please note that i did not say that there are
no complete claimed transition fossils, i just said that
one example , i might have found plenty more with the time
http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2060
Then what was your point? The fact that
some claimed transitionals are fragmentary and
some reconstructions are speculative in no way invalidates the rich collections of transitional fossils we
do have.
:
you do understand that all these examples you have shown and more have not been proven and are heavily interpreted into the theory ? dont you ?,
I might understand if you told me why they are not "proven" (which science doesn't do) and how they are "heavily interpreted into" the theory. But I know for
certain that one of them is the perfect example of a
confirmed prediction. The kind of support every scientist would like to see for their theory.
Do you know how
Tiktaalik was found?
Based on the
predictions of common descent. The age, the type and the location of the fossiliferous layers where something similar would most likely be found; the sort of creature that they were looking for - these were all inferred from already known fish and early tetrapod finds. It took them years of searching, but they finally found exactly what they were looking for.
Peek into
Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin, he was one of the team that discovered the fishapod. If you can't be bothered to get the book, you can also find the story on
Tiktaalik's homepage. It definitely isn't the case of finding something and then sticking a "transitional" label on it.
you dont seem to understand that just because someone says "well weve got this theory and we need this to say that, and that to say this ,so lets say that this is a transition and that is a transition , actually makes it true, do you ?
I understand that whole groups of fossil creatures, some of them more similar to group A and some of them more similar to group B, with clear A ---> B trends in similarity over time, are evidence for the theory of evolution. I also understand that transitionals aren't accepted as such just because some people want them to be so.
One of the greatest gaps in the fossil record is the one between single-celled organisms throughout the Precambrian and the rich animal life of the Cambrian. Yet perhaps one of the greatest controversies of palaeontology was/is the Ediacara biota, a bunch of creatures exactly from that gap. If what you suggest were the case then Ediacaran creatures would have been declared the ancestors of later animals without much hassle - not
interpreted as everything from giant protists to lichens or even something completely different from modern kingdoms of life.
pretty much says it all hey? hardly,
just because a few features are similar does not prove what your trying to prove, please at least admit that,
I can easily admit that. However, it's not a case of "a few features are similar". There is a
trend in the similarities. A very systematic one. In the picture I linked to, the oldest creatures are at the bottom and the youngest ones at the top - and this isn't only true of the particular species or genera but the whole groups they belong to. Sphenacodonts precede the more mammal-like gorgonopsians, who in turn precede the even more mammal-like therocephalians and cynodonts. The earliest cynodonts are also the least similar to mammals. Show me a better explanation than these synapsids gradually evolving into mammals - until then, I'm staying with Darwin, thanks.
most of this field of research is heavily loaded with bias ,surely you can see that anyone could find evidence like this to build any thoery that one wanted to build, the evidence does not speak for itself, you are speaking for it, which is not proof
Exactly how much experience do you have with science? No, it is
not easy to build any theory that explains the available evidence. There are rather a
lot of facts theories have to fit (in the case of evolution, anything from snakes' vestigial hindlimbs to the
prevalence of males in freshwater snails to the distribution of endogenous retroviruses in primates to the entire fossil record.) And they'd better be consistent with themselves as well.
Common descent makes countless predictions that are tested every single time someone sequences a genome, digs up a fossil or just looks at an organism in any detail. If you can make up another scientific theory (mind you: scientific! Intelligent design isn't science) that also explains the same data and would've similarly predicted
Tiktaalik or the defunct centromere of our chromosome 2, I'd be totally excited to hear it.
there is the root of all that is wrong in the world today,
Nah, nah, another very dramatic and totally unsupported claim.
how can you say that godditit does not count as an explanation??????
Because it doesn't. Goddidit, in terms of usefulness, is equivalent to "it just is that way": since God supposedly isn't bound by laws of nature (or laws of any kind), there is no reason other than his whims he would make something this way rather than that. Therefore there is no way "goddidit" can be used to explain or predict things about the world.
you know what ,godditit makes a whole lot more sense than " well we dont know"
No, it doesn't. "We don't know" is at least honest and definitely true.
until you come up with a better explanation how can you say that god does not even rate a mention ?
When have I said that? God may well have done it, I don't know and I don't think I can know. But it isn't an explanation.
you yourself have no idea how life can come from non life, or matter from nothing,
It's incredibly humble of you to act like an insider to my ideas. However, you are right in a sense: since I'm neither organic chemist nor physicist, any idea I have of these things is informal at best. But you are dreadfully wrong in another. Thanks to the scientists who
are the things I'm not, I do have some informal idea of how life may have come from non-living chemicals (see for example
nucleobases in meteorites,
amino acids in the primordial soup,
RNA polymerisation on clay,
ribozymes,
RNA world on ice... see, it's a monstrous big puzzle but we are far from clueless). It's admittedly very incomplete, but it's an idea. As for matter, "nothing" doesn't even exist if quantum mechanics is anywhere near right. And particles
can pop out of "nothing" as far as I'm aware (but I'll leave that to the physicists).
BTW, both these questions are totally irrelevant to the theory of evolution, which I thought was the subject of this thread.
Creatio ex nihilo also isn't a scientific doctrine. It's a Christian one, to my best knowledge.
And finally, not so long ago we had no idea how the traits of organisms are inherited, or how something as complex as a mammal develops from a single cell. Look at genetics and developmental biology today. Based on the history of science I wouldn't bet on a god of the gaps.
so until you do please dont throw around your loaded misconceptions about what might be true or untrue anymore
Which loaded misconceptions? I'd be grateful if you debated with facts rather than empty vagueries.
sure it would be a very depressive thing to be true, but it makes perfect sense, an omnipotent existant force that has created our reality and the incalculable complexity of the human being and life,
No, it doesn't make perfect sense if you dig deeper than the surface. Something with all these attributes is
also incalculably complex. So where does
that come from? And if it doesn't come from anything, what is the logical reason that allows this for a god but not for a universe?
you dont understand it, either do the scientists, my reputation does not need saving, because it is true that NS and evolution fail to answer countless systems , structures and things in the universe and earth without god, but i would not expect you to understand that,
I'm fairly intelligent. You can expect me to understand most things if explained adequately. So go ahead and tell me how evolution fails to "answer countless systems, structures and things" (for a starter, you could mention a few examples).
And again, please stay with evolution if you're discussing evolution. Natural selection only applies to competing imperfect replicators
. It has nothing to do with, say, the formation of quasars.
do you see what you have just said? what is the difference between the two? thus my claim is justified
Do you
really not understand the difference between survival and reproductive success? And exactly what claim have I justified? (I distinctly remember I mentioned genetic drift, which can, for example, preserve newly duplicated genes, which then may evolve new functions. So there is at least one mechanism that isn't natural selection but contributes to the complexity of life)
you think it funny that someone may believe in creation ex nihilo with god,
Do I? Where have I said that?
without realising that you yourself believe in creation ex nihilo only that you say that that in the beginning there was nothing and that nothing turned into everything,
Again, where have I said that? I'd be grateful if you didn't presume to know what I believe better than I do.
without ever beginning to explain how that might be possible,
Again, totally irrelevant to evolution. I suggest you go to the physicists if you want an explanation. As I've said, I'm in another trade.
what you believe totally defies all logic,
Since you've demonstrated you don't actually know what I believe this claim is not only empty but completely baseless as well. If you perhaps cared to show how my (real) beliefs defy all logic?
Apparently better than some on this board.
)
