- Jan 28, 2003
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You should study up on statistical methods. If I want to tell if a factory is turning out good cookies, do I need to eat every single one? No, that is not how it works. Rather, workers take representative samples at different times and test them for quality. If the samples show the cookies are excellent at noon, good at 4 PM, and mediocre at 8 PM, then something must be wrong with the process, and it is getting worse.
Likewise if the fossil record takes a representative sample deep in the record and finds only reptile fossils, and takes a sample further up and finds some with a bulge on the jaw, and later finds a bigger bulge, and later finds that bulge acting as a second jaw joint so the animal has both a reptile and mammal joint, and later finds animals that have only a mammal joint, then that is a clear indication that things have been changing. We are not talking about a few fossils. We are talking about thousands of fossils in hundreds of species showing this pattern.
If you want to show the sample size is too small to be significant, prove it. Scientists are strongly convinced that the sample size is more than enough to be significant. You have presented zero evidence that it is not.
Now, of course you could argue that it is not representative, that there was some systematic cause that made the animals fossilize in a sequence that did not represent what was there. Going back to the factory example, if the worker who takes the sample at noon takes all from the left side of the oven, the sample at 4 is taken from the right side, and the sample at 8 is taken from the middle, then we do not have a representative sampling. Different samples were taken different ways, so the trend might not be meaningful. Likewise, if your claim is that nature was changing throughout this time, you could claim that this constant change of nature is what causes the phenomenon.
That is why I have been asking you in multiple different ways whether you think the trend is just luck because the sample size is too small, or if you think there was some systematic changing of nature causing the fossil record to lay down fossils in the order shown. I have had absolutely no success in getting you to actually address the question. Instead you break my messages into tweets, make irrelevant points about each tweet, miss the overall point, and declare victory!
So if you claim that the pattern we see in the fossils is not meaningful because the sample size is too small, statistics show you are flat out wrong. If you claim it is not meaningful, because nature was constantly changing into a different nature hundreds of times throughout the course of history, Occam's Razor says you are wrong. And if you say the jaw really was evolving as the record shows, but that full mammals were walking around the whole time that others were evolving the mammal jaw, your idea is laughable.
So whatever it is you are claiming, it is wrong. You refuse to be nailed down as to what you believe. You float back and forth between the explanations above. When we explain what was wrong with one view, you switch to another, and then later come right back to the first in a blinding display of flipflopping. This proves nothing. All it proves is that it is impossible to nail jello to the wall.
I won't bother to respond to all the jibberish in your post, but this one is just too silly to pass up. For the record, many dinosaurs ate meat. So no, the mammal jaw was not something that evolved to allow animals to eat meat. And besides, this statement is an argument for evolution, which you will quickly drop when pressed on it, and switch back to one of your other explanations, so why even bother addressing your error? All I need to do is wait 2 days, and you will switch to a different explanation.
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