G
good brother
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It's almost like he read the letter at the beginning of this thread. Allow me to quote him a few time from the passage you gave us.
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 heres 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 historythe phylogeny--of any group of organisms, as long as there are more than two,
Gees 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.
In Christ, GB
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