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Noah may have used the last of the pterosaurs to fly them to where we find them today.
I rarely do much extensive reading deep into the threads. (I tend to see only the most recent posts.) So I'm surprised I found these questions directed at me from GOOD BROTHER. But because his interpretations about the fall and death before the fall have become prominent in the American evangelical world in recent decades, they merit a thorough refutation. Therefore, the questions I pose to Good Brother following my answers to his questions are directed at anyone and everyone who holds to his church's traditions. <snip>
Noah may have used the last of the pterosaurs to fly them to where we find them today.
That does not make sense, if life began on this planet only about 6000 years ago.Perhaps they were irradicated prior to the flood or the creation of mankind !!!!!! Like 63mya.
What evidence do you have for that?You do know pterosaurs haven't been around for the last 5,000 years or so, don't you?.
Perhaps Herman Fisher and Irving Price are scientists?
In any event, that looks more like a Veg-o-matic, than the Ark.
According to this web page, they flew in the skys above Eden, and sightings of what we call pterosaurs were documented in the KJV of the bible:
OBJECTIVE: Creation Education | Pterosaurs
That does not make sense, if life began on this planet only about 6000 years ago.
Regardless of the flaws in dating, even under some YEC scenarios it is still possible that dinosaurs were extinct by the time the ark was built. I can understand you guys wanting to ridicule creationists. You do it because your theory is such a mess and you are unable to defend it.
Now, the flavour of the month is feathered dinosaurs and you have modern foot prints dated to 212mya.
According to evos dinos arose 230mya and modern style birds appear to be thriving just 8my later.
Your theory is seriously in crisis and requires huge convolutions and non plausible scenarios to save it.
Not so for me. Even with your biased determination to misrepresent the data, it still aligns perfectly for me and I do not need libraries of inconsistent flavours of the month to support my views.
Wow, you can quote a completely bogus (as in bogus info, not bogus as in not there) site. Next you'll be quoting Wikipedia.According to this web page, they flew in the skys above Eden, and sightings of what we call pterosaurs were documented in the KJV of the bible:
OBJECTIVE: Creation Education | Pterosaurs
Regardless of the flaws in dating, even under some YEC scenarios it is still possible that dinosaurs were extinct by the time the ark was built.
I can understand you guys wanting to ridicule creationists. You do it because your theory is such a mess and you are unable to defend it.
Now, the flavour of the month is feathered dinosaurs and you have modern foot prints dated to 212mya.
According to evos dinos arose 230mya and modern style birds appear to be thriving just 8my later.
Your theory is seriously in crisis and requires huge convolutions and non plausible scenarios to save it.
Not so for me. Even with your biased determination to misrepresent the data, it still aligns perfectly for me and I do not need libraries of inconsistent flavours of the month to support my views.
The gene is still there in humans, it is just no longer functional.Many primate species are unable to synthesize vitamin C including ornagutan, gorilla, gibbon as well as guinea pig and bat; and some primates can like a lemur and galigo. This also appears to be an epigentic change and reversible not by selection, and hence basically means nothing at all, regardless of the ghosts you find.
Again, read the link.So basically you are suggesting that your predictions can be hit and miss. If one comes to be, it 'supports evolution'. If one doesn't then it is hand waved away with some bizarre and non plausible scenario.eg Y chromosome, brain size increase tied to bipedalism, teleofish with GLO orthologues missing, pterv1 etc.
I do actually.Do you know what a genetic remnant, or ghost as I call them, looks like? Let me tell you it does not look like anything at all. It is a set of numbers that an algorithm pumped out.
Respond away, be my guest.Actually I am responding to the thread topic and suggesting an interpretation of some data that you have yet to refute that suggests evolution is the sum value of misrepresentation used to support misrepresentation. No interpretation of the data that I offer could be worse than yours.
No, it is not a general comment - it is a fact.That is a general comment and means nothing. You can offer many things and I have spoken to a few. Defend them and stop evading the issue. They are as good as any. You are simply unable to lodge a refute, would be my guess.
