Fossil Challenge for Evolutionists

[GodsGrace101]

I'll be leaving for the evening (it's evening here)
but I'd like to thank all the nice folk that helped me to understand new things (instead of putting me down)
and that helped me to have a very pleasant discussion about something very confusing.....

 

[46AND2]

So far, I think the evolutionists.
They better hurry up and come up with this "proof" that is not called proof.

I mean...it IS difficult for the normal person to think a fish could become a bird....

I find it much more difficult to think life was poofed into existence by a magical being.

 

[sfs]

So far, I think the evolutionists.
They better hurry up and come up with this "proof" that is not called proof.

Oh, we've got tons of evidence. The only reason we use evolution is that it works -- it explains and predicts data. Scientists are quite pragmatic that way.

 

[46AND2]

What happened, or existed, the split second before the BB?

We can get just so far back and cannot get beyond that.

THIS is all I'm saying.

I'm also saying science has changed its mind on whether or not anything existed BEFORE the BB.
This can only mean that science is not CERTAIN of what it teaches. All my life through schooling I was taught that the universe always existed....Now kids are taught the opposite.

Anyway, what made the BB?
I read that all that energy should have caused an everything to just implode...why didn't it?

And as to the green highlighted above:
I know nothing.
I'm only repeating what scientists have been teaching throughout my life.

The problem is that you are working with a very entry level explanation of the Big Bang, which is quite an abstract, counter-intuitive idea when you dig into it further. There are a whole host of questions that come about that are either difficult to conceptualize, or just nonsensical because they don't apply in any meaningful way, even though they SEEM to be sensible questions to ask.

For example: There was no split-second before the big bang. There was no time. It's like asking what is north of the north pole.

Or what did/is space expanding into?

And yes, scientists are uncertain about that singularity state. And they have always said so. But why should we take on a "god of the gaps" to explain our gap in that knowledge, rather than just admit we don't know? How has that worked out in the past? There were gods for lightning, earthquakes, tornadoes, etc. When has a gap been filled by a god that has turned out to be correct?

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I know Lawrence Krauss.

What I said is that FORMERLY scientists believed that the universe (s) always existed.

THEN, not long ago, they discovered that the universe(s) had a BEGINNING.

This actually caused a problem for them and they now had to figure out HOW the universe began.

I'M not saying this...it's a known fact.

Krauss is trying to show that something could come from nothing.

I'm waiting on this one....

If you know Lawrence, you should ask him what he means by 'nothing'. I just read his book, 'A Universe from Nothing', and in it he takes great pains to explain exactly what he means by it each time he uses it, and he uses it in several different ways, none of which are 'the complete absence of anything'. Just as we say "there's nothing in the cupboard" when there are shelves and air in the cupboard, or "there's nothing in outer space" when there is spacetime, radiation, particles, etc., so in one part he uses 'nothing' to mean 'empty space' (spacetime without radiation or particles), and in another he uses 'nothing' to describe the more fundamental state from which spacetime itself emerges.

As for the beginning of the universe, you'll find that most cosmologists think that it's just the beginning of the universe as we know it. All that we can tell from the available evidence is that the universe was once incredibly hot and dense, then expanded very rapidly. The 'beginning' is the earliest point in time that we can extrapolate back to. That hot dense state itself precludes us knowing what - if anything - came before.

There are a variety of ideas of what went on before the earliest time we can 'reach', all of which could be consistent with what we understand of the physics underlying our universe; including being spawned as a baby or 'bubble' universe from a larger universe (or multiverse), being the result of a collision between multi-dimensional 'membranes' in higher dimensional space, being an eternal universe that oscillates, or just being self-contained and closed in time (i.e. finite but with no temporal boundary, like the surface of the Earth is finite but has no spatial boundary). It's also possible that the universe was infinite in size at the big bang, despite being the product of a finite event in another universe - this is allowed by Einstein's General Relativity.

So you see, common-sense may often be a poor guide to things in everyday life, but it's completely useless for the physics of the universe.

 

[pitabread]

Not sure if that's original enough to go down on my list of favorite cop outs, but I will consider it...Thanks for the effort.

You can file it alongside the "taking a course in evolution is a waste of time" cop out.

 

[Kenny'sID]

The ToE is incredibly well-supported science. I dont have to support anything, education on it is freely available all over the world.

If you want to challange the ToE you need to write an article for peer-review. If you cant then your ”view” is irrelevant.

Nope, you don't have to do anything, as a matter of fact, that's just what I expected...more excuses.

