I've been to caves in the south of Thailand and have seen "normal" cave fish, insects, frogs, etc. but never anything like this. Wish I was young and mobile enough to go back and explore more.
Posted on 03/28/2016 12:51:51 PM PDT by JimSEA
When the first water-dwelling creature wriggled up onto land about 400 million years ago, it took the first steps down an evolutionary path that would eventually lead to a diverse range of tetrapods — animals with backbones and four limbs — that navigate the world in a number of Now, scientists have discovered a blind cave-dwelling fish that "walks" around its rocky home, shuffling forward by shifting its pelvis back and forth in a way that is unique among fish alive today, but recalls adaptations that may have once allowed ancient fish to transition from water to land, hundreds of millions of years ago.
This is the first evidence in a living animal that offers a real-time glimpse of the mechanisms that may have served as the evolutionary foundation for all the different ways that four-limbed animals glide, fly, swim, creep and gallop — today, and throughout their evolutionary history. [Watch: Pelvic 'Boogie' Moves Blind Cavefish]
[snip]
Using their pelvises, the fish in the clips generated a rigidly rocking momentum that carried them forward through powerful water flows and over rocks covered by just a thin layer of water. Their movements — the diagonal opposition, in particular — were reminiscent of how limbs work in tetrapods, the study authors wrote. That kind of motion was noticeably different from the wriggling that fish such as mudskippers and walking catfish use to move temporarily on land, in which their tails and posteriors do most of the work, or the fin-propelled "walking" that frogfish and lungfish use underwater.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
I've been to caves in the south of Thailand and have seen "normal" cave fish, insects, frogs, etc. but never anything like this. Wish I was young and mobile enough to go back and explore more.
It takes God to make a fish walk.
Amazing! I find it fascinating the evolutionists tie themselves into knots with explainations.
Aparently some fish just started doing it, and then they stopped and reverted back.
Maybe fish needed a bicycle after all.
Maybe fish needed a bicycle after all.
POST OF THE DAY!
POST OF THE YEAR!
POST OF THE DECADE!
love it. I used to see that feminazi sticker years ago and it made me want to punch feminazi freaks in the face. And I’m a woman.
“In evolutionary biology, convergent evolution is the process whereby organisms not closely related (not monophyletic), independently evolve similar traits as a result of having to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches.”. If it happens once, it may well happen several times given the right conditions both in the environment and the creature (fish here). However this fish has a necessary structural adaptation many lung fish and other walkers don’t have, an attached hip. There is no reason to believe only one fish species evolved into one amphibion species. Evolution is a “bush” not a “ladder”. You should do some reading on this subject by someone other than a creation apologist. I don’t believe it will have any negative impact on your faith.
Even if fish evolved that way, we’ve seen other apparently equally credible examples of multiple “evolutions” of an identical feature in nature
How do we know that THESE particular hipped fish ever made it past fishhood?
I have. Trust me I have. Long ago when I was sould searching and deciding whether to really follow the faith of my fathers, or trust in human knowledge.
The bottom line; it always boils down to logic and moral law.
I wholeheartedly believe in adaptation. But a fish, will always be a fish, and a duck a duck.
All honest Christians I have ever known have questioned our faith, and came out with a solid foundation.
We don’t. In fact these specific fish undoubtedly weren’t the ones. It’s an example of convergent evolution where a “good idea” is selected numerous times. However, it shows one way it could have happened 395 million years ago when we find the first amphibion fossils along with likely fish candidates for common ancestors.
I think the creation and flood descriptions in Genesis are allegorical and certainly teach lessons but aren’t literally true. There are other portions of the Bible that are clearly allegory. It doesn’t mean they are “not true” just because they teach a lesson rather than detail an occurance. There is also a very fuzzy line between the Old and New Covenants. Should we or shouldn’t we eat shellfish. An apparent contradiction doesn’t hang me up and some things are clearly miracles like the virgin birth and resurrection and, as such, aren’t subject to scientific inquiry. Unlike the flood, for instance, science cand verify the events leading up to them and can record changes as a result of the miracle.
That’s just my approach as supported by other believers far brighter than I.
Thanks (again) for posting these science articles. I wonder whether this species qualifies for the designation “living fossil” in the same sense that a coelacanth does? You also mentioned convergent evolution. I, for one, found the book on this subject by Simon Conway Morris (of Burgess Shale fame) to be an excellent treatment, despite some of the controversy that it generated.
What would the “good idea” to “bad idea” ratio need to exceed before life was wiped out altogether, let alone evolve?
Here’s where actually following the story helps. A lot of folks get their information secondhand.
Some followings take the creation days as metaphors for larger activities. Reading the story for yourself and understanding the general tenor of the bible can turn up a lot of detail. The documented creation days have no noons or afternoons. It’s like God worked the graveyard shift for six days straight. A progress from darkness into light bespeaks some kind of spiritual progress too, and many creatures are described with a word, nephesh, that connotes breathing, even those that even the ancients would know do not breathe (such as fish).
Did this larger activity entail some kind of evolution? We might not ever be able to prove that it did, though the activity behaves oddly compared to what we might expect from a process driven out of randomness. The appearance of species burgeons as the species get more complex — the very conditions under which one would expect species to be more vulnerable to extinction.
Mystery undergirds the universe in which we live. Science could not hope to approach telling us the entire story.
“Bad ideas” clearly outnumber “good ideas” but they impact the survival of an individual and its ability to pass on the trait. Extinction Events are where the environment changes so drastically that most creatures cannot individually survive and the kill off doesn’t give time for adaptation.
If you look at the various extinction events, you will see that they vary from a snowball earth to a fireball and resulting cloud cover that kept the normal cycles of plant life from happening for some time (years). The Permian extinction resulted from a poisoned atmosphere and ocean from volcanic flows and coal deposit fires. For most species, there was no change that could save them. However some plants and animals did survive and in the period afterwards there was an explosion of new creatures evolved from the survivors and of the survivors we still have many.
The problem with taking a theory of evolution as a fundamental fact, is that one never finds a probability hill steep enough to call a halt to it.
And remember these hills work both ways. They have to (1) be climbed up; and (2) not be fallen down.
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