In case you havn't noticed, many dinosaurs had feet that look almost exactly like modern-day birds.The point being that bird footprints that appear to look identical to modern day birds of flight dated to 212 million years ago is fantastic news for creationists. Your dating methods place birds less than 200 million years from the devonian, the age of fishes. That is a biblical support. That's great and we are lucky to have found such a find. The chances of hollow bird bones surviving from that time are slim so these footprints are a great find, I reckon. Don't forget 212mya birds were thriving in my scenario and I can speculate that they predate the tetrapods. Flight is seen in flying fish that can glide for huge distances. It all makes sense to me.
It all fits. I do not have to evoke ridiculous and non plausible scenarios and all sorts of convolutions.
Tetrapods have been dated to 400mya and much earlier than predicted, and at the close of the devonian. Tetrapod footprints at that time is great because it is after the devonian that land creatures were created.
Actually, I don't think you have any answers.Again, it all fits. Just like you, I do not have to have all the answers.
Sorry, the ploy of confusing adaptation of a sea lion to another variation of sea lion is proof of evolution. Well my friend, this is where evos use that magic wand and extrapolate in a huge leap of faith that a mouse deer can poof into a whale. It is a great imagination but imagination is all it is.
You hit the nail on the head, indohyus resembles a mouse deer and the bone density is irrelevant unless you are looking to create your own special intermediates. So what I say is correct. Your researchers are not interested in looking to what any fossil resembles here today. They will ignore a plethora of similarities and zone in on some difference, desperate to find an intermediate. With DNA evos do the opposite.
Carl Zimmer on Pakecetus said:"One particularly baffling fossil was the back part of a 50-million-year-old skull. It was about the size of a coyote's and had a high ridge running like a mohawk over the top of its head, where muscles could attach and give the mammal a powerful bite. When Gingrich looked underneath the skull, he saw ear bones. They were two shells shaped like a pair of grapes and were anchored to the skull by bones in the shape of an S. For a paleontologist like Gingerich, these ear bones were a shock. Only the ear bones of whales have such a structure; no other vertebrate possesses them."
That's becasue you just make it all up as you go along.....It all fits nicely for me. The Y chromosome is no problem for me and neither are the bird foot prints, etc. Evos get lots of headaches trying to invent stories to make the surprises and anonolies fit. I am pleased I am a creationist.
Which actually means that you don't care if you are actually right cos your mind is made up, any evidence that comes along to disprove you is either hand waving, magic or just plain lies.Basically nothing I have to offer could be worse than the instability, flavour of the month and biased misrepresentation evos have to offer..
I saw a buzzard once and I thought I was looking at a turkey. I suppose that is why they call them turkey vultures sometimes. Although I am sure they are way different from each other.In case you havn't noticed, many dinosaurs had feet that look almost exactly like modern-day birds.
As I couldn't keep up with the threads here, I had to take a step back.
It's interesting to see how Astrid posts.
She quotes a lot of references. A lot of these don't support her arguments. E.g. she posts links showing that the phylogenetic tree has been modified over the years as more evidence has come in and better theories to explain evolution has come in. She tries to paint this quite normal procedure as indicating something "wrong" with evolution, but doesn't actually say what it is that is "wrong" or why we should be concerned if the phylogenetic tree is refined and improved over time.
She does bluster a bit. E.g. she posted the John Sanford link. I looked into it, found problems, found a sophisticated analysis of his work, read some more, and figured out what was wrong with it. When I posted my response, I received a blustering "get over it". But, Astrid didn't actually address my points concerning why Sanford's simulations were based on poor models of mutation and variation to the point where the predictions of his model mean nothing. But she hasn't addressed these issues. And personally I'm not convinced that she can. She posts a lot of scientific looking links, but I don't think she really understands the content of her links, and hence can't construct an argument based on them. She can only post, and bluster. I'd be happy to be proved wrong here, but that's all I'm seeing so far.
She's done some similar blustering with the Vitamin C example. The point was raised as to why humans have only the first few steps of vitamin C synthesis present, but the last step doesn't work. Why would a God make us work that way? But Astrid suddenly posts a link to a paper about mammals being able to synthesise or not synthesise Vitamin C, again with a blustering put-down. I looked at the paper and I can't see how it supports her argument.
