Quetzal,
You have a good point.
And so did you. I was trying to see what it was like to live in creationist land for a bit with the fully aquatic amphibians are fish comment. Clearly they are not fish. But you made my point better than I did.
I think that fishies coming up on land like lp's catfish or Chiroptera's mudskippers blur the terrestrial/aquatic distinction more than a bit.
I actually think they are better examples of potential evolutionary intermediates for the reasons you mention, certainly in the evo/creo debate. There's no reason to believe that even fully aquatic salamanders aren't secondarily (or more) aquatic, for example. Like you say, they are highly derived. Salamanders look similar to the early tetrapods, but in no way can they be considered "living fossils" as they simply didn't exist in the late Devonian.
Actual fish that are clearly more adapted for a marine/aquatic existence than a terrestrial one provide a far better predicate for inferring the possibility of water to land evolution than salamanders, IMHO. They have made the all important first step that stops the otherwise incredulous nose screwing.
Interestingly,
Acanthostega gunnari in my avatar is equipped with internal gill bars (as opposed to the external salamander ones) giving away it's fishy ancestry.
Mark
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"Physical Reality of Matchette’s EVOLUTIONARY zero-atom-unit in a transcendental c/e illusion" - Brad McFall
[This message has been edited by mark24, 12-04-2003]
[This message has been edited by mark24, 12-04-2003]
[This message has been edited by mark24, 12-04-2003]
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