Job 33:6
Well-Known Member
- Jun 15, 2017
- 7,442
- 2,801
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Christian
- Marital Status
- Married
- Politics
- US-Republican
Salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha, O. keta, etc.) are born, sexually mature, spawn only once and then immediately die. The rest of the monophyletic group that salmon belong to, including anadromous trout (e.g. Oncorhynchus mykiss) which compete for the same resources, all spawn multiple times during their lifespan. My research indicates that all species of the genus (really all three sub-families) emerged roughly seven million years ago, albeit after a 33 million year gap in the fossil record. Why then the huge disparity in their numbers? The salmon, for the most part, far outnumber their multiple-spawning cousins. If I understand natural selection correctly I would expect the numbers to be reversed, or that the salmon wouldn't have made it very far in the first place.
If you point to an assumedly linked trait of greater egg production caused by the same mutation that causes their post-spawn death, I would point out that the king salmon lays, on average, 2-10x more eggs than any of the other species under consideration yet seems (yes, the population numbers that I use are anecdotal but I bet we could find real numbers that back it up) to be the least represented of all of them. This is the case not only in general (where commercial and sport fishing certainly take their toll) but also in isaolated ecosystems (e.g. Lake Chelan, WA) that see minimal pressure.
Before dismissing Chesterton entirely because his thought was not ... scientific (?):
"But suppose the boy had not been taught by a priest but by a professor, by one of the professors who simplify the relation of men and beasts to a mere evolutionary variation. Suppose the boy saw himself, with the same simplicity and sincerity, as a mere Mowgli running with the pack of nature and roughly indistinguishable from the rest save by a relative and recent variation. What would be for him the simplest lesson of that strange stone picture-book? After all, it would come back to this; that he had dug very deep and found the place where a man had drawn the picture of a reindeer. But he would dig a good deal deeper before he found a place where a reindeer had drawn a picture of a man. That sounds like a truism, but in this connection it is really a very tremendous truth. He might descend to depths unthinkable, he might sink into sunken continents as strange as remote stars, he might find himself in the inside of the world as far from men as the other side of the moon; he might see in those cold chasms or colossal terraces of stone, traced in the faint hieroglyphic of the fossil, the ruins of lost dynasties of biological life, rather like the ruins of successive creations and separate universes than the stages in the story of one. He would find the trail of monsters blindly developing in directions outside all our common imagery of fish and bird; groping and grasping and touching life with every extravagant elongation of horn and tongue and tentacle; growing a forest of fantastic caricatures of the claw and the fin and the finger. But nowhere would he find one finger that had traced one significant line upon the sand; nowhere one claw that had even begun to scratch the faint suggestion of a form. To all appearance, the thing would be as unthinkable in all those countless cosmic variations of forgotten aeons as it would be in the beasts and birds before our eyes. The child would no more expect to see it than to see the cat scratch on the wall a vindictive caricature of the dog. The childish common sense would keep the most evolutionary child from expecting to see anything like that; yet in the traces of the rude and recently evolved ancestors of humanity he would have seen exactly that. It must surely strike him as strange that men so remote from him should be so near, and that beasts so near to him should be so remote. To his simplicity it must seem at least odd that he could not find any trace of the beginning of any arts among any animals. That is the simplest lesson to learn in the cavern of the coloured pictures; only it is too simple to be learnt. It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. Art is the signature of man."
So if I'm reading this correctly, your concern with the theory of evolution is that you don't think it makes sense for salmon, who only spawn once, to out-number other species such as trout's that spawn multiple times in a single life span?
If these are the things that keep a you up at night, im not sure I even want to know your thoughts on the summation of phylogenetic trees across independent fields.
Last edited:
Upvote
0