Posted on 05/05/2004 1:52:07 PM PDT by Junior
LONDON (Reuters) - Great white sharks and tuna have a similar build for speed despite evolving separately for millions of years, scientists said Wednesday.
"Nature does it best in terms of design," said Jeanine Donley of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. "It is amazing that they have developed to be so similar."
Lamnid sharks, which include mako and great whites, have been separated on the evolutionary tree from bony fishes, such as tuna, for over 400 million years. But the muscles and tendons that enable them to swim so fast are remarkably similar.
"Tunas and lamnid sharks have a body form that represents an extreme in biomechanical design for high-performance swimming," Donley said.
Lamnid sharks, which inhabit tropical to cold temperate waters in almost all seas, and tuna diverged from their ancestors in the design of their swimming features millions of years ago.
Their specialized features distinguish them from nearly all other fish and make them more like each other than their closest relatives.
The team, who reported their results in the science journal Nature, used video footage of sharks swimming in a tunnel and a device that measures muscle length during movement.
They believe it was evolutionary selection that allowed them to swim at high speed with a minimum of movement.
"There are body shapes...the roundness, the degree of tapering, even the tail shape, that you can calculate what would be approximately the most efficient for steady, straight swimming or burst swimming," Donley said.
"These two types of fish have this particular type of body shape which is ideal for hydromechanical efficiency."
Commenting on the research, Adam Summers of the University of California, Irvine, said scientists have been speculating on the similarities between tuna and mako sharks for decades.
"Understanding the mechanisms behind their locomotion could lead to high-speed autonomous underwater vehicles," he added.
Religion is religion.
Hmmm, common design.... common process!
Nature does nothing -"nature" does not exist. "Nature" is a word used to describe the material part of all existence. There is no entity we can call "nature" that is supposedly doing anything. And "nothing" can't "design". Design is the product of intelligence, not chance. This statement in nonsense! Typical of scientists with materialistic presuppositions.
They even resort to anthropomorphisms and it STILL doesn't occur to them.
I just completed R.C. Sproul's "Not a Chance". He contends that in the rush to divest God of any role in our affairs we have adopted a paradigm where action and purpose are ascribed to "chance".
For instance, Sproul points out that the results of a given coin toss is NOT a chance event. It is simply a physical event so complicated, and with so many uncontrolled variables, that we consider it a chance event. The reality is that it is simply an event which we have not chosen to calculate. However, we act as if "chance" acts as an agent to actively randomize the result. There is no such agent in the universe.
Eyes and Wings are two others.
I'll say it did. You can't even tell it's fish at all.
What's that? Oh, not 'fast food fish?'
Nevermind.
Compare that to the few hundred years it took man to fly and then fly to the moon....I'll take the human development cycle over the evolutionary one.
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