Nov 06 2008
Waiting on a Supernatural Snake
I like snakes, as I do most types of mammals/birds/reptiles/flowers/trees/etc. The diversity of life is blow-me-over fascinating.
The above is a Florida banded watersnake, photographed while birdwatching on the nearby St. John’s river with my wife.
Believers in ID/creationism often assert that they’ll accept evolution when they see a transitional fossil between blank and blank, and they’ll make some ridiculous criterion for what they perceive would be an obvious transitional form (little do they seem to realize that all species are, fundamentally, “transitional.”)
Show me a half-antelope, half-giraffe. Show me a half-bird, half-reptile, preferable one of a form that had only evolved one wing, thus is half-bird.
Few are stupid enough to demand, show me a half-human, half-monkey, say, one with a human’s body and a monkey’s tail. Why? We all have tailbones and some unfortunate individuals are even born with short, misshapen tail-like appendages, thanks to a genetic boo-boo (the technical term).
In that spirit I have developed my own criteria I would like creationists to meet that would prove beyond reasonable doubt that a creator had its hand in biological life on earth. I want to be shown a form of biological life that 1) evolution is at a complete loss to explain, 2) only appealing to a supernatural creator would make sense of it.
For suggestions, I will limit myself to the snake category.
- Show me a snake with mammary glands. Two, six, eight, I don’t care. Show me a snake with mammary glands and I’d be much more likely to suspect something supernatural is/was going on. Why? Snakes aren’t mammals; they don’t nurse their young. Something completely superfluous like that would be a good clue there was a wise-guy creator behind the scenes.
Of course, sometimes we encounter features of a body, like the human appendix or tailbone, and say, “Well, these are superfluous and therefore why would evolution have done it – they contribute not at all to an organism’s fitness.” But sometimes, and I hope I am not engaging in special pleading here, a biological characteristic may not serve a present purpose yet did in some past form/environment.
Mammaries on a snake – I don’t see how you could argue that at any point in the past these glands served some sort of purpose. But I defer to the ophiologists.
- A rattler not of the diamondback decoration, but one that has on its back the words (in English, Aramaic, Hebrew, Spanish, Pig-Latin, I don’t care) “God was here.”
- How about a snake that could talk? If not talk, at least warble like a bird?
- A snake with only one end to its alimentary canal. An end through which food entered but nothing exited. A one-way entrance. A snake capable of completely digesting everything it consumed, perfectly efficient, thanks to a tiny nuclear reactor, or something, in a stomach chamber. That would be one super-natural snake.
- A snake that grew a small, red rose at the tip of its tail just prior to mating. Hey . . . animal . . . vegetable . . . no type of biological alchemy could be beyond the laws of the supernatural realm, for it is a lawless realm if there ever was one.
By “a snake,” I should mention, I mean a variety of snake: more than one specimen documented by different people. To rule out funny business.
So there you have it. Until I see “evidence” of the type I have described above, I will remain unconvinced of the arguments for ID/creationism.
In case you couldn’t guess, I am actually not so close-minded as to demand that the evidence necessary to change my thinking take a predetermined form. A conclusion free of tongue-in-cheek might instead be: “Until I see ‘evidence’ of the type I have described above, don’t come bothering me with demands for a transitional fossil of your specifications.”
