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Disgusting, Scary 'Walking' Fish Invades Maryland
texchanchan writes: "It's from China, it's a predator, and it can live for DAYS out of water. And it's in Maryland as reported at Yahoo. 'They can survive for two to three days out of water, breathing air with a primitive lung, pushing themselves around with their pectoral fins.' Read about it at the Maryland Fishing Report site or just look at its picture. Maryland Fishing Report says: 'This fish was most likely introduced by an individual with an aquarium. Never release aquarium fish into ponds and lakes!' Those exotic species will get us yet."
I really love the idea of the Parrots in NYC, there is apparently only one colony of them living on top of Statium lights on the northern end of the city. Only a little over a hundred, no one is quite sure where they came from, but they've been there since the 60's or 70's. There has been some talk of killing them off but I think few think they could spread very far.
She was afraid it would eat the goldfish, so she had it transferred to a nieghbors pond where it currently lives.
Theres no point to this post, I just wanted some crackhead moderator to waste a mod point putting it in -1 land.
Oh my god. My dad caught one of these at our camp on Lake Huron last year, maybe 2 years ago (I'd have to ask, I don't remember when). When my dad netted it, the fish "growled" at us angrily all the way from the netting in the boat until we killed it back at camp. It was genuinely scary. The fish was out of water for like half an hour and didn't die. We noticed its front fins on the bottom were almost like little hard stubs. We looked it up in my mom's fish book (she's into fish and aquariums and all that) and the closest thing we found was a Bowfin. But my mom disagreed, since the match didn't seem to have the right head shape.
Anyway, it was greasy, but pretty good.
I'm not making this up. This news thing makes it even creepier. Jeezus.
Zoober
"unwillingness to think". Hmmm. I'm a creationist and I like to think. Do you ever think about abiogenesis and how it could happen? Consider this - take the twenty amino acids, figure the smallest life form theorized has 256 proteins (the smallest count in a known organism is roughly 400). The average length of those 256 proteins is 445 amino acids. Since bacteria have under 8% glycine (the only non-chiral amino acid), that leaves about 410 amino acids that are chiral in the average protein in bacteria.
To get the correct chirality by random chance for just one protein is one chance in 2^410 or more than 10^123. That doesn't even consider the all-important sequencing of those proteins, nor folding them properly, nor the environment they're in (for example, water causes proteins to dissociate, not to polymerize).
There are only 10^78 (estimates I've seen range from 10^62 to 10^78) atoms in the universe. The universe has been around (based on 18 billion years) for less than 10^18 seconds. So even making one protein per each atom in the universe per second for the lifetime of the universe still gives bad odds for the correct chirality of one protein (one in 10^27).
Once you stop and think, the odds of life arising are tiny enough to be equivalent to impossible. It takes a lot more faith to believe in molecules to man evolution than to believe in the Bible.
The chances of all the basic building blocks of the simplest living creature magically coming together in one place might be low, but if you allow for self-replicating proteins as a stepping stone to "life" then that condition is not necessary.
It may be possible to get to something resembling a living creature through successive iterations and mutations of a "not-life" protein. These can happen very, very fast and are completely directed (in the sense that they are non-random, as you proposed).
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
The odds are not just low, they are flat out impossible. 10^50 is considered a mathematical equivalent of impossible, and 10^123 is way beyond that.
So your way of getting around impossible is to suggest "allow for self-replicating proteins". If the protein is just 51 amino acids (considered too small for the smallest bound of 60 for a protein, but it is the final size of insulin which starts out bigger as proinsulin), with 3 glycines (insulin's amount of them), you have 2^48 odds or 10^14 odds of getting just the chirality correct. To get a specific 51-acid chain you would have odds of one in 20^51 (ignoring chirality) or one in more than 10^66. So even if you say there were a million billion (10^15) possible 51-amino acid proteins that were self-replicating, you'd still be at worse than one in 10^50 odds to get any one of them to ever exist. And 10^50 is defined as impossible. And all that is assuming very favorable conditions - i.e., only amino acids bond to the forming chain, only the 20 common ones for life get involved (there are an awful lot of other amino acids in the world, just not in life), ignoring that this is happening in water where the energy gradient is against the hydrolysis involved in peptide chain building.
And if there were a self-replicating protein, what would prevent it from continuing to exist today? Where is it?
And if gradual evolution is to be accepted, why are there no 2-5 cell creatures - why unicellular and many-cellular, no few-cellular? Surely it would be adaptive to have a bicellular organism with one able to work in acid, one in base, and the inactive one goes dormant during its non-advantageous state (myriad other examples are simple to imagine).
Science is not about "might be". It's about facts. And a simple fact is that unless the "self-replicating protein" were near-perfect in replicative abilities, it would not be able to accurately reproduce itself. And simple entropic principles would lead to its degradation into simpler parts.
You state that a nonliving protein is "completely directed". By what?
A clarification: you blurred the point I was making. A real protein (like 445 AA's on average in a small unicellular organism) has odds of getting just the chirality correct of less than one in 10^123. Then to give all possible odds to a self-replicator, I took an absurdly small 51-AA peptide as an example, and showed it was worse than one in 10^66 to happen. The hypothetical self-replicator is still vastly unlikely.
The old saw of adding energy providing a way around randomness failing is not too awfully useful. The Japanese Navy added a lot of energy to the battleships in Pearl Harbor, and not much other than increased entropy and tragedy resulted. What new ordering of information came from that? There are even more convincing arguments, such as no one has conceived of a way to produce the sulfur containing AA's (cys, met). And just chirality alone has never been explained. Until simple points like that are answered, the idea that life arose spontaneously is about as scientific as saying the moon is made of cheese because it looks from here like it has holes.
With the exception of designed collectors (chlorophyll, solar cells) the Sun's energy is also most often destructive. Leave your car in the sun for a couple of decades and see what the paint looks like.
Evolution makes a number of predictions which have been found to be dead wrong. Like the Miller-Urey experiments. Like the computer simulation done in the 60's (at Stanford I think) which showed the dominant survival of not the fittest organisms.
On the other hand the Bible has made prophecies over millennia that have been proven true. For example, the book of Isaiah found in the Dead Sea Scrolls from 125BC had predictions about Jesus that were absolutely correct. Daniel predicted to the day when Jesus would enter Jerusalem. The book of Job (probably the first book written in the Bible) talks about dinosaurs (not by that name, that word was coined in 1841, the KJV was translated in 1611), the hydrologic cycle, and other facts unknown until very recently.
could this be living proof of the evolutionary path that aquatic creatures took to make it to land many millions (billions) of years ago? looks like it to me
The fish is a delicacy in Asian cooking; I've had them.
I get *hell* from customs for sneaking Mighty Taco across the border, and yet these nasty things are available in any large Asian community?
Something's not right there. How is it that these were allowed to be imported in the first place?
It's a sign of either an intellectual failure or starvation (I'll leave the intellectual failure with customs and starvation with my Chinese friends) that those things would be considered a delicacy, anyway.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.