Thursday, April 06, 2006

 

Alleged Missing Link Found - Explanations Vary


Scientists have unearthed fossils of a fish that walked the earth, ah, well, proto-digited it, 375 million years ago. Most of this guy looks like a giant fish, 4 to 10 feet long (individuals may vary), but his forward fins and some other parts are similar to four legged land animals that were the next step. We call the later "tetrapods", Latin for four foot, which seems appropriate. So this guy (you will see why I am calling him that in a minute, and remember, this is a gender free zone) is the missing link, at the cusp of the fish-tetrapod transition. OK, his name is "Tiktaalik roseae", which was suggested by the local Indian chiefs. Tiktaalik is Nunavut for "large shallow water fish" and roseae means "redskin". The discovery was made in the far northern Canadian Arctic, a hop and a skip from the North Pole, so all the controversy in the U.S. about naming sport teams and cub scout troups like that obviously hasn't reached there yet. I guess it is not quite as bad as Guanlong wucaii. My post on that Wookey February 10 apparently didn't help.

Naturally some people are trying to make out that this is a rebuttal to the creationists, who have argued that the absence of such a fossil cripples evolution theory. Duane T. Gish of the Institute for Creation Research says "This alleged transitional fish will have to be evaluated carefully. He added that he still found evolution "questionable because paleontologists have yet to discover any transitional fossils between complex invertebrates and fish, and this destroys the whole evolutionary story."

POTUS and I believe that all the various views on the subject should be respected, and you should "teach the controversy", including stuff about this alleged fish. For instance, why would the Nunavits already have a single word that means all that? You don't think it was passed down for 350 million years, do you? Remember that the 5,000 year folks that rely on the "begats" suggest that all these alleged fossils were just planted there at the creation. At the moment I can't think of the "why?", but I remember it made sense when I heard it.

And then there are the views of the Flying Spaghetti Monster people (see post of January 8). I believe it is primarily an "alien" based theory, and that it has a lot to say for it. For one thing, it is more flexible, as there could be more than one visit. Picture the aliens seeing this large shallow water fish flopping around on its fins, stuck in the mud. The liberals probably would have liked to give him a leg up right then, but the conservative approach might prevail, evolving the design just enough to allow movement, but leaving him in the mud. The tetrapod business could wait for the next ship. Come to think of it, the FSM theory should satify everyone, as it has intelligent design and evolution built in.

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