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| Science Question of the Week |
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The Science Problem of the Week will be kept on line for not less than 1 week. After 12 problems have been posted, the person with the most correct answers will win a fabulous prize! Last Round's Winners: Seth Berry and Ryan Lavender The 29th round of the Science Question of the Week Competition was won by Seth Berry and Ryan Lavender, who correctly answered 12 out of 12 questions! Congratulations, Seth and Ryan! The Science Problem of the Week will take a for a while. It will return March 1stLast Week's Question: Scientists recently discovered tracks that appear to have all the hallmarks of being made by a tetrapod. They claim that the tracks are roughly 395 million years old, but that presents a problem for the hypothesis of evolution. Question: What problem does this discovery present for the hypothesis of evolution?? Answer: The problem is that these tracks come TOO SOON in the fossil record. Tiktaalik is the famous “missing link” that was discovered in 2006. It was supposed to be the “perfect” transition between fish and amphibian (even though it produced more questions than it answered). However, it is dated to be 10 million years AFTER these tracks. This is a problem, as it shows that yet another one of evolution’s predictions has been falsified. As Neil Shubin said in the PBS show “Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial”: "What evolution enables us to do is to make specific predictions about what we should find in the fossil record. The prediction in this case is clear-cut. That is, if we go to rocks of the right age, and the rocks of the right type, we should find transitions between two great forms of life, between fish and amphibian. ...What we see when we look at the fossil record, at rocks of just the right age, is a creature like Tiktaalik." The problem is that these tracks show this prediction to be wrong. Tiktaalik was NOT found in rocks of just the right age. Now please note that Tiktaalik doesn’t have to be one of the transitions between fish and amphibian. It could simply be a creature that is related to one of the as yet unknown transitions. Nevertheless, as Henry Gee (an ardent evolutionist) put it: "What does it all mean? It means that the neatly gift-wrapped correlation between stratigraphy and phylogeny, in which elpistostegids represent a transitional form in the swift evolution of tetrapods in the mid-Frasnian, is a cruel illusion. If - as the Polish footprints show - tetrapods already existed in the Eifelian, then an enormous evolutionary void has opened beneath our feet." (http://network.nature.com/people/henrygee/blog/2010/01/05/first-footing) Last week's question was answered correctly by: Erich, Megan, Nathania, Naila Avila, Mary Katherine Barfield, Alexis Bedrosian, Ben Berry, Seth Berry, Timothy Daudelin, Isaac Daudelin, Gavin Donley, Philip Dreste, Brigitte Dunne, Martin. H, Benjamin Hackett, Patricia Hansen, Johan M. Harnisch, Erin Hobbs, Marcus Hochstetler, Jeremiah Hoffman, Benjamin Koenig, Michael Koenig, Elisha Kossove, HannahLeah Lambert, Paul Lambert, Ryan Lavender, Andre Liebenberg, CJ Lues, Christina M, Jacob MacDonald, Steven McCracken, Patrick McCracken, Scott Mokris, Tommy Myron, Dominic Rankin, Ethan Snell, Matthew Staley, Jamie Tucker, Logan Visser, Stephen Warta, Caleb Wright, David Wulff , and Jonathan Young. Congratulations to all of you! |