Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Late_Cretaceous · 03-07-2002, 09:43 AM

Here are some examples, with references from talkorigins of species to species transitons in the fossil record.

Some species-to-species transitions:

De Ricqles (in Chaline, 1983) documents several possible cases of gradual evolution (also well as some lineages that showed abrupt appearance or stasis) among the early Permian reptile genera Captorhinus, Protocaptorhinus, Eocaptorhinus, and Romeria.
Horner et al. (1992) recently found many excellent transitional dinosaur fossils from a site in Montana that was a coastal plain in the late Cretaceous. They include:
Many transitional ceratopsids between Styracosaurus and Pachyrhinosaurus
Many transitional lambeosaurids (50! specimens) between Lambeosaurus and Hypacrosaurus.
A transitional pachycephalosaurid between Stegoceras and Pachycephalosaurus
A transitional tyrannosaurid between Tyrannosaurus and Daspletosaurus.

Here is a good website describing the mechanisms of speciation

<a href="http://www.biology.ucsc.edu/~barrylab/classes/animal_behavior/SPECIATE.HTM" target="_blank">http://www.biology.ucsc.edu/~barrylab/classes/animal_behavior/SPECIATE.HTM</a>

Not only are transitonals in the fossil record, but they are around us today. With many general spread out over a large area the populations are divided into separate species or subspecies. Howver, these distinctions become blurred. Often times, individuals from neigboring species/subspecies can successfully breed with each other, but individuals fron opposite ends of the range cannot. This is called a cline. If you had a species like this, and wiped out all but a small population at either end of a huge range you would wind up with two distinct separate species (when before they would have been considered a single species). Voila, a whole new species created - by definition.

randman · 03-07-2002, 09:56 AM

Morpho, thanks for a good answer, the one that should have been given up-front by others. Instead were bogus arguments stating falsely things such as taking quotes out of context, which I did not, and I don't think others do either.
Your point about a lack of these transitions being shown in the fossil record is a good one, and it would be more fruitful for evolutionists to admit to this, and explain the mechanics involved in the fossils, but what is mostly done is outright misrepresentation. Moreover, this misrepresentation has caused a backlassh in the public, and it is time for evolutionists to quit overstating their case.
Instead of claiming the fossil record shows these evolutionary paths with countless transitional fossils and such, they need to explain that by transitional they mean intermediate with a ton of transitions left out.
Think about it this way. Compare 2 similar but different creatures today. Look at their bones, and then surmise what one would think if these bone s were found as fossils. Now, look at the differences in anatomy, blood-type, skin, etc,...and then we can properly try to then look a the these transitions and deduce how many steps are missing between them.
This is not what is presented though. The impression is given that the transitions are shown, or someone links to whale-looking heads and says, see there. Well, tell me. How different would 2 of these creatures be, and then ascertain how many genetic mutations would need to take place.
What it looks like to me is that there should be something like 15 species in--between these transitions mimimum, but they don't appear, and thus I don't see the hard data.
I am not a paleontologist which is why I quote Gould on the data, but I do feel one can draw his own conclusions about what an "expert" says, but you have to trust their data to some extent.
I don't think evolutionists for the most part even trust the data actually on the fossil record.
Gould says not just that you can't find micro-changes in species, but that for the most part, they don't happen. In other words, they exhibit stasis, but then he postulates they happen very quickly geologically speaking when they do.
Well, that looks to me that creationists claims are right. What we KNOW is stasis. What some beleive is punctauted equilibrium.

randman · 03-07-2002, 10:11 AM

Morpho, I do apprecaite your tone and answer. Sorry if I cam off too hard.

Let's look at the walking whale transitional form. What kind of mutation, how many, would it take for a whale to have offspring that have legs?
In the old days, this was presented as something fairly easily done, and that people actually developed fish gills and such. The idea is heck one day, a man could be born being able to breathe underwater or something. Needless to say, recapitaltion has been thoroughyl debunked for the haox that it is, but the beleifs stemming from it still abound.
Is that kind of mutation possibly, and natually occuring?
Can one species of whale produce in the next step another tha walks on the land?

l-bow · 03-07-2002, 10:20 AM

Excuse me but...

