I know there are many stories in the Bible that don’t jive with science and I was just wondering if this was one of those stories.
TIA. : )
The Bible doesn’t specifically say that snakes had feet before the Fall of Man, though some people may feel it implies such.
Genesis 3:14, the scripture in question.
Mark my words, this will end up in GD. 
Ahhh…that wasn’t my intention, sorry.
But thanks for the link. As an adult, I just have my Sunday School memories to go on and every once in a while I find there are some things that need clearing up, lol.
I think there’s some evidence that snakes are descended from lizard-like reptiles that had legs, but I’m pretty sure the evidence will be found to point strongly AWAY from this happening while the human race has been around.
Not sure if there’s any evidence of snakes talking - I suspect not.
Snakes have evolved from lizards which had legs. (In fact, they are nothing more than a kind of legless lizard.) Pythons and boas still have vestigial leg and pelvic bones.
There is no scientific support for the biblical statement that snakes “eat dust,” however.
No need to apologise Sarah, it’s a good question. I just see so many Biblical questions without a real clear cut answer available, leading to debate about the actual passage means.
Besides, the are many who feel that early Genesis is just metaphor, so the event (the curse) in 3:14 may not have been meant to be literal.
As always, with the Bible, ymmv.
[QUOTE[Snakes have evolved from lizards which had legs. (In fact, they are nothing more than a kind of legless lizard.) Pythons and boas still have vestigial leg and pelvic bones.[/QUOTE]
I wouldn’t say that that is entirely accurate. Snakes evolved from a legged squamate ancestor. The boid lineage is fairly primitive; colubrids and elapids show very little sign of a girdle.
I think that this is an English only forum .
So what’s a “legged squamate ancestor,” other than a lizard (in popular parlance)? Or perhaps you object to the word “lizard” because it’s a parphyletic group?
Yes, cladistically speaking, snakes are generally now believed to be nested within the other Squamata. “Lizards” as a group are paraphyletic, unless snakes are included within them. However, if we may refer to any extant legged squamates as “lizards,” then there is no real reason not to refer to the snakes’ legged ancestors as such as well.
This cladogram for the Squamata shows that the Iguania (containing iguanid lizards, etc.) are the sister-group to the Scleroglossa, which includes various other lizard groups as well as the snakes.
I’m not sure what your point about elapids and colubrids is.
I have no zoological background, just slightly above average experience with herpatology, so excuse the dumbness of this, but if snakes are simply lizards without legs, then what seperates them from true legless lizards?
I don’t use cladistic taxonomy.
Snakes did not evolve from “lizards” as we know them, any more than we evolved from “monkeys.” IMHO. Whether or not the squamates were “lizards” as we know them (i.e order Sauria,) with snakes being a more recent split, I’m not sure. As for the colubrids, I was just making the point that boids do have girdles, but that Elapidae and Colubridae don’t.
subOrder Sauria.
The answer is “No”. (AFAIK)
There is scientific evidence to support the thesis that snakes evolved from legged creatures. There is not, AFAIK, any scientific evidence to support the Biblical story. The distinction is crucial: evidence that supports giant lizardlike creatures does NOT support Chinese stories involving dragons - if the dialogue and events of the story aren’t supported, the “story” isn’t. Other Stories might be.
I keep peppering my remarks with AFAIK because I know that I can’t logically prove a negative (and I’m sure that someone could twist some data into evidentiary support of the Biblical story), but I am quite secure that the overwhelming consensus of herpetologists is that here is no direct scientific evidence that “the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou [art] cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life” – even if they believe it to be true. What scientific evidence do we have of any remarks by God? Further, no serious evidence limits snake evolution to the time frame of human history.
Lack of an ear, structure of belly scales. And other details of skull, tooth, and eye structure.
Add lack of eyelids and a very distinctive jaw structure significantly different from any lizard’s jaw. (FWIW, no known reptile is known to have had a pinna, “ear” in the sense of “He cut off his ear” or “Beagles have floppy ears,” but lizards have functional middle and inner ears and a miniscule exterior opening.)
Ilsa, your technical distinction is accurate – but traditional usage says that a quadrupedal member of Order Squamata is a “lizard” and an apodal member is a “snake” (even though there are limbless lizards), so the statement that “snakes evolved from lizards” is accurate in that quadrupedal squamates gave rise to the Serpentes. (Sauria is paraphyletic, by the way; there is no “ancestor of the lizards,” taking all members of Sauria into account, that is not also an ancestor of the snakes.)
I do not have data at hand, but I believe there is clear anatomical and biochemical/genetic evidence that all families of snakes share a common ancestry, with the boids being the group that preserves the most primitive characteristics and the colubrids the most specialized.
But, as noted, this merely means that Genesis hit this one right in terms of evolutionary sequence, not that there is scientific evidence of God having condemned all snakes in retribution for a serpent’s role in leading Eve to sin.
Not to be too blunt, but I get the distinct feeling you are trying to dazzle me with bullshit. I will soon have a PhD in this, you know. It is a bit pedantic to quibble on the parahpyly of a suborder; as no one really uses them anyway.
Well, duh; not to put too fine a point on it. That was my point to begin with.
Colibri, you intrigue me. What is your story?
In addition, Sauria is paraphyletic in that it does not include all taxa derived from the common Squamate ancestor. The only constituent taxa it includes are the “lizards.” Hence the uselessness of the suborders Sauria and Serpentes to begin with. This is where cladistics comes in handy.
I’m guessing Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids, but I could be wrong.
Eh? I thought you just said you weren’t a cladist? And if you consider suborder Sauria/Lacertilia “useless”, then why quibble over the term “lizard”?
Anyway you’ll find plenty of standard references like Colbert and Morales’ Evolution of the Vertebrates:A History of Backboned Animals Through Time ( 4th ed., 1991, Wiley-Liss, Inc. ), quite explicitly ( if briefly ) saying that snakes arose from lizard ancestors. Of course they are considering the earliest “lizards” to be genera like Paliguana and Saurosternon from the upper Permian or lower Triassic, which most workers wouldn’t include in the modern Squamata. But the earliest squamates seem to arise by the mid-Jurassic, earlier than any known snake fossil, making the possibility of a squamate origin not at all unlikely ( whether it be from marine platynotan lizards like Mosasaurs or some terrestrial critter ).
Perhaps use of the word “lizard-like” would be an acceptable compromise?
- Tamerlane
It may (or may not) be worth noting that the cladistic version of Sauria is rather different from the Linnaean version. The Linnaean suborder lies within the order Squamata, and consists of some 26 families of various “lizards”.
The cladistic Sauria lies much further back in the reptilian Family Tree, being somewhat synonymous with “diapsid”, and consists of the most recent common ancestor of the groups Lepidosauromorpha (which in turn contains most of the various extinct marine reptiles [specifically, the ichthyosaurs are excluded; Icthyosauria is a sister clade to this version of Sauria], as well as all of Squamata [which, of course, also includes all true lizards and all snakes]) and Archosauromorpha (which contains all the croco-critters, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, birds, and so on), and all its descendents.
The (as far as I know) unnamed node which unites Amphisabaena, Gekkota, Scincomorpha and Anguimorpha would be the closest cladistic version of the Linnaean suborder Sauria, I believe.
As for the “lizard” bit, lizard works (for me) as a general descriptor of morphology, rather than having to be a name for any actual clade. Kinda like “rat” works for any number of generic, rat-like early mammals 