Tuesday, 16 August 2016

The History of Wall Street’s Unspoken Relationship to Nazi Germany: Dragon Teeth to Be Planted All Over Europe Again


Many media outlets compare the contemporary situation in Europe with the days before WWII. I would like to make an important correction here. Now we are watching the West fostering another Nazi regime represented by Kiev junta and it makes remember the second half of the 1930s when it did the very same thing cooperating with Germany turned into a fascist state.
Of course, the Ukraine we know today cannot measure up to Hitler’s Germany. But the first blow is half the battle. The running amok Fuhrer started as an unknown corporal preaching xenophobia and revenge.
It’s an open secret that Adolf Hitler was supported by the United States. The US penetration was significant, especially its cooperation with the German war industry. By 1933 the United States controlled key branches of Germany’s economy, as well as several large banks such as Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, etc.
Big business started to trust Hitler. Those were the days of affluence for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as funds from abroad began to pour in. Thanks to large donations from Fritz Thyssen’s group including the United Steelworks (Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG), I.G. Farbenindustrie AG (Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG) and mining industry tycoon Emil Kirdorf the party received 6,4 million votes to become the second largest in the Reichstag (parliament). Hjalmar Schacht (22 January 1877 – 3 June 1970), a German economist, banker, liberal politician, and co-founder in 1918 of the German Democratic Party, became the key connecting link between German industry and foreign donors.
British business and banking interests also started to channel donations to the Nazi party. On January 4, 1932 Montague Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England from 1920 to 1944, met Hitler and German Chancellor Franz von Papen to conclude a secret accord on providing funds for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The US was also represented at this meeting. Both Dulles brothers were present. Western historians shy away from mentioning the fact. John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles were politically connected Wall Street lawyers, servants of corporate power, who led the United States into an unseen war that decisively shaped today’s world.
It is worth noting, that during the 1950s, when the Cold War was at its peak, the two immensely powerful Dulles brothers led the United States into a series of foreign adventures whose effects are still shaking the world. John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State while his brother, Allen Dulles, was director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Federal elections were held in Germany on 5 March 1933. As a result of lavish donations coming in from abroad, the ruling Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler, who was appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933, registered a large increase in votes emerging as the largest party by far. Nevertheless they failed to obtain an absolute majority in their own right and needed the votes of their coalition partner, theGerman National People’s Party (DNVP), for a Reichstag majority.
The new German government was treated extremely favorably by US and UK ruling circles. Western democracies kept silent when Berlin refused to pay reparations. Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics, went to the United States in May 1933 to meet President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and leading Wall Street bankers. Germany was granted a $1 billion credit. And in June, during a visit to Norman in London, Schacht requested an addition $2 billion in loans as well as a reduction and eventual cessation of payment on old loans. Thus, the Nazis got something that the previous government could not.
In the summer of 1934, Britain signed the Anglo-German Transfer Agreement, which became one of the foundations of British policy towards the Third Reich, and by the end of the 1930′s, Germany developed into Britain’s primary trading partner. Schroeder’s bank turned into Germany and Great Britain’s main agent, and in 1936, its New York branch merged with a Rockefeller holding to create the investment bank «Schroeder, Rockefeller and Co.», which the New York Times described as «economic-propagandist axis of Berlin-Rome».
The ‘Secret Memorandum’ was issued by Adolf Hitler in August 1936. The memorandum went out only to a few senior Nazi leaders and its contents – information about the Four-Year Plan – was formally announced to the party’s faithful in September 1936 at the party rally in Nuremberg. The Secret Memorandum stated that in four years Germany was to develop capable combat-ready armed forces and its economy was to be mobilized to meet the needs of war. As he admitted to himself, Hitler viewed foreign credit as the financial basis for his four-year plan, so this didn’t raise the slightest alarm.
In August 1934, American oil giant Standard Oil purchased 730,000 acres of land in Germany and built large oil refineries that supplied the Nazis with oil. At the same time, the United States secretly provided Germany with the most modern equipment for its airplane factories, which were slated to produce Germany’s military aircraft.
In turn, Germany received a large number of patents from several American companies including Pratt and Whitney, Douglas, and the Bendix Corporation, and the “Junkers-87″ dive-bomber was built using purely American technology. As the war broke out, the monopolies stuck to the good old tried-and-true rule – nothing personal, only business. By 1941, when the Second World War was in full swing, American investment in the German economy totaled $475 million: Standard Oil invested $120 million alone, General Motors — $35 million, ITT — $30 million, and Ford — $17.5 million.
What motivated the interest of Western business in the growing might of Nazi Germany?
