Dr Rick

Wrong, again; you are not being offered the job.

<strong> Another lie...

<strong> ...and another. Your misrepresentations are not facts.

<strong> You're the one who admits to not understanding biology and instead of educating yourself tells us to not talk about it. You're the one misrepresenting what Gould and other experts believe. Your the one playing with semantics. You are the one making false claims about threads that were moved.

[ March 20, 2002: Message edited by: rbochnermd ]</p>

Daggah

"I think it is plain and clear why certain evolutionists have admitted to the lack of any examples of species to species transitions leading to major morhpological change." You can't say speciation occurs and still hold this to be true. They're contradictory. Furthermore you have repeatedly claimed that this statement is true because no species evolve. And again, if you accept speciation, this is contradictory.

"same parent species, the same "kind" if you would." This equivocates kind and species.

On the contrary, I am taking your own statements literally. I can't play semantic games until one of you creationists actually takes a stab at defining your favorite weasel-word.

Coming from someone who doesn't understand the concepts of PE, stasis, evolution, and speciation, this is a pretty rich statement. And here we have the classic "indoctrination" claim.

Speaking of honest appraisal of the facts...how honest is it to repeatedly evade them?

Kevin Dorner

Yet you claim you know little or nothing about genetics, and have argued in this forum with practicing biologists about genetics and other things that they work with everyday.

You're an artist. How would you feel if someone told you: "You can't paint. I know nothing about art, and I can't paint, and I haven't bothered to learn, but someone claiming to represent God said your paintings suck, and so therefore you can't paint, and you're wrong about painting, and you've carefully crafted paintilutionist propogondola to say you can paint, but it's nothing but paintilutionist straw men" and they told you this, not once, but many times, while you tried to paint them an impressive work but they ignored it, and continued to say the same thing, over and over.

[ March 20, 2002: Message edited by: Kevin Dorner ]</p>

Synaesthesia

There are so many good posts and paragraphs but the only ones that flourish into discussions are those that involve flames.

Why is it that only insults are being responded to?

Mageth

Guess being stupid is how you get to be Mod here.

My guess is that inferring that our moderators are "stupid" is not a good way to approach things here on the SecWeb...in other words, stupid.

randman

Actually, from what I've seen insults are the largest part of many evolutionists's arguments here.
Take the basic idea of claiming that I set the standards too high for transitional fossils, that "of course", those standards are impossibly high and thus cannot be met.
Now, another states it is a fact that the same standard of transitional that I beleive would be required to demonstrate evolution has been met indeed numerous times even.
Both of these counters to my argument cannot be right. Impossibility is the opposite of actually being shown.
Yet, noone answers that dilemna. Instead they resort to insults, and then state, well, you are not qualified to really understand. If that is the case, then perhaps noone should expect to teach such an advanced theory to kids until the get to grad school in the sciences where they can then properly understand.
What is really being said is that the public should accept evolutionists claims at face value. This is a naked argument from authority.
As far as the art analogy, I would not ask the person who thinks my art is crummy to beleive that it is actually great art, and claim it is imprtant for him to accept this since after all, I am an artist, and he is not.
But this exactly what some here argue should happen.

Dr Rick

You asked for fossil evidence supporting "transitions" which has been provided ad nauseum with various posts and links, but you still argue that the evidence doesn't meet your standard. What this standard is you refuse to specify. This is where the apparent contradiction arises; you ask for something and then deny it when it is provided.

You refuse to consider the evidence from Biology, all of which nicely complements Palentology in supporting evolution.

[ March 20, 2002: Message edited by: rbochnermd ]</p>

MrDarwin

And yet it seems that insults are what randman prefers to respond to, rather than honest and straightforward questions that are raised about his assertions, such as <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=000421" target="_blank">this one</a> regarding his claims based on one of the sources he cites.

[ March 20, 2002: Message edited by: MrDarwin ]</p>

randman

You didn't answer the question so I quit responding to you. Which graphic illustration is correct? You tried to weasel out of it be stating it isn't an exact science.
So does that mean they could in fact both be wrong?
But the contention is that this is a proven fact.
So the question remains?
One graphicalle depicts a creature that is not very whale-like, and this is the earlier depiction and seems to be part of a more measured view of the creature.
Another is a sensationalized depiction designed to infer more whale-like features than can be scientifically supported.
My question is which is right?
Please answer the question.

Quetzal

Well, yeah earlier. I meant I finally got around to responding to your last 10 March post in the old "some of you have claimed I haven't responded" thread. (Sorry about the delay). I draw your attention to the most recent one I posted this am 'cause it addresses the points you brought up in your March 20, 2002 10:06 AM post on this thread (it was serendipitous, not intentional). I'll give you a chance to peruse that one while I look at this response.

As far as length of time for major transitions, I'd say it would depend on the organism. As an example, the Pakicetus/Ambulocetus transition is estimated at about 5 million years (between representatives of two families), whereas the Pakicetus/Basilosaurus transition (between two classes) took about 15+ million years.

If you'll pardon a digression, I think another area where you're having some difficulty is with the classification schemes. We don't need to get into a lot of detail here to make my point. You know scientists classify life based on species, genus, etc. You're also aware that these classifications are how scientists show relatedness. What isn't immediately obvious (although it would be if you think about it), is that all these different hierarchies are simply larger groups of species. A genus is a bunch of species that are really closely related - sharing some traits, being different in others. Familes are a group of genera, etc. All these categories are simply names given to ever-larger groupings of related species - nothing more. IOW, any mechanisms (say, natural selection) working at the population or species level will axiomatically operate in identical fashion at the level of a class or even phylum, etc. Why? Because a phylum is simply a very large grouping of species that share some common trait (such as a spinal cord). So when scientists talk about transitions between, say, orders, especially within the fossil record, they're saying they've found a species that shares traits across order boundaries (which, with the relatively new science of cladistics, really gets blurry anyway). In short, they're merely describing the relative closeness of members of two species. There isn't some mystical barrier based on taxonomic nomenclature. It's just two different species - more or less related - and ultimately identical to comparisons between two living species of hare (say, between Lepus arctus and Lepus townseii). So although the trick (and lots of glorious arguments among paleontologists) is to determine, based on morphology, just how related two temporally separated fossils are, if they share enough traits we can be fairly confident that they are related. Hope this helps to show what we're trying to describe when we talk about "transitionals": it's not a "begat", it's a relationship.

Yeah, stasis is observable (among some species), although I'm not sure why this is such a problem for you. I gave you a succinct explanation of ESS in modern ecosystems. Just consider the apparent stasis among some organisms in the fossil record as an ESS writ large. PE is simply a different way of describing (not explaining) the fact that some species (or even larger groupings) remain relatively morphologically stable over time. As long as the environment stays roughly the same, there is no selective pressure on the organisms that make up a given population. There is also apparently an even greater "inertia" (if I can be pardoned the analogy) with a very LARGE population (Eldridge's trilobites represented a global population - hence local disturbances were practically unnoticed - species and local populations went extinct fairly regularly, but the major taxonomic groupings of trilobites remained relatively unchanged for 150 million years!) See why stasis doesn't pose any problems for evolutionary theory? (And conversely, see why Gould was so strident trying to prove his point?)

Ummm, I'll take your word that you're a layman on genetics, and so won't hammer you on it. However, you should know that a) "information" may not be a very good way of describing what happens in genetics and b) there are a lot of peer-reviewed scientific reports indicating both new genes, beneficial mutations, new genetic combinations, etc. have occured both "in the wild" and in the lab, so your assertion here really doesn't hold much water.

I look forward to hearing your substantive (preferably) response to this post and the one I referenced above.