Are there transitional fossils?

[Justatruthseeker]

There goes this thread.

You are about 10 pages too late when they posted their definition of species and then totally ignored it....

 

[Justatruthseeker]

its just geting worse:

Ancient whale jawbone found in Antarctica

if its true then the first whale appeared before its suppose ancestors (again like the tiktaalik example).

I still cant get over the fact that every form is set in appearance from the first to the last. They cant find one single common ancestor, draw lines from these set forms to this assumed common ancestor that can never be found, then call it established fact. Ridiculous the state these people have let science de-evolve to. But you cant falsify it because they ignore their scientific definitions, claim punctuated equilibrium one day and gradual evolution the next. There are at least 20 different theories of evolution, so its really a lost cause as you show one claim to be wrong and they switch to another then switch right back to the one you just showed wrong....

 

[mark kennedy]

You are about 10 pages too late when they posted their definition of species and then totally ignored it....

The definition of species can be a bit ambiquise, the rule of thumb is that speciation occurs when two species can no longer interbreed. Now there are exceptions, there can be distinct species that can still interbreed, Polar Bears and Grizzlies or Troglodytes and Bonobos for instance.

 

[Justatruthseeker]

No, I do not believe Eohippus was an ancient member of the horse species. It was about 18" high, had four long toes with small hoofs on each front leg, and three on each back leg. It browsed on leaves. It was by no means a horse or zebra (Equus). It was in the same family as a horse. That does not make it a horse, any more than being in the same family as your kids makes you your kids.

Neither do I, but its your imaginary picture....

There was, for instance, no constant and overall increase in size... The feet did not steadily change from four toes to three and then to one... Each is distinct from the first to the last.... Your imaginary lines are still drawn to imaginary ancestors.

As Simpson admitted in an article appearing some years ago in the magazine Natural History, "The description of Owen would not seem amiss if our mental image of Hyracotherium were not so colored by later knowledge [?] that it was ancestral to the horse." ("Resurrection of the Dawn Horse," George Gaylord Simpson, Natural History. November, 1940.)
Any paleontologist wanting to preserve his professional status would never have considered Hyracotherium or Eohippus a horse in 1839. They all called it exactly what it was.
"When in 1839 part of a skull was found... in London days, even the most eminent paleontologists of the day little suspected that the 'Eohippus' belonged to the horse family... in fact Sir Richard Owen named its genus Hyracotherium... when he compared it with conies (hyrax), pigs and rodents." (Time, Life and Man, R. A. Stirton, p. 465.)


"[Steven] Gould [of Harvard] and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least 'show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.' I will lay it on the line--there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record . . It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test." *Colin Patterson, letter dated April 10, 1979 to Luther Sunderland, quoted in L. D. Sunderland, Darwin's Enigma, p. 89.

It sure looks like a transitional.

Everything looks transitional to evolutionists, even if every fossil ever found is the same from the first to the last.....

Look again. There is a whole series of creatures, leading from land animals to whales.

Each distinct in the fossil record from the first to the last. With only imaginary lines drawn to imaginary ancestors supporting your imaginary links.

First, please open your eyes and read the explanation I have posted many times. Do you care to actually respond to the actual argument about cousins of ancestors?

And yet our cousins are the same species...... even the same species as their ancestors.

 

[mark kennedy]

And yet our cousins are the same species...... even the same species as their ancestors.

That makes very little sense, it's classic equivocation.

 

[Justatruthseeker]

The definition of species can be a bit ambiquise, the rule of thumb is that speciation occurs when two species can no longer interbreed. Now there are exceptions, there can be distinct species that can still interbreed, Polar Bears and Grizzlies or Troglodytes and Bonobos for instance.

No, because if they are interbreeding it is simply a mistake in classification classifying them as separate species before they discovered they could interbreed... Like Darwin did with finches... like biologists did with bears... etc, etc, etc....

Biological species concept - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The biological species concept gives an explanation of how species form (speciation). A biological species is a group of individuals that can breed together (panmixia). However, they cannot breed with other groups. In other words, the group is reproductively isolated from other groups."

So if you believe Polar Bears and Grizzly Bears are separate species.... you would be wrong. But then they classified them as separate species when they believed they could not interbreed.

Definition of SPECIES

"comprising related organisms or populations potentially capable of interbreeding"

Species - Biology-Online Dictionary

"In order to be considered into a species rank, the group of organisms wherein two of its members are capable of reproducing fertile offspring (especially through sexual reproduction). There are certain groups though that can still be further subdivided into subgroups (i.e. subspecies, such as varieties, formae, etc.)."

species Definition in the Cambridge English Dictionary

"biology a set of animals or plants, members of which have similar characteristics to each other and which can breed with each other"

Defining a species

"A species is often defined as a group of individuals that actually or potentially interbreed in nature. In this sense, a species is the biggest gene pool possible under natural conditions.

