Tiktaalik the Fishapod

Evolutionary scientists are dancing in the streets. After searching for “the missing link” for 146 years since the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, they have finally found it. The fossils of a 375 million-year-old fish that they say is a long-sought "missing link" in the evolution of fishes from water to a life walking on four limbs on land was discovered in the Canadian Arctic, 600 miles from the North Pole.

Dr. Neil H. Shubin, leader of the research team, announced the finding in the standard language of scientific discoveries: It's a really amazing remarkable intermediate fossil — it's like, holy cow. I think he may have meant holy Pezosiren portelli, the legged sea cow. These evolutionary scientists tend to be excitable fellows.

The fossil skeletons have the fins and scales of a giant fish up to nine feet long, but other anatomical traits of a transitional creature, a fish that is still a fish but exhibiting changes that anticipate the emergence of land animals — a predecessor thus of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans.

The fish has been named Tiktaalik which means "large shallow water fish." Tiktaalik, Dr. Shubin said, is "both fish and tetrapod, which we sometimes call a fishapod."

The New York Times gushed that the fossils are widely seen by scientists as a powerful rebuttal to religious creationists, who hold a literal biblical view on the origins and development of life. (John Wilford, 5/5/06)

Doug Tennapel objects: Wait a minute, you're telling me that scientists have been preaching Godless evolution all this time without a legit fish-to-tetrapod missing link?! Well what were you using all this time on the fossil tree, science fiction? Luckily, no gap is so great between species that can make some scientists lose their faith in a dogmatic fundamentalist allegience to Materialist Darwinism.

It seems to me that some widely seen scientists still believe that their competition are the religious creationists, somehow missing the entry into the heavy-weight division of the Intelligent Designer who has been manhandling their champion in the manner of Joe Louis Barrow over Max Schmeling in 1938. (As an aside, it is interesting that, in 1940, The Brown Bomber actively campaigned for Wendell Willkie for the presidency over FDR because he believed that Willkie and the Republicans would do more for civil rights.)

But, returning to Tiktaalik, and the more important socio-political aspects of the discovery. Hugh Hewitt was the first to ask: “So, are we all descended from a Canadian fish?”

Well, as much as I respect Hugh, I am not willing to go that far. However, Tiktaalik does have a remarkable likeness to John Kerry, so it may be that the fishapod is the ancestor of French Canadians, and American liberals. I don’t know but it could be that survival of the fittest thing. I can just about see the phylogenetic tree from fishapod to walking sea cow, to monkeys, apes and liberal (or French) hominids.

As Darwin said, "Probably all of the organic liberals which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed."

I can believe it.