It does look like Astrid is posting something that has the surface appearance of a scientific argument, but which lacks the underlying logic.
That's my analysis, anyhow.
But why do evolutionists always tell me it's not about superficial appearances? First, you say "LOOK at their feet! Both dinosaurs and birds have feet that LOOK ALIKE." and then you say, "LOOK at their bones! Both LOOK LIKE they have hollow bones." Not you particularly, but other evolutionists say "LOOK, it LOOKS LIKE they both had feathers!" "LOOK, it LOOKS LIKE they both have beaks!" LOOK, it LOOKS LIKE they both this or that..." "LOOK" "LOOK" "LOOK", but when a creationst says something about appearances, then all of a sudden its not about looks anymore.In case you havn't noticed, many dinosaurs had feet that look almost exactly like modern-day birds.
Like these in fact:
Many dinosaurs had hollow bones...
So which is it? When do you think they went extinct? Millions, or thousands of years ago?Regardless of the flaws in dating, even under some YEC scenarios it is still possible that dinosaurs were extinct by the time the ark was built.That does not make sense, if life began on this planet only about 6000 years ago.
Where did I say it was my theory?I can understand you guys wanting to ridicule creationists. You do it because your theory is such a mess and you are unable to defend it.
Yet in all the time you have been here you have yet provide evidence for this assertion. But, I don't have a vested interest in that theory, so your continued scratching at it is of no matter.
Now, the flavour of the month is feathered dinosaurs and you have modern foot prints dated to 212mya.
According to evos dinos arose 230mya and modern style birds appear to be thriving just 8my later.
Your theory is seriously in crisis and requires huge convolutions and non plausible scenarios to save it.
What *are* your views? Have you actually stated them clearly anywhere on this board?Not so for me. Even with your biased determination to misrepresent the data, it still aligns perfectly for me and I do not need libraries of inconsistent flavours of the month to support my views.
I don't understand the whole 'missing link' problem...
Everything is a link between something. The fossil record is pretty complete now isn't it?
I mean, we have almost complete lineages of some species don't we? ...and mountains more genetic evidence to determine ancestry...
I have a question: Why did God create chicken with the genes for teeth?
Also: Why did God create mice with the genes for scales?
Even more interesting question: Why do all the other animals that don't seem to be decedents of reptiles NOT have the gene for making scales?
Coincidence maybe?
I will start with what the book is not about. It is not a primer on how evolution works. Apart from a brief discussion of how Darwin came to discover natural selection, there is nothing about the various ways evolution can occur. There is a bit on species definitions, where he explains the limitations of Mayr’s Biological Species Concept (the “interbreeding” one), but nothing on the various modes of speciation. It does not discuss the difference between fact and theory—in other words, it is aimed at an audience who already knows something about evolution and knows that common descent is a fact.
The purpose of the book is to tackle one, and really only one, type of pervasive misconception, one that many people hold: the misconception of the “The Missing Link”.
In order to do this Gee wanders through a lot of historical territory, examining the ways the fossil record has traditionally been interpreted, and points out that paleontology for most of its history suffered from the very human tendency to tell ourselves stories about the past. Most of paleontology and the fossil record has been couched in narrative terms: this happened, and then it led to this, and then this, and as a result we have (birds, whales, humans, etc.). For example, the history of tetrapods was, for a century or more, told in terms of fishy creatures evolving limbs in order to survive on land. The evolution of horses is one of progression towards the modern horse; increasing height and tooth crowns, decreasing number of toes. Humans stepped along in a progressive chain of increasing uprightness and brain power. A story was told of becoming; new fossil finds were slotted in to move the tale along.
And as Gee describes, as satisfying as this narrative approach is, it is a misleading, erroneous, and unscientific way of understanding the fossil record. We cannot say that this fossil was the ancestor to that fossil; we cannot even try to legitimize it by saying that this fossil represents the ancestral species represented by that fossil. As he says in the infamous quote, we cannot infer cause and effect from fossils. We do not have enough of them, we do not know if the individual that became the fossil ever reproduced or not, we cannot legitimately create a line of fossils, call them ancestors and descendants, and also call it science. It is not science because we cannot test such a claim: it cannot be falsified.
