April 17, 2014
THERE ARE NO DARWINISTS ANY MORE:
This Fish Crawled Out of the Water...and Into Creationists' Nightmares (Chris Mooney, Apr. 11, 2014, Mother Jones)
We all know the Darwin fish, the car-bumper send-up of the Christian "ichthys" symbol, or Jesus fish. Unlike the Christian symbol, the Darwin fish has, you know, legs. Har har.But the Darwin fish isn't merely a clever joke; in effect, it contains a testable scientific prediction. If evolution is true, and if life on Earth originated in water, then there must have once been fish species possessing primitive limbs, which enabled them to spend some part of their lives on land. And these species, in turn, must be the ancestors of four-limbed, land-living vertebrates like us.Sure enough, in 2004, scientists found one of those transitional species: Tiktaalik roseae, a 375 million-year-old Devonian period specimen discovered in the Canadian Arctic by paleontologist Neil Shubin and his colleagues. Tiktaalik, explains Shubin on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, is an "anatomical mix between fish and a land-living animal."
It's kind of sad, the state that Darwin's champions have been reduced to. Because, of course, if Darwinian evolution were true, the testable scientific evidence for it would be demonstrations that speciation occurs and that it occurs exclusively as a function of natural selection. This is, obviously, not that. It is, however, the sort of thing they're left celebrating.
Posted by Orrin Judd at April 17, 2014 4:15 AM
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