Posted on 01/11/2008 10:18:38 AM PST by fanfan
Unlikely as it sounds, an extinct Canadian fish with foot-like fins is set to make a serious splash in the U.S. presidential race.
Tiktaalik roseae -- a 375-million-year-old fossilized "fishapod" discovered on Ellesmere Island in 2004 -- has been hailed as an "evolutionary icon" because it represents the crucial transition from sea to land for some of the Earth's most primitive creatures.
The discovery was announced amid global fanfare in 2006, and Tiktaalik is now the showcase species in a report released last week by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to promote the study of evolution and counter calls for U.S. schools to teach creationism.
That issue has dogged Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and an ordained Baptist minister, who publicly rejects the idea that humans came from apes.
Now Neil Shubin, the University of Chicago biologist who discovered the High Arctic fossil, is poised to release a populist recounting of his Canadian find -- Your Inner Fish -- in which he traces the primordial origins of the human race to such lowly creatures.
"It is far worse for Huckabee. Before apes, his ancestors were fish, worms, and other creatures," Mr. Shubin told Canwest News Service yesterday. "With jaw bones that correspond to gill bones in fish and sharks, a body plan shared with headless worms, and with parts of a DNA recipe shared with relatives of jellyfish, Huckabee's ties to some of the most humble forms of life on our planet run deep indeed."
The planned launch of Your Inner Fish next Tuesday has already prompted a prediction from the leading U.S. evolutionary scientist Don Johanson -- co-discoverer of Lucy, the "missing-link" ape -- that "creationists will want this book banned" because it so convincingly discredits their world view.
"If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, I'll accept that," Mr. Huckabee said in an interview last year. "I believe there was a creative process ... I believe that there is a God and that he put the process in motion."
Though he has tried to avoid the issue in recent months, Mr. Huckabee's views about evolution are coming under renewed scrutiny after solid support among evangelical Christians powered his surprise victory last week in Iowa in the opening round of the Republican presidential race.
The influential journal Nature welcomed the publication of Science, Evolution and Creationism this week, applauding its focus on "fossils such as the Canadian Tiktaalik" and noting the book's timely release came "on the same day that Mike Huckabee won the Republican presidential caucus in Iowa."
And in its latest issue, New Scientist magazine editorializes warmly about the pro-evolution push by the U.S. National Academy Sciences, arguing that the effort is "unlikely to be enough to convince Huckabee" but "will help to highlight the idiocy of a political position that calls for America to lead the world while denying one of the foundation stones of scientific progress."
Mr. Huckabee has said he doesn't oppose the teaching of evolution and wouldn't expect U.S. schools to promote creationist ideas, such as Intelligent Design, "as if it's the only thing that they should teach."
Polls in the U.S. routinely show that nearly half of all Americans discount the theory of evolution.
Tiktaalik was a predatory species that hunted in shallow waters at a time in Earth history when Ellesmere Island -- now Canada's northernmost land mass -- was a subtropical swamp situated near the equator.
The fossilized bones of the three-metre-long Tiktaalik (its Inuktitut name means "big, shallow-water fish") showed that it had the scales and fins of a fish but the ribs, neck, head and limb-like bones of a land animal.
"The major bones in our own arms and legs are similar in overall configuration to those of Tiktaalik," notes the report by the National Academy of Sciences. "The discovery of Tiktaalik, while critically important for confirming predictions of evolutionary theory, is just one example of many findings made every year that add depth and breadth to the scientific understanding of biological evolution."
The academy, which is congressionally mandated to advise the U.S. government on scientific issues, also states: "Because science has no way to accept or refute creationists' assertions, creationist beliefs should not be presented in science classrooms alongside teaching about evolution. Teaching non-scientific concepts in science class will only confuse students about the processes, nature, and limits of science."
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...I’m a creationist / evolutionist...
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Me too, cripplecreek. It is so obvious yet so many people miss it.
God created the Universe. God created all the natural laws by which this most elegant Universe operates. Scientists are about discovering all those natural (scientific) laws.
Is God a scofflaw? Isn’t it logical that God would create using the natural laws of this Universe?
What is your opinion on this?
Gordon Lightfin ?
.
ROTFLMAO!!!
I’m “nuetral” on evolution. I don’t think evolution necessarily contradicts the Bible, if you take “day” as a relative length of time (einstein relativity of time), and take the words meaning “create” as not implying by what process, but I also think, from a small amount of reading, that the theory of natural selection itself is weak as an explanation of major evolutionary changes and is not proving out.
But,but,but there was this rock laying around with nothing better to do and got hit by lightning and turned into every living thing.
When God breathed life into Adam I see it as meaning that God breathed a soul and humanity into Adam. As far as the ultimate creation of the universe is concerned, I don’t know how someone can look to the stars at night or into the eyes of a child and not believe in God.
That’s how tenures are passed out.
Has Huckabee expressed an opinion yet on the age of the earth?
I accept evolution as theory.
Yah. I certainly would agree that evolution is a theory!
If this fossil represents a species intermediate between fishes and amphibians, it’s hardly one of earth’s “most primitive” species—it was a vertebrate, much more complex and developed than tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of species.
The only science allowed in the Presidential Campaign entertainment show is Global Warming.
I understand that both evolution and gravity are theories.
I do not understand the hostility to the idea of teaching ID. Some scientists act as if science is somehow degraded by ID, for reasons I don’t understand. Granted, if I had cancer and the researchers were reading about ID instead of trying to find a scientific cure, I wouldn’t like it, but evolution/natural selection is not an APPLIED science, so what does it hurt to combine it with ID? After all, science has never found a satisfactory explanation of time, light, matter, consciousness, eternity ... thus begging for an answer regarding creation. The question of creation is more pressing than any purely “scientific” theory of genetic variance.
Mike will get back to you after he reviews an episode of the Flintstones.
The real question is by saying he rejects the literal interpretation of Genesis and the young earth dogma of the fundamentalists, is the Arkansas Elmer Gantry going to turn off some of his evangelical supporters?
There are those who dismiss the notion that God played any role in the creation of the universe. I keep asking them if God(s) also evolved from the same event or if they mean there is no God.
The science of global warming is being determined by "consensus" and not actual "findings".
ID is not science. It is religion in disguise, dreamed up after the U.S. Supreme Court removed creation "science" from the classrooms. And creation "science" was the response to an earlier court decision removing creationism from the classrooms.
Further, ID cannot live within the normal rules of science. The desire to be considered a scientific "theory" without going through the normal process (data, hypothesis, testing, peer review, etc.) is just the first problem. Second, ID has no research program. It is being entirely pushed in the political arena by the Discovery Institute, by lawyers, PR flaks, journalists and the like. That does not impress scientists much. Finally, ID does not follow the scientific method. It starts with the answer it wants and seeks to "prove" that answer by any means possible--except science and the scientific method.
Here is a good article on the subject: What Is The Scientific Theory of Intelligent Design?, by Lenny Flank. This goes into much more detail.
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