Even the most confirmed enemy of “intelligent design” theories can have a hard time imagining [much less providing forensic evidence for] the forebears of these great fish inching slowly down an epochs-long evolutionary course to become modern tuna. They seem like deus ex machina incarnate or, rather, machina ex deo—a machine from God. How else could a fish come into being with a weird slot, as hard and fixed as the landing-gear slot on an airplane, into which it retracts its dorsal fin to achieve faster speeds? How else could a fish develop a whole new way of swimming where a slim crescent of a tail, insignificant in size compared to most fish tails, vibrates at astronomical speed while the rest of the body slips forward with barely any bend, pitch, or roll? And how else would a fish appear within a phylum of otherwise cold-blooded animals that can redirect the heat that its muscles throw off back into its very flesh and raise its body temperature by as much as twenty degrees above ambient conditions? Yes, the biggest tuna are warm-blooded.1Tuna—what a magnificent (and nutritious) fish! The seaworthy body and behavior of every living tuna exhibit the design and manufacturing brilliance of He who commissioned “fishers of men.”
(excerpted from James J.S. Johnson, A Christmas Carol in Four-Part Harmony, Acts & Facts, December 2011, Institute for Creation Research)
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1. Greenberg, P. 2010. Four Fish, the Future of the Last Wild Food. New York: Penguin Books, 199-200.