Not really.
From Britain’s Daily Telegraph
Scientists at McGill University have discovered that fish change their anatomy and learn to walk more efficiently when kept out of water for a prolonged period in a discovery that hints at how ancient species evolved to walk on land.
The researchers kept polypterus, an African fish with lungs, on land for eight months (they would normally gravitate back to water).
In less than a year, they found that the fish had learned to walk more efficiently, placing their fins closer to their bodies and lifting their heads higher. They had also learned to move without slipping.
Even their skeletons had adapted around the shoulders, becoming stronger and elongated to increase support during walking and deal with the loss of support from the water.
…
“There were anatomical changes that resembled the same key evolutionary changes that are seen in the tetrapods that moved into land.”
From Nature:
After 8 months, the terrestrially raised bichir [polypterus] had a more sophisticated style of walking than did aquatically raised controls. Furthermore, their bone structure and musculature changed to be more suited to a walking lifestyle.
The results provide evidence for developmental plasticity, in which organisms alter their anatomy and behaviour in response to environmental change. The team suggests that this process, as demonstrated by the bichir, could have given the earliest tetrapod ancestors the ability to venture onto land. In doing so, claims Standen, they would have become exposed to the selective pressures of a terrestrial environment, thereby speeding up the evolutionary transformation from fins for swimming into limbs for walking.
Maybe. But if they are that plastic, wouldn’t they just go back to the water, given a chance?
David A. DeWitt, biology and chemistry chair at Liberty University, writes to say,
This is not evolution! It has absolutely nothing to do with evolution. There is nothing that is heritable here:
“After 8 months, the terrestrially raised bichir had a more sophisticated style of walking than did aquatically raised controls. Furthermore, their bone structure and musculature changed to be more suited to a walking lifestyle.
The results provide evidence for developmental plasticity, in which organisms alter their anatomy and behaviour in response to environmental change. The team suggests that this process, as demonstrated by the bichir, could have given the earliest tetrapod ancestors the ability to venture onto land. In doing so, claims Standen, they would have become exposed to the selective pressures of a terrestrial environment, thereby speeding up the evolutionary transformation from fins for swimming into limbs for walking.”
They are not talking about natural selection, they are talking about behavioral plasticity. This is a fancy way of saying ‘learned behavior’. The fish that were raised in a terrestrial environment improved their walking ability. Also, although they say that the “organisms alter their anatomy and behavior” it would be more accurate to say that “their behavior altered their anatomy.” This is not the way that we usually think about such things, but that is what happens. The fish did not will themselves to have different anatomy. However, as they used certain muscles in particular ways, those muscles grew stronger. As the muscles grew stronger, they put different mechanical pressures on the bones. The shape of the bones were altered in response to the different mechanical pressures.
See, people intuitively (and falsely) believe that bones are not malleable, that they take a particular shape and that is it. Were it so, we would not be able to grow. The fact is that bone cells continually turn over, but less so as we age. Mechanical pressure will significantly alter how the bone cells divide and therefore over time will alter the shape. Anyone who wears glasses has a way to prove it. Where the frame of the glasses make contact with the skull behind the ears there will be slight depressions. When you get a different pair of glasses, it won’t exactly match, but over time the location of the depression will move.
Here is another example: Babies are born flat footed. As they begin to walk, the arch of the foot develops. The shape of the bones and the way the muscles connect alters in response to the forces and pressures of upright walking. This happens automatically and it is because of how the bone cells respond to mechanical pressure. There is not a gene that produces an arched foot, it is a developmental response to behavior.
Notice what they did not do: they did not select for fish that walked better. The individual fish themselves improved in their walking ability through learning and as they used muscles repeatedly in different ways those muscles grew stronger and as a result, there were changes in bone morphology. No natural selection here. How long did it take? Less than 1 generation.
Standen assumes that natural selection in fact favoured such fish back in the Devonian. We don’t know for sure unless we have some idea what the advantage might be. One problem is that she must have fed and protected the fish during the course of the experiment, something nature is markedly less likely to do. Also, what about egg laying? A fish that could not get back to water, could not lay eggs, and either the line would die out or the plasticity would reverse itself.