Did anybody understand what I was trying to get at? The point is the kind of change that PE is supposed to account for is more often than not, well within the bounds of what creationists consider to be of a single created "kind". So why do creationists try to use PE to try to make the point that that PE is actually the evolutionists trying to account for change OUTSIDE the bounds of variation for a single "kind"?

Mageth · 03-07-2002, 10:22 AM

I posted this on another thread, but I'll post it here as well.

Letting Mr. Gould speak for himself, rather than listening to the creationist bullshit:

From <a href="http://www.harpercollins.com/hc/features/evolution/introduction.asp" target="_blank">here:</a>

Quote:

We must therefore turn to a second category of direct evidence from transitional stages of major alterations found in the fossil record. A common claim, stated often enough to merit the label of "urban legend," holds that no such transitional forms exist and that paleontologists, dogmatically committed to evolution, have either withheld this information from the public or have claimed that the fossil record is too imperfect to preserve the intermediates that must once have existed. In fact, although the fossil record is indeed spotty (a problem with nearly all historical documents, after all), the assiduous work of paleontologists has revealed numerous elegant examples of sequences of inter-mediary forms (not just single "in between" specimens) joining ancestors in proper temporal order to very different descendants -- as in the evolution of whales from terrestrial mammalian ancestors through several intermediate stages, including Ambulocetus (literally, the walking whale), the evolution of birds from small running dinosaurs, of mammals from reptilian ancestors, and a threefold increase in brain size during the last 4 million years of human evolution.
-

Stephen Jay Gould

And from <a href="http://home.mmcable.com/harlequin/evol/lies/lie009.html" target="_blank">here:</a>

Quote:

We [Gould and Niles Eldredge] proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium largely to provide a different explanation for pervasive trends in the fossil record. Trends, we argued, cannot be attributed to gradual transformation within lineages, but must arise from the differential success of certain kind of species. A trend, we argued, is more like climbing a flight of stairs (punctuations and stasis) than rolling up an inclined plane.

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists�whether though design or stupidity, I do not know�as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. Yet a pamphlet entitled �Harvard Scientists Agree Evolution is a Hoax� states: �The facts of punctuated equilibrium which Gould and Eldredge�are forcing Darwinists to swallow fit the picture that Bryan insisted on, and which God revealed to us in the Bible.�

Continuing the distortion, several creationists have equated the theory of punctuated equilibrium with a caricature of the beliefs of Richard Goldschmidt, a great early geneticist. Goldschmidt argued, in a famous book published in 1949, that new groups can arise all at once through major mutations. He referred to these suddenly transformed creatures as �hopeful monsters.� (I am attracted to some aspects of the non-caricatured version, but Goldschmidt�s theory still has nothing to do with punctuated equilibrium�) Creationist Luther Sunderland talks of the �punctuated equilibrium hopeful monster theory� and tells his hopeful readers that �it amounts to tacit admission that anti-evolutionists are correct in asserting there is no fossil evidence supporting the theory that all life is connected to a common ancestor.� Duane Gish writes, �According to Goldschmidt, and now apparently according to Gould, a reptile laid an egg from which the first bird, feathers and all, was produced.� Any evolutionist who believed such nonsense would rightly be laughed off the intellectual stage; yet the only theory that could ever envision such a scenario for the origin of birds is creationism�with God acting in the egg.

It would be proper for you to quit misrepresenting Gould's position on evolution/transitionals, no?

[ March 07, 2002: Message edited by: Mageth ]</p>

HRG · 03-07-2002, 10:26 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by randman:
[QB]
I am not a paleontologist which is why I quote Gould on the data, but I do feel one can draw his own conclusions about what an "expert" says, but you have to trust their data to some extent.