The goal was to direct Hitler to the East involving a German invasion of Russia. The conquest ofLebensraum («living space») was for Hitler and the rest of the National Socialists the most important German foreign policy goal. At his first meeting with the leading Generals and Admirals of the Reich («Empire») on February 3, 1933, Hitler spoke of “conquest of Lebensraum” in the East and ruthless ‘Germanization’ as his two ultimate foreign policy objectives.
For Hitler, the land which would provide sufficient Lebensraum for Germany was the Soviet Union, which in Hitler eyes was both a nation that possessed vast and rich agricultural land and was inhabited by what Hitler considered as Slavic Untermenschen (sub-humans) ruled over by what he regarded as a gang of blood-thirsty, but grossly incompetent “Jewish revolutionaries”. These people were not “Germanizable” in his eyes; only the soil was.
The US and Britain, which were firmly opposed to the rise of Communism in the Soviet Union, tacitly endorsed Hitler’s “conquest of Lebensraum” in the East, as initially stated in Mein Kampf:
“We National Socialists consciously draw a line under the direction of our foreign policy war. We begin where we ended six centuries ago. We stop the perpetual Germanic march towards the south and west of Europe, and have the view on the country in the east. We finally put the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-war and go over to the territorial policy of the future. But if we speak today in Europe of new land, we primarily point to Russia and the border states”
In turn, the policy of appeasement was implemented by Western countries in the 1930s against a background of financial and economic cooperation of Anglo-American business interests with Nazi Germany.
In October 1930, Germany withdrew from both the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments of 1932–1934 (sometimes named the World Disarmament Conference or Geneva Disarmament Conference) and the League of Nations.
In March 1936, Hitler ordered his troops to openly re-enter the Rhineland which had been demilitarized under the Versailles Treaty.
In March 1938 Austria was annexed.
The West did not react.
Fall Grün (Operation Green), a German military plan to occupy Czechoslovakia, was approved by Hitler in December 1937. The execution of Operation Green was called off after the Munich Pact was concluded between England, France, Italy and Nazi Germany on September 30, 1938.
While Hitler signed the Munich agreement along with Arthur Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier and Benito Mussolini,  the operation to invade Czechoslovakia prevailed. On October 21 he ordered to start preparations for the military annexation of the rest of Czechoslovakia and the Klaipeda Region (also known as the Memel Territory) which had been part of Lithuania since 1923.
In March 1939, Germany delivered an ultimatum to Poland demanding renegotiation of the Danzig agreement. The Polish Corridor (also known as Danzig Corridor, Corridor to the Sea or Gdansk Corridor) was a territory located in the region of Pomerelia (eastern Pomerania, formerly part of West Prussia), which provided the Second Republic of Poland (1920–1939) with access to the Baltic Sea, thus dividing the bulk of Germany from the province of East Prussia. The Free city of Danzig (now the Polish city of Gdansk) was separate from both Poland and Germany.
But Memel and Danzig were not the ultimate goal of Nazi Germany. Adolph Hitler was fully aware that nobody in the West had any intention to stand in his way. On April 1939 he secretly ordered Poland to be attacked on September 1.
With the seizure of Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s duel-track policy was an open secret even for the most shortsighted politicians and diplomats. The Soviet Union still cherished hope to build a collective system of security in Europe. It managed to make London and Paris start talks on creating a really effective alliance to counter the aggressor. But these talks were to reveal that the Western partners were reluctant to hinder Hitler’s expansionary policy to the East. Sir Alexander Cadogan (Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office) cited Chamberlain saying he would rather resign the premiership than conclude an agreement with the Soviets.
When Germany attacked Poland and the Second World War started, Western leaders pointed their finger at both the Soviet Union and Germany which signed the Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939. Supported by a choir of propaganda, they said it was not the Western appeasement policy, but rather the USSR-Germany Non-Aggression Pact which triggered the war.
In the wake of World War II, neither London, nor Washington, nor Paris want to hear the truth about these historical events. They signed the Nuremberg Trial verdict that found Germany guilty of grave crimes and violations of international law and the laws of war, without acknowledging who was behind Nazi Germany?  The political and financial elites of the United States, Great Britain and France were directly involved in fostering Nazi regime. They incited Hitler to move east.
The West has never recognized its responsibility for supporting Hitler’s regime.
In today’s context, it has does its utmost to prevent Russia’s return on the world stage as a leading actor.
Today it is fostering the ulcer of Nazism and xenophobia emerging right in front of our very eyes. To hide the truth it circulates the Washington-invented and Europe-inculcated story about “Russian aggression” against Ukraine.
Russia is demonized and provoked into direct confrontation with a view to triggering its involvement in Ukraine’s internal conflict.
While the Kiev junta is not “in the same league” as Germany’s Nazi regime, history shows that the ulcer of Nazism combined with the thrust of Russophobia is gaining momentum. And sooner or later it may be beyond the control of those who encouraged it in the first place.
The slogan “Ukraine above all” sounds  very much like a remake of Nazi Germany’s “Deutschland über alles”, (Germany above all). “Ukraine above all”  is being used to justify the crimes committed by Ukraine forces in Novorossiya.
Edited by Global Research
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DISCOVERY" OF THE COELACANTH