What this experiment mainly shows is how fish can become more terrestrial without any evolution, provided they cannot get back to the water. But could they feed and protect themselves on land indefinitely back then? This particular fish has markedly failed to abandon the water, left to itself. Interesting experiment, for sure.
See also: Early tetrapod (“fishapod”) sheds light on transition to land— maybe (Tiktaalik)
and
Have we at last solved the question of how sea creatures moved to land? (Pacific leaping blenny, which also never really abandoned the water)
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Yeah, I read this the other day. Funny how it is about evolution yet they are taking wild type (i.e. genetically identical for all intents and purposes as those they keep in water) fish who already possess the ability to breath (have functional lungs) and seeing if they can adapt to living out of water, in the same generation.
In other words, no evolution here guv’. Just plain old using what you have and adapting. No Darwinian processes, no random mutations conferring benefit. No, just clever fish, who already have lungs.
Oh, and by the way, they already have lungs.
It is a crime to science to even relate this in anyway to evolution or guessing how “easily” ancestors made the transition to land. THE ANCESTORS HAD TO EVOLVE FUNCTIONAL LUNGS FIRST. Simples? Unlikely.
Oh, and by the way, these fish HAD FULLY FUNCTIONAL LUNGS ALREADY.
It’s like sticking some humans in the wild without civilisation and making comments on how humans evolved to their environment to find food with natural predators before they learned to make it into caves.
Science is really sinking to a new low. This study is purely about how amazing a fish that usually lives in water (HAS FUNCTIONAL LUNGS), spends minimal time out of water given the choice, can actually survive out of water quite comfotably through adapting (and because it has functional lungs). That’s all, nothing here about evolution.
What would have been really interesting is to see if there were changes in the epigenetic inheritance of the offspring of these land adapted fish.
(Oh and by the way, THEY ALREADY HAD LUNGS).
~ For it is written, “I WILL DESTROY THE WISDOM OF THE WISE, AND THE CLEVERNESS OF THE CLEVER I WILL SET ASIDE.”
~ …who foils the signs of false prophets and makes fools of diviners, who overthrows the learning of the wise and turns it into nonsense..
It’s just a shame that in the more technologically-advanced, modern societies of today, there is no longer any place for such wonderfully Byzantine, religious narratives.
I believe that tens of thousands of years of an ascetical life-style forced on them by their environment, have made Australian Aborigines natural mystics, so little wonderment that their Creation narrative is extraordinarily rich and colourful.
The puzzle is, how these atheists, at least to a limited extent, seem to short-circuit this multi-millennial process of religious development at the existential margins, and are able to produce such a fascinating religious mythology, almost as if ‘on demand’.
I prefer this mythical evocation by G K Chesterton. I’ve always loved it:
‘When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.’
I mean the first verse, of course, in terms of the mythical evocation.
Dr JDD,
Exactly. And it is nonsense.
The lungfish did indeed already have lungs as you noted, and as David DeWitt was previously quoted:
I don’t understand what’s so hard to grasp here. What if this were a test question:
Of course there are those here who would immediately choose d on the claim that evolution is “change over time.” This would qualify nearly everything as evolution, including the regrettable degradation of the paint job on some areas on my car due to solar radiation, the digestion of the food that I had for lunch, the deforestation of the Amazon, and global warming. Oops, I mean climate change. Where are my manners? 😉
-Q
Axel,
Thanks, I’ve always admired the wit of Chesterton. There’s a lot of symbolism hidden in “The Donkey” that I didn’t understand, so here’s what I found online
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n.....27025.html
Nice.
-Q
Q, it’s weird, but that made an immense impression on me as a young child, when my limited experience of the world and life could not have prepared me to understand the full meaning. I know the note of defiance of the donkey was special to me, in the light of his description of himself as what we, in our debased post-Christian world, are pleased to call ‘a loser’. And the inspired, poetic treatment of such profound spiritual truth invests it with extraordinary power, doesn’t it?
