Evolutionists still don't know how the archerfish got its amazing abilities. They can only wonder! Viewed through the distortion of evolution, they cannot explain how the archerfish gradually learned to not aim where its eyes see but to aim instead at a different spot where the target actually is.

Without its binocular vision, it could not see the object with such precision, and without the special shape of the upper mouth and a specialized tongue, it could not make the groove it needs to shoot the concentrated jet of water. Many factors have to appear together—and be perfectly formed—for this shooting mechanism to work. This, of course, goes totally against Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory, which is based on a gradual, step-by-step process.

Benchwarming pays off for the archer fish
Christopher R. Brodie

People who throw things for fun or profit—basketball and baseball players, the guy who slings darts at the pub—should respect the archer fish. This species blasts its insect prey out of the sky or off a perch with a quick squirt of water that's accurate up to two meters away (not bad for a fish that averages 25 centimeters in length).

However, these animals start with lousy aim, so they have to acquire the skill over time. What's amazing is that archer fish don't have to rehearse their piscine field goals: They can learn how to hit a fast-moving, flying object by watching another fish do so, according to a paper in the February 21 issue of the journal Current Biology. Imagine a fan who watches a season of hoops on TV, then picks up a basketball and sinks a 40-foot jump shot.

Stefan Schuster and his colleagues at Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg discovered this unusual ability when they set out to study how archer fish hit their prey so accurately. The investigators regularly presented small, stationary targets at various heights to young fish, which became quite good at knocking them down over the course of a year. However, a moving target flummoxed them, even when it was going very slowly (five millimeters per second, or about twice as fast as a speeding snail).

With time and extensive training (hundreds of repetitions), the archer fish got better at hitting targets that moved horizontally at constant speed. This feat requires a tricky bit of neural computation that has to account for several variables: the target speed and direction, the changing angle between observer and target (which determines how much light is bent, or refracted, at the air-water boundary), the time of flight and the effect of gravity. As the fish became proficient, each increase in target height or speed erased most of the previous gains in accuracy until the shooter could adjust its calculations.

Based on this pattern, the investigators were surprised to find that the ballistic solution painstakingly learned and revised for horizontal movements could easily accommodate the addition of a vertical component. For archer fish, it seems, movement in three dimensions isn't any more difficult to follow than movement in two dimensions.

Nonetheless, the German team was unprepared for what happened when they began another round of training with a group of five fish unfamiliar with the moving-target game. This trial must have seemed like a busted experiment at first, as the dominant member of the group hogged all the shots and wouldn't let his subordinates line up for even a single attempt at the target. As expected, the one performing fish had learned its skills just fine by the end of training. But when Schuster's team removed the varsity player, the benchwarmers—fish that had previously failed to hit even the lowest, slowest targets and hadn't taken a single shot during the practice sessions—showed nearly the same ballistic prowess as their former leader.

One possible explanation was that the nondominant fish figured out all the angles simply by watching the target while the alpha trained. But in a control group without a dominant fish (experimenters played the same role by nudging the others out of firing position during the training), the spectators performed just like spectators, with dismal hit rates. In other words, the naive fish had to learn by watching a successful group member, and this observation apparently told them all they needed to know about refraction, target speed, rise time and gravity effects.

Archer fish don't have impressive neural hardware to process all this information; like other fish, they have a primitive cerebrum, so the means of performing these computations must already exist in simple nervous systems. At present, Schuster's team is working to identify the neuroanatomical circuits, but he doesn't expect to find distinctive features. The major goal is to "get [our] hands on how a defined network performs in a cognitive task," he says.

His success could be something of a breakthrough: Computational neuroscientists have spent decades figuring out how animals learn new motor skills, and most of their models use some kind of feedback routine that tries to minimize error with each new repetition—what engineers call a "closed-loop" design. But shots from the archer fish are "open-loop"—they don't involve continuous feedback. "That's what I find most challenging," says Schuster, "the fact that [the task] can be done extremely fast and with remarkable precision without adhering to traditional closed-loop design. We hope very much to convince researchers in robotics that much speed can be saved by implementing predictive (or ballistic) shortcuts in the motor guidance of autonomous robots."

Fish aren't particularly smart, but archer fish do seem to have a fairly sophisticated cognitive ability to generalize from one set of circumstances to another and to make predictions based on that general knowledge. They clearly acquire this skill more efficiently than we humans figure out how to swish a three-point shot or to throw a wicked curveball. Can we learn from the fish? Well, Dr. J is a Pisces. And Adrian Dantley, Charles Barkley and Shaquille O'Neal are too. So I guess the answer is yes.

Originally posted by StarlightAngel:
Fish aren't particularly smart, but archer fish do seem to have a fairly sophisticated cognitive ability to generalize from one set of circumstances to another and to make predictions based on that general knowledge.

Sure, I've read Darwin's fictional 'accounts' so-called 'facts' and his pet theories. Miracles too numerous to count. Random this, random that, it explains mothing.

Originally posted by StarlightAngel:
i am sure even the staunchest creationist has no problem accepting evolution when he/she needs a new antibiotic.

Originally posted by lightning(creation scientist):

Quote:

Originally posted by StarlightAngel:
i am sure even the staunchest creationist has no problem accepting evolution when he/she needs a new antibiotic.

hi starlight! yes, god's plan is awesome, even for you!

Originally posted by Paulwa:
Evolution as a theory is a dying breed. Hanging itself by its own rope! Just keep watching as evolution believers keep falling from that atheistic vine grown by Lucifer himself to deceive mankind.
Yep it's me..poor ole stupid Paul, but my King, Jesus the son of God will be here soon to explain it all to you. And there will be peace in this old world and happiness for all to learn of their creator. It's going to be a grand millenium when He comes to rule this old world and clean it up of sin, crime and sickness. Thank God His day is very near. Weather, earthquakes and sin will nearly do us all in before He does though. Well technically believers won't go through all this..the rapture remember? But then it is only seven years before we return with Him and go to work on this place. It is going to be great!!!
Paul

Originally posted by Paulwa:
You are right Gimpy, no man knows the day nor the hour, but Jesus says and commands us to recognize the season of His return. It's there in the bible for anyone to read.

By the way the rapture was looked for in the first 100 years after Jesus death on the cross. Darby in 1800's was a very late comer to recognize that the rapture is a fact Jesus preached and was better explained by the Apostle Paul...well gotta go for today guys...wifey is calling.
Paul