But here’s the thing: while it is not legitimate to infer lines of descent from fossils, and construct scenarios about why such and such a lineage grew legs/grew big brains, we can in fact construct testable hypotheses about the relationships of one fossil species to another. We can reconstruct the evolutionary history—the phylogeny--of any group of organisms, as long as there are more than two, and we can do this because we know that all organisms are related by common descent, even if we cannot identify any specific ancestors. We use cladistics.
Cladistics is basically an algorithm for recovering nested patterns. It can work in any system where a feature in one object gets passed down to “descendant” objects. It works in biology because of the facts of reproduction and heredity. It also is used in recovering the history of manuscripts: in the days of manual copying, mistakes introduced in one copy were often passed down to “descendant” copies.
What this tells us is that the algorithm does not rely upon any a priori assumptions about evolution, beyond the unarguable facts of basic heredity. We don’t need to know how evolution works, we don’t need to know anything about any dates on any of the objects. As Gee writes:
“Cladistics is concerned with the pattern produced by the evolutionary process; it is not concerned with the process that created the pattern, or the swiftness or slowness with which that process acted” (p. 151)
And of course we do not need to know anything about the relationships among the objects of interest: that is the purpose of cladistics—to recover those unknown patterns. The patterns are recovered by analyzing features of the objects in question, and tracking how they are passed down. A group is formed because of the features the objects within the group all share that are also present in the ancestor of the group, but are not present in other groups.
We know that traits are passed down from ancestors to their descendants, that is basic biology. We know that ancestors usually have more than one descendant, which means that each descendant has the potential to become the ancestor of a lineage that is distinct from any other of its siblings. This is how families work, and this is how common descent works. To deny common descent is to deny the reality of families. Gee’s point, though, is that when we get into Deep Time, we do not have all the members of the family we would require to construct an ancestor-descendant lineage, we only have occasional bits of information in the form of individual fossils. We know that there are ancestors, that had descendants; we do not know what those specific ancestors were. But cladistics allows us to reconstruct the relationships among the bits of information we DO have, in a way that does not rely upon invention or wishful thinking. We use available data to construct hypotheses of relationships.
Why have I emphasized “hypothesis of relationships”? Because this is critical to the entire theme of Gee’s book: Irrespective of what any individual may want to be true about the relationships, the data will determine the outcome, not a priori beliefs, wishful thinking, the research directions of a career, intuition, “common sense”, or authoritative statements. One’s hypotheses can be tested, by anyone with access to the data, or by the discovery of new fossils, or by refinements in the algorithms themselves. So if we have a bunch of tetrapod or dinosaur fossils, and The Expert believes that fossil B is a “missing link” between fossils A and D, and publishes his work claiming that there is a sequence of ancestry and descent represented by fossils A--> B --> D, this will likely get a lot of media attention, with breathless headlines about how the discovery of B has “Changed Everything We Know About ________ Evolution!!!11!!one!” (insert group of choice). And the misconception of The Great Chain of Being, or the Ladder of Progression will be reinforced, because it makes intuitive sense to us, it satisfies a deep-seated requirement to link things together and create a story of life.
And it is Wrong. Gee calls this sort of thing “Evolution by copywriter”, and “voodoo paleontology”. This was pervasive in the past, but in today’s paleontology such pronouncements are usually avoided by the scientists themselves (with some unfortunate exceptions). Rather than make breathless announcements about new Missing Links, they will reanalyze the data with the new information, testing previous hypotheses of relationships, and along the way testing any claims that A --> B --> D form a lineage. And while they can never prove such a scenario to be true, it may indeed bedisproved, or falsified.
It is theoretically possible that species A may be the ancestor to B, but that is something we can never know for certain. However, cladistics provides a way of testing such claims. Basically, if one wishes to propose that fossil A is the ancestor to fossil B, then fossil A and B must represent sister species on a cladogram—they must be each other’s closest relatives (share a common ancestor)—if they do not, then fossil A cannot be the ancestor to fossil B, no matter how much one might wish it. If A is NOT the sister to B on a cladogram, it means there are intervening ancestors between A and B.
