Oolon Colluphid

Which, we should point out to Ed, is only the final 5% of the recorded history of life, which dates back 3500 million years. That's 95% of the record where there ain't no pollen. Care to explain, Ed?

Oolon

Jack the Bodiless

No, it would not. Darwin himself predicted "living fossils" like the coelacanth, surviving in isolated stable habitats.

But there is no genuine fossil of a creature which appears too early in the fossil record. Like a coelacanth in the Precambrian, or a hominid in the Jurassic. It is statistically impossible for this to be a coincidence.

...Which is why some creationists (those who are aware of the significance of this) feel the need to invent such fossils
Nope, the chances of NOT finding single fossil grains is astronomical. Pollen gets everywhere, and rocks are rich in pollen grains. But not a single grain of grass pollen got into those older rocks.
Nope, Robert E. Lee became the ancestor of Ed when Robert E. Lee was born at the age of zero. Or, alternatively, when Ed was born. Certainly not when his son was born!

Automaton

Wow Ed, I am amazed at your ability to rip stuff out of "Not By Chance". Did you even read the actual article? (Ed probably cringes at the thought of getting an education.) It is about one specific case of resistance, one out of thousands. But if you think they all convey a decrease in information, and since you're so fond of journal articles, why don't you go <a href="http://www.molbiolevol.org/cgi/reprint/13/6/719?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&title abstract=resistance&searchid=1014897317449_307&sto red_search=&FIRSTINDEX=0&journalcode=molbiolevol" target="_blank">th is</a> and point out the reasons why all these cases are wrong.

Automaton

Oh yeah, while you're at it, look <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/utils/fref.fcgi?http://www.pnas.org/cgi/pmidlookup?view=full&pmid=11158568" target="_blank">here</a>. Have fun trying to lie your way out of it this time.

MrDarwin

Hey, where's Patrick when we need him? I'm a rather poor stand-in.

Any citations or should we just take your word for it on these claims?

So you are admitting that what you just asserted in the previous sentence might not be true? So which is it, they are found, or they are not found? Make up your mind.

In reality, fossils are not rare, they are exceedingly common, and the fossil record of some groups is extremely well-known. Fossils of certain organisms or groups of organisms (especially terrestrial) are rare. But things like trilobites, brachiopods, various corals, and crinoid stem segments are extremely common fossils. I know; I used to collect them as a kid. In fact, there's a bin of fossil trilobites in my museum gift shop right now, being sold for just a few dollars each. These things aren't exactly precious gems. There are enormous layers of sedimentary beds made almost entirely of fossilized microorganisms.

It's not exactly a secret among paleontologists that the first or last occurrence of an organisms in the fossil record is probably not the same as its true occurrence through time. But a coelacanth in any Precambrian sediments (or any other vertebrate) would be "out of place." An organism can persist past its last occurrence in the fossil record, but it cannot exist before its ancestors.

Actually, fossil grains are extremely common in the fossil record. This is because (a) flowering plants are the dominant plants on the earth, and are found in virtually every environment where plant life is possible; (b) pollen in general is extremely tough and easily fossilized, and (c) pollen is carried by wind to all corners of the earth--the chance of finding modern sediments withoutpollen grains is astronomical. The neat thing about the pollen grains of flowering plants is that (d) it is unlike that of any other pollen-bearing plant (e.g., pine trees). Tricolpate pollen appears in the fossil record only shortly before the unambiguous occurrence of fossils of flowering plants (there are many plant fossils from that time and shortly before that may or may not be flowering plants or their immediate ancestors)--and once it appears, it is ubiquitous.

The interesting thing is that pollen of flowering plants is not found in sediments earlier than the Cretaceous, even though botanists fully expect that flowering plants evolved sometime before their first appearance in the fossil record. The scientist who finds unambiguous flowering plant pollen in earlier sediments, e.g., early Jurassic, would make quite a name for himself, so there is no evolutionary reason to deny that flowering plant pollen could indeed be found in earlier sediments; it just isn't. However, fossil pollen from any flowering plant in any Precambrian or early Paleozoic strata would be extremely unlikely based on what we know about plant evolution, because terrestrial vascular plants had not yet evolved, much less flowering plants.

[ February 28, 2002: Message edited by: MrDarwin ]</p>

GunnerJ

Ho ho! What a wit! Perhaps the reason for his "personal attack" is the same for mine: it was deserved. When you babble on with nonsensical, poorly-thought out, unevidenced bullshit assertions and reply with pithy one-liner regurgitations of tired, hackneyed apologetics to other people's long, well thought out, clearly sourced replies, you deserve all the "personal attacks" aimed at you.

Hey Jack, Ed just paid you a compliment!

MrDarwin

A quick websearch turned up a couple of interesting articles on angiosperm evolution, with particular reference to their pollen record:

<a href="http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/IB181/VPL/Cup/Cup5.html" target="_blank">http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/IB181/VPL/Cup/Cup5.html</a>
<a href="http://www.monmouth.com/~bcornet/paleobot.htm" target="_blank">http://www.monmouth.com/~bcornet/paleobot.htm</a>

John Solum

The YEC Geoscience Research Institute has an article that discusses Clifford Burdick's claim to have found pollen in Precambrian rocks.

<a href="http://www.grisda.org/origins/08007.htm" target="_blank">http://www.grisda.org/origins/08007.htm</a>

To summarize their article they couldn't reproduce Burdick's findings (i.e., they didn't find any pollen in their samples), and the types of pollen Burdick reported are like modern pollen that are found in that area.

There are also links to reactions to the GRI article, including one by Burdick. Burdick's final sentence refers to "jumbled stratigraphic sequences" in Glacier National Park. It sounds like he's referring to the Lewis thrust fault. YEC claims about the Lewis thrust in particular, and thrust faults in general, are entirely wrong. Here's an article I wrote on the subject.

<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/lewis/" target="_blank">http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/lewis/</a>

Here's a one sentence summary: thrust faults aren't proposed to explain sequences of fossils that don't fit an "assumed evolutionary progression", and there's clear evidence of motion along the Lewis thrust.

I'd like to see more information on the "hooflike foot prints" that you refer to.

Most of the animals that have ever existed during Earth's history weren't fossilized, but that doesn't change the fact that there are a huge number of fossils preserved in rocks of different ages, and that those fossils are found in rocks that were deposited in a wide variety of environments (lake, tide flats, river, delta, deep marine, terrestrial, etc.). The result is that we have records of the types of organisms that were alive in different environments at different times in earth's history (so it's not reasonable to claim that younger fauna are different from older fauna because they lived in different environments). All those fossils from rocks deposited in a variety of environments occur in the same order worldwide. In other words, the order in the fossil record is real and it's not just due to poor preservation.

Ed

Given as I have stated that the scriptures dont give a date for the flood, I don't know when it happened. Some christian geologists don't think it left much evidence in the geologic record either, ie Dr Davis Young, Unversity of N.C..

Ed

Those genes are already present in the organism so that hardly qualifies as an increase in information.