For example, these happy face spiders look different, but since they can interbreed, they are considered the same species: Theridion grallator."

"...So we meet again: When another storm reintroduces the island flies to the mainland, they will not readily mate with the mainland flies since they've evolved different courtship behaviors. The few that do mate with the mainland flies, produce inviable eggs because of other genetic differences between the two populations. The lineage has split now that genes cannot flow between the populations...."

species | Learn Science at Scitable

There is not two species hybridizing, because if they mate they are one species. Simply error in the classification of them as separate species that has never been corrected when finally discovered they could interbreed.

As I said before, evolution is error after uncorrected error after uncorrected error.

 

[mark kennedy]

No, because if they are interbreeding it is simply a mistake in classification classifying them as separate species before they discovered they could interbreed... Like Darwin did with finches... like biologists did with bears... etc, etc, etc....

Biological species concept - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The biological species concept gives an explanation of how species form (speciation). A biological species is a group of individuals that can breed together (panmixia). However, they cannot breed with other groups. In other words, the group is reproductively isolated from other groups."

So if you believe Polar Bears and Grizzly Bears are separate species.... you would be wrong. But then they classified them as separate species when they believed they could not interbreed.

Definition of SPECIES

"comprising related organisms or populations potentially capable of interbreeding"

Species - Biology-Online Dictionary

"In order to be considered into a species rank, the group of organisms wherein two of its members are capable of reproducing fertile offspring (especially through sexual reproduction). There are certain groups though that can still be further subdivided into subgroups (i.e. subspecies, such as varieties, formae, etc.)."

species Definition in the Cambridge English Dictionary

"biology a set of animals or plants, members of which have similar characteristics to each other and which can breed with each other"

Defining a species

"A species is often defined as a group of individuals that actually or potentially interbreed in nature. In this sense, a species is the biggest gene pool possible under natural conditions.

For example, these happy face spiders look different, but since they can interbreed, they are considered the same species: Theridion grallator."

"...So we meet again: When another storm reintroduces the island flies to the mainland, they will not readily mate with the mainland flies since they've evolved different courtship behaviors. The few that do mate with the mainland flies, produce inviable eggs because of other genetic differences between the two populations. The lineage has split now that genes cannot flow between the populations...."

species | Learn Science at Scitable

There is not two species hybridizing, because if they mate they are one species. Simply error in the classification of them as separate species that has never been corrected when finally discovered they could interbreed.

As I said before, evolution is error after uncorrected error after uncorrected error.

Evolution is the change of traits over time, it's a phenomenon in nature, nothing more. Distinctly different species can interbreed in certain instances but the rule of thumb is that species do not interbreed with other species.

 

[PsychoSarah]

Evolution is the change of traits over time, it's a phenomenon in nature, nothing more. Distinctly different species can interbreed in certain instances but the rule of thumb is that species do not interbreed with other species.

Might be a rule of thumb, but nature doesn't like to play by our rules. There are tons of situations in which Species A and Species B interbreed, Species B and Species C interbreed, but Species A and C cannot interbreed. You can't qualify all 3 populations as the same species, since not all of them can interbreed, so they end up as being classified as different species. Furthermore, it is also a matter of long term reproductive ability. Nepenthes (tropical pitcher plants) species can interbreed across the board (hundreds of crosses, I know of no two species that cannot produce offspring together). There are quite a few natural hybrids of the species that grow in close proximity. However, eventually, continued hybridization loses species traits, and future offspring will not be fertile if they are not back-crossed with a parent species. Although reduced fertility begins to be very noticeable in plants with 4 different species in their lineage, first generation hybrids can be infertile in rare cases. Hence the many species in which any of the same genus can interbreed.

Furthermore, barriers to reproduction must be considered. Two bird species that might occasionally interbreed will never fully establish genetic drift between their populations. Species of birds may only rarely interbreed with closely related species due to differences in mating season, mating ritual (do males have a "dance", etc.), and sexual selection (one species might have a red spot, which females of that species find attractive, that males of the other species lack entirely).

Even stranger situations may exist: there are no modern humans that share mitochondrial DNA with Neanderthals, yet their are modern humans with traces of Neanderthal sequences in their nucleic DNA. Since mitochondrial DNA is practically exclusively inherited from female parents, this suggests that crosses between Neanderthals and humans in which the Neanderthal was female were infertile, but crosses in which the Neanderthal was male were fertile. That, or all offspring of this cross that were fertile were exclusively male. Which reminds me, a very small portion of female donkeys (never the males) are fertile.

