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Jet Black said:just for a moment, why are you so hooked on bringing "all present phyla" up all the time? You do know that phyla are an artificial man made construct and there is nothing especially special about them, don't you?
Oncedeceived said:I am very aware that phyla are a manmade construct just as is most of the terms used in Science. They are special only in that the many forms that life took in this period, and that this fits with what Genesis predicts. I am "hooked" on bringing it in the argument due to it being representive of my views on Genesis.
caravelair said:huh? what does that mean? i asked you what evidence would falsify the claim that grasses existed in the precambrian. what you said above does not answer that question, and does not appear to make any sense either.
not only does the evidence not support the claim that grasses existed in the precambrian, but it clearly implies that they did not. do you agree or disagree?{/Quote]
I disagree. Here:
A study of fossil dinosaur dung has for the first time confirmed that the ancient reptiles ate grass. Grass was previously thought to have become common only after the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.
But grasses were probably not a very important part of dinosaur diets - the fossilised faeces show the big beasts ate many different types of plants.
However, the Science journal study suggests grass was possibly an important food for early mammals.
Caroline Strömberg from the Swedish Museum of Natural History and her colleagues studied phytoliths (mineral particles produced by grass and other plants) preserved in fossil dinosaur dung from central India.
Theory dumped
The 65-67 million-year-old dung fossils, or coprolites, are thought to have been made by so-called titanosaur sauropods; large, vegetarian dinosaurs.
Fossil grass phytoliths were found in the dinosaur dung
"It's difficult to tell how widespread [grass grazing] was," Ms Strömberg told the BBC News website, "Dinosaurs seem to have been indiscriminate feeders."
The study also sheds new light on the evolution of grass. Grasses are thought to have undergone a major diversification and geographic proliferation during the so-called Cenozoic, after the dinosaurs had gone extinct.
But the researchers found at least five different types of grass in the droppings.
This suggests grasses had already undergone substantial diversification in the Late Cretaceous, when the giant beasts still walked the Earth.
Defence mechanism
Many grasses today contain high levels of silica, which makes them tough and hard to chew. One theory proposes that this is an evolutionary defence against being eaten by herbivores.
This defence is traditionally thought to have been a response to large-scale grazing by mammals in the Cenozoic. But, if the theory is correct, it raises the possibility that grasses first began developing this defence in response to grazing by dinosaurs.
However, small mammals living alongside the dinosaurs may also have been grass feeders.
An enigmatic group of extinct mammals known as sudamericid gondwanatherians, which lived during the Late Cretaceous, show possible signs of adaptation to a grassy diet.
Their teeth are ideally suited for handling abrasive materials like grass. But because of grass's patchy presence in the fossil record, these features were interpreted as an adaptation to a semi-aquatic, or burrowing, lifestyle like that of modern beavers.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1118_051118_grass_dinos_2.html
Grasses exist today on every continent except Antarctica, and many animalsincluding humansdepend on them for food.
Scientists have long believed that the now ubiquitous plants first began to spread and diversify some 70 to 60 million years ago.
Fossil evidence had suggested that grasses evolved along with early plant-eating mammals. Hoofed animals with high-crowned teeth suitable for chewing grass first began to appear about 25 million years ago.
But the grass minerals in the Indian coprolites were much older than the hoofed mammals and were already diverse. Five different species were evident, which means that grasses likely diversified substantially before the end of the late Cretaceous.
The researchers believe that various species of grass had spread before India became geographically isolated from other continents about 125 million years ago.
Now, as you can see it was probably at least 125 million years ago that grasses are believed to be present but during that whole period which is a long period I might add there is no fossil evidence to support that they even existed.
the evidence that grasses did not exist in the precambrian seems to me to be as strong as it possibly could be. i can't imagine what evidence would more strongly imply this, can you?
I think that the articles I provided do give support that they may have been present in the precambrian. Evidence is there that shows that the presence of grasses were around at least 125 million years without one fossil being found of them.
how can you claim that science supports your hypothesis, when you selectively ignore any evidence which suggests you are wrong? that's not how science works.
Am I ignoring it, or are you?
perhaps, but nothing like finding a cow or grasses in the precambrian has EVER happened.
But it is possible that grasses did, and the possibility for a cow is zero to none.
that is quite a different matter. grasses were previously thought to have arrived 55mil years ago, and now we have records over 65mil years. that is the type of find we might expect. it is unreasonable to expect to find them 3 billion years earlier.
If they could exist for 125 million years without us finding them it is not to far a stretch to believe that they could have been in precambrian. Especially when they were first evolving. This evidence shows that there were at least five kinds of grasses in the dino dung. Yet no evidence other than this has ever been found.
well if they existed in the precambrian, they must have existed since then, right? unless of course they existed, went extinct, and then got re-created again 70 million years ago. is that what you're claiming?
