You've Probably Seen a Fish with Lungs in Person

essentialsaltes

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"If any", meaning, all may not even have ancestors or descendants, makes it clear the comment "all species are transitional" ,is not correct after all. They have to have ancestors in order to be transitional.

You have misconstrued my meaning. My "(if any)" only applies to descendants.
 
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d taylor

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What do you mean by "as is?" How else is there to take it?
Take the Bible as the verse accounts are given in the Bible. Unless The Bible itself indicates that they should not. God created Adam from the the dust of the ground
And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

There is no reason from the Bible that this account given should not be taken as stated, as with all other Bible accounts.

The reasons come from outside sources (sin full man). That way makes man the decider of truth.
 
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Speedwell

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Take the Bible as the verse accounts are given in the Bible. Unless The Bible itself indicates that they should not. God created Adam from the the dust of the ground
And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

There is no reason from the Bible that this account given should not be taken as stated, as with all other Bible accounts.

The reasons come from outside sources (sin full man). That way makes man the decider of truth.
Except that "taken as stated" the Garden story is clearly an etiology. If you want to take it as 100% accurate literal history as well you are free to do so, but no essential point of Christian doctrine depends on it and your opinion in the matter is not normative for other Christians.
 
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PsychoSarah

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Fact is, Skippy there may already be as equal to other animals in terms of the ability to survive, so he needs no evolution to help him with that. Though he can get caught on land, and make the same deadly mistakes any animal can, he has the ability to hide on both land and water, as well as to move to places the fish cannot, in search of food, or another puddle in case of drought, when his puddle dries out.

Not to mention he can spit water in his predators face, and while they're doing the whole "Ewww!" thing, he's outta' there. :D

On a side note, one might think the same of a lung fish by the way they look and the fact they may seem pretty helpless, and in need of the help of evolution, when they are far from it. They can live 5yrs underground without food or water, where they can out live many other type animals in certain types of disasters, including some of their own predators.

Animals survive or not because of how they were made, and not because they made themselves survivable via evolution.
Problem is, there's no actual reason to make all these escape related traits for a mudskipper or catching traits for a monitor lizard if they were created. Just make the prey meet the minimum necessary to consistently get food for themselves, and make the predator slightly faster.

If you want to argue that the prey MUST escape some times in order to maintain population balance, I'm sorry to say that it doesn't work anyways. It's fairly common for predators to consume so much of the animals they prey upon that it results in a food shortage followed by mass starvation.

Plus, for Biblical literalists that believe modern carnivores were herbivores before the fall of Adam and Eve, the predator-prey relationships we observe make even less sense.

Also, organisms don't voluntarily participate in evolution, by definition (species influenced by selective breeding by humans, such as dogs, are altered via artificial selection rather than natural selection). It's simply something that happens to them. Faster rabbits are more likely to survive and pass down that trait to offspring, and over time that makes successive generations faster than the ones that preceded them. The increase over generations generally stops once increasing that trait ceases to be of further benefit (it expends too much energy, for example). Which is part of why organisms don't just get continuously stronger or larger over generations indefinitely.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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You have misconstrued my meaning. My "(if any)" only applies to descendants.
Of course, there will always be descendants, speciation being an arbitrary point we identify on a continuum of population change. How could we identify a species whose first generation was also its last?
 
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essentialsaltes

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Of course, there will always be descendants, speciation being an arbitrary point we identify on a continuum of population change. How could we identify a species whose first generation was also its last?

In the case of extinction, there are no descendants.
 
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Speedwell

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Well, no. This is where I again caution with the use of the term "transitional". If we specifically use the term transitional to refer to intermediaries between taxa then by definition not everything can be transitional.
I see your point. But I don't believe that there is any such thing as "intermediaries between taxa." I think the point is that taxa are not pre-existing categories into which creatures evolve. There is no "gap" which evolving creatures have to "jump" with a special form called a "transitional." Just gradual divergence of morphology.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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In the case of extinction, there are no descendants.
No descendant species. The point is simply that populations are in constant genetic transition. It doesn't really matter - it was a response in kind (pun!) to Kenny's tedious semantic quibbling.
 
