[AdmSmith]

A preprint of the research paper by Vidal and Hedges is posted on at http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/link.asp?id=pa6a316clj7h

[AdmSmith]

A snake for your collection.

[BroncosFan]

Ping for you and your Creation "science" adversaries.

[Willie Green]

ping

[VRWC_minion]

14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:

[Chewbacca]

Good grief this is common sense stuff.
Shoot, the Bible says right in Genesis that God cursed the serpent and said it would from that day forth crawl on its belly.

[anonymous_user]

Scientists Discover Where Snakes Lived When They Evolved into Limbless Creatures

Democratic Underground?

[colorado tanker]

And I thought snakes came from Hope, Arkansas.

[Fifth Business]

"Having limbs is a real problem if you need to fit through small openings underground, as anybody who has tried exploring in caves knows," Hedges says. "Your body could fit through much smaller openings if you did not have the wide shoulders and pelvis that support your limbs."

[ClearCase_guy]

Their land-based lifestyle, including burrowing underground at least some of the time, may be the reason. "Having limbs is a real problem if you need to fit through small openings underground

Land-based lifestyle? Are limbs somewhat rare among land-based creatures? And the burrowing part? I guess that explains why moles and prairie dogs have no limbs.

As usual, close to 100% guesswork, culminating in a conclusion. The "science" of evolution.

[Ol' Sparky]

There isn't even enough fossil evidence to complete the evoluationary fairy tale in theory.

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nods of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record." (Gould, Stephen J. "The Panda’s Thumb, 1980, p. 181)

"Fossil discoveries can muddle over attempts to construct simple evolutionary trees--fossils from key periods are often not intermediates, but rather hode podges of defining features of many different groups... Generally, it seems that major groups are not assembled in a simple linear or progressive manner--new features are often "cut and pasted" on different groups at different times." (Shubin, Neil, "Evolutionary Cut and Paste," Nature, vol. 349, 1998, p. 39.)

"Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information..." (Raup, David M., "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, vol. 50, 1979, p. 25.)

"Large evolutionary innovations are not well understood. None has ever been observed, and we have no idea whether any may be in progress. There is no good fossil record of any." (Wesson, R., Beyond Natural Selection, 1991, p. 206)

[aruanan]

"Having limbs is a real problem if you need to fit through small openings underground, as anybody who has tried exploring in caves knows," Hedges says.

Picture thinking.

[Ol' Sparky]

"Given that evolution, according to Darwin, was in a continual state of motion ...it followed logically that the fossil record should be rife with examples of transitional forms leading from the less to more evolved. ...Instead of filling the gaps in the fossil record with so-called missing links, most paleontologists found themselves facing a situation in which there were only gaps in the fossil record, with no evidence of transformational intermediates between documented fossil species." (Schwartz, Jeffrey H., Sudden Origins, 1999, p. 89.)

[LiteKeeper]

INTREP - and the "facts" story changes once again.

[RightWingAtheist]

Ping

[Verginius Rufus]

I'm wondering...did they manage to get any genes from sneaky snake?

[steve-b]

Scientists Discover Where Snakes Lived When They Evolved into Limbless Creatures

Not, one presumes, in Georgia.

[rintense]

Now, the first study ever to analyze genes from all the living families of lizards has revealed that snakes made their debut on the land, not in the ocean.

Hell, we've known this for years on FR. Hillary spends most of her time on dry land.

[Gritty]

This research was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Astrobiology Institute and the National Science Foundation.

Everyone is missing the point here.

Why are we spending hard-earned taxpayer money on this nonsense?

If somebody wants to do this kind of research, fine. But let them get private funds or pay for it out of their own pocket. Don't make us pay for it!

[PsyOp]

I thought this was an article about the U.S. Senate. Oh Well, moving on...

[Old Professer]

It must have been easier to dig the burrow using limbs.