Missing Link Missing Funding

Ok here are two stories on evolution that come from Canada. The irony would be delicious, except for the idoicy.

It's a story of two kinds of dinosaurs. One that is a real fossil and one that is political.

The first is the discovery of a possible missing link between fish and amphibians coming from the Canadian arctic. Proof of evolution. Empirical fact.

The fish that crawled out of the water

A crucial fossil that shows how animals crawled out from the water, evolving from fish into land-loving animals, has been found in Canada. The creature, described today in Nature¹,², lived some 375 million years ago. Palaeontologists are calling the specimen from the Devonian a true 'missing link', as it helps to fill in a gap in our understanding of how fish developed legs for land mobility, before eventually evolving into modern animals including mankind.

Tetrapods did not so much conquer the land, as escape from the water. John Maisey American Museum of Natural History, New York

Tiktaalik - the fish that found it's feet

The fossil record is full of 'missing links', transitional forms between organisms on either side of a phylogenetic tree, but with Tiktaalik, a fish that shows striking features of a limbed vertebrate (tetrapod), one of these rare missing links has been found. Nature presents a FREE ACCESS story from news@nature.com alongside the discovery and analysis of this incredible animal, and a discussion of its significance in a special News & Views article.

The other story is how a Canadian scientist who wants to study the influence of the Intelligent Design debate in the US is having on Canadian students. He is denied funding.

No he is not a creationist, he is a scientist who accepts evolution as a fact. Which is why he is being denied funding. Right-o that makes alot of sense.

Professor denied federal research funds for assuming evolution to be scientific fact

Hmm do ya think SSHRC is being influenced politically by the Regime change in Ottawa? Doing their masters bidding and denying funding to 'controversial studies' (sic), that might upset the social conservative fundamentalists in the Conservative government. Like the Rev. Stockwell Day, who is a creationist?

Or are they just jumping the gun anticipating an ideological change now that the vociferous critics of SSHRC/Canda Council are in charge.

The last time the Conservatives were in charge they dismantled large sections of SSHRC/Canada Council.

The government's budget was therefore constructed to show that the federal cabinet understood the Reform Party agenda--that it too was determined to cut government fat and slash away at those parts of the bureaucracy most seen to providing useless services and not helping the ``just plain folks back home.'' Indeed, to conceptualize this view it is useful to look at the National Citizen's Coalition document of a few years ago--we might think of the Coalition as being part of the organic intellectuals of the Reform party. The document was entitled ``Tales from the Tax Trough'' and it listed a whole series of useless government services including a hit list of what the NCC saw as particularly stupid research projects. Who was mentioned? SSHRC projects were the first on the list--followed by those of the Canada Council, the Canadian Institute on International Peace and Security, and IDRC. On the hit list were projects on the analysis of yard art, the fool in Western civilization, the wife's role in food shopping for the family, and the participation of women in trade unions in Argentina. Some of us, myself included, may react by thinking what interesting projects these are--and in fact how socially pertinent--but this is clearly not the intent of the pamphlet. The tone of the pamphlet and indeed the way it is likely to be read is of a totally profligate government flinging out dollars to finance absurd projects without any regard for, and even as an insult to, the hard-pressed taxpayers. In rereading this pamphlet one can easily conjure up the image of Don Mazankowski consulting it in preparing his budget. The ``little people'' speak and Big Don listens.

Evolution of the Reform Alliance Conservative Party

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