Guest post by David H. Middleton
Truly amazing…Miocene (~20 MYA) lizards, preserved in amber, “identical to their modern cousins.”
Ancient lizards in amber amaze scientists
Tuesday, 28 July 2015 Stuart Gary
ABC
A community of lizards from the Caribbean, preserved for 20 million years in amber, have been found to be identical to their modern cousins, say researchers.
This suggests the different niches inhabited by the lizards have – incredibly – changed little over the past 20 million-year, report the team, in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[…]
I guess the Warmists are wrong about climate change endangering lizards…
…because 20 million years ago, the climate was warmer than today, and the lizards lived through at 3.0°C temperature spike 15 million years ago.
(Older is to the right.)
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The only fork-tongued lizards who are an endangered species are Homo sapien, subtype, gub’ment climatescientist when (not if) their climate data manipulations are revealed.
The lizards in our garden hibernate during winter when it is cold. During Spring, Summer and Autumn they emerge and bask in the sun until they warm their bodies enough to scamper about after insects. The lizards appear to love the sun and seek the hottest possible weather. I am sure that they will love it if and when the long promised warming finally does appear.
If I may be permitted a non-sequitur…
Where’s Janice? I haven’t seen any posts from her in awhile.
Yoohoo, Janice! Are you out there? I miss you.
Maybe her Big Oil checks dried up?
sorry, may have info.
The fact that the lizards haven’t changed is not an indicator of stasis so much as it is a refutation of evolution and vast ages. The assumed vast ages required by evolutionism are imposed upon the data. But if you look at the data without presuppositions, it screams youth, not age. Look up more info on this subject on sites like Creation.com. There is a vast amount of evidence disproving both evolution and vast ages. (By the way, Natural Selection is not Evolution. Natural selection operates on existing genetic information. Evolution has to create vast amounts of information out of nothing.)
There is zero evidence in support of a young earth and all the evidence in the universe conclusively showing it to be around 14 billion years old and the solar system five.
But evolution doesn’t need vast ages to work. The evolution of new species and even genera can and often does occur in a single generation, through such mechanisms as polyploidy and hybridization. Natural selection usually takes more generations, but not necessarily vast ages. Artificial selection is even more rapid, such for instance that domestic sheep are now a separate species from their wild ancestors.
Evolution would predict that modern lizards would appear superficially similar to their Miocene ancestors if their environment hadn’t changed much. Natural selection works both to preserve adaptive genomes under stable conditions as well as to favor differences when the environment changes.
People misunderstand evolution. There is no genetic barrier to accumulated variation producing new species, genera, families, orders, classes, phyla and kingdoms gradually. Indeed, this process has been repeatedly observed, along with the rapid evolution mentioned above. Evolution is an observed scientific fact, with a body of theory explaining it, always subject to improvement, just like the heliocentric theory, the theory of gravitation, the atomic theory of matter, the germ theory of disease, relativity theory, quantum mechanics, etc.
One source of the many genetic and chromosomal variations upon which evolution works is mutations. Previously negative mutations can become positive in new environments. For instance, the point mutation that allows formerly sugar-eating microbes to metabolize nylon occurred over and over again for millions if not billions of years, but was always fatal until the advent of nylon.
University of Lincoln? Never heard of it. It must be one of those new third-rate “universities” – rebranded polytechnics. Chris Packham (ultra-green BBC favourite) is a ‘visiting professor’.
So the lizaards will also be able to survive the projected future cooling
http://www.reportingclimatescience.com/news-stories/article/study-finds-long-term-solar-oscillations-and-predicts-cooling.html
“The paper follows research reported this month to the UK Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, Wales, by physicists who predicted that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the “mini ice age” that began in 1645. ”
Interesting read.
Sooooooo. Why does my neighbour, who raises lizards and snakes, have to have a heat lamp when the outside air temp is 90F, so that her pets can bask and survive? Oh my. “Pet” lizard/snake. Is that a PC/cAGW wrong? The last 50 years in so called “human” history may go down as the stupidest ever studied. We both have normal, skittering about snakes/lizards in our backyards. When it does get too warm (?), they hide out under shrubs and cool spots. Oh wait. Maybe the mammoths ate all the grasses? And I know for a fact, her cages for them are kept between 95-105F, not 0.001F difference. However do they survive?
Many people seem to confuse natural selection with evolution as being the same thing and they are not. Natural selection usually involves the LOSS of genetic information, not its increase (the only increase has been from adding “existing” genetic material between organisms). If you think that you have heard of some evidence of real evolution (creation of new genetic information out of nothing), then it has never been reported in any scientific journal.
The mindset that rejects the evidence is exactly the same as the mindset that insists that anthropogenic global warming is a “fact”. They believe it because some authority figure told them that it is true and they are not interested in any evidence to the contrary.
It is a huge subject, and hurling elephants will not make it go away. Sticking with the biological arguments, there have been lots of surprises that the general public are ignorant of. These lizards are not a rare occurrence; there are lots of “living fossils” being discovered quite frequently. For another biological example of facts that fly in the face of vast ages, mammoth blood has been recovered from specimens over a supposed 10K years of age. DNA experts insist that DNA cannot exist in natural environments longer than 10,000 years, yet intact strands of DNA appear to have been recovered from fossils allegedly much older, and even blood cells and connective tissue from supposedly 65 million year old dinosaur fossils. No matter what stories are made up to attempt to explain away the impossible, it remains the truth.