Taking quotes out of context is one thing. Understanding what Gould is really saying is another one; and he is not describing the data in the way you want to understand him.

In his testimony in the Arkansas trials, he states explicitely that creationists misunderstand him and presents one example of gradual evolution and speciation of snails.

Quote:

I don't think evolutionists for the most part even trust the data actually on the fossil record.
Gould says not just that you can't find micro-changes in species, but that for the most part, they don't happen.

No, he doesn't. Look at the quotes you have been shown.
[quote]

In other words, they exhibit stasis, but then he postulates they happen very quickly geologically speaking when they do.
[quote]
And he also presents an example where we can see continous changes happening.

HRG.

lpetrich · 03-07-2002, 10:35 AM

Here's a very good URL on Punctuated Equilibrium (PE or Punc Eq):

<a href="http://www.skeptic.com/01.3.prothero-punc-eq.html" target="_blank">http://www.skeptic.com/01.3.prothero-punc-eq.html</a>

He seems much better read in the primary literature than Randman; he notes that PE is essentially what Ernst Mayr's theory of speciation would look like in the fossil record: new species form rapidly in isolated offshoot populations, and change relatively little after that. (has Randman even heard of Ernst Mayr?) He also notes some actual research in doing measurements on lots and lots of fossils, and then checking on what those measurements' statistics are. Essentially, the statistics are simply too good to be waved away as imperfect preservation, as has often been done in the past.

However, imperfect preservation does produce many gaps in the fossil record. For example, over the last 4 million years, many fossils of human ancestors and close offshoot species have been found, but none of chimpanzees and gorillas. The favorite theory for this is different tastes in habitats: human ancestors preferred living in low flatlands, which could easily be buried in sediment, while chimp and gorilla ones preferred living in forested uplands, which generally could not.

This is also a speculation as to why flowering-plant ancestors older than the late Jurassic have been very difficult to find: they had lived in some place where they don't get fossilized, so all we see are a few wayward plants here and there which may or may not be ancestors.

Sauron · 03-07-2002, 01:09 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by randman:
Look, the way I see it, I put myself on the line here.

Hardly. You duck and dodge the very plain questions that are put to you. In what way is that evasiveness "putting yourself on the line"?

You're doing everything possible to avoid being nailed down to a definition of "transitional" here, to explicitly PREVENT yourself from being "put on the line".

randman · 03-07-2002, 01:49 PM

You guys are ducking the issue. I have explained very much what transitional means to me.
Do 2 things. Why does Gould use the terms:
stasis
sudden appearance

What is he getting at?

Valentine Pontifex · 03-07-2002, 01:52 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by randman:
[QB]Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, and Homo heidelbergensis, these are probably types of people.
The rest are not. That's where I would draw the line at this point.

Check out this article.
<a href="http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/magazines/tj/docs/tjv13n2_human_non-transitions.asp" target="_blank">http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/magazines/tj/docs/tjv13n2_human_non-transitions.asp</a>[/ QB]

Now can you tell us why you draw the line where you did? After all KNM-ER 3733 and KNM-ER 1470 don't look that much different. Why is one obviously human and one obviously not?

And give a reference besides AiG since they have have proven themselves time and time again unreliable. And an article by John Woodmorappe, whose works often push fraud, is not very inspiring of confidence.

Looking at that article, I can show that Woodmorappe did not bother to read the Wood and Collard paper using so extensivey or he did not understand it.

Woodmorappe (pen name of Jan Peczkis, who is supports evolution when writing using his real name) wrote in the AiG article:

Quote:

In comparable manner, Homo habilis has now been split up into Homo rudolfensis and Homo habilis sensu lato.

This is false, what Woody calls Homo habilis sensu lato is Homo habilis sensu stricto. Sensu stricto is latin for "in the strict sense" while sensu lato means "in the broad sense." To see that Wood and Collard got it right and were clear about it, this is what Wood and Collard wrote:

Quote:

Thus, H. habilis and H. rudolfensis (or Homo habilis sensu lato for those who do not subscribe to the taxonomic subdivision of "early Homo") should be removed from Homo.