In 1938, thirty two-year-old Marjorie Courtenay Latimer was the curator of a tiny museum in the port town of East London, northeast of Cape Town, South Africa. She had befriended a local seaman, Captain Hendrick Goosen, of the trawler Nerine, which fished the nearby coastal waters of the Indian Ocean. When he put into port the captain made a frequent practice of having the dockman call Miss Latimer to come look over the Nerine's catch. She was welcome to take any unusual specimens she might want for her museum.
On December 23rd, 1938, the Nerine entered port after a stint trawling off the mouth of the nearby Chalumna River. The dockman called Marjorie, who was busy mounting a reptile collection, but felt she ought at least go down to the docks to wish the crew of the Nerine a merry Christmas. She took a taxi, delivered her greetings, and was about to leave when, according to her account, she noticed a blue fin protruding beneath a pile of rays and sharks on the deck. Pushing the overlaying fish aside revealed, as she would later write, "the most beautiful fish I had ever seen, five feet long, and a pale mauve blue with iridescent silver markings." Marjorie had no idea what the fish was, but knew it must go back to the museum at once. At first the taxi driver refused to have the reeking, five-foot fish in his cab, but after a heated discussion, he drove Marjorie and her specimen back to the museum.
Raking through the few reference books on hand, Marjorie found a picture that, she has said, led her to a seemingly impossible conclusion. Her specimen bore similarities to a prehistoric fish, particularly in the structure of the head and the tri-lobed shape of the tail. She made a rather crude sketch of the creature, which she mailed, along with a description, to Professor J.L.B. Smith, a forty one- year-old persnickety chemistry teacher with a locally well known passion for fish, at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, some fifty miles south of East London. Smith, however, was away for Christmas holidays, correcting exams at his seaside getaway. Meanwhile, Courtenay's museum director in East London was not impressed with the find. He dismissed the fish as a common rock cod- a grouper!
But on January 3, 1939, Miss Latimer heard back from Smith in a now famous cable: "MOST IMPORTANT PRESERVE SKELETON AND GILLS = FISH DESCRIBED." However, in an attempt to preserve the fish by mounting it, the innards had been discarded. A search for them in the museum and town trash bins proved fruitless. Even photographs taken of the preparation had somehow been spoiled.
Smith, anxiously biding his time, wondering how he could incorporate the possibility of such a discovery into an already overloaded dual career, did not arrive at the East London museum until February 16. The professor, a thin wiry man of about 5'7", sporting, as was his custom, a close-cropped crew cut, khaki bush shorts and sandals, viewed the mounted specimen, exclaiming, according to one account, "I always knew somewhere or somehow, a primitive fish of this nature would appear." Smith identified the fish immediately as a coelacanth, that is as a member of what must be a still living coelacanthspecies. The fish would soon be called the "most important zoological find of the century" (an accolade that might now go to the Martian microfossils if they check out.) A living dinosaur, it was said, would be no more amazing than this incredible discovery.
After a local newspaper reporter was allowed to take a single photograph of the mounted coelacanth, the picture soon appeared around the world. Smith, Courtenay-Latimer, and the coelacanth became overnight celebrities. When a public viewing for one day only was arranged, 20,000 visitors are said to have shown up.
But the story of the coelacanth's "discovery" does not end there. With no internal organs left from the East London specimen, many questions remained unanswered. Smith was soon obsessed with finding a second intact specimen. Speculating that the fish had drifted down from the north on the Mozambique current, he had a reward notice with a picture of the first specimen posted among the East African coast up as far as Kenya. A decade went by with no response. Smith continued a long-term project of cataloging the fishes of the Indian Ocean, always proselytizing about the coelacanth wherever he went. It was during this period that the myth of the coelacanth as a deep ocean fish took hold in the popular and scientific imagination. Expeditions from Europe scoured the ocean depths in search ofcoelacanths. But Smith remained convinced that the fish's physiognomy and blue color made it a lower reef predator and not a true deep-water fish.
