Ed

I dont think my comment fits your definition of ad hoc. Someday geologists may discover that evidence.

Valentine Pontifex

1) This kind senario is physically impossible.

2) It would still fail to explain the pattern of biogeography.

lpetrich

(stuff on dog skulls snipped for brevity)

The interesting thing to notice is that the skull on the bottom has its lower jaw longer than its upper jaw, thus creating severe underbite. By comparison, the upper one's upper and lower jaws are the same length. The difference is most likely a result of different growth rates; it would be interesting to find out what the genetics look like.

In fact, much macroscopic-feature evolution is most likely a result of changes in growth rates of various parts.

I can't believe that Ed is serious here. Gondwana started to break up around 100 million years ago, and it split off from Laurasia (the northern continents together) around 150 million years ago.

And our species simply did not exist back then.

For links to some continental-drift reconstructions, check the thread in this forum on "Continental Bumper Cars".

Duck!

It seems that Ed is so desperate to defend his flood belief that he'll say or suggest ANYTHING in order to shoehorn the flood into opposing viewpoints.

If the flood happened 150mya when Gondwanaland broke up, then that's 150,000,000 years of Biblical genealogies to account for. That's HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of generations unaccounted for in the Bible.

Are you suggesting that Genesis was written 150,000,000 years ago? Or was written a few centuries BC? If so, then it was written 150million years after the fact. A legend that had been handed down through HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of generations? I can't think of a source that's possibly less trustworthy than a story handed down through so many generations?

I can anticipate the response....

"But maybe.........."

THINK ED! Look at ALL the evidence. You have no problem accepting scientific evidence for supercontinents existing 150 million years ago but you have either forgotten, ignored or rejected the scientific evidence that says that modern humans are only a couple of hundred thousand years old. What reason do you have to think that humans existed 150 million years ago? From what I understand, geologists and paleontologists date rocks and fossils from these periods using radioisotopes to arrive at their dates. If you accept the continent existing 150mya, then you surely accept their scientific methods. Why don't you think they've found NO human fossils or artefacts from then? Indeed, how come there doesn't exist a single Homo sapiens fossil from more than a couple of hundred thousand years ago?

And what makes you think (apart from religious indoctrination) that the flood happened anyway?

You're all to eager to claim that there's little or no proof of it. So why believe in it if there's no proof of it?


Duck!

[ April 10, 2002: Message edited by: Duck of Death ]</p>

lpetrich

I'll pick a few nits first. It was Pangaea (or Pangea; essentially all the continents) that started breaking up about 150 million years ago, with the two main pieces being Laurasia (North America + Greenland + most of Europe + Siberia) and Gondwana (or Gondwanaland) (South America + Africa + India + Australia + NZ + Antarctica) Laurasia and Gondwana started breaking up about 100 million years ago. For more, see <a href="http://www.scotese.com" target="_blank">Chris Scotese's site</a>.

However, I agree with the rest of Duck of Death's comments.

And Ed has a remarkable talent for coming up with ad hoc hypotheses -- hypotheses which he does not seem to have thought very carefully about.

[ April 10, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>

Ed

Somehow these sections of OC's post disapppeared from my response to it above. All of the ones that I said were human are well within the range for humans 700cc to 2200cc. I think for those familiar with vertebrate anatomy it IS obvious. Also, as a sidelight, the size of the brain is not necessary directly connected to intelligence. Several years ago a young man went to college and obtained a college degree and obtained a decent job with 90% of his skull being filled with cranial fluid. With only a thin layer of brain surrounding the fluid.

Quote:

OC: So did you look at those links The Devonian Times and Synapsida]? Yes. <a href="http://www.fionatye.co.uk/reevestye/hikers/book1.html" target="_blank">http://www.fionatye.co.uk/reevestye/hikers/book1.html</a> OC: "What? Yes? Is that all you’ve got to say? Yes! One word! Ed shrugged. 'Well, there are a hundred billion words in the bible, and that only leaves a limited amount of space in my brain,' he said, 'and I don't know much about the fossil record of course.' " What, exactly, do you think those fossils show, if not fish becoming tetrapods and reptiles giving rise to mammals??

The main differences between mammals and reptiles occur in their soft tissue such as the heart and reproductive organs. Since this is not fossilized in the mammalike reptiles this connection is highly speculative. In addition, studies of the their skull endocasts show that their brains were typical of reptiles. And as far as fish becoming reptiles, the lack of fossil specimens intermediate between anurans or urodeles and the older amphibians has forced paleontologists to base their speculations about the evolution of the group upon evidence from the anatomy and embryology of modern species which is a highly questionable practice.

Quote:

Ed: It is probably a term used more often in America than Britain. All those things (except genetics) you mentioned and more are studied. My specialty was fisheries in grad school. The primary duty of most wildlife biologists is the maintenance of wildlife and fishery habitat, ie wildlife and fishery management. I don't have any published papers. My grad school advisor tried for a while to have my thesis published but it never worked out. OC: I guess you can have a stab at resolving Morpho’s argument then?

I did see above.

