Coelacanths
From SkepticWiki
Contents |
[edit] Definition
[edit] Creationist Arguments
The existence of coelacanths provides creationists with many wonderful opportunities to be wrong. The following quotations are a reasonable sample of the genre:
- Evolutionary scientists had claimed that the fish called Coelacanth had evolved legs and went on land to become a land creature some 70 million years ago and was thus non-existent today. [1]
- Using even the evolutionists' time scale, which some scientists dispute, the coelacanth is the same fish it supposedly was hundreds of millions of years ago. It is surely strange that the coelacanth could remain so stable all this time, both genetically and morphologically.' [2]
This combines a number of mistakes.
- Coelacanths are, as we have noted, an order; most creationists talk about them as though they were a species. The modern coelacanth species, Latimeria chalumnae and Latimeria menadoensis, are not the same species or even the same genus as the coelacanths in the fossil record. [3]
- It would not in fact be "strange" if a fish well-adapted to its environment did stay in much the same form for millions of years. However, it appears from the fossil record that coelacanths have not done so. [4]
- Land animals are not descended from coelacanths, but from rhipidistians. [5] (See main article Intermediate Forms Between Classes.)
- The reason scientists used to think that coelocanths were extinct was that they couldn't find any living coelacanths. It had nothing to do with the theory of evolution. One presumes that creationists also thought that coelacanths were extinct until living specimens were discovered.
- If tetrapods were descended from coelacanths, which they are not, this would not magically make coelacanths go extinct: colonising a new niche in nature does not require that the old one becomes uninhabitable. (See also the article Why Are There Still Monkeys?)