Captain Eric Hunt, a dapper thirty eight-year-old Briton who owned and helmed a vessel, the Nduwaro, trading among Zanzibar, Madagascar, and the Comoros, a group of small islands in the Mozambique Channel belonging to France at the time, attended one of Smith's lectures in Zanzibar. An intelligent, curious fellow, with a penchant for marine aquaria, he quickly became fascinated with the whereabouts of the coelacanth. Hunt offered to post Smith's reward notices among the Comoro islands, which are midway between Tanzania and Madagascar. Smith obliged and with the help of local authorities, the Comoros were soon plastered withcoelacanth reward notices.
On December 21, 1952, fourteen years after the discovery of the first living coelacanth, Captain Hunt, returning to the port of Mutsamudu on the Comorian island of Anjouan, was approached by two Comorans carrying a hefty bundle. One, Ahamadi Abdallah, had caught by hand-line what the locals called a "mame" or "Gombessa", a heavy grouper-like fish that turned up on their lines from time to time. The fisherman was accompanied by an astute schoolteacher, Affane Mohamed, who had noticed that this was the same fish pictured on the reward notices Hunt had posted. Hunt was ecstatic and arranged for Smith's award of one hundred British pounds to be paid to them. As there was no better preservative available at Mutsamudu, Hunt and his crew salted the fish, then sailed with it to the harbor at Dzaoudzi, an islet off the Comoran island of Mayotte, where he bought formalin from the director of medical services. Already aware of the scientific importance of the internal organs, Hunt injected the preservative into the specimen, then cabled Smith in South Africa. He awaited Smith's response.
The French authorities at nearby Pamanzi were not sure that this creature was indeed the fabledcoelacanth. Nevertheless, concerned that they might be missing out on something important, cables were dispatched to French scientific authorities in Madagascar. But no message came back. Hearing nothing, the Pamanzi authorities decided to take possession of the fish anyway if Smith did not come for it personally. Hunt sent a frantic second cable to Smith, urging him to fly to the Comoros immediately.
For J.L.B. Smith this find, if indeed it were acoelacanth, would consummate a fourteen-year obsession. Worried all the time that Hunt's specimen might not be what he claimed, Smith negotiated with Prime Minister Malan of South Africa, for a plane to fly him to the Comoros. Malan, out of the capital on yet another Christmas holiday, consented. By now Smith was a nervous wreck, hardly amused when the flight crew of a DC3 "Dakota" put at his disposal for the trip, faked a radio message that French fighters had scrambled to intercept them.
Having landed in the Comoros, it was a quick trip from the airstrip down to the harbor at Pamanzi where the Nduwaro was moored. When Smith saw the dead fish he wept. It was indeed a coelacanth. He now had his second specimen, organs intact, and the familiarity of the natives with this creature meant that at least one location of the coelacanth'shabitat had been discovered. The Dakota soon left the Comoros with Smith and "his" fish, returning to another round of worldwide publicity.
In the aftermath, the French felt cheated and closed the coelacanth to non-French researchers until the islands became independent in the 1970's. Four years after the "discovery" of the secondcoelacanth, Eric Hunt disappeared at sea after his schooner ran aground on the reefs of the Geyser Bank between the Comoros and Madagascar. He was never found. J.L.B. Smith wrote his account of the coelacanth story in the book "Old Fourlegs," first published in 1956. His book, Sea Fishes of the Indian Ocean, meticulously illustrated and co-authored by his wife Margaret, remains the standard ichthyological reference for the region. In spite of the controversies that followed, he was content with his role in the fabulous s episodes. Smith died in 1968- a suicide after a long illness. Captain Hendrick Goosen passed away just after the fiftieth anniversary of the "discovery" of the coelacanth in 1988. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer lived on in East London, the lone survivor of the greatest fish story ever told, until her death on May 17, 2004 at age 97!
 

