RightWingGirl said:
For evidence agaist Evolution;
If Evolution were true, and we have been evolving for roughly the last 3,500 million years, and only in the past 1.6 million years we have had humans (erect), and modern animals in somthing like 250-300 million, and yet we have only a handful of sharply contested "missing links" to make up for 3,200 million years!
3,000 million years, why this large gap, where are the missing 80% of the fossils we should see? I know that few animals reach fossilization, so let us make it 50%. Where are these fossils?
This is the biggest question I have.
I'm a little confused about the numbering system you're using here. It makes me wonder if by chance, you've been given this information by someone else who perhaps doesn't fully understand what they're trying to tell you.
Isn't "3,000 million" what most of us in the U.S. would call, "3 Billion", or are you attempting to avoid the confusion caused by the descrepancy between the U.S. "Billion" and the British "Billion"?
Aside from that, I'm curious as to how anyone determined the number of fossils that "should" be found. It seems this would require not only fairly accurate knowledge of populations of extinct animal species but also the specifics of the environments in which each of them died. Fossilization is actually an extremely rare occurence. Decay is the most common fate of all animal remains and only fails to occur when the remains are locked into an environment either naturally toxic to bacteria or which seals the remains from an exchange of gases necessary to bacterial action.
As has been pointed out, even if we had never found a single fossil, evolution still stands as the best conclusion we have which explains the evidence pertaining to species diversity.
As far as transitional fossils, my question to you would be similar to my question about how many fossils should be found and how that was determined. What transitional fossils do creationists predict should be found that haven't been found? Why is it expected that these "missing links" should be found? I often get the feeling that creationists picture evolutionary process more as a metamorphosis within individual animals than a gradual change across many generations of animals. Lizards don't turn into dogs. Evolution is a process of branching ancestry. While some lizard-like creatures might undergo genetic changes which will, through quantum changes to their offspring, eventually lead their distant offspring closer to a mammalian physiology, others, due to differences in their environments, will remain reptilian. So do creationists believe we should be finding fossilized remains which are half reptile and half mammal? If so, then they clearly do not understand what is stated by the theory of evolution.
Beyond that my question to you concerning transitional fossils takes the form of a simple demonstration. I'm going to suggest to you that the number on the left made a small change and produced the number to its right. Gradually changes to each lead to the next until distant generations became the number on the right. I'm purposely not going to fill in every step to simulate what I think you mean by "missing links", and I'd like you to tell me where the missing links are.
1-1.3-1.31-2.4-2.63917-3.2-3.25-3.6-3.9851-4.01-4.753-4.8821- 5
Can you show me the missing links between 1 and 5?
