Evo/devo and the lungfish: the last gasp of intelligent design.

The fishes of the early and middle Devonian found themselves forced to choose between the invading salt water marshes and the isolated freshwater pools which periodically contracted into stagnant swamps or hard mud flats. .. The more advanced of the fishes, however, in order to survive in the stagnant waters of the continents, took to swallowing air and thus invented lungs and prepared the way for the evolution of the terrestrial vertebrates. The scientists used state-of-the-art statistical and molecular methods to unravel the evolution of the hormone aldosterone. They resurrected the ancestral receptor gene— which existed more than 450 million years ago, before the first animals with bones appeared on Earth. .. The experiments showed that the receptor had the capacity to be activated by aldosterone long before the hormone actually evolved. Bridgham, et al. (2) This weekend at the New York Auto Show, the taxicab of the future will be on display. Designers say the cab is so futuristic that the driver will be from a country that doesn't even exist yet. Creationists, fans of " intelligent design " and other flat-earth zanies have been playing defense since December 2005 when Judge Jones of Dover, Pennsyl-vania, ruled that intelligent design (ID) had no place in science classrooms. After Dover, bills designed to subvert the teaching of evolution failed to pass even in such conservative states as Kansas, Utah, and South Carolina. Meanwhile, newer studies in evolutionary and developmental molecular biology (Evo/Devo) have left the favorite notions of intelligent design in Devonian mud. At Dover, the ID apologists advanced the concept of " irreducible complexity, " i.e., some systems are so complex that they had to be designed in one flash by one intelligence— guess Who (4)? It turns out that molecular genetics can reach into the Devonian seas of 400 —500 milllion years ago to explain " Aldosterone and the Conquest of Land (5). " Evo/Devo has puzzled out a system as " irreducibly " complex as the human kidney and its hormonal regulation. Random mutations, over time, in marine creatures adapted a system that responded to stress in the sea (via cortisone) to one that retained salt Homer Smith (1895–1962), physiologist and author of Ka-mongo: The Lungfish and the Padre (1932); courtesy private collection .