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The hypothesis that coelacanth is the closest living relative of tetrapods 3 was rejected based on three genome-scale approaches


http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.1949
Yunfeng Shan, Xiu-Qing Li, Robin Gras
(Submitted on 10 Oct 2009)
Since its discovery of the living fossil in 1938, the coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) has generally been considered to be the closest living relative of the land vertebrates, and this is still the prevailing opinion in most general biology textbooks. However, the origin of tetrapods has been the subject of intense debate for decades. The three principal hypothesis (lungfish-tetrapod, coelacanth-tetrapod, or lungfish-coelacanth sister group) have been proposed. We used the maximum gene-support tree approach to analyze 43 nuclear genes encoding amino acid residues, and compared the results of concatenation and majority-rule tree approaches. The results inferred with three common phylogenetic methods and three genome-scale approaches consistently rejected the hypothesis that the coelacanth is the closest living relative of tetrapods.
Comments:27 Pages, 2 figures and 3 tables
Subjects:Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE); Genomics (q-bio.GN)
Cite as:arXiv:0910.1949 [q-bio.PE]
(or arXiv:0910.1949v1 [q-bio.PE] for this version)

Submission history

From: Yunfeng Shan Dr. [view email]
[v1] Sat, 10 Oct 2009 22:01:47 GMT (358kb)

 datasheet download PDF

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Correcting the headline: ‘Coelacanth’ yes; ‘Ancient’ no

http://creation.com/correcting-the-headline-coelacanth-yes-ancient-no
by 
I know of some Christians who, wary (and rightly so) of the strong evolutionary anti-God bias of the secular media, avoid or take little interest in daily news reports.
While I certainly endorse the earnest Christian’s desire to focus on thinking about ‘whatever is true, … whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely …’ (Philippians 4:8), it’s important to note that not everything that is reported in the secular news media is false. Some of what is reported is not only true, but strategically very useful in the hands of Bible-believing Christians. The trick is to be able to separate out the facts from the evolutionary millions-of-years Bible-denying ‘spin’ that so many reporters and journalists weave into their articles these days. Admittedly this requires more effort and alertness on the part of the believer compared to simple avoidance. However, the ability to exercise ‘the Berean standard’ (Acts 17:11) in our daily lives is a very useful discipline to have (Hebrews 5:14), enabling Christians to sort through the dross and pick up gems valuable for demolishing evolutionary ideas (2 Corinthians 10:5) and proclaiming the truth of God’s Word.
A classic example was the recent headline ‘Ancient coelacanth caught in Indonesia’.1 How ancient? The article explained the coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) was ‘a species once thought as extinct as dinosaurs,’ i.e. that it ‘was believed to be extinct for 65 million years until one was found in 1938 off Africa’s coast.’ The 1938 discovery ‘ignited worldwide interest’, and this latest Indonesian catch of a ‘living fossil’ (as the article described it) was also notable because the fisherman managed to keep it alive in a pool for a further 17 hours—’an extraordinary survival time’ for such a deep-water fish, according to a local marine biologist. Other coelacanth specimens have been caught in recent years, including one in the same waters off North Sulawesi in 1998, but the 17 hours that this latest coelacanth remained alive after being caught surpasses that of specimens captured previously.

