theyeti

Some links of interest:

<a href="http://home.mmcable.com/harlequin/evol/lies/lie030.html" target="_blank">A Rather Complete "Incomplete" Ambulocetus Whale Fossil</a>

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=001267" target="_blank">When whales walked the earth</a>

<a href="http://www.neoucom.edu/Depts/ANAT/Thewissen.html" target="_blank">Research Program of the Thewissen Lab</a>

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=001374" target="_blank">Whale evolution</a>

BTW, randman, trueorigins is a YEC site that believes in 6000 years old Earth and Noah's flood and all that nonsense. Maybe you do too, but if not then you should think about who you're getting your info from. No one is really impressed by you simply cutting and pasting their bad arguments. That article is little more than hand-waving, and doesn't address the fossil evidence at all other than to try to cast doubt on its authenticity.

theyeti

randman

Well, we can go back and forth, and I will certainly read your whale article, and if it looks like my article I linked was wrong, I will quit using it.
Maybe it would be helpful to get back to a basic point here.
Why did PE come along? It came in response to certain aspects of the fossil record. Now, that data, I don't beleive is being misinterpreted by critics of evolution. From what was taught, gradualism left the impression that everything was evolving, which wasn't true, and that the fossil record was such as it was not.
Gould claimed the fossil record exhibits 2 characterisitcs.
stasis
sudden appearance

Is this right, or wrong?

Kosh

We could, but my wife is waiting to give me
one of those wet sloppy BJs, so spanking you
just isn't interesting anymore...

randman

MOderator, I checked out your articles. One does appear to debunk the article I posted. Another link to a prior thread was fairly interesting, but I did take note of the debate involved.
If evolutionists presented their case as it is without the dogma, they would probably not be facing the crisis of nearly half of Americans no longer accepting their beleifs.
On the Talkorigins site, Isaak and other spokesperson pay down the suppossed facts on how evolutionary paths occurred. The impression is these are incontrovertible facts, but that is really not the case as your link indicated. Often, new evidence comes up, and the supposed paths are changed yet the proponents had linked this "proof" as evidence and when someone like me finds out that what they said was fact was not actually so.
I appreciate your link which critiqued the link I posted. Most of the actual reasons for me rejecting evolution come from facts that evolutionists acknowledged, though they try to back out of them.
Basically, I think all of these species can be explained by the fact of One Creator, not common descent. Maybe that can't be tested, or maybe some of it can somehow.

theyeti

Randman, I think the point has been made that PE is about species appearing "suddenly". The idea is that speciation is a quick and jerky process rather than smooth and gradual. It is quite a heavily debated topic, and many "evolutionists" don't buy into it, largely for the reason, among others, that the fossil record does show many good transitions between species. And since speciation has been observed in both the wild and the lab, it's not a controversial issue as to whether or not speciation can occur. (The speciation that we observe in our life times, or over a few hundred years, would certainly not leave transitionals in the fossil record).

As for larger transitions (land mammal to whale, reptile to mammal, dinosaur to bird, etc.) the fossil record certainly seems to be gradual. We don't see modern whales popping up all of the sudden when before there was nothing but land animals. That's the whole point. The fossil record shows clearly that a) life forms go progressively from those that are more different from today's, to those that are more similar to today's (i.e., the younger it is, the more similar to modern life it is). And it also shows abundant transitional forms between the older forms and the more recent ones. Now add to that the phylogenetic evidence of nested heirarchies, which correlates perfectly with the fossil record (i.e., phylogenetically derived features appear later in the fossil record). Add also to that the correlated biogeographical patterns of both modern and fossil life. And what you've got can only be explained through evolution.

theyeti

randman

In your dreams, Kosh. Your wife ain't staying up this late watching you ignore her while posting on the web to give you your little fantasy.
Maybe tomorrow night, but I think she must be pretty bad-off if she has been waiting to give you what you describe, and you have put her off so long.
What? Does she have braces or something?

randman

So you think Gould is wrong.
By the way, he argues for stasis as much as for sudden appearance, and his take is these points are facts. If there are so many gradual changes as you state, then why does he and PE advocates not acknowledge them?
Maybe they don't fully agree.

lpetrich

What would be an "undogmatic" presentation of evolution?

All I've seen from Randman is regurgitating lots of creationist quotes out of context; that can hardly be called real scholarship. I've read books and papers and so forth by evolutionary biologists; that's why I can consider myself competent on that subject.

I wonder why Randman's mind is so closed to the possibility of more than one. Because when I survey the world of life, I think that if there were any designers, there must have been a great multitude of life-designers over the hundreds of miliions of years.

Also, I'd like to see Randman account for oceanic-island flora and fauna -- the sort of plants and animals that can naturally get to those islands. Birds and bats can be blown in the wind, turtles and lizards can snooze in a log, but mice and rats in that log would soon starve. Thus, we see big flightless birds and giant turtles, but no big rats.

Biogeography is a big creationist weak spot; Darwin himself had noticed that. I wonder if Randman has ever wondered why many animals and plants have had distributions much more limited than they might possibly have. Evolution is a natural explanation; some superpowerful creator(s) would not be blocked by the barriers that keep many species from spreading over their complete possible ranges. A tiny selection of examples:

Rattlesnakes
Sloths
Kangaroos
South American Anteaters vs. Aardvarks vs. Pangolins vs. Echidnas
Woodchucks vs. Wombats
Ostriches vs. Rheas vs. Emus vs. Cassowaries vs. Kiwis vs. Moas vs. the Aepyornis
Cactus plants

It's a matter of scale -- individual species originate from small offshoot populations, but on a larger scale, evolution looks almost continuous.

Reverend Mykeru

You are not going to get a response on this simply because Creationists are arguing in "bad faith" on this issue.

At the same time that a Creationist demands to see a "transitional" form between fossils, the Creationist also begins with the a priori assumption that such a thing can't exist.

No matter what you do, the Creationist is going to play Three Card Monte with whatever you put on the table. For example, if you have fossil A and fossil C, the Creationist will demand to see a transitional form. So you provide fossil B. Now the Creationist will demand to see the transitional form between A and B and B and C. Every transotion you provide will just give the Creationist more "gaps" to play this Xeno's archer game in the hope that the arrow never reaches the target.

The solution to this debate is not to give the Creationist transitions, or even ask them to define what they mean by transitions. All you have to do is point out the dishonesty of the game they are playing.

MrDarwin

Let's not, and address the subject at hand. I supposed I'll have to restate my question, which randman ignored, choosing instead to try to change the subject:

Define "transitional form" and tell precisely what you would expect from a transitional form or fossil, if one group really had evolved from another, such as birds evolving from dinosaurs, tetrapods (4-legged land animals) evolving from fish, or mammals evolving from reptiles.