“And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas”
Genesis ch.1 v.22
CREATION
This item will start with two poignant statements from two well-
“The anonymous aphorism ‘I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it’ is a continuing truth of science ...”
Roger Lewin -
“We do not see things the way they are; we see them the way we are.”
David Pilbeam
The fish to the right is a Coelacanth. It was thought to show the ‘in between’ stage linking sea creatures with land dwelling creatures. The British Museum certainly thought so!
“The fish and its relatives had flourished during the Devonian period some 350 million years ago, before declining to a dignified end. Bur before expiring, it had managed to flap onto the estuarine mudflats with the aid of its embryonic limbs and give birth to a hopeful new generation of creatures able to exploit the land – truly a Columbus among marine organisms and a worthy progenitor of the human race … The British Museum of Natural History mounted a display and parties of school children pressed their noses against the hallowed glass cabinets of South Kensington in pursuit of merit marks from approving school teachers”
Richard Milton in his book The Facts of Life, wrote ...
“It soon became evident from examining the real article … that the coelacanth was a poor choice for the ‘missing link’ between marine and terrestrial life. Its four fins are much like those of any other fish and are no more suitable for supporting its weight on land, or giving rise to amphibious limbs than those of a fairground goldfish. There is too the awkward fact that the coelacanth lives at such great depths in the ocean … that it explodes due to decompression when brought up to the surface – a slightly ticklish handicap for a colonizer of the land”
A real specimen was fished up off the east coast of Africa in 1938 and it put the cat amongst the pigeons.
‘I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it’
“The tale of the ‘fish that walked’ is a cautionary tale in more way that one. It
cautions us against blind acceptance of the intellectual appeal of an elegant theory,
and equally against uncritical acceptance of the intellectual authority of those
whom we as a community pay to do our difficult thinking” – R. Milton -
Wiki
Wiki
“Paleontologists confidently pronounced that it went extinct some 65 million years ago, since no trace of it was found in more “recent” fossil layers. Imagine their surprise when, in 1938, a living coelacanth was found off the coast of Madagascar! [The] National Geographic News article notes that “[s]everal other coelacanths have been caught in recent decades.”
“Accepting that these organisms have remained virtually unchanged for tens of millions of years exposes the plastic nature of evolutionary theory. In the same amount of time, other organisms have supposedly undergone major changes through the same evolutionary processes. Can evolution be falsified as a theory if it explains both no change and major change? Or is it a perfect theory because of its ability to absorb any evidence—regardless of how contradictory it may appear?”
Answers in Genesis