No. I am pointing out that the missing link status of Australopithecus is not a universally accept fact in the Darwinist community, but public school students and the public in general are supposed to believe that it is.
Firstly, do you have any source more modern than the 1980's that disputes this? After all, new information changes theories, and we've had plenty of new fossil information since then. I wouldn't claim that scientists today are divided about quantum physics by quoting Einstein from the 1920's!
Secondly, suppose that the status of Australopithecus is not universally accepted within the Darwinist community. However, by the same token, humanity's close relationship with the other great apes - the chimpanzees and gorillas - is completely watertight and universally accepted within that same community. Would it not then be right to teach the public that this is in fact true? (And for the third time, genetics is much more powerful evidence for evolution than fossils.)
Fossils are difficult to interpret period due to their fragmentary nature. A case in point came a few years ago when National Geographic did a story about the supposed Darwinian origin of mammals. Darwinists claim that they have found fossils for the earliest mammals, but the fossils are all teeth and bone fragments. But we don’t use bone or teeth as diagnostic characteristics when classifying living organisms as mammals. But this doesn’t stop Darwinists from seeing live birth, mammary glands, fur or warm bloodedness in bones and teeth. When they need a missing link, Darwinists always claim a large amount of license in order to interpret fossils and force them to say what the Darwinists want them to say.
However, the more information we collect, the less license any of that information will have to support a fallacious theory. Don't you agree?
And, to mangle Oscar Wilde (?) : News of the fragmentary nature of fossils has been greatly overrated. For a start, we
do use bone and teeth as diagnostic characteristics for mammals:
Living mammal species can be identified by the presence of sweat glands, including those that are specialized to produce milk.
However, other features are required when classifying fossils, since soft tissue glands and some other features are not visible in fossils. Paleontologists use a distinguishing feature that is shared by all living mammals (including monotremes), but is not present in any of the early Triassic synapsids: mammals use two bones for hearing that were used for eating by their ancestors. The earliest synapsids had a jaw joint composed of the articular (a small bone at the back of the lower jaw) and the quadrate (a small bone at the back of the upper jaw). Most reptiles and non-mammalian synapsids use this system including lizards, crocodilians, dinosaurs, (and their descendants the birds), and therapsids (mammal-like "reptiles"). Mammals have a different jaw joint, however, composed only of the dentary (the lower jaw bone which carries the teeth) and the squamosal (another small skull bone). In mammals the quadrate and articular bones have become the incus and malleus bones in the middle ear. Note: "non-mammalian synapsids" above implies that mammals are a sub-group of synapsids, and that is exactly what cladistics says they are.
Mammals also have a double occipital condyle: they have two knobs at the base of the skull which fit into the topmost neck vertebra, and other vertebrates have a single occipital condyle. Paleontologists use only the jaw joint and middle ear as criteria for identifying fossil mammals, as it would be confusing if they found a fossil that had one feature, but not the other.
I don't see how any amount of "license" would be able to find incus and malleus bones where they don't exist. Don't you agree?
But we have much more than that:
The therapsids went through a series of stages, beginning with animals which were very like their pelycosaur ancestors and ending with the Triassic cynodonts, some of which could easily be mistaken for mammals:
- gradual development of a bony secondary palate.
- the dentary gradually becomes the main bone of the lower jaw.
- progress towards an erect limb posture, which would increase the animals' stamina by avoiding Carrier's constraint. But this process was slow and erratic - for example: all herbivorous therapsids retained sprawling limbs (some late forms may have had semi-erect hind limbs); Permian carnivorous therapsids had sprawling forelimbs, and some late Permian ones also had semi-sprawling hindlimbs. In fact modern monotremes still have semi-sprawling limbs.
- in the Triassic, progress towards the mammalian jaw and middle ear.
- there is possible evidence of hair in Triassic therapsids, but none for Permian therapsids.
- some scientists have argued that some Triassic therapsids show signs of lactation.
Again, most of these are features objectively distinguishable from fossils (minus the last point about lactation, I'd agree).
The oldest known marsupial is Sinodelphys, found in 125M-year old early Cretaceous shale in China's northeastern Liaoning Province. The fossil is nearly complete and includes tufts of fur and imprints of soft tissues.
(Sinodelphys)
Not too difficult to interpret for those with the know-how, don't you think?
The living Eutheria ("true beasts") are all placentals. But the earliest known eutherian, Eomaia, found in China and dated to 125M years ago, has some features which are more like those of marsupials (the surviving metatherians):[11]:
- Epipubic bones extending forwards from the pelvis, which are not found in any modern placental, but are found in marsupials, monotremes and mammaliformes such as multituberculates. In other words, they appear to be an ancestral feature which subsequently disappeared in the placental lineage.
- A narrow pelvic outlet, which indicates that the young were very small at birth and therefore pregnancy was short, as in modern marsupials. This suggests that the placenta was a later development.
Unfortunately it is not certain when placental mammals evolved - the earliest undisputed fossils of placentals come from the early Paleocene, after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
(Eomaia)
Note, as an aside, that (in the last paragraph of the quote) scientists are perfectly willing to admit when they don't know stuff!
Hadrocodium, whose fossils date from the early Jurassic, provides the first clear evidence of fully mammalian jaw joints.
(Hadroconium)
Sorry ... plenty of fossils. Not all of them fragmentary.
And here's the kicker: all the text was quoted off Wikipedia! Note, friend, that all this information is in the public. All this information is freely available to you and to me and if you wanted to bring evolution down, you should start by reading what scientists have to say first hand (instead of relying on the people who have an agenda against them to tell you what they're doing!).
So I repeat my question to you: what do you think is the strongest piece of evidence that refutes evolution? The strongest piece of evidence that evolution
cannot possibly explain?
