Snakes With Legs And Snakes Without

[Reverend AtheiStar]

http://www.newropeans-magazine.org/index.p...3874&Itemid=110

 

"On the surface, this sounds like an inefficient approach to creation, i.e., the notion of having life forms acquire legs in becoming mobile on land and then losing them again in the interest of becoming even more mobile in a specific environmental niche. Within the context of "intelligent design," that doesn't sound very intelligent. Whatever was the 'intelligent designer' thinking to put legs on the rear end of a snake - or take legs off the front of a lizard?"

 

Snakes With Legs and Snakes Without - The Lowly Biblical Serpent Belies

Written by Dr.Gerry Lower

Friday, 28 April 2006

 

The evidence supporting the evolutionary origins of life forms on earth is so massive in quantity and so explanatory in quality as a unifying view of life, it simply cannot be denied. It is only denied by religious fundamentalists who require an external, supernatural god in order to justify themselves in their own eyes.

 

While "intelligent design" promotes itself as asking important and legitimate questions, that characterization is undeserved and untrue. "Intelligent design" is a political effort to defend religion and a god who justifies the self-righteousness and belligerence beneath capitalism's greed-driven socioeconomic programs. Intelligent design is an effort to maintain capitalism's status quo and enhance religion's dominion over the American politic. Leave it to the lowly serpent of Biblical fame to set things straight.

 

"Intelligent designers" tend to see snakes as they see themselves, i.e., as things. Evolutionary biologists see snakes as things having origins and destinations, a past and a future. To explain the emergence of snakes, evolutionary biologists have had two hypotheses to consider, i.e., either snakes emerged from the sea by virtue of sea creatures losing their fins or they emerged from the land by virtue of legged reptiles losing their legs. Nowhere does it say that only one of these two options is tenable, in spite of the normal bickering between scientists.

 

In 2003, biologists from Argentina found a 90 million year old snake fossil in a terrestrial deposit in the Río Negro province of northern Patagonia. The snake fossil had a well-defined sacrum supporting a pelvis and functional hind legs outside of its ribcage. This snake was "made for walking." The discovery of Najash rionegrina is consistent with the concept that snakes evolved on land and that they evolved from long-bodied lizards.

 

This discovery is also of interest because of what it has to say about evolutionary steps and directions. In order to emerge on land, of course, life forms had to evolve legs that would allow terrestrial locomotion. Once on land, however, some life forms proceeded to evolve increasingly sophisticated legs and locomotion, some life forms returned to the sea and their legs evolved into flippers, and other life forms proceeded to lose their legs altogether.

 

For ground-hugging reptiles in dense ground cover, there is a real advantage to "slithering," i.e., the ability to move quickly over a surface by employing an undulating movement (as opposed to running on tiny legs with a short stride). In that regard, it is of interest that Najash rionegrina had only rear legs, none in front. The clear indication is that the front legs were dispensed with before the rear legs.

 

This would indicate that the ability to slither was adopted with the front of the body first, perhaps as an undulating means of whipping the head away from attack. The rear legs were retained longer to propel the snake through its burrows - until the advantage of body length-slithering was recognized in enhanced speed of locomotion and survival. The lack of front legs on Najash, a snake about 1 meter in length, would indicate that long-bodied reptiles became snakes by increasing their body length before or concurrently with losing their front legs.

 

On the surface, this sounds like an inefficient approach to creation, i.e., the notion of having life forms acquire legs in becoming mobile on land and then losing them again in the interest of becoming even more mobile in a specific environmental niche. Within the context of "intelligent design," that doesn't sound very intelligent. Whatever was the "intelligent designer" thinking to put legs on the rear end of a snake - or take legs off the front of a lizard?

 

In spite of their claims, "intelligent designers" are not looking for an explanation of the source of intelligent creativity in life. They already believe that source to be external and supernatural like the god that justifies their existence. That justification is what "intelligent design" is really all about, an effort to maintain a supernatural belief system and a specific self-concept consistent with religion and capitalism. The actual source of creativity in life is irrelevant to "intelligent designers."

 

The mutational pressures that drive evolution, of course, are not creative at all. They merely provide the basis for genomic diversity at the level of individual codons. Natural selection is not creative either. It merely provides the context for change. The creativity that directs evolution, the "intelligent design," comes from the inside, from the biological genome itself. That "omnipotent" genome can provide the potential for both the emergence and the disappearance of phenotypic characteristics.

 

The existence of snakes with rear legs is actually a testimony to the enormous creative potential built right into the biological genome, i.e., that it can, when called upon, create appendages and then uncreate them if there is a survival advantage in doing so. The same is true at the cultural level of organization in that we can create belief systems, e.g., post-WWII religious capitalism, and we can uncreate them as well if there is survival advantage in doing so.

 

Being a matter of human choice, we can accomplish cultural evolutionary change in a tiny fraction of the time required for biological evolutionary change. In the space of half a century, for example, we can and have destroyed Jefferson's democracy in America. We did so by adopting capitalism as an imposed religion, eliminating socialism from the political arena, punishing those who were not team players with loss of employment, extolling the virtues of wealth and power, and riding greed-driven religious capitalism to fiscal glory in the name of a supernatural god.

 

The cost of this fiscal ascendency has been the integrity and security of our families, our communities and our nation. We have dispensed with nascent Christian human rights and the values of democracy in favor of individual greed and lust for power, to become collectively like our former British oppressors.

 

The "chosen" (imposed) way to America's greatness has become the way to America's certain downfall. The people have been sold a bill of goods by corporate America, they have been stripped of the authority and responsibility that is naturally and rightfully theirs. Almost overnight, they are now being asked to see that their chosen path to heaven is the path to hell on earth.

 

Once that fact is better appreciated and learned (no doubt the hard way from the Bush administration), we can choose to evolve as a people back up to human rights and the values that made America human. We will evolve, almost overnight, because there is clear survival advantage in doing so.

 

Returning to American democracy and nascent Christian human rights will require that we, the people, think for ourselves. Is that asking so much? Restoring American democracy will then require a bit of intelligent redesign in defining what we mean by the terms. Already, we know full well where that intelligent design will come from. It will come "of, by and for" the people.

 

Dr. Gerry Lower

Bell Center, Wisconsin (USA)

 

 

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Readings:

 

1) Nicholas Bakalar, Snakes Evolved on Land, New Fossil Find Suggests, National Geographic, April 19, 2006

2) Gerry Lower, Systematic Evolution and Life on the Whole, Axis of Logic, January 5, 2005

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Dr. Gerry Lower lives in Bell Center, Wisconsin in an 1867 school house on the east bank of the Kickapoo River. His website is at www.jeffersonseyes.com and he can be reached at tisland@blackhills.com .

[Fweethawt]

Just like The Rapture™...

 

I will believe it when I see it.