World News Korner

Fresh from raging at Neil deGrasse Tyson over the new "Cosmos" series, Creationists turn their attention to a new, and potentially more unsettling, science based program.

Courtesy of 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 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.

Shubin's bestselling book about his discovery, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, uses the example of Tiktaalik and other evolutionary evidence to trace how our own bodies share similar structures not only with close relatives like chimpanzees or orangutans, but indeed, with far more distant relatives like fish. Think of it as an extensive unpacking of a famous line by Charles Darwin from his book, The Descent of Man: "Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

The PBS series based on Neil Shubin's incredible work is due to premiere Wednesday. So of course it has irritated the proponents of Intelligent Design/Creationists.

As some of you may know Creationists love to harp on the gap in the fossil record as proof that Evolution does not prove that man evolved over time from more primitive life forms.

To be honest it has always confused me as they choose to completely ignore the overwhelming evidence in the fossils we HAVE uncovered, and focus instead on the ones that they believe are still missing. Kind of like if you were putting a jigsaw puzzle of a jaguar together, and though the assembled pieces clearly show that it is in fact a jaguar, because there are one or two missing pieces certain people refuse to see it.

That is why this discovery is especially consternating to the Creationists, as it adds yet another important piece to the puzzle.

So of course it must be refuted.

Courtesy of Raw Story:

Prominent creationist Elizabeth Mitchell reviewed the show for Answers In Genesis, and she was unimpressed by the manner in which Shubin allegedly “juxtaposes factual human anatomy with tiresome tales that misleadingly suggest [his] evolutionary interpretations superimposed on the fossils, genetics, embryology, and anatomy in the episode are as trustworthy as the observational science.”

The common design of of Tiktaalik limbs and human hands “is consistent with the biblical account,” she wrote. “It only makes sense that a wise Creator, the Common Designer of all living things, would use this versatile, stable skeletal pattern in countless different kinds of creatures.”

Mitchell then tackled Shubin’s claim that the location of the male reproductive organ on the outside in humans is evidence is another indication that “flaws in the human body, like our susceptibility to hernias, remind us that we’re all adapted from ancient ancestors; we are, every one of us, just a jury-rigged fish.”

She found “several problems with that statement,” foremost among them — that it contradicted the Bible. “God designed a perfect human body along with a perfect world in the beginning,” she wrote.

Part of my problem with the Creationists, besides the fact that they insist that every question as yet unanswered by science proves the existence of God, is their contention that we were created perfect.

This idea of perfection, is decidedly imperfect.

For instance as human beings our olfactory nerves are pathetic as compared to many of our fellow mammals, our eyesight is a joke, our physical strength would put us quite near the bottom of the food chain if our brains did not compensate so well, and our bodies are fragile machines prone to malfunction, disease, and an expiration date after only about 75 years or so.

There is nothing perfect about us.

In fact as most evolutionary biologists know, we are a transitional lifeform ourselves, as are all creatures on the planet.

And recognizing that fact means that learning we have evolved from apes, fish, or ultimately single cell creatures, should not be seen as an insult, but rather an amazing accomplishment.

Unlike religion, science does not define mankind as a fallen race, in need of salvation from a micro managing sky daddy, but rather a miracle of evolution for whom the journey toward the eventual destination of our species is really only just beginning.

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