Evolution: it's all about conjecture

Ran across a MOST amusing article in Live Science this morning.

Being the scientifically-minded person that I am, I'll try to simplify the technical language for the sake of those who refuse to acknowledge the mighty strides of Evolutionary Science, i.e. Us Creationists.

A robot that slinks along the ground and winds through water like a salamander is helping scientists understand how animals walked from aquatic environments onto land millions of years ago.

(scientists "created" this robot because reproducing the real thing was proving too problematic--it looked to be taking forever)

"We were trying to understand what really happened during the transition from primitive fishes to amphibians, like the salamander,” said Auke Ijspeert, a physicist of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, lead author of a research paper on the 33-inch-long robot."

("We were trying to understand, which is really tricky since we weren't even there at the time. But being research scientists, people are bound to listen to us.")

Ijspeert and his colleagues learned that ocean dwellers didn’t need to ditch their swim fins and evolve a completely new neural circuit to creep onto land. The transition was much simpler.

Simple changes in electrical stimulation to the robot’s onboard “spinal cord” turned out to cause the transition in locomotion. Low levels of electrical stimulation sent the robot on a slow-stepping walk.

(so basically, since we found that lowering the electrical stimulation to the robot resulted in a slow-stepping walk, the electrical stimulation in the real live fish must have suddenly slowed down--despite the appalling lack of remote-control devices during the Paleozoic Era--allowing them to creep out of the water and onto land)

The model [image] therefore provides a potential explanation, he said, for how limb movement in perhaps all vertebrates was linked with body movements to induce the transition from water to land.

And here the article basically ends. But one very crucial element has not been addressed and it is this:

When the fist aggressive (and therefore obviously male) fish wriggled out of the water, there was no other animal present to whom he could refuse to ask directions from.

That aspect alone is enough to give Ma plausibility problems.
 
 

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