As shown they did exist when they were not found in the fossil record yet they were present. So they need not evolve again. They could have been there all the time without any evidence.
and yet we find many earlier fossils of other plants, as you freely admit. grasses are no less likely to fossilize than many of the other earlier plants we have found. so why are those plants preserved, and not grass? not only is grass not found, but grass pollen, which has also been found fossilized, has never been found more than 70mil years ago. furthermore, our modern species that are adapted to living in grasslands, like horses, arrived in the fossil record around the same time. and then all of a sudden we find many fossilized grasses, pollens, horses, etc after this time period. why were they fossilized with such freqency afterwards, but almost not at all before hand? not even once over the period of more than 3 billion years?
I think these articles provide substanciation to my hypothesis.
come on now, you have to realize that this very strongly suggests grasses did not exist until then. do you admit this? if not, i would suspect you of lying.
Really? I don't think lying has any part in my presentation of my viewpoint and I take offense at the implication.
furthermore, i cannot think of evidenc we could possibly find that would suggest this more strongly. can you? what would it be?
No, I think that I have shown that the evidence is absent but not non-existent.
if you can't think of anything stronger, and you still say this claim has not been falsified, then obviously it would not be possible to falsify it, correct?
We have no record of the first life forms but we know they existed right? There are theories that ToE makes about that and they can not be falsified either. Does that make ToE falsified? Well the same is true for Creation. Even if this verse can not be proven or can not be falsified it does not mean that the whole of Genesis or Creation can be either.
it is extremely unlikely that they would have existed for 3.5 billion years, and not ever get fossilized once until 70mil years ago, and then suddenly get frequently fossilized afterwards.
I think I have shown that it is possible and maybe even likely.
you can claim that, but if the fossil record is too incomplete for us to evaluate your predictions, then they can't be falsifiable predictions, can they? evolution, on the other hand, makes prediction about what we should find in the present too, so we don't need the fossil record at all for evolution to be falsifiable.
So does Genesis.
secondly, and more importantly, finding a cow so earlier than sea life would NOT falsify your hypothesis, because you could always claim that sea life existed earlier, and we simply haven't found the fossils to prove it yet, EXACTLY as you are doing with the grasses example. if you can do that with grasses, you can do the same thing with your cow example.
That is a false statement. I could not.
Then it is you who is ignoring evidence.there is also a possibility that leprechauns exist, but i have no reason to believe that it is so. likewise, i have no reason to believe that grasses existed before 70mil years ago.
yes you did, you said this:
part of the order is that grasses would have existed in the precambrian. you say the fossil record supports the order, how does it support this claim?
I conceded in the beginning that there is no evidence of grasses being in the precambrian but I have shown that the possibility exists that they could be.
any prediction of a hypothesis will falsify the entire hypothesis if the prediction is wrong. so either this prediction about grasses falsifies your hypothesis, or it is not a falsifiable prediction, would you agree?
Ridiculous. That is not how Science works and you know it.
Jet Black said:but that is only one particular way of grouping them that appeared during the cambrian. some of those phyla could have emerged prior to the cambrian - the cambrian is just when we first see them.
If genesis was written differently, you could look earlier into the precambrian to see the prokaryotes and eukaryotes emerge and treat them as all the forms of life, or you could look later to see all the orders emerge if it suited you. If you take a look at the first "down with phyla" article I linked to, you can see that the position of the nematode mouth in the neural or abneural position is easily alterable an has moved several times independently.
chordates and protostomes are fundamentally differentiated by the position of the mouth, and this difference is even more fundamental than the phyla. So if one of those nematodes had mutated well after the cambrian, say in the teriary, then not all the "phyla" evolved in the cambrian, since these nematodes have a fundamentally different bodyplan - look at figure 1b. you can see that a change within a phylum can effectively create a difference that should effectively give the organism its own whole new phylum. This renders the idea of the formation of the phyla as an argument a bit meaningless, because the changes that led to the modern phyla are no more distinct than the changes that led to the modern classes, orders, genus and species, it just happens to illustrate when they occured.
In short, by bringing the cambrian explosion and phyla into play, I think you are letting loose a bit of a red herring, because arguably you could take any of the arbitrary stages of classification and slot it into genesis wherever the relevant lines on animals forming come to be.
Oncedeceived said:Let me clarify. I was just saying that I had given some scenerios that my be valid for the verse. One being that grasses might have been present in the precambrian. As I had claimed when giving these scenerios, they can not be substanciated due to the poor fossil record of this period.
