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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   thylacines from wolves
Sunday, September 13 2009
The sun came out again and a certain unfamiliar dryness returned to the air. I'm not a big fan of the autumn, but I'd be happy with more days like this one.

My Wikipedia safaris have taken me back and forth across all the classes of celestial bodies in the universe and then (somehow) into the heart of the Class Reptilia, where the various clades are presented: Archosaurs (Crocodilians, Dinosaurs, Pterodactyls, and Birds), Synapsids (Mammals and their extinct reptilian ancestors), Squamata (Lizards and Snakes), Turtles, and Tuataras. It gets complicated when you go down the road of insisting on cladistic classifications for creatures. Ancestral groups (such as the Pelycosaurs) end up being orphaned outside of modern classes or included awkwardly within them. (Should an alligator be in the same class with a hummingbird? Are we all really just bony fish?) There's clearly a problem with using cladistic absolutism in classifying organisms in an evolutionary hierarchy, but the alternatives all tend to be slippery slopes toward wastebacket taxa.
My Wikipedia surfing eventually took me back once again to the monotremes (the egg-laying mammals) and marsupials. I've always been curious about how marsupials ended up being the only pre-human-contact mammals of Australia, and for the first time I found an explanation based on the arrangement of continental plates during the time when marsupials and placental mammals were evolving (the early Cretaceous), though it helped to consult a map of the ancient Tethys Ocean, which can be imagined as the Indian Ocean back when India and Australia were still attached to Antarctica. The theory is that marsupials evolved alongside placental mammals in or around present-day China, then moved west to North America, south to South America (where they eventually became the dominant mammal type, a condition lasting until only three million years ago). From South America they spread across Antarctica and then perhaps reached Australia as small animals rafting across a deep-but-narrow oceanic trench. Supposedly all of Australia's marsupials descended from a common ancestor that arrived 50 million years ago, much like South America's monkeys and large rodents (which, it's thought, arrived as a few individuals rafting in from Africa circa 40 million years ago).

Somehow my surfing eventually led out of Wikipedia to a remarkable set of pages by a young earth creationist trying to explain the presence of marsupials and monotremes in Australia from, well, a Biblical perspective. It's always entertaining watching Biblical literalists trying to hatch "scientific theories" to explain natural phenomenon. One doesn't have to read far into such material before the author finds himself out on thin ice, forced to suddenly retreat to the sheltering skirts of supernatural phenomena. For Biblical literalists, such retreats are virtues, not liabilities, since it demonstrates a faith in and need for an all-powerful deity.
The theory being advanced on the aforementioned page was that perhaps the marsupial versions of placental mammals (that is, the Thylacine interpreted as a marsupial wolf) actually evolved from the wolf, and that marsupialism is an acquired trait to deal with the peculiar conditions of Australia. I know, your head is spinning. What is a creationist doing advocating evolution of any kind? Well, it turns out that creationists have come to accept limited evolution within the "kinds" mentioned in the Bible. Nobody, not even Biblical literalists, know precisely what is meant by the word "kind" (or the actual Hebrew word baramin), but the author surmised that it corresponds roughly to the classification level of family. This means that a house cat and a lion and a tiger could all share a common ancestor that lived only six thousand years ago. If that pace of evolution sounds a bit rapid, well, Biblical literalists insist it's possible, particularly if an all-powerful God is helping it along with His magical powers. Thus, the theory goes, a Thylacine could just be a dog that evolved a marsupial reproductive system. Such evolution could have happened since that famous cruise on Noah's Ark.
Suffice it to say, such a "scientific" theory could never come from anyone with a modicum of biological knowledge. Marsupials have had their genes extensively examined and it's been determined that they have much more in common with each other than they do with any placental mammals. Indeed, it's likely that a comparison of the wolf genome to a primitive marsupial (such as an oppossum) would show more similarity than a comparison to a Thylacine genome. Then there's this issue: a dog has 78 chromosomes, but marsupials never have more than 32 and usually have 22 or fewer. Contending that Thylacines are related to wolves because of superficial similarities is like contending that maple seeds are just paralyzed tadpoles — it's the sort of statement one expects to find only in musty medieval texts. Such nonsense is what passes for "scientific theory" in the world of creationist "research," a paradigm that must never contradict bronze-age axioms.

While I'm on the subject of kooky stuff found on the web, check this out. It's the URL of a popunder that littered my desktop several days ago. Superficially, it lookes like a page from some handy Web 2.0 user-generated content site, one providing objective appraisals of the value of various internet entities. But it's not; the whole thing is a fiction. There is no hierarchy of answered questions and no user base asking or answering them. The entire site of "webanswerspro.com" consists of just this one page of fake user feedback, a bit of astroturf web spam shilling for something called Google Wealth Connection. It's a clever form of marketing, but that doesn't mean its not duplicitous and repulsive.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090913

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