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USincognito

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True the Bible has nothing to do with evolution...

Good...

..because evolution does not exist.

How would you know? You rant and rave about it, but you never actually discuss it nor any of the evidence for it to ostensibly show that it's not really evidence.
 
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Kenny'sID

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Problem is, there's no actual reason to make all these escape related traits for a mudskipper or catching traits for a monitor lizard if they were created. Just make the prey meet the minimum necessary to consistently get food for themselves, and make the predator slightly faster.

My point was mainly:

Fact is, Skippy there may already be as equal to other animals in terms of the ability to survive, so he needs no evolution to help him with that.

The escape traits/other comments, were merely some examples, but as far as not needing them goes, that my seem right to us, but I'll have to give the creator the benefit of the doubt on what was actually needed, and what was not.

Plus, for Biblical literalists that believe modern carnivores were herbivores before the fall of Adam and Eve, the predator-prey relationships we observe make even less sense.

I don't believe that necessarily...never gave it that much thought. But, once again, I have a tendency to give someone who can do things I cant even imagine doing, the credit for doing it right, regardless of how it may appear to me.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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If a species goes extinct, there are no descendant individuals either, afterwards.
True; but speciation requires a population of individuals to be sufficiently different from the ancestor species; unless you immediately exterminate the population at the point of speciation, there will be descendant individuals; one might even argue that you need a few generations to confirm speciation...

When you discover an unknown species at, or close to, the point of its extinction (e.g. fossils at the K-T boundary, or the last individuals of an unknown extant species), you've almost certainly found a species that has changed (transitioned) somewhat since its speciation, but you may not be able to say when that speciation occurred. In both situations, you typically have very few individuals to assess, and for fossils, little chance of genetic analysis.

But, as I said, it's really a semantic argument that depends on the particular definition of (or criteria for) 'species' and 'speciation'.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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My point was mainly:
Fact is, Skippy there may already be as equal to other animals in terms of the ability to survive, so he needs no evolution to help him with that.
The escape traits/other comments, were merely some examples, but as far as not needing them goes, that my seem right to us, but I'll have to give the creator the benefit of the doubt on what was actually needed, and what was not.
Evolution isn't a question of need, it happens in populations that have no selection pressures at all (e.g. via genetic drift). But typically, there are selection pressures - some individuals will be better adapted, producing more viable offspring than others; the environment may be changing, and predators compete to become more efficient & effective. This will select for the creatures best able to reproduce under those pressures, so evolution will occur.
 
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Kenny'sID

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Evolution isn't a question of need, it happens in populations that have no selection pressures at all (e.g. via genetic drift). But typically, there are selection pressures - some individuals will be better adapted, producing more viable offspring than others; the environment may be changing, and predators compete to become more efficient & effective. This will select for the creatures best able to reproduce under those pressures, so evolution will occur.

If you'll look closely you'll see I was only humoring the OP, and had no other real point other than, how you say? Goddidit? So though I think you are both sincere in what you believe, It's all moot to me because there is no evolution....never has been, never will be.
 
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Speedwell

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If you'll look closely you'll see I was only humoring the OP, and had no other real point other than, how you say? Goddidit? So though I think you are both sincere in what you believe, It's all moot to me because there is no evolution....never has been, never will be.
Many of us who accept evolution have no problem with "Goddidit." This is all about the Bible, not the existence of God.
 
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Speedwell

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Let's just say, i got the idea an Atheist would have a problem with it.
You evidently don't understand atheists very well. They don't care very much whether you believe in God or not. It's that you deny science which concerns them. The existence of God does not deny science.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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If you'll look closely you'll see I was only humoring the OP, and had no other real point other than, how you say? Goddidit? So though I think you are both sincere in what you believe, It's all moot to me because there is no evolution....never has been, never will be.
Evolution has been observed countless times in the lab and in the wild. It's fact. You can dispute the ToE, but changes in the heritable characteristics of populations over successive generations are demonstrable.
 
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