Woody continued:

Quote:

What used to be called �early Homo erectus� has now been split off and elevated to a separate species, Homo ergaster. What remains is called Homo erectus sensu lato.

Woody made the exact same mistake again. If one wants to specify the H. erectus of the spliters one uses sensu stricto. Sensu lato in this case includes Homo ergaster.
And guess what mistake Woody makes next:

Quote:

Finally, the trend seems to be to elevate Neandertal man to a separate species once again � Homo neanderthalensis and Homo heidelbergensis as distinct from Homo sapiens sensu lato.

Woody makes the mistake yet again:

Quote:

The habilines (Homo rudolfensis and Homo habilis sensu lato) are of questionable taxonomic validity, as pointed out by Lubenow.9 This owes largely to the uncertain assignment of fragmentary remains to the same taxon. Furthermore, as shown by Wood and Collard,1 they do not fit into the genus Homo at all. To the contrary:

Hey, did we not have a creationist in the other thread insisting that Homo rudolfensis (i.e. KNM-ER 1470) was obviously human? :-)

Hey Randman, are you not the person who insists that TJ is a peer reviewed journal. That kind of elementary error that showed that the author was not familiar with the terminology of the field and possibly did not read the paper he cited would get an immediate rejection for even the least demanding of peer-reviewed journals. Of course this article does not even remotely resemble a peer reviewed technical article.

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03-07-2002, 09:43 AM	#61
Late_Cretaceous Veteran Member Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Alberta Posts: 1,049	Here are some examples, with references from talkorigins of species to species transitons in the fossil record. Some species-to-species transitions: De Ricqles (in Chaline, 1983) documents several possible cases of gradual evolution (also well as some lineages that showed abrupt appearance or stasis) among the early Permian reptile genera Captorhinus, Protocaptorhinus, Eocaptorhinus, and Romeria. Horner et al. (1992) recently found many excellent transitional dinosaur fossils from a site in Montana that was a coastal plain in the late Cretaceous. They include: Many transitional ceratopsids between Styracosaurus and Pachyrhinosaurus Many transitional lambeosaurids (50! specimens) between Lambeosaurus and Hypacrosaurus. A transitional pachycephalosaurid between Stegoceras and Pachycephalosaurus A transitional tyrannosaurid between Tyrannosaurus and Daspletosaurus. Here is a good website describing the mechanisms of speciation <a href="http://www.biology.ucsc.edu/~barrylab/classes/animal_behavior/SPECIATE.HTM" target="_blank">http://www.biology.ucsc.edu/~barrylab/classes/animal_behavior/SPECIATE.HTM</a> Not only are transitonals in the fossil record, but they are around us today. With many general spread out over a large area the populations are divided into separate species or subspecies. Howver, these distinctions become blurred. Often times, individuals from neigboring species/subspecies can successfully breed with each other, but individuals fron opposite ends of the range cannot. This is called a cline. If you had a species like this, and wiped out all but a small population at either end of a huge range you would wind up with two distinct separate species (when before they would have been considered a single species). Voila, a whole new species created - by definition.

