Q10 - The prehistoric fish Tiktaalik is the earliest

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Inference (most supported)

Stimulus Breakdown:
The first fish with fingers probably wouldn't have stuck out at the time (lots of weird variations among fish at that point), but it was important to animal evolution since it was probably the precursor to land animals with fingers.

Answer Anticipation:
Can we combine any of these claims to derive something new? If we were trying to "straddle the Pivot", we could infer "an attribute that was an important development in animal evolution would not have stood out as unusual at the time".

Tough to say what they'll go for, so let's just guard against TOO STRONG, OUT OF SCOPE, and NEW COMPARISONS and pick the most provable answer.

Correct Answer:
E

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Too speculative. It was a fish, after all. We don't know if it spent a second of its life on land.

(B) Too extreme. We can't support that fingers were T's ONLY significant feature.

(C) Too extreme. It could certainly be true that at least one current fish species has T as an ancestor.

(D) Too extreme. This paragraph doesn't let us generalize about what NO fish could EVER do!

(E) YES! We know that T's fingers made it evolutionarily significant and that T's fingers wouldn't have stood out as unusual at the time. Put those together and you have this answer.

Takeaway/Pattern: It turned out to be a "straddle the Pivot" type inference, where you have facts on both sides of a BUT/YET/HOWEVER and the inference is safe way of synthesizing the two. F.e. "Patrick is a mean teacher. But he gives his students candy" -> "not all teachers who give their students sweet edibles are friendly"

#officialexplanation

[ca_teran1]

Hello,
What does straddle the pivot mean? How was this linked? When can I come across a straddle pivot again in inference to choose answer.
I don't see how e is the answer. Thanks

[ohthatpatrick]

When we read Inference paragraphs, we're looking to combine two or more claims in order to derive some other true statement. The most popular ways they do this are via CONDITIONAL or CAUSAL language.

The other, but less, popular ways they do are via DISTINCTION/SIMILARITY or QUANTITATIVE language.

"Straddle the pivot" was a term I just made up there and then provided an example of.

PIVOT words are "but / yet / however / nevertheless".
Straddling a saddle or fence means you have one leg on both sides.

So "straddle the pivot" means an idea that has "one leg on both sides" of the BUT/YET/HOWEVER

In my example:
"Patrick is a mean teacher. But he gives his students candy"

A straddle-the-pivot inference
-> "not all teachers who give their students sweet edibles are friendly"

The simple way of saying that inference was
"Some mean teachers give their students candy"
but I was showing you a way LSAT would make that same idea harder to read/process.

In regards to Q10,
what is the evolutionary significance of T?

"T's fingers were an important development in animal evolution (likely to be the ancestor to many land animals with fingers)"

Would we be able to judge that T is the ancestor to many land animals with fingers if we just compared T to fish species of its time?

No. First of all, we'd only be looking at fish, and the evolutionary significance of T is that it became the ancestor to LAND animals.

Secondly, we're told that the ocean was a stew of weird-ass fish back then, so T's weird fingers wouldn't have seemed any more likely to be important than some other prehistoric fish's weird feature.

If you agree with everything we just said, then you agree with (E). If we only looked at prehistoric fish, we wouldn't be able to determine that land animals from later eras would inherit the finger DNA from T, and thus we wouldn't be able to determine T's evolutionary significance.

hope this helps.