This Fish Crawled Out of the Water…and Into Creationists' Nightmares

[Playinghardball]

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 has a neck," says Shubin, a professor at the University of Chicago. "No fish has a neck. And you know what? When you look inside the fin, and you take off those fin rays, you find an upper arm bone, a forearm, and a wrist." Tiktaalik, Shubin has observed, was a fish capable of doing a push-up. It had both lungs and gills. In sum, it's quite the transitional form.



More here: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/04/neil-shubin-inquiring-minds-tiktaalik-creationist-nightmare

[gopiscrap]

1. Love it!

[arcane1]

2. That was a great book, and I'm looking forward to the PBS series.

[intaglio]

3. No, no you don't understand ...

... now there are TWO transitional species missing!!!11eleventy one!!



Because I really don't want to be taken seriously.

[No Vested Interest]

4. That is one ugly fish (?). If I had found it, I'd have

thrown it back.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

12. It would have crawled out of the water and bit you for that.

[TlalocW]

5. Shubin went on to say

That it probably tasted a lot like chicken, and it would have gone well in a white wine sauce.

TlalocW

[dhill926]

6. well….this is obviously a fake, because...

um….well….you know….

[calimary]

8. Because - BENGHAZI!!!!!!!!!

Anything that ruins a teabagger's/creationist's/fundamentalist's day absolutely MAKES mine!

[dhill926]

10. of course!

my brain just freezes up when trying to complete a potential tea-bagger thought…

[Orrex]

7. This will mean nothing to Creationists

They demand a complete, direct, linear and uninterrupted tracing from modern man back to the first single-cell creature, and even then they'll simply declare that God designed the whole process.

It's an unwinnable argument because they're insane. No amount of evidence can persuade them.

[calimary]

9. True enough. But I enjoy envisioning them waking up each morning

and the first thing they find themselves reaching for - is the nearest bottle of Maalox.

[srican69]

17. wouldn't it be nice if we could selectively reverse the process and turn all the

creationists back to bacteria


Imagine the benefits - the average IQ of the human race will increase by 100% ( assuming that there are as many of them as there are of us)

[AAO]

11. Looks more like a cowpie than a fish.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

15. Could be worse...

Could be flattened while alive.

[longship]

18. I bet you posted that pic just for the halibut.

[FiveGoodMen]

19. I chose him out of thousands...didn't like the others; they were all too flat.

[Paulie]

21. Hi Eric!

Say hi to Eric, Eric and half Eric for me!

[FiveGoodMen]

23. Eric sends a semi-hello back to you!

[Spitfire of ATJ]

20. That served no porpose.

[longship]

13. The book is on me read list. The PBS series is very good, so far.

R&K

[libodem]

16. I've been watching it, too

Your inner fish. I liked the embryology part were it showed our gill slits during fetal development. Apes my ass.

[allan01]

14. re: This Fish Crawled Out of the Water…and Into Creationists' Nightmares

credits: toho. warnerbrothers : others
thanks for the post .the science haters will just love this .

[RainDog]

22. Evolution predicted the location of the fossils

predicted such a fossil would exist, and the finding of such fossils demonstrates the validity of evolutionary theory as the best explanation for the diversity of life in our own time and in the past.

what's also interesting is that human evolution also demonstrates its place within the sphere of evolutionary science as more variety has been uncovered in the homo species line before homo erectus - adaptive radiation.

So homo sapiens do not exist outside of evolutionary processes that apply to other species, as some religious folk choose to believe (i.e. all animals except for humans evolved.)

What's also interesting is the realization, that, as some have put it, evolution is more like a hack than some elegant design - because, if something is working from a mutation - there it goes.

life itself is amazing.