Separating fact from fiction

Let’s now separate out the eyewitness-observed facts in the article from the evolutionary storyline woven through the article.
Eyewitness account: A fisherman caught a fish in Indonesia. The fish, a coelacanth, had formerly been known only from fossil specimens, and long presumed extinct. But in 1938, a coelacanth was found off Africa’s coast, showing the species was not extinct, and other specimens have been caught since then. This latest coelacanth specimen from Indonesian waters remained alive for 17 hours after being brought to the surface—a record to date.Evolutionary storytelling: The coelacanth is an ‘ancient’ species, which disappeared from the fossil record 65 million years ago, along with the dinosaurs. Presumed to have been extinct for that time, the discovery that they’re still alive earns them the tag of ‘living fossil’.
Now that we’ve removed the evolutionary storytelling, how are the eyewitness-sourced facts of the article ‘strategically very useful’ for Bible-believing Christians?

Using fact to destroy fiction

When reaching out to non-Christians who assume that evolution explains our origins, we can use news items like this to show how evolutionary ideas about millions of years just don’t ‘stack up’ with the evidence, in stark contrast to the biblical account of history.
Evolutionists assume that the fossil-bearing rock layers have been laid down over millions of years, hence when creatures like the coelacanth are absent from upper rock strata (which evolutionists say straddle ‘the last 65 million years’) they presume that means that the coelacanth must be extinct. Hence, a news item like this one complete with a photo of the fisherman in the pool with his live, freshly caught coelacanth, flies in the face of evolutionary interpretations of the ‘fossil record’.
you could point to the photo of the fisherman holding his still-wriggling catch and say something like: ‘For a fish that evolutionists had supposed was extinct for 65 million years, you can’t get much fresher than that!’
So, when witnessing to non-Christians, you could point to the photo of the fisherman holding his still-wriggling catch and say something like: ‘For a fish that evolutionists had supposed was extinct for 65 million years, you can’t get much fresher than that!’
You could then point out that the Bible describes an event that helps us to understand why we find so many beautifully preserved fossils, such as the coelacanth, right around the world—i.e. there was a global Flood. A great many fossils show evidence of having been buried quickly under water-borne sediment, thwarting scavengers and decay—hence the often exquisite degree of preservation. So the ‘fossil record’ is a sobering legacy of the global Flood of just 4,500 years ago (and its aftermath), and reflects the order of burial in that event, not the order of evolution (’appearance’) and extinction (’disappearance’) over millions or billions of years.
Thus, when creatures such as the coelacanth turn up alive and well, it’s no surprise to Christians who know that the Bible can be trusted from the very first verse. But for evolutionists, the discovery of a ‘living fossil’ is often not only a surprise—why no evolution in 65 million years?—but also can completely overturnprevious evolutionary notions about it. For example, evolutionists once said that amphibians evolved from a Rhipidistian fish, something like the coelacanth. It was explained that they used their fleshy, lobed fins for walking on the sea-floor before emerging on the land. As long as the coelacanth was ‘extinct’, such speculation seemed impossible to disprove. But with the discovery of a living coelacanth in 1938 and their subsequent observation, it was found that the fins were not used for walking but for deft maneuvering when swimming. Also, its soft parts were found to be totally fish-like, not transitional. It’s now known also that the coelacanth has some unique features. It gives birth to live young after about a year’s gestation, it has a small second tail to help its swimming, and a gland that detects electrical signals. (Surely evidence of having been designed.) Thus the finding of live coelacanths proved fatal to the idea that such were a ‘transitional form’ from which amphibians (and subsequently land animals and birds) are descended.2
Accordingly, the coelacanth is a nice little ‘gem’ of a witnessing tool, and the secular media’s fascination with such an ‘ancient’, ‘living fossil’ regularly opens up opportunities for alert Christians to use the ‘news of the day’ in their outreach. (See our past items on the coelacanth, including: Living fossil turns up—again, More living fossil coelacanths, Dinosaur fish lady dies, The Lazarus effect—Creation 29(2):52–55, 2007.)
Of course, it is wise to be prepared for ‘questions arising’, e.g. the obvious one relating to the latest article is ‘But what about the dinosaurs? If the dinosaurs haven’t been extinct for 65 million years, where are they today?’
To answer, you could point out:
When pointing this out to others, be ready for incredulity, as it can take a while for some people to get over their ‘shock’ at hearing of such things for the first time, and they may challenge you with a return question that comes out of the evolutionary paradigm: ‘But if dinosaurs and people lived together, surely we would find their fossils together?’
So, how should we be ready (1 Peter 3:15) to answer? In cases like this, sometimes it can be more strategic to answer the question by asking a question—one that highlights the flawed assumptions behind the original question, e.g., ‘Coelacanths and whales live together—but why don’t we find their fossils together?’3
By thus prompting your questioner to think for himself (or herself), and reminding them again of your earlier words about the biblical Flood, who knows where the conversation might proceed from there? If further questions arise, there’s plenty of free online material available fromhere to help you with providing answers. And don’t be disheartened if your questioner doesn’t exhibit any apparent change-of-heart—after all, anyone ‘labouring in the Lord’ does not labour in vain (1 Corinthians 15:58). And how’s this for incentive to persevere with ‘imparting wisdom’ in the face of indifference or hostility:
Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever. Daniel 12:3