Challenge the theory, or evolution the fact? I ask because you all aren't quit together on what's what there yet.

 

[Kenny'sID]

You can file it alongside the "taking a course in evolution is a waste of time" cop out.

I'm not going to take a course on a complete joke that very clearly by now, no one here can prove..I'd be taking a course on something that doesn't exist, something you have all admitted to by your unwillingness to simply prove it. You all don't even have a whole lot of confidence in it, and know as well as I do what will happen once we start looking into the details.

But don't stop what you're doing, I like it when you consistently help to make my case.

 

[pitabread]

I'm not going to take a course on a complete joke that very clearly by now, no one here can prove..I'd be taking a course on something that doesn't exist, something you have all admitted to by your unwillingness to simply prove it. You all don't even have a whole lot of confidence in it, and know as well as I do what will happen once we start looking into the details.

Except you never will "look into the details". All you've done is made the same excuses every time anyone pushes you to learn.

Consequently, everything you have written is just empty bravado. I'm really not sure what you think you are accomplishing here.

(Other than reinforcing the link between lack of acceptance of evolution with lack of knowledge thereof.)

 

[Job 33:6]

Maybe I am misunderstanding the topic, but there are many means in which the order of fossils could be predicted within the earth, if we did not study fossils prior (assuming the geologic column were constructed without any use of index fossils).

Common reference is made to the evolution of cytochrome C.

However, determining where fossils specifically are (temporally), using molecular clocks, still uses index fossils as a means of calibration.

This doesnt mean that raptors are found in the cretaceous, just because we have already found them there (which would be circular reasoning). Rather it would mean that derived feather bearing raptors would post-date primitive theropods and pre-date birds.

Where explicitly that transition would occur though, would probably be challenging to determine without any fossil that could be used in calibration.

There is a case however, in which biologists and paleontologists argued over where particular fossils would be located, in which case biologists predicted the location of hominin fossils with greater precision than paleontologists did (with use of more temporally distant fossil discoveries).

Immunological time scale for hominid evolution. - PubMed - NCBI

Paleontologists were mistaken in suggesting that ramapithecus was the first direct ancestor of modern man (see below). This being an early suggestion based on fossil finds. Ramapithecus | fossil primate genus

Ramapithecus, fossil primate dating from the Middle and Late Miocene epochs (about 16.6 million to 5.3 million years ago). For a time in the 1960s and ’70s, Ramapithecus was thought to be a distinct genus that was the first direct ancestor of modern humans (Homo sapiens) before it became regarded as that of the orangutan ancestor Sivapithecus.

"The first challenge to the theory came in the late 1960s from American biochemist Allan Wilson and American anthropologist Vincent Sarich, who, at the University of California, Berkeley, had been comparing the molecular chemistry of albumins (blood proteins) among various animal species. They concluded that the ape-human divergence must have occurred much later than Ramapithecus. (It is now thought that the final split took place some 6 million to 8 million years ago.)"

"Wilson and Sarich’s argument was initially dismissed by anthropologists, but biochemical and fossil evidence mounted in favour of it. Finally, in 1976, Pilbeam discovered a complete Ramapithecus jaw, not far from the initial fossil find, that had a distinctive V shape and thus differed markedly from the parabolic shape of the jaws of members of the human lineage. He soon repudiated his belief in Ramapithecus as a human ancestor, and the theory was largely abandoned by the early 1980s. Ramapithecus fossils subsequently were found to resemble those of the fossil primate genus Sivapithecus, which is now regarded as ancestral to the orangutan; the belief also grew that Ramapithecus probably should be included in the Sivapithecus genus."



In this case, molecular biology was used to predict the location of particular fossils of a transition, which contradicted earlier paleontological thought. And the biologists turned out to be correct, in which they argued that the first fossils for human ancestry would be discovered (or ought to be discovered if at all) closer to 6-8 million years old, as opposed to 15 million (as suggested by paleontologists). Which ultimately served to be corroborated and confirmed by later fossil discoveries such as sahelanthropus (which has human traits and chimpanzee traits and is dated to 8 million years ago as the biologists had previously predicted that such a fossil would).

So, the fossil record was used in some ways in making the predictions, however in this case, biology "out-performed" paleontology in predicting the precise temporal location of fossils (using other more distant fossils for calibration). Paleontology then basically was updated and corrected based on the latest and greatest discoveries which provided an understanding of evolution and the fossil record with higher precision than before.

