Spineless evolutionists smoking stinkweed

[Jerry Smith]

If you erased a scientists' memory of all knowledge of the Cetaceans, made casts of the bones of the various Delphinades family and tagged them with a sequence of dates, I expect that the scientist would not be able to class them into more than one or two species without knowledge of the soft parts. Larger differences in morphology that assist in classifying living organisms are generally absent from the fossils, because normally only the hard parts fossilize.

Added: the scientist would only recognize 'stasis' in a fossil record put together the way you suggest.

 

[LiveFreeOrDie]

Originally posted by randman
I think you could line up all of the existing animals in the delphinades family and do the same.

If you think you can, then do it, please.

Heck, considering there is fertile cross-breeding between the killer whale sub-family and bottle-nosed dolphins,

Wrong. There is a single known fertile cross-breeding between the Pseudorca crassidens (False Killer Whale) and Tursiops truncatus (Bottlenose Dolphin). Both are members of the Delphinidae family, which includes Killer whales and Pilot whales.

Here is a Pseudora crassidens (False Killer Whale):

And Tursiops truncatus (Bottlenose Dolphin)

Just for reference, here is a real Killer Whale (Orcinus orca):

I am not sure the range of a single genome of species or "kind" does not cover some theoritical "evolution" of one thing to another. In other words, if you lined up the dolphin and the killer whale, already one classifies them into different sub-families, but they can interbreed successfully, and froma creationist perspective are the thus the same "kind."

Just because two species CAN reproduce in an artificial environment doesn't mean they actually DO in the wild. In fact, if there weren't some barrier to reproduction between dolphins and false killer whales then we would expect the species to eventually merge. Besides, the ability to reproduce is not the only criteria that biologists use to classify species.

However, if fossils were found at different strata, it is likely that evolutionists would insist that not only were they different species (as they do today), but they would think one evolved from the other, and that they they could not mate. In other words, they would totally miss the mark, and assume macro-evolution had occurred rather than simple selctive breeding which cannot produce macro-evolution.

Whether the two specimens are considered related by evolution has nothing to do with their ability to interbreed and everything to do with the chronology of the specimens and their morphological relationships.

If we observe a morphological change over the chronological sequence of fossils A, B, C, and D, then it is irrelevent whether or not D could interbreed with A. The sequence still demonstrates gradual change over time.

 

[randman]

First, pseudo-oracas are in the same sub-family as orcas, and the dolphin is not, despite the pretty pictures. Why do you think that is?
It is because the false-killer whale is considered closer to the killer whale than either of them is to the dolphin. Moreover, there are other pictures you ought to post which more thoroughly illustrates why the pseudo-orca is placed with orcas and not with dolphins.
You also seem to be unaware that they do actually sometimes breed in the wild.

 

[LiveFreeOrDie]

Originally posted by randman
First, pseudo-oracas are in the same sub-family as orcas, and the dolphin is not, despite the pretty pictures. Why do you think that is?

I don't know what you mean by "sub-family". Here is the taxonomic classification for both:

Killer Whale
Order: Cetacea
Family: Delphindae
Genus: Orcinus
Species: orca

False Killer Whale
Order: Cetacea
Family: Delphindae
Genus: Pseudorca
Species: crassidens

If by "sub-family" you mean "Genus", then you are wrong.

It is because the false-killer whale is considered closer to the killer whale than either of them is to the dolphin.

By whom? AiG?

Moreover, there are other pictures you ought to post which more thoroughly illustrates why the pseudo-orca is placed with orcas and not with dolphins.

Be my guest.

You also seem to be unaware that they do actually sometimes breed in the wild.

I am prepared to accept that if you would provide references.

 

[Jerry Smith]

LFOD, I checked randman's facts last go-round and there was at least one researcher who classified pseudorca and orca in the same sub-family, with the other dolphins and porpoises in a separate sub-family. I don't remember the details, but rm's facts did check out.

 

[npetreley]

Interesting that you evolutionists are attempting to hijack this into vertebrates...

...as for meeting the challenge....

chirp....chirp...chirp.....chirp....chirp....

Don't worry, I can occupy myself while I wait...

99,999,999,999,999 bottles of beer on the wall, 99,999,999,999,999 bottles of beer...

 

[Jerry Smith]

Originally posted by npetreley
Interesting that you evolutionists are attempting to hijack this into vertebrates...

...as for meeting the challenge....

chirp....chirp...chirp.....chirp....chirp....

Don't worry, I can occupy myself while I wait...

99,999,999,999,999 bottles of beer on the wall, 99,999,999,999,999 bottles of beer...

Don't worry. No one is likely to meet your challenge any time soon. You can go ahead and reveal what you think we should conclude from our inability to meet your challenge, or even what we could conclude from our inability to meet your challenge even without the stipulation about polyploids..

 

[npetreley]

Originally posted by Jerry Smith


Don't worry. No one is likely to meet your challenge any time soon. You can go ahead and reveal what you think we should conclude from our inability to meet your challenge, or even what we could conclude from our inability to meet your challenge even without the stipulation about polyploids..

To quote myself, "But with 99.9% of the fossil record to draw upon, one would think you'd come up with SOMETHING that meets the criteria, even if you don't know how to tell if the fossils represent polyploids."