In another connection, a Catholic, popular, historical novelist called Louis De Wohl, wrote a book on the life of St Thomas Aquinas, called he Quiet Light, and in it, he wrote that at the university he attended he was called by his fellow-students, the Dumb Ox, because he never volunteered an answer to lecturers’ questions. One day, he was asked to do so, and gave a long magisterial disquistion in answer to the question he’d been asked, leaving everyone dumbfounded, not least the lecturer.
He was a real oddball, (but not like Donald Sutherland’s character), as his family were robber baron, Borgia types, but he’d been brought up from the age of five, as a Benedictine oblate – which did leave him somewhat simple-minded in some ways. For instance, when his fellow students mocked him for shuffling over to the window, after they had told him there was a donkey (there it is again) flying past it, he intoned, no doubt very solemnly, ‘I had rather believe that a donkey could fly, than that a Dominican novice could tell a lie….’ He makes George Washington sound positively racey, doesn’t he? Jack the Lad.
I’ve sometimes mused that I stopped learning there and then. That poem contained all I needed or wanted to know. Whatever I learnt after that has been only what God wanted me to learn.
That’s mostly narcissistic twaddle, but there is, I think, a little kernel of truth in it.
news,
Maybe. But if they are that plastic, wouldn’t they just go back to the water, given a chance?
Less competition for food?
Axel noted
That’s what I find sometimes here and there, and always when I read the Bible. The wisdom of Lao Tsu had a similar effect on me early on:
A true and noble scientist is humble, always ready to be instructed by nature, God, and fellow humans regardless of their position.
-Q
velikovskys,
There can indeed be competing priorities. Escape from preditors might be another reason.
-Q
As to the fossil evidence, a few years ago Darwinists were very excited that Tiktaalik seemed to finally provide a ‘missing link’ for the evolution of fish to a land dwelling creature, but, as is usual with Darwinian hype, their excitement soon turned to disappointment,,,
Moreover,,
This following article has a excellent summary of the ‘less than forthright’ (i.e. heavy handed) manner in which Darwinists handled anyone who dared question this paltry evidence:
The discontinuity in the fossil record is far sharper than many people realize:
supplemental note: As to the inflated hype of Darwinists for any supposed transitional fossil, followed by the inevitable let down, Darwinists have a long, infamous, history in that regards, especially as it pertains to supposed human evolution:
Vel says:
Maybe. Maybe not.
How would you ever test that?!
This is the problem with evolutionary theory.
It’s not testable. All you have to do is think up a “plausible sounding explanation” and you are good to go.
So these scientists are using tax payers money to discover what we already know, namely that bones and muscles change in accordance with certain pressures and usage. Awesome!
I’m always amazed but never suprised at how evolutionists try to call anything and everything evolution even when it is clearly nothing of the sort.
I would like to see them continue this expirement by letting the fish go back into the water and watch how the fish go back to normal.
logically_speaking,
Once again proving evolution. lol
That’s pretty much what happens with peppered moths and Darwin’s finches.
But notice that Darwinist descriptions are usually anthropomorphic and Lamarckian.
-Q
tiguy,
How would you ever test that?
I guess you might start by studying what food sources were available on the land, fossils might provide evidence of diet. Contrast structural differences between the marine and terrestrial versions.
All you have to do is think up a “plausible sounding explanation” and you are good to go.
You could create a blog or a non profit institute to help the explanation along,but in science they collect stuff called data, a good explanation should explain new data as well as existing data, if it doesn’t the explanation is revised or replaced.
logic,
I would like to see them continue this expirement by letting the fish go back into the water and watch how the fish go back to normal.
The problem is any changes which occurred in a terrestrial environment might put them at a disadvantage on the return to the water, where fins are more efficient. They may be lunch.
velikovskys wrote
Ah, but after pretending to turn back into fish for a while, some would survive and then evolve into humans who would later return to land. 😛
-Q