 

[Job 33:6]

And the same goes with tiktaalik. And really everything in the fossil record. As more fossils are discovered, the succession really just becomes more and more clear. If the polish tetrapod tracks are found to be true in how they were described (as tetrapod tracks which predate tiktaalik), it would not make tiktaalik less of a transitional fossil, nor would it defy the theory of evolution. Rather it would only add precision to our understanding of exactly when the fish to tetrapod transition occurred, and how.

Isaac newtons theory of gravity was ultimately overwritten by einsteins relativity, but isaac newtons measurements in and of themselves were not necessarily wrong, rather they were just limited in scope.

And just the same, with the theory of relativity and the out-dating of isaac newtons theory of gravity, we have a better description of how gravity works via an updated theory.

The same can be said for many topics in science. As more discoveries are made, theories arent necessarily thrown out, rather they are just expanded upon.

And so the original conclusion of ramapithecus being the first hominin ancestor, really was just improved upon with the latest and greatest data. In which case I will quote someone else:

 

[Job 33:6]

@lifepsyop

1. If we observe a derived population in the geological record before the basal population that will falsify evolution. For example finding a mammal species, like a rabbit, in a strata laid down before the evolution of mammals, would falsify evolution.
2. If we observe a species that has survived what was thought to be an extinction, that is not a problem for evolution because it's not an example of 1.

You appear to be confusing the observation of faunal succession (which evolution does predict) with a singular, particular evolutionary progression (which evolution does not predict) and confusing both of them with out of place fossils which would falsify evolution.

I tried to explain the latter works to you in the other thread.
1. If we observe a derived population in the geological record before the basal population that will falsify evolution. For example finding a mammal species, like a rabbit, in a strata laid down before the evolution of mammals, would falsify evolution.
2. If we observe a species that has survived what was thought to be an extinction, that is not a problem for evolution because it's not an example of 1.

 

[Bungle_Bear]

Uh, Tiktaalik was discovered in "Late Devonian" rock layers, where fishapods, or "primitive" tetrapods have always been found. That's the point. What's so hard for you to understand about this?

Didn't I specifically say this is an erroneous claim? Shubin's Tiktaalik was the first example found. There were no earlier finds of "fishapods".

As you said - That's the point. What's so hard for you to understand about this?

 

[Job 33:6]

Yea that's correct^ tiktaalik was the first discovered. Before then were just lobe finned fish and beyond that, the late devonian was filled with tetrapods. Tiktaalik is certainly the first of it's kind with scales and fins but also with a flat head, unfused skull with a mobile neck, robust limbs and spiracles for breathing air.

Beyond that, it's found where it ought to be found if evolution were true. It wasn't found in the Cambrian nor the Mesozoic, Carboniferous, Permian, ordovician, cenozoic etc. It really is right where it ought to be if evolution were true.

 

[VirOptimus]

You know...you're very arrogant.
A person is allowed to have a view even if they're NOT a scientist. We can think.

And no one here is asking YOU to be their teacher.
Far from it....

And usually, yes, it's the person that makes the claim that has to prove what he stated.

If YOU think evolution is true...YOU have to prove it...not me disprove it.

Its not I who are arrogant, its you.

The ToE is more or less settled science, its a description of physical reality. Fighting physical reality is dumb.

 

[Jimmy D]

It's layman's vocabulary. You can't expect us to know your language. Lawyers have theirs, doctors have theirs... IOW, to ME, unless something comes along that we can't see right now....the BB theory is pretty much proven. It's "accepted" by the scientific community and so should be accepted by us also.

I don't see this with evolution.

I'm only a laymen too, having spent a while studying and debating these topics you soon pick up the lingo! I think that if one (in this case the Doctor who wrote the letter) is to attempt to challenge the scientific consensus they can't be expected to be taken seriously if they can't even understand basic concepts like what a scientific theory is.


What you say about the big bang is the case with evolution too, it is accepted by the scientific community, the only objections come from a minority religious types with a particular set of beliefs to protect (i.e. a literal understanding of Genesis which is usually accompanied by the queer idea that God wrote the bible. Therefore, if Genesis is anything other than a literal recording of historical events that God is a liar). As someone else mentioned it's similar to the age of the Earth, it's obviously very ancient yet we have YECs dismissing any evidence and claiming it's less than 10000 years old.

"Repeatedly testing" is part of the problem...life cannot be created in the lab even though all chemicals for life are known and available to us. I may be off on this,,,but if life cannot be started...how do we even GO to evolution?
Shouldn't one come before the other? I'm not sure about this.

