"Nobody said God created dolphins out of thin air, you're making absurd statements based upon your a priori commitment to the evolutionary thought paradigm"
Then what exactly are you proposing if not the miraculous appearance of animals out of thin air?
CC:
@Aussie Pete
God never makes the claims that life was produced out of thin air... now I think you're using "out of thin air" as a turn of phrase to mean "from nothing with no predecessor", but God makes the claim that He created life from the dust of the ground--not air. That said, He also does make the claim of creating life on days 5 and 6 of creation and the text indicates this is
de novo in the sense that this life did not come from other life, but was fashioned directly by Him [miraculously, from the dust of the ground... not following the normal order of life producing after its own kind -> the normal order was established with the command He gave
after He had already created life].
What has since transpired after the creation of life, is the created kinds producing after their own kind and this is what is seen in the fossil record. "Evolution" in this sense has been occurring, where there was an original ancestral created kind that God made (from the ground), and since then, these kinds have been reproducing and diversifying. As I have previously indicated (and I think you'll agree), the fossil record certainly does give indication of diversification of life. Where you and I take a different interpretation is that I believe God created something more than a single-celled universal common ancestor simple life form from which all complex life arose--that He created distinct [complex] kinds originally, including distinct human-kind, distinct birds of the air, distinct creatures of the sea, distinct beasts of the field, and distinct creeping things, all as distinct kinds. To what extent the variability or number of kinds existed originally at creation can only be speculated at this time; but at a minimum, the text provides for at least these major distinctions.
Creature[
s] (plural) indicates God created more than one creature, so the ancestral dolphin may not have been exactly like modern dolphins (the original kind from which, say all members of the Delphinidae family arose, would have been what was created on day 5). Now you reject this because you interpret the fossil record as a succession of living organisms fossilized through different catastrophic events over very long periods of time. Such is not the interpretation of biblical creationists, which is where I lean.
"
Please bring up Tiktaalik, so I can tell you it's predicted location was later discovered to be preceded by tetrapod tracks conventionally dated to be millions of years older. "
I'll bring up tiltaalik so that I might inform you that alleged terrestrial tracks predating tiltaalik are contested and that no actual tetrapod bone has been found to predate tiktaalik, in case you thought tetrapod bones had actually been found. Indeed the traces have be reinterpreted as fish traces (see link below). But even further, the trace marks themselves post date fish and predate fully developed tetrapods, where we would expect early tetrapod trackways none the less (if that were truly what they were), given that common descent were true.
To clarify, if the first alleged trackway were discovered anywhere beyond the devonian (mesozoic, cenozoic, proterozoic, hadean, archean, carboniferous, ordovician, Cambrian, Permian etc.), you might have a fair counter argument. However the alleged trackways still exists where common descent suggests that they ought to be (right around the beginning to mid devonian), none the less. Even if the alleged trackways were found at the very end of the silurian, it still wouldn't contradict the theory of evolution (though it would be surprising).
Beyond all this still, tiktaaliks locality was predicted none the less. Nobody has ever found silurian, ordovician, Cambrian nor precambrian tetrapod-hybrid fish fossils.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10420940.2015.1063491
Of course the date is being contested and reinterpreted... and by whom? Obviously the evolutionary biologists who want to believe that tiktaalik is the earliest evidence of a transition from sea to land and this claim comes under question/scrutiny if the tracks precede the animal. Everything about tiktaalik, archaeopteryx, rodhocetus, and every other alleged transition is immersed in a sea of quibblings and flip-flopping back and forth using conjecture against conjecture as the basis of argument. As it relates to origins and events/processes never observed, this is what scientists do and they regularly backpedal and reprise their ever-changing (yet oddly always-correct) position. By adhering to these views, your position will also waffle accordingly.
Anyway...
I will one-up you further by pointing toward research on immune cells also used to predict the temporal locality of human-chimpanzee ancestral fossils as well.
Immunological time scale for hominid evolution. - PubMed - NCBI
In this case, biological traits of modern day species were used to predict the temporal locality of fossils which at the time were even doubted by paleontologists to exist. Research later demonstrated greater accuracy in biological predictions than paleontological with respect to finding fossils, at least in this instance.
I see you've chosen Repeat. This is yet another way, among the myriads, of equivocating common design to mean common descent (it is not a "one-up"). A table has 4 legs and a chair has for legs, so therefore the chair evolved into the table, or the table evolved into the chair... or maybe a kind of convergent evolution, or maybe divergent evolution.... same thinking, just being applied to humans/apes. Tour made short order of the alleged "commonness" between apes/humans being only within 1.5% of the entire genome. That is mathematically demonstrable. Stating that immune cells predicted a temporal location of anything is 1) Conjecture (because you presuppose that one evolved into the other, which wasn't observed), 2) The mechanisms for the alleged evolution cannot be reproduced/demonstrated, 3) Such a view is not supported biblically, and 4) There is an empirical discordance between humans and primates that also cannot be explained by any data-supported research such as our interest in art, music, culture, religion, development of written and spoken language, and creative power, just to name a few... simply repeating more spurious conjecture retrofitted to try explaining events and processes not observable / demonstrable do no good.
I'll just quote myself from another post:
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.
Repeat, again. Paleontologists were indeed mistaken, man evolved from man, originally created as a man, by God, day 6. Ramapithecus is a pongid, a non-human primate. I just did research on this and even within the secular community the evolutionary biologists all want to make ramapithecus a 'link' but this is not in full agreement among biologists and many anthropologists (along with paleontologists) associate ramapihecus as being an extinct variation of modern orangutan. It is likely that many within the hominidae family (though not humans) originate from an ancestral created kind during creation.
The bottom line:
No credible scientist doubts the existence of the fossil succession nor the existence of a plethora of transitional forms. It is true that Darwin was unfamiliar with the succession, but again, he lived over 100 years ago.
Repeat, again. You don't ascribe "credibleness", because the conclusions of these scientists don't agree with your conclusions (but your conclusions are largely an assumption-driven extension of what little is observable and not data-substantiated, so again, I'm going to lean in favor of what is written in scripture and the little bit that is actually data-substantiated).
In the following article, the author goes into the lack of transitional forms within the fossil record and the abruptness of new species that show up:
Problem 5: Abrupt Appearance of Species in the Fossil Record Does Not Support Darwinian Evolution | Evolution News
This article is not particularly 'sympathetic' to creationists either, many from the Discovery Institute and Stephen Meyer himself hold to an old-earth view with a traditional interpretation of the geologic column representing long periods of time. That said, their research and interviews with other scientists support that fact of significant gaps throughout the fossil record and abrupt appearance ("explosions") of distinct species with no prior intermediary. Your biased view may wish to argue that certain layers still represent very long periods of time to allow for the imagined process of natural selection acting on random mutations to design new life forms, but there are no intermediates to support that view so again, I'm going to lean in the direction of scripture.
So far at least 3 repeats of the same thinking just being applied to specific instances; all of which come up empty beyond story-telling.