 

[Justatruthseeker]

Evolution is the change of traits over time, it's a phenomenon in nature, nothing more. Distinctly different species can interbreed in certain instances but the rule of thumb is that species do not interbreed with other species.

Might be a rule of thumb, but nature doesn't like to play by our rules. There are tons of situations in which Species A and Species B interbreed, Species B and Species C interbreed, but Species A and C cannot interbreed. You can't qualify all 3 populations as the same species, since not all of them can interbreed, so they end up as being classified as different species. Furthermore, it is also a matter of long term reproductive ability. Nepenthes (tropical pitcher plants) species can interbreed across the board (hundreds of crosses, I know of no two species that cannot produce offspring together). There are quite a few natural hybrids of the species that grow in close proximity. However, eventually, continued hybridization loses species traits, and future offspring will not be fertile if they are not back-crossed with a parent species. Although reduced fertility begins to be very noticeable in plants with 4 different species in their lineage, first generation hybrids can be infertile in rare cases. Hence the many species in which any of the same genus can interbreed.

Furthermore, barriers to reproduction must be considered. Two bird species that might occasionally interbreed will never fully establish genetic drift between their populations. Species of birds may only rarely interbreed with closely related species due to differences in mating season, mating ritual (do males have a "dance", etc.), and sexual selection (one species might have a red spot, which females of that species find attractive, that males of the other species lack entirely).

Even stranger situations may exist: there are no modern humans that share mitochondrial DNA with Neanderthals, yet their are modern humans with traces of Neanderthal sequences in their nucleic DNA. Since mitochondrial DNA is practically exclusively inherited from female parents, this suggests that crosses between Neanderthals and humans in which the Neanderthal was female were infertile, but crosses in which the Neanderthal was male were fertile. That, or all offspring of this cross that were fertile were exclusively male. Which reminds me, a very small portion of female donkeys (never the males) are fertile.

There is not a single instance when separate species interbred with another species, except incorrectly classifying those subspecies as separate species. Finches are not separate species, they are subspecies of the same species, which is why they can interbreed. They are so closely related because they are in fact one species.

If they would correct their classifications then there would not be a single instance of separate species mating. The second two animals interbreed, or even have the possibility of interbreeding, they are one species.

You all just keep arguing semantics while ignoring the scientific definitions.

 

[Justatruthseeker]

Where are you getting this? The actual number is around 6 trillion.

Each person has 23 pairs of chromosomes. For each of his father's 23 pairs, each person gets one or the other of the pair. For each of his mother's 23 pairs, each person gets one of each pair. Those 46 combine to make 23 chromosomes for the offspring. That is 2^46 combinations, about 7 trillion.

If you begin with one pair of dogs, then all you have is 2 chromosomes at each site for the male and 2 for the female. That really doesn't give much room for variation on any given trait.

Oh, now all of a sudden you want to ignore alleles and the innumerable combinations available in which they can be written. Isn't it evolutionists that are claiming a change in alleles can change characteristics of the offspring? Just a sad, sad attempt at rationalizing it in your own mind.....

 

[mark kennedy]

There is not a single instance when separate species interbred with another species,

There are at least two, definitely capable of interbreeding.

except incorrectly classifying those subspecies as separate species. Finches are not separate species, they are subspecies of the same species, which is why they can interbreed. They are so closely related because they are in fact one species.

If they would correct their classifications then there would not be a single instance of separate species mating. The second two animals interbreed, or even have the possibility of interbreeding, they are one species.

You all just keep arguing semantics while ignoring the scientific definitions.

Then define it and move on.

 

[doubtingmerle]

not really since your calculations based upon decay rates dont take into account time dilation. So that you are off by a few thousand years in the recent past and hundreds of millions to billions in the far past is not surprising.

Uh no, the records of the ancient Chinese are not skewed by any time dilation. They are based on actual historical records, and they show that Chinese history went right up through the supposed date of the global flood with nobody noticing. See Noah's Flood .

 

[doubtingmerle]

i actually refer to this one:

Ferrari Evolution

now, base on your argument- we now need to conclude that those cars evolved from each other? of course not. so the same can be said to the fossils case: we cant conclude any evolution.

Again it can be seen that the pheonotype of animals progressed with time, and it can be inferred that the DNA also progressed as the phenotype progressed. Knowing what we know today about DNA and changes of animals, the most likely explanation for why the DNA and the phenotype advanced with time is that the animals evolved. Add on top of that all the other evidence for evolution, and we have a convincing case.