Related Articles

References

  1. Ancient coelacanth caught in Indonesia, USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/
    discoveries/2007-05-21-coelacanth-indonesia_N.htm    , acc. 25 June 2007. Return to Text.
  2. W. Roush, W., ‘Living Fossil’ Is Dethroned, Science 277:1436, 5 September 1997 Return to Text.
  3. Dr Carl Wieland elaborated on this point in his recent debate with an evolutionist-available on DVD. For our online review/summary of the debate, see Clash over origins. Return to Text.
Published: 13 July 2007 (GMT+10)


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The 'living fossil' coelacanth fish left behind by evolution

One of the few species to have hardly changed in tens of millions of years
303
pg-22-fossil-fish-ap.jpg
The coelacanth fish lives in deep-sea caves off the coast of Africa AP
A deep-sea fish which became known as a “living fossil” has not changed in appearance since before the time of the dinosaurs with the help of an extraordinary genome that is barely evolving, a study has found.
The coelacanth, which lives in deep-sea caves off the coast of Africa, was once known only from its fossils and so was thought to have gone extinct at least 70 million years ago until a recently-dead specimen was discovered by South African fishermen in 1938.
It is one of the few species to have hardly changed in tens of millions of years and now scientists believe this physical stability is mirrored in the coelacanth’s genome – the 3 billion “letters” of its DNA code.
“We found that the genes overall are evolving significantly slower than in every other fish and land vertebrate that we looked at. This is the first time that we’ve had a big enough gene set to really see that,” said Jessica Alföldi, a research scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Massachusetts.
Charles Darwin first coined the term “living fossil” to describe species that have endured unchanged due to limited competition with other animals. However, Dr Alfoldi said that the description is not always helpful because it suggests a relic from the past that has been brought back to life.
“It's not a living fossil; it’s a living organism. It doesn’t live in a time bubble; it lives in our world, which is why it’s so fascinating to find out that its genes are evolving more slowly than ours,” she said.
Coelacanths grow about four feet long and have conspicuously fleshy fins that resemble the limbs of four-legged land animals with backbones, the vertebrate “tetrapods” such as frogs, lizards and mammals. This and their ancient lineage suggested they may be closely related to the first fish that made the evolutionary transition from sea to land.
Scientists have speculated as to whether the unchanging physical appearance of the coelacanth was truly because it was evolving slowly, or whether its DNA was somehow evolving just as rapidly as other species.
The complete coelacanth genome shows that the genes do indeed match the fish’s appearance in terms of slower evolution, the researchers say in a study published in the journal Nature.
The genes of the coelacanth have a lower rate of “substitution” – a type of mutation – than other animals with backbones, which may reflect the fact that they do not need to evolve quickly because they live in the relatively unchanging environment of deep-sea caves where there are few predators, the researchers say.
“We often talk about how species have changed over time. But there are still a few places on Earth where organisms don’t have to change, and this is one of them,” said Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, scientific director of the Broad Institute’s vertebrate genome biology group, a co-author of the study.
“Coelacanths are likely very specialized to such a specific, non-changing, extreme environment – it is ideally suited to the deep sea just the way it is,” Dr Lindblad-Toh said
A genome analysis also found that the coelacanth is unlikely to be directly descended from the first fish to walk on land. A more likely candidate is the lungfish, which are closely related but have a much more complicated genome, the scientists said.
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