The Guardian has a fascinating story on a very important fossil find, but manages, unfortunately, to draw at least one silly conclusion from it:
Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375 million years ago.
Palaeontologists have said that the find, a crocodile-like animal called the Tiktaalik roseae and described today in the journal Nature, could become an icon of evolution in action - like Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that bridged the gap between reptiles and birds.
As such, it will be a blow to proponents of intelligent design, who claim that the many gaps in the fossil record show evidence of some higher power.
Well, no. It's not a blow to proponents of Intelligent Design. If it turns out that the fossil really is all that paleontologists presently think it to be, it presents a difficulty only for those who believe that major biological taxa were specially created. Whether there is now direct evidence that fish evolved into tetrapods or not has no bearing on the fundamental claims of Intelligent Design theorists who argue that the universe in general, and life in particular, display remarkable evidence of having been intentionally engineered. Nothing about this discovery conflicts with that claim or any other basic principle of ID.
Someday, perhaps, journalists will be sufficiently roused from their dogmatic slumbers to actually get themselves educated on this issue. Until then, we'll simply have to be vigilant in pointing out their manifold misunderstandings and errors.
There's a lot more on Tiktaalik at the link.
