CrAzY CrEaTiOnIsT NeWs!

This is going to be a brief CrAzY CrEaTiOnIsT NeWs, because I found that really none of the other news items sparked my interest. Nor did they have a creepy mutant, for that matter. As you know, I like to occasionally comment on News To Note, an ongoing testimony to the power of the creationists at Answers in Genesis to fail to understand science news. I have learned more about evolution just by assuming these people were wrong and then doing independent research on the topic. What I find is always far more interesting than "God did it," which is, ultimately the only conclusion/premise that they are willing to put forward.

The Telegraph: “Snake with Foot Found in China”

A snake with a leg—is it evidence of evolution, creation, both, or neither?

The Telegraph reports this week on a strange sighting in Suining, China: a snake, 16 inches (41 cm) long, that has a leg (complete with claws).

Yuck! That's awesome!

Discoverer Duan Qiongxiu described her encounter: “I woke up and heard a strange scratching sound. I turned on the light and saw this monster working its way along the wall using his claw.” Frightened, she killed the snake with a shoe—but then preserved the oddity in a bottle of alcohol.

The snake is now in the custody of West Normal University in China, where it is scheduled to undergo an autopsy to learn more about the leg.

This is an important point. I've been poking around, and not everyone is convinced that this is actually an example of pleiotropy. See the thoughtful comments at PZ Myers' site. There is good ground to be skeptical that this is not the expression of a lost gene or was caused by an environmental factor. Indeed, many of the folks suggestion that it is the snake's last meal, a lizard. At the same time, there is equally good evidence that it is an expression of a previously expressed gene--take the coloration, for example, or that it looks like a not-quite fully developed leg, both options that contributors to PZ's site suggest.

I don't know. I lean toward pleitropy, based on the color, but am willing to suspend judgment until there is a dissection to see whether the leg is the snake's or not. This, of course, is the only respectable position where your knowledge is incomplete.

To some, a snake spontaneously growing a leg (or so it appears) would seem to be out-and-out proof of evolution. After all, if a snake can grow a leg, why couldn’t a fish grow feet, a dinosaur grow feathers, etc.? How could creationists explain the increase in genetic information that a snake leg would require?

That would be feeble minded creationists mostly, not evolutionists, and not for that reason. You are setting up a couple of straw man, and even though you are going to knock them both over with a single flying roundhouse, it's still completely unimpressive. Evolutionists would not say that a dinosaur grows feathers (really, the crocoduck argument?--you suck Ray-Comfort bad). They would not demand that you to account for the "increase in information" because it would never occur to them.

But there’s a catch. Both evolutionists and creationists actually believe that snakes weren’t always legless. Evolutionists believe that snakes are the evolutionary descendants of lizards that gradually lost their legs (as we discussed in 2007 and 2008); thus, they view this legged snake as hearkening back to its evolutionary ancestors. As for creationists, we read in Genesis 3:14 that God punished the serpent for deceiving Eve:

So the Lord God said to the serpent: “Because you have done this,
You are cursed more than all cattle,
And more than every beast of the field;
On your belly you shall go,
And you shall eat dust
All the days of your life.

Hey! Big slam on the cattle! What does God have against cattle?

While the Bible does not explain the scientific specifics of “on your belly you shall go,” creationists have generally understood this to mean that the original serpentine created kind had legs. Even if God “muted” the genetic information for legs in snakes (so that none could truly walk), a mutation could cause some of the latent genetic information to be expressed in the form of an errant limb.

Do snakes eat dust? I merely ask. No, you ridiculous louts, they did not mean "use their tongues to smell and sometimes dust gets on their tongue." I'm willing to bet that God would have been capable of making that point.

Regardless of the specific history of snakes’ legs, what matters is that a leg on a snake would not be a truly novel genetic feature, since there is evidence that the snake genome once had the information to produce legs. The leglessness of snakes today represents a corruption, loss, or deactivation of that information (at least, the elements coding for a full set of functional limbs).

This is actually, an addition of genetic information, a novel new protein that suppresses leg development. But you know, whatevs.

HJ