Jack the Bodiless

Not a single cell: a single self-replicating molecule.

Theories relating to the origin of the first replicator are more properly abiogenesis, not evolution. But the first true cell is considered to be a distant and evolved descendant of the first self-replicating molecule.

Beware of creationists arguing that a living cell is "too complex" to have arisen by "pure chance". This claim, though true, is misleading. Self-replicating molecules are much simpler, and once evolution is operating on them, it isn't "pure chance" anymore (as natural selection preserves useful traits and discards harmful ones).

Oolon Colluphid

Hi CR!

Well, hopefully I won’t be stealing Rufus’s thunder here... Ah, but there’s the rub. How many gaps is too many? You see, gaps are just what we’d expect, given what we know about how fossils are formed.

The critter has to die and not be eaten or scavenged, buried in just the right sort of substrate before it’s broken down entirely (the vast majority of fossils are from water-living things, nice lake sediments and so on; most on land don’t get buried fast enough).

Then it has to be left undisturbed long enough for the bones or whatever to be gradually replaced with minerals.

Then it has to survive in the rock for however-many million years, ie not get exposed and weathered, not crushed or broken up.

And then it has to be found. Now, we could open-cast mine for the things, but this usually mean catching them just as they weather out of the rock, or when digging for other reasons. So they only can be found in a small range of places (compared, that is, to all the places they might actually be).

And after all that, what? Well, nevertheless, we’ve got a lot of fossils. And you know what? Not one of them contradicts evolution.

Not only that. We have many bridges across these ‘gaps’. We have spectacular series of them. We have smaller-scale changes in trilobite rib numbers; we have cynodont therapsids, we have dinobirds, we have Australopithecus afarensis, africanus, Homo habilis, ergaster, erectus. To name a few.

In other words, we have many examples of non-gaps.

Now, it could be that buried in all those rocks we can’t look in are definitive fossil proofs that evolution’s wrong. (Creationists have been happy to fake these for us.) It could be. But don’t bet on it.

The point is, you see, that science tackles the unknown, but bases its ideas on the known. So gaps do not matter. What matters is all the non-gaps. We have clear-cut examples of evolution from the fossil record.

What’s more, the creationist ‘gaps in the fossils’ position is fragile. For what happens if an intermediate form between ‘unbridgeable gaps’ is found?

(I’ll tell you what happens. Creationists then point out that there’s now two gaps, one on either side. Go figure.)

What they’ve got is a god-of-the-fossil-gaps. And where does their god go if a gap is filled?

And filled they often are. Back in Darwin’s day, we knew bugger all about our ancestors from fossils. So there was a huge gap between the other African apes and us. But now we know of a dozen or more species of hominid bodding around in the right place (Africa, ie not Australia or the Americas, for instance) at the right time (the last 6 million years or so), and the ‘controversy’ you’ll hear of from the AiG crowd among palaeoanthropologists is to do with precisely which was ancestral to what -- eg where A garhi fits.

Bottom line: evolution predicts that there existed in the past organisms that had characteristics of two, now separate, groups. Fossils of such organisms have been found, so evolution is vindicated. And since creation claims such things cannot be, it is refuted.

So the gaps don’t matter, what matters is what we’ve got.

(Links for all this are available if you’d like to follow it up. I nearly put some in, but didn’t want this to be too off-putting: I’m wary of throwing too much at you at once.)

Hope that helps.

Cheers, Oolon

Shpongle

Have you seen the huge red flag AIG has in their statement of faith?

"6. By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record."

Beforehand, they define their interpretation of scripture. That they are unwilling to waver from it, even in light of contradictory evidence, prevents them from doing intellectually honest science.

They may dress up their arguments better than Hovind, but like Hovind, they just want to preach their preformed religious worldview.

Doubting Didymus

Welcome to the IIDB evolution forum, ChristianRationalist. I have to congratulate you on doing so well on rufus's pop quiz. Some of those are less obvious than they look. (for example, it's hard to find any two texts that can agree with each other about the definitions of macro/microevolution)

I hope you stick around. It's unusual and quite pleasant to meet a creationist (would you describe yourself as a creationist, by the way?) that actually knows the basics of evolutionary theory. Most YECs are quite adamant about seeing people give birth to a shrub, or some such.