Thursday, December 23, 2010

More lies from my youth

If you used a fundamentalist Christian textbook in your high school science class, chances are it will have pointed out how stupid scientists are by the fact that a fish they though was extinct and was in the fossil record was still found alive today. That fish of course is the coelacanth.


Upon reading this, I could immediately relate to this chunk of text:

 I've mentioned before that I went to fundamentalist Baptist high school. My first introduction to the Coelacanth was through a heavily biased (and flawed) biology texbook from Bob Jones University, which (to the best of my memory) described the Coelacanth as a "living fossil" and took that description literally. Evolution couldn't possibly be real, I was told, because here was this Coelacanth, utterly unchanged 65 million years (air quotes implied) after it was supposed to be extinct. If evolution were real, why would it ignore the Coelacanth?
The truth: It didn't. What Courtenay-Latimer found wasn't a fleshed-out, swimming fossil at all. Coelacanth isn't a single species. It's an order—comprising multiple extinct species, and two living ones. The living Coelacanths aren't the same as the fossil Coelacanths, and there's nothing that looks exactly like a living Coelacanth in the fossil record. The order survived. But it didn't survive untouched by evolution.
Kids, I don't care what anyone says to you; be informed and find things out for yourselves.

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