You turn to car evolution, which is analogous. When things are analogous, not every aspect of the analogy matches reality.

In cars, drawings are analogous to the DNA. Drawings of the Ferrari did indeed evolve with time, as engineers copied the old drawings with modifications to make new drawings for new models.

And in cars, factories are analogous to mothers. And the factories (mothers) of the Ferrari did evolve with time, as incremental changes were made to the factories that produced each year's model.

So in many ways the evolution of the Ferrari is analogous to the evolution of the horse. But cars made of metal do not give birth to other cars made of metal. That seems to be your whole point: that you have found a series of things made of metal that do not give birth to things made of metal. Of course not! But the designs, the drawings (analogous to DNA), and the factories (analogous to mothers) literally did evolve with time.

 

[doubtingmerle]

so basically a spinning motor isnt evidence for design according to this.

It depends on the spinning motor. Some are designed, some maybe not.

but we actually do know that a car or a robot or a motor are evidence for design.

It depends on the spinning motor. Some are designed, some maybe not.

 

[doubtingmerle]

Ok, at the end of the Cambrian explosion (wont ask you for the beginning, please show me any forms that exists in the layer afterwards found in that layer? I cant prove it to you since they dont exist...

Each layer contains only distinct forms not found in the layers above except thos that survived - as listed above, and those found in the upper layers are not found in the layer below.

Trilobites thrived in the Cambrian and continued on beyond the Ordovician. That disproves your claim that all Cambrian life was wiped out at the end of the Cambrian. Your simple picture even shows Trilobites in the Ordovician.

It's why evolutionists invented “punctuated equilibrium.”

Uh no, Punk Eek has nothing to do with explaining why all Cambrian life got wiped out before the Ordovician. After all, we can see that it never happened.

What evidence would it leave? Not a sharp demarcation line as all the other extinctions and creation of new life. The life that existed before the flood was brought through it, so no change in creatures would be seen in the sedimentary layers.

Oh for instance, a global flood would leave a global layer of debris, with the largest and heaviest rocks at the bottom gradiating up to smaller and lighter objects and finer particles at the top of the pile. We find plenty of evidence of local floods, but nothing of a global flood.

And the oceans basins would show a layer of terrestrial debris.

you know for a fact that over 100 dogs came from just a couple wolves.......

Oh, puhleeeze. I have been emphatic in saying that dogs derived from many wolves and wild dogs that contributed to the modern dog genome. I have been emphatic in saying it was not just 2 dogs that were the parents of all dogs. It was probably thousands of them that contributed genes. I actually have been saying the exact opposite of what you claim I am saying.

Regrowth on Mount St Helens 07-31-2011

So much for that timeline theory of new growth.....

35 years after Mount St. Helens eruption, nature returns

From your article:

"The initial impression was that nothing or few things would survive," Crisafulli recalled. "It looked like everything had been destroyed, that all vestiges of life had been snuffed out."

But on the ground, he saw the first signs of life. Ants scurried about and pocket gophers dug through the ash, burrowing in search of food. Fallen trees provided homes for insects and infused much-needed nutrients into the parched system. Further up the mountain, many alpine lakes and their aquatic systems came away unscathed because they had been protected from the ash by ice and snow.​

Fallen trees, ants, gophers, and topsoil? There is life and fertile soil from day one. That is not what you would have had after a global flood.

After a global year-long flood, the soil would have been saturated in salt. How could anything grow on that?

How could plant life possibly get re-established? Even if Noah had saved seeds and the soil was somehow undamaged, how can all those plants get established with 2 each of every plant eater on earth hungry for a meal? They would gobble up every blade of grass or start of a tree as soon as it started to come up.

Earth may have underground 'ocean' three times that on surface
and so much for that belief too. But you never understood what breaking open the fountains of the deep meant. The Bible writers knew of that water thousands of years before scientists finally got around to looking.

Uh, how hot would this water be that is 400 miles below the earth's surface? Had enough of this come up to cover the earth, Noah would have vaporized.

For more on the problems with a global flood, see Problems with a Global Flood, 2nd edition .

 

[doubtingmerle]

I still cant get over the fact that every form is set in appearance from the first to the last.

That's odd, because when I look at horse evolution, I see major changes in form from first to last. Want me to post the pictures again?

They cant find one single common ancestor, draw lines from these set forms to this assumed common ancestor that can never be found, then call it established fact. Ridiculous the state these people have let science de-evolve to.

