"Your Inner Fish" Chapter 1- Finding Your Inner Fish

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OK a non-believer will review Neil Shubin's book "Your Inner Fish". I have blogged about this being a failed prediction and this time I will add more detail from Neil to support my claim.

Chapter 1 is the set up for Neil's journey to find the origin of limbed organisms. That's right, according to Neil he was "interested in understanding the origin of limbed animals", not just any ole transitional form. And he said, wrongly as it turns out, that to find the origins of limbed animals "we can now restrict our search to rocks that are roughly 375 million to 380 million years old".

First, the set-up:

"In a nutshell, the 'fish–tetrapod transition' usually refers to the origin, from their fishy ancestors, of creatures with four legs bearing digits (fingers and toes), and with joints that permit the animals to walk on land. This event took place between about 385 and 360 million years ago toward the end of the period of time known as the Devonian. The Devonian is often referred to as the 'Age of Fishes,' as fish form the bulk of the vertebrate fossil record for this time."- Jennifer Clack, The Fish–Tetrapod Transition: New Fossils and Interpretations; "Evolution: Education and Outreach", 2009, Volume 2, Number 2, Pages 213-223

Got that- "the transition" refers to an event, a specific event that occurred between two specified time periods, a time when there were fish and no tetrapods and the time when there were fish and tetrapods. (as I said Here and again here- just can't get enough of RichTard's cowardice and ignorance)

With that now firmly established we return to "Your Inner Fish" chapter 1 where Shubin discusses what he was looking for- hint: evidence for the transition, ie the event:

Let's return to our problem of how to find relatives of the first fish to walk on land. In our grouping scheme, these creatures are somewhere between the "Everythings" and the "Everythings with limbs". Map this to what we know of the rocks, and there is strong geological evidence that the period from 380 million to 365 million years ago is the critical time. The younger rocks in that range, those about 360 million years old, include diverse kinds of fossilized animals that we would recognize as amphibians or reptiles. My colleague Jenny Clark at Cambridge University and others have uncovered amphibians from rocks in Greenland that are about 365 million years old. With their necks, their ears, and their four legs, they do not look like fish. But in rocks that are about 385 million years old, we find whole fish that look like, well, fish. They have fins. conical heads, and scales; and they have no necks. Given this, it is probably no great surprise that we should focus on rocks about 375 million years old to find evidence of the transition between fish and land-living animals.- Neil Subin pages 9-10 (bold and italics added)

OK he did it just exactly as described, bracketed the dates. However his dates were wrong, which means he did not find evidence for the transition, which occurred many millions of years earlier.


But anyway near the end of chapter 1 Neil sez:

It took us six years to find it, but this fossil confirmed a prediction of paleontology: not only was the new fish an intermediate between two different types of animal, but we had found it also in the right time period in the earth's history and in the right ancient environment. (italics in original)

Oops. As it turns out Tiktaalik was not found in the right time period for Neil said he was looking for.

In order to find what he was looking for, evidence of the transition, he needed to focus on rocks 400 million years old, as the new data puts terapods in existence about 395 million years ago.

Tetrapod trackways from the early Middle Devonian period of Poland

Back to the review- so chapter 1 is all about setting up the expedition and hindsight being 20/20 we now know it was set up under the wrong premises. But that is the nature of science-> the science of tomorrow can upset or confirm the science of today. In this case it was upset. That just means in order to find what he was looking for he just has to set out again to find the origin of limbed animals.

However I have to wonder is if Neil had the data from Poland would the rocks Tiktaalik was found in have been dated to say 400 million years old? Dating sedimentary rocks isn't as straight-forward and simple as some may want you to believe. Sometimes you could have the sediments dated by index fossils and the index fossils were dated by the sedimentary layer they were found. That makes for a fudge factor. And evolutionists have a lot of fudge.

That said Neil et al., did find a fish-like animal that had more robust fore-limbs than a regular finned fish. Was it a stand-alone population designed for a specific environment? Was it a hybrid? Was it a fish-a-pod transitional, a natural experiment to adapt from purely aquatic life to life on land? Unfortunately neither genetics nor developmental biology can tell us, yet.

Chapter 1, the big set-up was a failure. Not a total failure because genetics and/ or developmental biology can still come through AND he can always find a speciman in the "correct" time period, which can then change again.

end chapter 1