The building blocks of life can be created by natural processes, but I'm happy to agree with you to an extent - we haven't discovered how life started yet, but it did!

I'm not sure if other posters have attempted to explain to you that this is not really a problem for the TOE, however life started, be it through God's creation, natural chemical processes, or any other process we care to imagine, once the earliest life one Earth was established evolution is the best, if not the only, well evidenced explanation for how it diversified.

I think Stephen Meyer brought this up in his interview. You could watch just the very beginning, I do believe he mentions this...
(and please don't accuse me of FOLLOWING him, like was done to me with Dr. Tours -- I don't "follow" anybody)

No problem, it's a fair request, I'll have a quick look later (I'm at work now).

What do you mean by dogs or wheat?
I could understand how wheat could be changed, but dogs? Unless we use a different DNA in a dog,,,but the DNA is already in existence...

I mean that simply through artificial selection the process of evolution has been artificially "amplified" leading to these organisms have changed dramatically. Maize is maybe a more striking example than wheat...

Or look at these two fellows that have descended from wolves...

Just two examples of how the proccess of evolution can be "reproduced through experimentation" despite what the doctor claims.

I'm as stupid as he is!
What is speciation...doesn't that mean one species changing into another?
And what is this TOE you're all talking about?

Is speciation what I call microevolution
and general evolution what I call macroevolution??

Woah, I'm not saying that you are stupid, you obviously aren't. If you thought that I am implying that then it is obviously a flaw in my communication and I apologize. I'm criticizing the author of the letter, not you.

The TOE is an abbreviation of the Theory of Evolution, it get's repetitive typing that out all the time but it's important to make a distinction between evolution - the observation that populations gradually change or adapt, and the Theory of Evolution - which attempts to explain how it happens.

Speciation is the evolutionary process by which populations evolve to become distinct species. (link)

It doesn't just happen in one or two generations, but is a gradual process of incremental changes, I think that you've said that you accept micro evolution? That's all it is, but over a longer period of time. There are different ways for speciation to occur, as described in the link.

I don't know what good fossil evidence is anyway since it shows differing species at different times but it doesn't show the evolution in progress...

This answers my previous question...
I never hear of these intermediate forms...I will look into it. But what kind of intermediate forms? Within the same species???

Questions that deserve a better answer than I have time to offer at the moment (as I mentioned, I'm at work ) I'll get back to you on this.

Hmmm. I do think Stephen Meyers spoke to this. I'd have to listen to the interview again. Care to recommend anyone else? (that agrees with your statement)

Well, one of the most prominent Genetic guys (that's the technical term for 'em I believe) in the world is Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project and is the founder of the Biologos website which has many articles on the for evidence of the TOE.

I suggest having a read through a few of the articles there.

Yes, but you do have to admit that it's taught as fact.

I admit it alright, I also admit that a globe Earth is taught as a fact!

I hope you get a chance to look at that Biologos website, I'm sure it can answer your questions better than me.

 

[xianghua]

Did you know that modern Coelacanths are so different from the ancient fossils that they aren't even classified as the same genus?

but they are still coelacanths.

 

[Kenny'sID]

Except you never will "look into the details". All you've done is made the same excuses every time anyone pushes you to learn.

Consequently, everything you have written is just empty bravado. I'm really not sure what you think you are accomplishing here.

(Other than reinforcing the link between lack of acceptance of evolution with lack of knowledge thereof.)

You do realize nothing you have said thus far has proved evolution....right? I'm really not sure what you think you are accomplishing here, you either prove it, or not? I'm looking into the details now bay asking you to prove it....get it? This is me trying to learn from someone who knows, what better way?

What's the point of doing your usual blaming the other side as the reason you can't prove it, It's never worked before?

Excuses don't answer the question.

 

[xianghua]

If you haven’t studied evolution and biology, how can you say you don’t believe it? Science does give an explanation for how species evolve,

i dont think so. its just a belief (if we are talking about something like a reptile evolving into a mammal) .not something that we can observe.

 

[bhsmte]

You do realize nothing you have said thus far has proved evolution....right? I'm really not sure what you think you are accomplishing here, you either prove it, or not? I'm looking into the details now bay asking you to prove it....get it? This is me trying to learn from someone who knows, what better way?

What's the point of doing your usual blaming the other side as the reason you can't prove it, It's never worked before?

Excuses don't answer the question.

If the bar for accepting well evidenced scientific theories, was your personal blessing we would be living in the stone ages.