Thank God for the platypus. Or maybe not. Why is it that when “creationists” want to claim that they are rational, they always assert that there is no genetic mutation or evolution, and, therefore, humans are not primates? Why don’t they “prove” their arguments with the duck-billed platypus?

Recent research supports the idea that the platypus has been around for 150 million years or more. The platypus is the nearest thing we have to a “missing link” -- a missing link between reptiles, birds and mammals, that lived from the time of the dinosaurs until today.
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The genes that snakes use to produce venom are the same genes the male platypus uses to produce venom. The genes birds use to produce egg-protein are the same genes the platypus uses to produce egg-protein. The same genes human females use to produce milk, platypus females use to produce milk.

How can you look at a platypus (and at the DNA of a platypus) and say with a straight face that genes don’t mutate and evolve?

What I like most about the scholarship in the sciences is that it continues on regardless of the shrieks of the creationist crowd. Thank God for that. Or maybe not.

During the European “Dark Ages”, the leading scholarship in the world was in the Islamic universities. It was the Muslims who preserved the writings of Plato and Aristotle. The Muslims gave us our foundation in astronomy, math and medicine. But the scholarship of the Muslim world fell into decline. Different reasons are proposed as to how it started, but it seems pretty universally agreed that the decline of scholarship was caused by the rise of religious fervor, intolerance of scholarship, and a blind devotion to Islamic “values”.

There is an argument (I’m not sure that it is taken seriously by many) that Islamic scholarship never fell into decline -- that it is just as vibrant and cutting edge today as it was 1,000 years ago. I suppose anyone who believes that also believes that in 1914 the Ottoman Empire wasn’t the “Sick Old Man of Europe”, but only the “Not-Feeling-Well-At-The-Moment Old Man of Europe.”