep, dammed in containers carved in the rock by glaciers on the slopes of the mountain, growing larch wood, ancient conifers and rot. Larch name given by white people to confuse the tree with the European. The Mapuche indigenous people of the region (1,200,000 inhabitants in Chile and Argentina), I called Lahu.
whole area, from Corcovado, 120 km south of Esquel to El Bolson, 120 km
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| Self-Image: Blest port to the border with Chile |
north and depressed is a huge basin of 20,000 km2 in Argentine territory in the Pacific storm drain, through Chilean soil. Puelo Lake, for example, that one arm enters the sister country, has an altitude of only 220 m above sea level.
Bariloche San Carlos de Bariloche is located 300 km north of Esquel, on the shores of Lake Nahuel Huapi, and is famous for its chocolates and its tracks slopes.
The water surface is over 100 km long and to penetrate the mountain range reaches almost to the border with Chile. Here the rainfall reaches 4000 mm per year while on its east side to reach only 300 mm a year.
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| Self-Image: | museum announcement
Chocón
From the above drains the eastern end of Lake Nahuel Huapi forming Limay River. Before reaching 400 km Neuquén, the capital of the province, the river is dammed at Piedra del Aguila and El Chocón. In the latter place, near the dam, the houses that were built for workers of the work formed the basis for the present and friendly village of El Chocón. " P aleontólogos the site and created the City Museum there Ernesto Bachman.
modest and careful in this place, passionate scientists collect samples of field specialists studied in the laboratory and classified once exposed to the public. It is noteworthy that human remains found at the sites, once investigated, are given to indigenous communities for their final burial.
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| Self-Image: Giganotosaurus Carolinii |
Research confirm that Patagonia was discovered by humans for more than 13000 years and, therefore, America thousands of years earlier.
The museum saw the fossilized remains Bachmann (80% of the skeleton) of the largest carnivorous dinosaur in the world (found to date): "Giganotosaurus carolinii." Measurements provide more than 13 m long and 4.60 m tall at the hip and who lived from 99 to 96,000,000 years.  |
| Own Image: museum |
Bachmann
intelligence evidence the big head and jaw with sharp teeth indicates enormous ferocity, a set of properties that must have affected the psyche more than one of our tiny mammalian ancestors who lived with them.
The return to Cordoba, about 1300 km, requires another crossing of the desert. The path leads to the northeast, vegetation gradually increases its height and the first plowed fields warn that the desolation left behind. The green plains of the pampas wet foretell the existence of towns, cities and highways. Further, populous cities expose the essence of modern society. It's where top predators inhabit the present.
Reflections
Four-ascending sequences living descendants are described below:
1. Fish - amphibians - reptiles - mammals - whales.
2. Fish - amphibians - reptiles - dinosaurs - birds.
3. Fish - amphibians - reptiles - dinosaurs - larch.
4. Fish - amphibians - reptiles - mammals - human.
fish are still fish, but some of them became whales, birds or humans, never larch. The third stream is absurd, the other equipped with plenty of scientific evidence to support them. However, raises some doubts.
To
some scientists these processes are gradual, others are staggered.
Is evolution a continuous or discontinuous?
If it were broken: Where and when discontinuities occur?
fish and humans have substantial developmental differences are determined: the volume of the brain? Because humans are bipedal? Why have prehensile hands? Why not biological reasons?
Do genetic variations alone can achieve over time the fish become whales, birds or humans?
If cetaceans have large brains, why blue whales do not play chess?
If the South American spider monkeys have hands and prehensile tail: why not play on the Paraguayan harp, the song "Bellbird" (Guyra pu)?
If birds are bipedal and have your head up, why not design software?
From the Big Bang to the emergence of life on planet Earth: the phenomenon occurred abiotic evolution? or is it just a biological process that began with the first protocell?
stone scrapers among the native peoples of Patagonia and the automated projector microcine Feruglio Museum: are there developmental discontinuity? How many? Do you explain from biology?
what is the pattern that links the existence of planet Earth with the exhibition of "Giganotosaurus carolinii" in the museum Bachmann?
If this pattern exists: can it be organic?
The evolution and adaptation: are facets of the same phenomenon or are separate events?
The evolutionary process: is change ...? generation, or ...?
Mario Hails, October 2010
