S2Focus

Nothing of too much import here, but last night our PBS afflilate aired a Nova program about the Coelacanth entitled "Ancient Creature of the Deep".

The fact that the Coelacanth was first discovered off the coast of South Africa gave the Nova producers a nice opportunity to slip in a little dig at creationists.


From the transcript of the program (at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3003_fish.html ):

NARRATOR: Malan was a creationist and the father of South African apartheid. Aiding Smith in his evolutionary research was dangerous politically, but South Africa's prestige was at stake, and Malan welcomed the publicity.


This little tidbit might come in handy for flogging the next creationist who shows up here blabbering about evolution and racism.

lpetrich

Creationists are fond of talking about "living fossils" like the coelacanth, which have outwardly changed little over their history.

But such slow change had induced at least one pre-Darwinian biologist to consider evolution, more specifically, Geoffroy St. Hilaire. He noticed that the Paris area had fossils of crocodilians that closely resembled present-day gavials, and he decided that re-creation of them after some past geological catastrophe was a superfluous hypothesis.

This is actually rather typical of crocodilians, which have not changed much since the first recognizable ones appeared in the Triassic, ~200 million years ago.

There are several other examples of such slow changers, like ginkgos, horseshoe crabs, certain brachiopods (Lingula), etc., but it is very difficult to compete with various Proterozoic fossil bacteria that closely resemble various present-day cyanobacteria and iron-metabolizing bacteria. Yes, that's from as much as two billion years ago.

There are earlier fossils, but they are more difficult to classify, so one has to make inferences from present-day organisms.