03-07-2002, 09:56 AM	#62
randman Regular Member Join Date: Mar 2002 Posts: 333	Morpho, thanks for a good answer, the one that should have been given up-front by others. Instead were bogus arguments stating falsely things such as taking quotes out of context, which I did not, and I don't think others do either. Your point about a lack of these transitions being shown in the fossil record is a good one, and it would be more fruitful for evolutionists to admit to this, and explain the mechanics involved in the fossils, but what is mostly done is outright misrepresentation. Moreover, this misrepresentation has caused a backlassh in the public, and it is time for evolutionists to quit overstating their case. Instead of claiming the fossil record shows these evolutionary paths with countless transitional fossils and such, they need to explain that by transitional they mean intermediate with a ton of transitions left out. Think about it this way. Compare 2 similar but different creatures today. Look at their bones, and then surmise what one would think if these bone s were found as fossils. Now, look at the differences in anatomy, blood-type, skin, etc,...and then we can properly try to then look a the these transitions and deduce how many steps are missing between them. This is not what is presented though. The impression is given that the transitions are shown, or someone links to whale-looking heads and says, see there. Well, tell me. How different would 2 of these creatures be, and then ascertain how many genetic mutations would need to take place. What it looks like to me is that there should be something like 15 species in--between these transitions mimimum, but they don't appear, and thus I don't see the hard data. I am not a paleontologist which is why I quote Gould on the data, but I do feel one can draw his own conclusions about what an "expert" says, but you have to trust their data to some extent. I don't think evolutionists for the most part even trust the data actually on the fossil record. Gould says not just that you can't find micro-changes in species, but that for the most part, they don't happen. In other words, they exhibit stasis, but then he postulates they happen very quickly geologically speaking when they do. Well, that looks to me that creationists claims are right. What we KNOW is stasis. What some beleive is punctauted equilibrium.

03-07-2002, 10:11 AM	#63
randman Regular Member Join Date: Mar 2002 Posts: 333	Morpho, I do apprecaite your tone and answer. Sorry if I cam off too hard. Let's look at the walking whale transitional form. What kind of mutation, how many, would it take for a whale to have offspring that have legs? In the old days, this was presented as something fairly easily done, and that people actually developed fish gills and such. The idea is heck one day, a man could be born being able to breathe underwater or something. Needless to say, recapitaltion has been thoroughyl debunked for the haox that it is, but the beleifs stemming from it still abound. Is that kind of mutation possibly, and natually occuring? Can one species of whale produce in the next step another tha walks on the land?

03-07-2002, 10:20 AM	#64
l-bow Regular Member Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: Hawaii Posts: 215	Excuse me but... Did anybody understand what I was trying to get at? The point is the kind of change that PE is supposed to account for is more often than not, well within the bounds of what creationists consider to be of a single created "kind". So why do creationists try to use PE to try to make the point that that PE is actually the evolutionists trying to account for change OUTSIDE the bounds of variation for a single "kind"?

03-07-2002, 10:35 AM	#67
lpetrich Contributor Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Lebanon, OR, USA Posts: 16,829	Here's a very good URL on Punctuated Equilibrium (PE or Punc Eq): <a href="http://www.skeptic.com/01.3.prothero-punc-eq.html" target="_blank">http://www.skeptic.com/01.3.prothero-punc-eq.html</a> He seems much better read in the primary literature than Randman; he notes that PE is essentially what Ernst Mayr's theory of speciation would look like in the fossil record: new species form rapidly in isolated offshoot populations, and change relatively little after that. (has Randman even heard of Ernst Mayr?) He also notes some actual research in doing measurements on lots and lots of fossils, and then checking on what those measurements' statistics are. Essentially, the statistics are simply too good to be waved away as imperfect preservation, as has often been done in the past. However, imperfect preservation does produce many gaps in the fossil record. For example, over the last 4 million years, many fossils of human ancestors and close offshoot species have been found, but none of chimpanzees and gorillas. The favorite theory for this is different tastes in habitats: human ancestors preferred living in low flatlands, which could easily be buried in sediment, while chimp and gorilla ones preferred living in forested uplands, which generally could not. This is also a speculation as to why flowering-plant ancestors older than the late Jurassic have been very difficult to find: they had lived in some place where they don't get fossilized, so all we see are a few wayward plants here and there which may or may not be ancestors.

03-07-2002, 01:49 PM	#69
randman Regular Member Join Date: Mar 2002 Posts: 333	You guys are ducking the issue. I have explained very much what transitional means to me. Do 2 things. Why does Gould use the terms: stasis sudden appearance What is he getting at?

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