Quote:

OC: What about land plants, parasites and pathogens, and saltwater organisms (or fresh water, if the flood was somehow saltwater)? And how did they get to where they are now? Ed: Parasites and pathogens would have surivived in their host organsims that were on the ark OC: I sort of figured that. So you’re saying that those living on the ark had typhus, cholera, amoebic dysentery and encephalitis, Ebola, Lassa, malaria, filariasis, schistosomiasis, hep B, rabies (imagine being surrounded by all that water!), influenza, leishmaniasis, trypanosomiasis, diphtheria, syphilis, anthrax, typhoid, gonorrhoea, tuberculosis, and plague. Not to mention bot-flies, sand fleas, mosquitoes, human fleas and lice. To name but a few. And then there’s all the stuff that affects animals...

Some of those organisms may not have been pathogenic in the past to humans. Most of them may have been in the animals rather than the humans. Then later they microevolved to be pathogenic to humans.

Quote:

or floating on vegetation mats. OC: How prescient of all those to jump onto those mats! But most of those won’t survive outside their hosts... so they must have been on board... So tell me Ed: how did anything get off the ark alive?

Some of those organisms may not have been pathogenic to either humans or animals, some may have been neutrally symbiotic.

Quote:

ED: Land plants would have survived either by Noah putting some on the ark, some floating on mats, and some surviving as seeds and later germinating. OC: So which was it for cacti? They’d not survive on mats (I merely overwatered my Mammillaria bombycina once and it became a soggy heap); there’s no mention of Noah collecting plants too (or did they come to him like the animals?); and he’d’ve been hard pressed finding all of them flowering at the same time in order to gather their seeds.

The scriptures dont tell us EVERYTHING. He may have had some whole plants. Also some early cacti may have been more hydrophilic.


[b] Who said anything about 4000 years? As I said above, we dont know when the flood occurred it may have occured much more distantly in the past.

Quetzal

Ed: Sorry, that wasn't much of an explanation as to why my partner was right. Please see my subsequent post. Thanks.

lpetrich

Where did this story come from?

However, there is indirect evidence, like a hard palate in the mouth that several therapsids had had. This makes it much easier to breathe as one chews one's food; if one's metabolic rate is lower and one does not do much chewing, as is the case for reptiles in general, there is not as much pressure to evolve a palate.

Also, some therapsids have pits in their skulls that may be for roots for vibrissae (whiskers).

As to brain size, this is only natural for a creature whose ancestors had recently been reptilian.

Says who about the fossil record of frogs and salamanders?

And I don't see how using anatomy and embryology is "questionable".

Ed concedes that evolution happens!!!

I wonder where the independent evidence is of that greater water-tolerance. And I mean "independent".

And how did Noah and his family get all the cactus plants to southwestern North America and the Andes in South America? Why didn't they simply plant some cacti in the Sahara and Arabian Deserts? Or the Kalahari Desert? Or the deserts of southwestern and central Asia? Or the Australian outback?

Cacti can grow without any trouble in Australia; I quickly found some Internet sites dedicated to discussions of cactus-growing there. And cacti have been successfully grown in other places also. So they are not ecologically tied to North and South America.

That seems like a very evasive response to me; Ed ought to explain what he thinks are the minimum and maximum possible times of occurrence of Noah's Flood.

It's like his evasion on the question of big-sediment vs. little-sediment Flood Geology (my terms). The big-sediment version of Flood Geology holds that Noah's Flood had laid down much of the sediment laid down since the base of the Cambrian, if not most of all of it. By comparison, the little-sediment version of Flood Geology holds that Noah's Flood had left behind very little sediment, perhaps too little to be noticeable.

MrDarwin

Mammalogists, herpetologists, and anatomists in general would be quite surprised by this statement. There are numerous and very clear-cut skeletal differences between modern mammals and modern reptiles. There are also clear-cut skeletal differences between modern mammals and the extinct reptiles they are thought to have evolved from. And there are numerous gradual skeletal transitions between them, transitional both in time and in morphology.

What does the fossil record of modern amphibians have to do with the evolution of land-living tetrapods? The group represented by modern amphibians arose after this transition, and was probably a separate branch from the one that ultimately led to reptiles.

Paleontologists and other evolutionary biologists base their hypotheses about the evolution of these transitions on a combination of comparative anatomy, molecular systematics, and a surprisingly rich fossil record that is improving even as we speak. It's a simple fact that there are numerous fossils of creatures occupying a gray area between fully aquatic fish and fully terrestrial tetrapods, just as there are numerous fossils of creatures occupying a gray area between reptiles and mammals. In both cases, the fossil record and hard-part anatomy are far more informative than Ed gives them credit for.

MrDarwin

I guess this all boils down to a simple question for Ed: does he believe that organisms have changed over time, or does he believe in the fixity of species? Never mind the mechanisms of change; does he believe that grizzly bears and bullfrogs and flounders have always been grizzly bears and bullfrogs and flounders, as far back as their ancestry goes, or did they have ancestors at some point in the past that were different from the things alive today? Does he believe that there are any two or more species alive today that share a common ancestor?

I guess a related question would be whether Ed believes there were points in time when certain species (now living or extinct) were alive but not others; for example, did whales and trilobites ever swim in the same oceans, or are paleontologists correct in interpreting the fossil record to mean that these creatures lived during completely separate, non-overlapping times?