Now, as you can see it was probably at least 125 million years ago that grasses are believed to be present but during that whole period which is a long period I might add there is no fossil evidence to support that they even existed.
I think that the articles I provided do give support that they may have been present in the precambrian.
Evidence is there that shows that the presence of grasses were around at least 125 million years without one fossil being found of them.
Am I ignoring it, or are you?
But it is possible that grasses did, and the possibility for a cow is zero to none.
If they could exist for 125 million years without us finding them it is not to far a stretch to believe that they could have been in precambrian.
No, I think that I have shown that the evidence is absent but not non-existent.
We have no record of the first life forms but we know they existed right?
There are theories that ToE makes about that and they can not be falsified either. Does that make ToE falsified?
Well the same is true for Creation. Even if this verse can not be proven or can not be falsified it does not mean that the whole of Genesis or Creation can be either.
I think I have shown that it is possible and maybe even likely.
So does Genesis.
That is a false statement. I could not.
I conceded in the beginning that there is no evidence of grasses being in the precambrian but I have shown that the possibility exists that they could be.
Ridiculous. That is not how Science works and you know it.
caravelair said:so grasses existed 125 million years ago, and you think this is evidence that they existed 3.5 billion years ago? by what you said, we have no evidence of them for a period of about 50 million years. do you realize that this is less than 1.5% of the time between now and the precambrian, right?
Jet Black said:the precambrian is only 590 million years ago. so 125 million years is more like 1/4 or 25% of the time between now and then. not that this percentage is a particularly useful number.
They were around, but only in the Eden area, so we don't see them at large in the fossil record.caravelair said:that's the end of the precambrian, but genesis says plants were there before any other life, so they should have been there since the beginning of the precambrian. if i'm not mistaken, we have found life forms around 3.5 billions years ago, have we not? so if grasses were around first, then they should have been around since then.
Godfixated said:The reason why the whole idea of the Cambrian Explosion is kind of ludicrous and, subsequently, the whole geologic column, it doesn't show up the same way all over the earth. There are many places where the timeline is skewed and even reversed. Take the Swiss Alps for instance, the column is upside down and we are finding species that are supposed to be much older are above the species that are much younger. But, this is handled like all other failures of evolution it seems, by keeping it on the down low.
Jet Black said:there is quite a difference between 125 and 525 million years. and the occurance of grass.
Grasses are members of the lillopsida, which are themselves members of the angiosperms, or the flowering plants. So grasses are a subset of a much larger set of plants, and they are not a very basal group either. This means that where we find the earliest traces of grass, we should also find rather alot of angiosperms. For a moment if we assume that the angiosperm fossils that we find are a representative random cross sample of those around at the time, then if we find only basal angiosperms, then it is fair to assume that there are no more modern angiosperms, and thus no grass (remember grasses are not basal).
Another thing that grasses produce by the bucketload is pollen. Pollen gets absolutely everywhere. Pollen is difficult to destroy and fossilizes readily, and there no evidence of grass pollen prior to the early tertiary.
The earliest angiosperms that we find occur about 140 million years ago, prior to this we don't find angiosperms at all, never mind grasses.
remember that grasses are not a basal group of angiosperm, so to suggest that grasses would be in the cambrian or precambrian, is to suggest that the more basal angiosperm members must have been there too, in extremely small numbers, but with extremely large variety. that's a bit odd, no?
While grasses are wind pollinated, they have flowers - so in essence they have specialised from the insect pollinated (that's what flowers are for) plants back to wind pollinated. The insect pollinated plants themselves evolved from wind pollinated plants, the gymnosperms. The earliest known gymnosperms did not occur until 395mya, which is a bit better, we are still a hundred million years off the cambrian, and even the precambrian
. again, gymnosperms produce lots of pollen, and we just don't see it in the early rocks. So we have no evidence of the ancestors to the angiosperms which themselves are the ancestors to the grasses as far back as the cambrian.
this is just looking at the plants. Other aspects of the angiosperms is that many are insect pollinated, if we have angiosperms, we should have pollinating insects, and polleniverous insects, and we don't find them in the cambrian or precambrian either.
the argument is hence basically the same as not finding cows in the cambrian. sure there could have been a couple of rogue cows around that far back, but the ancestors of cows are early mammals, and the ancestors of those are the therapsids, and the ancestors of those are reptiles, go back to amphibians and the early tetrapods and finally the vertebrates, and we don't get tetrapods in the cambrian and only find the most basal of jawed vertabrates there.
caravelair said:but that has nothing to do with what i was asking. i was asking you what possible evidence we could ever find that would falsify the notion that grasses existed in the precambrian. you have been totally avoiding this question. please answer it, or admit that nothing would falsify this to you.
that is NOT what i asked you. i asked what evidence we could possibly find that would more strongly imply that they did NOT exist in the precambrian, than the evidence we have today. PLEASE ANSWER THIS QUESTION. what evidence could we ever possibly find that would falsify the idea that grasses existed in the precambrian?
you mean 55 million years without them being found. this is a tiny fraction of the time between now and the precambrian.
you are. you have already shown that you will ignore whatever evidence contradicts you. i am not the only person on this thread to point that out, jet black noticed it too.
the chances of finding either in the precambrian is equally low.
we didn't find them for 55 million years, not 125.