[Sarcasm]
My Dentist can't tell me how many molecules are in my teeth. Ridiculous the state these Dentists have let their profession devolve.

My Family Doctor can't tell me how many hairs are on my head. Ridiculous the state these Doctors have let their profession devolve.
[/Sarcasm]

Every profession has known unknowns. Geologists know they cannot differentiate clearly which species an Eohippus is from. But they can identify fossils as being of the Eohippus genus, and can identify that either this genus or something closely related was the ancestor of the horse and zebra. And that tells us a lot.

You complain that there are known unknowns, while ignoring the known knowns.

 

[doubtingmerle]

Neither do I, but its your imaginary picture....

Wow, previously you had said Eohippus was a member of the horse species. Now you appear to be agreeing with me that Eohippus was not an ancient member of the horse species.

So since Eohippus is not a horse, but looks very much like Orohippus, which looks very much like the next fossil in the series, and so on up to the top of the series, where we finally reach a fossil that looks very much like the horse and zebra, how can Eohippus not be classed a transitional?

There was, for instance, no constant and overall increase in size... The feet did not steadily change from four toes to three and then to one... Each is distinct from the first to the last.

Nobody said the rates of change of all features were constant. Evolution varied randomly in different directions, eventually reaching the horse and zebra.

As Simpson admitted in an article appearing some years ago in the magazine Natural History, "The description of Owen would not seem amiss if our mental image of Hyracotherium were not so colored by later knowledge [?] that it was ancestral to the horse." ("Resurrection of the Dawn Horse," George Gaylord Simpson, Natural History. November, 1940.)
Any paleontologist wanting to preserve his professional status would never have considered Hyracotherium or Eohippus a horse in 1839. They all called it exactly what it was.
"When in 1839 part of a skull was found... in London days, even the most eminent paleontologists of the day little suspected that the 'Eohippus' belonged to the horse family... in fact Sir Richard Owen named its genus Hyracotherium... when he compared it with conies (hyrax), pigs and rodents." (Time, Life and Man, R. A. Stirton, p. 465.)

Right, if we all have is Hyracotherium or Eohippus, they do not look like a horse. And yet somehow, just several posts back, you said the Eohippus was a member of the horse species.

Eohippus was not a horse (in the horse species) but when we get all the fossils, then Eohippus can clearly be seen as transitional, a member of the extended horse family.

"[Steven] Gould [of Harvard] and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least 'show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.' I will lay it on the line--there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record . . It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test." *Colin Patterson, letter dated April 10, 1979 to Luther Sunderland, quoted in L. D. Sunderland, Darwin's Enigma, p. 89.

Ah, this thread has arrived. No thread on evolution is complete without the obligatory Colin Patterson quote.

Suffice it to say that Colin Patterson is firmly in support of what I have said about horse evolution. Your quote comes from a source notorious for misrepresenting what people have said. See Patterson Misquoted: A Tale of Two 'Cites'

And yet our cousins are the same species...... even the same species as their ancestors.

Are you joking, or are you really not able to understand this?

For every species in the fossil record, there are many cousin species that come from the same ancestor species, perhaps through a series of intermediate species. As "cousin species" they will be very much alike. When we find one that looks like what we would expect in an ancestor at that point it time, we can be assured that this is likely either the ancestor or a cousin species of an ancestor.

 

[doubtingmerle]

Oh, now all of a sudden you want to ignore alleles and the innumerable combinations available in which they can be written. Isn't it evolutionists that are claiming a change in alleles can change characteristics of the offspring? Just a sad, sad attempt at rationalizing it in your own mind.....

Uh, no I do not want to ignore alleles.

You are moving the goal posts. You had claimed a ridiculously large number of possible descendents from a human pair. The actual number of distinct possible gene combinations a child can inherit from the gene pool of his two parents (not counting mutations) is 2 to the 46th power, which is about 70 trillion.

You are now switching to the question of how many different combinations of gene are available for a baby, if we assume the gene at each locus can be selected from any member of the human race. In that case the number is truly astronomical, due to the number of alleles in the human race.

 

[AV1611VET]

[Sarcasm]
My Dentist can't tell me how many molecules are in my teeth. Ridiculous the state these Dentists have let their profession devolve.

My Family Doctor can't tell me how many hairs are on my head. Ridiculous the state these Doctors have let their profession devolve.
[/Sarcasm]

But they'll be glad to tell me my DNA says I came from a common ancestor, won't they?

 

[doubtingmerle]

But they'll be glad to tell me my DNA says I came from a common ancestor, won't they?

Yes, most doctors acknowledge the known knowns of science.