New species: the richness of nature

We know a lot about creation, but a lot we do not know. The enormous diversity of creation is well-known. There are numbers and numbers of living species. Around one million described. How many undescribed - another million or two? New species are discovered all the time - contrary to what most people think. Most of them small. Like insects or worms. Most people seem to think that we have discovered all the "large" or "higher" species, like mammals or birds. But we still discover new ones. And a considerable number - small and large - will undoubtly go extinct before we even discover them.

An illustration of this is a website I happened to see: http://marcvanroosmalen.org/newspecies.htm
Marc (a dutchman like myself by origin) works in the Amazonas. He describes a considerable number of new species he has discovered. Sea cows, pigs, monkeys, tapirs etc. A number of them are rare, and threatened with extinction. Marc uses his discoveries to stimulate preservation, as he states on his website: "My goal as a field biologist is to use new species as an ethical means to save entire ecosystems in the Amazon."

Have a look at his site and have again confirmed the diversity of creation and the urgent need of conservation. Do whatever you can for protecting the Amazonas and other precious natural environments!

Teenage Dinosaur pregnancy

Researchers at Berkeley, California, have found that large dinosaurs were sexually mature before they were full-grown. The analysis of bones of both predatory Allosaurus and plant-eating Tenontosaurus show this pattern. Studied individuals laid eggs when only 10 resp 8 yrs of age. See http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/01/14_teendinos.shtml
The growing pattern of those dinosaurs was similar to that of mammals and birds rather than reptiles. A fast growing phase, slowing down at adolescence. Just like large mammals, including man, sexual maturity was reached just at the end of the fast growing phase. Small mammals like mice and birds reach sexual maturity only after becoming full-grown.

These results once again confirm the image of dinosaurs as creatures quite unlike big repriles like crocodiles, more living like birds and mammals. Resaerch of the last years shows that dinosaurs were agile creatures, with well developed social life, closely related to birds rather than to reptiles. The classical image of slow and unintelligent giants has been abandoned by scientists for quite some time now.

Life's solution

Science and theology is one of my favorites, being a paleontologist by profession as well as a pastor. Just now I am re-reading Simon Conway Morris' book Life's solution - inevitable humans in a lonely universe.

I really must recommend that book. It is not a narrow specialist book, it is fully readable for anyone with a scientific interest. Written with humor also. Morris is challenging - with succes - the quite common view that evolution is a process steered by chance, humans happen to be one of the outcomes, but it could really have been anything. He challenges that other great paleontologist, the late Stephen J Gould, and his famous thesis that if the tape of evolution could be re-run the outcome would be quite different. It would not. Life has a tendency to move to certain specific solutions. Tendencies which apparently are rooted in the earliest organisms living long before the Scandinavian mountains I see from my kitchen window even started to form. The outcome in the end could not have become anything you can or can't imagine. It had to be humans - or something very much like humans. Evolutionary theory and theology have a bearing on each other. You get the feeling that evolution could very well be teleological (something of course the writer of Genesis 1 and 2 would happily agree with).

Simon Conway Morris is a believing evolutionist, as I am myself. He gives no room for genetic fundamentalism (with Richard Dawkins and his selfish gene as main advocates), nor for so-called creation science.
Curious?
Read the book if you haven't done that before.



A balanced book, written by a man with great knowledge and a very clear mind.