Is The pleclosumus a living fossil?

On Sun, 3 Jul 2005 02:00:43 -0400, "NetMax"
wrote:

wrote in message
roups.com...
Sorry if I misspelled the name of the strange yet popular catfish. I
had been pondering this fish and think it may be an ancient unchanged
species fish.


Plecos have some arrested features such as air-breathing and a pivot
behind their skull which makes them somewhat prehistoric when compared to
more modern catfish. I think it's just a case of their environment being
fairly consistent (algae, mud & bugs have been around a long time) so
their evolved design has been very successful. When there is a good match
between the design of the creature and the environment, then less of the
normal mutations which occur will be successfully carried forward. At
least this sounds like it makes sense to me.

I am an "Intelligent Design" convert. My favorite concept leads
from a "Young God" that gets and "energy kit" and lets it get away
from him and spends 13 billion years gaining some order. By the time
the material world was ready to be molded into "living things" a
"University" had formed. New life forms were created as Doctorate
thesis. Criteria were set out for each project. Successful designs
were allowed to survive until better designs were developed.

I no longer need to wonder "how", but wonder "why?? Following the
same University model, I suspect we are now the projects, only done by
team, each team member is given a human, each team a group. Grouping
used to be easy. Physical barriers such as mountains, rivers or
oceans kept the projects well defined. AS people became more mobil,
languages maintained separations. Today, with our high mobility and
intermixing, cultural walls are used. Its all a vast experiement, no
longer just physical evolution, but social evolution to determine best
social design. We each are important in the scheme, but like lab
animals each is disposable and replaceable.

So, have hope, you may be part of the successful design, a new
survivor equal to the Pleco! g

dick