Duh.

 

[Morat]

  Hmm. So you want us to give you fossils that aren't polyploids, even though we can't tell which are, and then whine that we're asking how to avoid giving you polyploids?

   I thought Bill Gates said some weird stuff.

 

 

[Jerry Smith]

But with 99.9% of the fossil record to draw upon, one would think you'd come up with SOMETHING that meets the criteria,

And why, exactly is it that one would think this?

 

[randman]

Jerry, there are huge differences between pseudo-orcas and dolphins, hard differences such as nearly twice the number of teeth, if I remember correctly, and huge differences in size and bone structure, none of which is shown in the cute illustrations LFOD posted.
These bone differences appear to me to equal the changes seen in the chart from reptile to mammal so frequently posted here.

 

[Jerry Smith]

I'll will try to check that out myself. If you can find a reference though, I would appreciate it.

Hold that thought: where are you going with this?

 

[randman]

Actually Jerry, the dolphin has twice the number of teeth (88) as the pseudo-orca (44), and the offspring has exactly 66. I included some technical references last time, but seem to have removed it from my bookmark. Shouldn't be too hard to find though.

Where I am going is whereever the truth leads.

 

[Jerry Smith]

The reason I said hold up was this: false killer whales and any particular species of dolphin that it can and rarely does interbreed with are still two different species. Now, I was just guessing, but I said if you got bone samples from various individuals of the Delphinades (I meant to imply a broad selection of them), that scientists would have a hard time identifying them as more than one or two different species, based strictly on the hard parts. Now, you are suggesting that the scientists would be likely to name them as transitionals, and indeed, if there were enough structural differences, with some of them corresponding more closely to the primitive state of cetaceans, and some more closely corresponding to modern dolphins & killer whales, and they were "dated" in the correct order, the scientists might make that mistake. The question is, are there enough of the right structures that you could fake the dating and fool a scientist? I'm really not sure there are. I would like to see which bones you would pick from which species to do this...

 

[randman]

Well, that was my point all along, even in the thread prior to this. However, I would point out that from a creationist perspective, these are the same kind regardless of how you choose to classify "species."

 

[LewisWildermuth]

Randman,

If you only had the bones of each how would you determine "kind"?

 

[randman]

"Rice (1984) divided the Delphinidae into five subfamilies: Stenoninae, with the genera Steno, Sousa, and Sotalia; Delphininae, with Tursiops, Stenella, Delphinus, Lagenodelphis, Lagenorhynchus, and Grampus; Globicephalinae, with Peponocephala, Feresa, Pseudorca, Globicephala, Orcinus, and Orcaella; Lissodelphinae, with Lissodelphis; and Cephalorhynchinae, with Cephalorhynchus. Barnes, Domning, and Ray (1985) accepted the same subfamilies but placed Orcaella in its own subfamily, Orcaellinae, and transferred it to the family Monodontidae. Pilleri and Gihr (1981b) considered the Stenoninae to be a full family with the name Stenidae."

http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/walkers_mammals_of_the_world/cetacea/cetacea.delphinidae.html#genera

"Randman,

If you only had the bones of each how would you determine "kind"?"

Great point. Ask the same question on determining "species" and you will have begun to see what I am talking about.

 

[randman]

"Many authorities, including Rice (1977), have referred all Tursiops to the single species T. truncatus. Hall (1981) used the name T. nesarnack in place of T. truncatus and treated T. aduncus as a subspecies thereof. Zhou and Qian (1985) reported the presence of both T. truncatus and T. aduncus off the coast of China. Van Gelder (1977b) recommended making Tursiops a synonym of Grampus, on the basis of reported hybridization between the two genera. Such hybridization now is known to have occurred both in the wild and in captivity, and hybrids also have been produced in captivity through interbreeding of Tursiops with the genera Pseudorca, Steno, and Globicephala (Sylvestre and Tasaka 1985)."

http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/walk...rld/cetacea/cetacea.delphinidae.tursiops.html

 

[LewisWildermuth]

Then if you cannot give me a better model on how the system works than we alreasy have why should I dump evolution for a six day creation?

I believe in a creation event, but not in the meddling of God in the creation after that like a bad mechanic.

 

[Jerry Smith]

Now, you are suggesting that the scientists would be likely to name them as transitionals, and indeed, if there were enough structural differences, with some of them corresponding more closely to the primitive state of cetaceans, and some more closely corresponding to modern dolphins & killer whales, and they were "dated" in the correct order, the scientists might make that mistake. The question is, are there enough of the right structures that you could fake the dating and fool a scientist? I'm really not sure there are. I would like to see which bones you would pick from which species to do this...

I have done some looking it and it appears that the number of teeth can vary within a single species on these, and that the differences between the pseudorcas and the dolphins in teeth count are smaller. 16-22 (32-44 total) per jaw on the pseudorcas & 18-26 per jaw (36-52 total) in Bottlenose dolphins -- if I added them up right and understood correctly what I read.

When you speculate that scientists could be fooled by a seeming progression of forms, if they didn't know they were all modern forms, have you really looked at how you would put such a progression together?