THAT IS NOT WHAT I ASKED. PLEASE stop avoiding this question:
again you did not answer my question! instead you turn it around and ask me one. would you please give me the simply courtesy of answering a question when i ask it? is it possible to falsify the claim that grasses existed in the precambrian, or not?
Like I said, so does Genesis.no, i think you misunderstand. having an unfalsifiable prediction does not mean a theory is falsified. in order for a theory to be scientific, it must be falsifiable. in order for it to be falsifiable, it must make falsifiable predictions. let's grant for the sake of argument, that it is impossible to falsify a prediction about what we should find in the precambrian. fine, it doesn't matter for evolution because evolution makes OTHER predictions that CAN be falsified, like nested hierarchy, and present day biogeography. your predictions, on the other hand, seem to be all unfalsifiable, like this one about the grasses. you prediction is the order in genesis. if any aspect of this appears to be wrong, you can just use the same exact copout you are using with grasses, and say that they did exist earlier, we just haven't found the evidence yet!
then please show me a falsifiable prediction of genesis. so far you have failed to do so.
how can you possibly claim that? that is the EXACT same defense you are using RIGHT NOW with grasses. we have not found grasses until billions of years after the precambrian, but you are claiming that it's possible they existed then and we just haven't found the fossils yet. suppose we found a cow in the precambrian, earlier than any sea life. you could do the EXACT same thing. you could say that it's possible that sea life existed earlier and we just haven't found fossils of it yet. after all the first life was soft bodied, which rarely fossilizes! you can't claim that you wouldn't do this, because if that were true, you wouldn't be doing the same thing with grasses right now. and that is why this prediction is not falsifiable.
Oncedeceived said:Yes, I have. You are ignoring it. There is an order with man coming last in that order. If mankind came earlier that would falsify Genesis. If mammals came before sea life, that would falsify Genesis..
Oncedeceived said:I have answered it, several times I believe. Here is one just a few posts up:
We have no record of the first life forms but we know they existed right? There are theories that ToE makes about that and they can not be falsified either. Does that make ToE falsified? Well the same is true for Creation. Even if this verse can not be proven or can not be falsified it does not mean that the whole of Genesis or Creation can be either.
It is not falsifible,
...but as I have shown, ToE has theories that can not be falsified as well.
No I mean 125 million years. The article which I presented gives support to this.
What am I ignoring?
Do you honestly believe this?
We found them in the Cretaceous period which is 146 to 65 mya, and that was five kinds. Don't you think that it would be rather strange that they just spontaniously arrived in five different ways in this period?
Please notice that I have.
You ask me questions, I ask you questions...I thought that was what debate was all about.
Like I said, so does Genesis.
Yes, I have. You are ignoring it. There is an order with man coming last in that order. If mankind came earlier that would falsify Genesis. If mammals came before sea life, that would falsify Genesis.
I think that I have given valid reason behind this veiwpoint. I will bring in more support if you wish.
Edx said:How about the order that the earth was created before the sun? How about the order that plant life was created before the sun?
Oops! Genesis falsified.
Edx said:How about the order that the earth was created before the sun? How about the order that plant life was created before the sun?
Oops! Genesis falsified.
Oncedeceived said:I hope you are not serious.It is far from a rogue cow or two. Are you claiming that the possibility of finding grasses in the precambrian is as unlikely as finding cows???
Oncedeceived said:It is very possible even probable that the earliest insects could have been soft bodied and hard to fossilize. In fact, I have read an article and I will try to find it that supports my view on this.
Jet Black said:yes. you are claiming basically that several taxonomic levels of plants - angiosperms, gymnosperms, vascular plants and their pollen along with their related fauna, just happen to have not fossilized for hundreds of millions of years. For hundreds of millions of years we are just unlucky to have not found a single example of Viridiplantae?
I could say the same about the mammals couldn't I? and if not, why not? Perhaps all the therapsids were wandering round in the precambrian just luckily managing to avoid fossilization along with the vascular plants, while some groups split off to form the mammals, ungulates and so on.
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