My Zoology professor always said the Chimera looked like female biology professors.
Posted on 10/08/2009 6:50:55 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Newly Named Fish an Evolutionary Enigma
A new species of chimaera found in Californian waters has been given a name. Chimaeras are bizarre cartilaginous fish with features that stand out among other fish. What also stands out is their lack of evolutionary change over supposed eons of evolutionary time...
(Excerpt) Read more at icr.org ...
Does it fry?
Oh. I know. It managed to survive the Bush years somehow, and now it's coming out of hiding to rejoice over the elevation of you-know-who.
I love science!
I don’t know, but given the armor plating, I imagine it slices about as easy as a tin can.
They ALL do.
Oh my, shut off more water for the valley.
Perhaps name it Ich-hope-Obamalus, since it was discovered during Obama’s regime. The fish likely caught wind of hope on the horizon and instead of living in the mud, it heard there was stimulus money in Detroit...I’ll bet it was caught after migrating towards the Great Lakes.
I’m gonna have to get me one of those!
My Zoology professor always said the Chimera looked like female biology professors.
Surfing will probably be banned by the whackos.
These fish (and alligators for that matter) definitely demonstrate that some critters don't really need many changes at all to maintain their existence. We might even suggest that they are so adapted to their environments that if a mutation does pop up it is instantly fatal and we just never see it!
Or, alternatively, they are organized like government agencies where well enough is good enough, and they just stay as they are until Congress finally cuts off their funds.
That line of argument would imply, in this case, that the environment the fish lived in would have to remain relatively unchanged for 200 million years. Otherwise, it’s pretty inconcievable that, if random mutations cause beneficial adaptations to appear in the vast majority of other organisms, it never created one that this little fish could make use of.
“Does it fry?” Of course! You’ve never heard of frying frish?
Obviously, if macro-evolution were true, the chimaera could evolve into many different forms over the course of hundreds of millions of years—just look at all the other sea creatures that share the chimaera’s environment! The fact that it hasn’t means the best explanation for the chimaera is that it is a young species, and that the evos’ hundreds of millions of years is erroneous.
“The fact that it hasn’t means the best explanation for the chimaera is that it is a young species, and that the evos’ hundreds of millions of years is erroneous.”
and the enviros go “oops”.
Who y’all callin’ “enigma”? Dat be racist, baby!
B.S. Zool. 1977
Or that the present chimaera has evolved over hundreds of millions of years to fit its present niche. Or maybe its present habitat is very similar to what it lived in hundreds of millions of years ago.
Going further, let's say the "environment" has nothing whatsoever to do with "mutations" ~ just whether or not a particular critter gets served up parboiled, roasted or fried ~ and that there's a "lowest common denominator" genome configuration that keeps you around, this critter could live in remarkably varied environments.
Another way to look at the situation is that this one fish has a set of genes quite like our own such that if you paw your way through the whole panoply of mammalian life you will find the same ones over and over with few variations.
Our own genes, with slight variation, also survive over geologic periods of time (and you can measure that sort of time however you wish, it becomes a relative value that tells folks that we mean "longest possible time we can measure in the here and now on this particular rock"). What does vary are the exogenous instructional material that turns the genes on or off, and the number of genes of any particular kind that we have available for our use. Sometimes just having an extra gene will give you a disease or an advantage. Having 10 extra may give you a larger brain (e.g.).
In that light the fish in question wouldn't be any different than ourselves except that it's exogenous materials may be more stable than our own for reasons no one has yet discovered.
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