God, I love a good fish story. Don’t you, my dear fundamentalist Christians? I mean the fish is “your symbol” from the early days of Christianity (check out that funerary stele above – pretty cool). I see it on the bumper stickers of your cars every day. But I digress. Shall I proceed? Thank you.
So. Evolution. Just a theory. Right? A theory that is either (1) Dead Wrong or (2) the greatest Evil ever inspired by Satan. The Bible is the only source of truth. It tells us that the earth was created in its entirety, including every animal on the planet, in six days. The dinosaurs all died in the Flood (no room in the Ark, I’m told). We’ve been here 6000 years give or take a few. Carbon 14 dating is a lie and geologists haven’t got a clue.
Isn’t that what you tell me all the time, all of you, devoted pure souls who have a personal relationship with Jesus and put a smile on your face when you tell me I’m going to hell unless I change my belief in the validity of science. I have to admit, I admire your persistence. So I can’t wait for you to explain the following fish story to me.
A deep-water fish found mostly off the coast of southern Africa has been found to have non-functional lungs, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications.
Latimeria chalumnae is no ordinary fish. Besides possessing vestigial lungs, the species is frequently called a “living fossil” for being part of the order coelacanth, which was long thought extinct.
L. chalumnae was discovered in a fisherman’s net in 1938, and it bore remarkable similarities to fossils of coelacanths, fish thought to have died with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Well, I’m sure there’s an answer for this conundrum. I mean why would an intelligent designer put vestigal lungs in a fish that lives at depths in the ocean that would crush most of us flat as a pancake? I mean, evolution does have an answer, even if it is one you don’t appreciate:
The presence of lungs, albeit seemingly useless ones, in the L. chalumnae may answer some questions about its relationship to its ancient cousins. Researchers say some coelacanths survived the Cretaceous/Palaeogene extinction event that killed off the land-dwelling dinosaurs because they had already adapted to deep water. This adaptation would have made lungs unnecessary organs for the fish.
The coelacanths that are only known in the fossil record appear to have calcified lungs. Perhaps, scientists say, those lungs were to help the fish live in shallower waters where lungs would have been more advantageous.
You know what else is really strange? The embryos of these fish (however old you believe their species to be) actually develop real, functioning lungs just like land animals. It is only as the fish grows to adult size that its lungs stop developing, becoming merely a vestigial organ.
Weird, right? Why would God do that? Seems sort of ridiculous for him to do that, but maybe that’s just me. It’s just one more mystery I’d love to ask him about (Father, Son or even the Ghost dude, I don’t care) after the Rapture. Damn shame you tell me I don’t have a ticket on that rocket ship because – science, no personal relationship with Jesus, et cetera. Oh well, maybe you can ask him for me. Because God has all the answers. Right?
