The Transitive Tension

The creationists - both overt and manque - love to argue that evolution is dubious in part because, as one sky-fairy site puts it,

There are no transitional links and intermediate forms in either the fossil record or the modern world. Therefore, there is no actual evidence that evolution has occurred either in the past or the present. (More here and here)

Of course, this is not the case. The evolutionary science site Talkorigins, for instance, has long had a concise refuation of the "no transitional forms" canard available on its exhaustive list of counter-creationist arguments. And today, paleontologists announced the discovery an important and clear-cut transitional form, a kinda-sorta fish with a skeletons that

have the fins and scales and other attributes of a giant fish, four to nine feet long. But on closer examination, scientists found telling 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 scientists described evidence in the forward fins of limbs in the making. There are the beginnings of digits, proto-wrists, elbows and shoulders. The fish also had a flat skull resembling a crocodile's, a neck, ribs and other parts that were similar to four-legged land animals known as tetrapods.

Not only is this creature scary as hell to look at, it is - as the Times puts it - "a powerful rebuttal to religious creationists, who hold a literal biblical view on the origins and development of life." I doubt this is going to sway many hard-core creationists (after all, doesn't Jeremiah talk about a horrible dragon? well, by golly, if you translate it that way, he sure does!) But who knows - maybe this news will have some effect, perhaps on one of those blinkered adolescents described the other day in the L.A. Times, like the dolt who made his youth-group pastor proud by sneering, "I think it's kind of strange that they can find all these dinosaur fossils from what you say is millions of years ago, but they can't find any transitional human fossils."

Transitional human fossils... That's a contradiction in terms, like "resurrection from the dead."