Here is an example of this, from human evolution, a field of paleontology unfortunately prone to Voodoo Paleontology and the antediluvian notions of progression and “becoming”: we are most interested in our own story, after all. But entrenched attitudes can be hard to dig out. This example is not in Gee’s book, but from my own files.
In 1999 a new species of hominin was described, Australopithecus garhi. The discoverers provide descriptions of a relatively complete cranium and dentition, and several postcranial elements (arm and leg bones). They then make this claim: “This species is descended from Australopithecus afarensis and is a candidate ancestor for early Homo” (Asfaw et al., 1999:629). We can see how they have created an untestable story of becoming, as Gee puts it. And in this case it is the scientists themselves doing it.
But all is not lost; cladistics is becoming much more common amongst paleoanthropologists. In 2004 David Strait and Fred Grine published a massive paper that showed that the disagreements between molecular phylogenies and morphological phylogenies based on craniodental characters of extant humans and great apes largely disappeared when fossil hominins were added to the data. They also tested several proposed phylogenies of fossil hominins, including the A. garhi claim. Their consensus cladogram, utilizing a data matrix of almost 200 characters, showed that A. garhi could not be ancestral to Homo: it did not represent the sister species to the Homo clade. Therefore the claim that A. garhi was a “missing link” between A. afarensis and Homo was falsified. Asfaw et al. protested this result of course, but the point remains: their proposal was “story-telling” with no objective way to test it, while Strait and Grine made no a priori assumptions, and just let the data speak for itself. Their result, being itself a hypothesis of relationships, can be tested by anyone willing to try it.
To sum up this rather lengthy exposition:
The history of life cannot be characterized by a story of progress. There is no chain, no links, no steps on a ladder, no “becoming” something (a bird, a modern human). There are just taxa, and their relationships to each other--either close, or more distant. There are traits that are shared, by larger or smaller groups, that show us the pattern of descent with modification, and we can recover that pattern by using cladistics. We don’t have to make up stories about why it happened that particular way.
And this is what Gee was talking about in his quote. He was NOT saying that ancestors did not exist, or that common ancestry was false, or even that the relationships of one fossil to another cannot be determined. He was simply saying that inventing a chain of ancestors and descendants cannot be supported by testable data, that any such scenario is speculation. It is perfectly legitimate to say that A. garhi is a distant cousin of ours, with a few common ancestors and some closer relatives in between. It is not legitimate to say that A. garhi IS one of those ancestors: we can never know (and the evidence is against it anyway).
We can even apply this to the other quotes that Our Faithful Poster was putting up: Eldredge was not saying that horse evolution was false; he was lamenting the fact that the display showed a linear progression of ancestors and descendants. In point of fact, horse evolution is remarkably well represented in the fossil record, and is remarkably bushy and speciose. There were many different groups that lived at the same time, each with its own set of characteristics that set it off from related groups, so in the context of horses it is especially misleading to suggest that there is a single line of ancestry and descent.
Okay, I'd be glad to help.I don't understand the whole 'missing link' problem...
No, not really.Everything is a link between something.
No, not really.The fossil record is pretty complete now isn't it?
No, not at all.I mean, we have almost complete lineages of some species don't we?
No, not really....and mountains more genetic evidence to determine ancestry...
Okay, I'd be glad to answer it if I could.I have a question:
Chickens probably had teeth at one time just like the archeopteryx had teeth and it was a bird. Chickens are actually born with an "egg tooth" at the end of their beak. It enables them to break free from the confines of the egg and builds their muscles at the same time.Why did God create chicken with the genes for teeth?
Can you cite evidence for this claim?Also: Why did God create mice with the genes for scales?
Completely bogus. I never presented it as anything else. A 'young' Earth? Pterosaurs living with humans? Adam and Eve, and Moses, as real people? Who would believe such things?Wow, you can quote a completely bogus (as in bogus info, not bogus as in not there) site.
Next you'll be quoting the bible.Next you'll be quoting Wikipedia.
What does 'In Christ' mean? Are you completely in Christ, or just part of you? If so, which part?In Christ, GB
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