Quizzes & Puzzles20 mins ago
god v aliens
do aliens exist, cause it occurred to me the other day that if they do then that totally rules out the theory of god because in the bible it says that there are no other planets in the universe or any other galaxy that have life on so if there is aliens then were all screwed cause theres no heaven either
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Clanad, absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence. It is a common fault of creationists to ignore this adage. "Where are all the missing links?!"they cry. In fact, most animals do not become fossils. Because we can't find them, does not mean those animals did not exist.
Let's hear it, the "dearth of evidence to support the evolution of bipedalism in Homo" that you talk about.
It is a common fault of creationists to ignore this adage. "Where are all the missing links?!"they cry.
And for evolutionists, - "There is plenty of scientific evidence to support evolution - we just havn't found it yet!".
"In fact, most animals do not become fossils. Because we can't find them, does not mean those animals did not exist."
Likewise, presuming that they must have existed, does not mean that they did!
Oh, come now. There is plenty of fossil evidence already. The objection from creationists is that there are missing links, with their logical conclusion being that it shows that these creatures did not exist. It doesn't. It shows that they have not been found. They do not all need to be found to demonstrate speciation. We have already found a remarkable number.
What types of evolution, if any, do you/do you not accept, badams?
There is plenty of evidence, among the fossil records we have found.
Dogs. My uncle breeds them, and gets a fortune for them beause they are thoroughbreds. (He's been known to book three flights to America - one for him, one for his wife, and one for the dog he's selling! Seriously!)
If you traced the roots of these dogs back only a few hundred years, you would find them to be very different then from what they are now. They havn't mutated - human selection (a bit like natural selection only faster and more controlled) has selected certain characteristics and by careful breeding has ensured that these will appear in virtually every pup now. But they are still basically the same dogs. You could breed one with a greyhound, or a poodle - no problem (and local greyhounds and poodles know this! - Big problem!)
Suppose the greyhound and poodle give up, and just breed with each other - enter the Groodle. Groodles are long-legged dogs with short bodies and fluffy fur - not very streamlined, but cute in a pink dress. Now if you were to take a male and female Groodle to a good breeder, eventually he could get you a dog which was a reasonably good Greyhound or Poodle by un-Natural Selection. Left to nature, it would take a lot longer, and you might be forgiven for thinking that both the Poodle and the Greyhound "evolved" from Groodle.
Given a series of skeletons (or skullcaps, since very often this is all that we have of some of the extinct apes which are discovered) of dogs, it would not be difficult to arrange them into a sequence which made it look as though they evolved, even though they are all the same species, and all co-exist.
Demonstarting what appears to be a sequence of "mutations" does not in any way prove that random mutations occur, or if they do, that they can generate new species.
What is in place that stop enough changes taking place to give rise to a new species?
Lack of new genetic information. In the "shaggy dog story", the apparent evolution does not need any, but evolution of a new species does. There is a big step from the natural selection of existing genetic information, to the creation of new genetic information.
And all these 'skulls' we're talking about. What makes you think they're all 'regular apes' when the vast bulk of the scientific community is agreed that they are in fact hominid ?
That's simply because "the vast bulk of the scientific community" simply accepts what a small group of the scientific community tell them! What certainty is there that they are hominid? None - they could as easily belong to any extinct primate species, or have been placed in a group classed as hominid because that's where its convenient for them to be.
MargeB, if you would but read Darwin, as I've suggested a number of times (it is still the bible, pun intended, of evolutionists) you would clearly see it is the evolutionists that require the transitional forms, of which there are none... You are right in one thing though, millions of fossils have been located, classified and files... yet not one undisputed transitional form... Go figure...
Lack of new genetic information. In the "shaggy dog story", the apparent evolution does not need any, but evolution of a new species does. There is a big step from the natural selection of existing genetic information, to the creation of new genetic information.
This is simply not correct. New genetic information is created all the time. For instance in the duplication of DNA strands, genetic 'point' mutations are regularly created, a process which can create new proteins. Within a population, genetic mutations can give rise to increased genetic variety. Upon this foundation of genetic variety, the competition amongst individuals will give rise to preferential selection.
That's simply because "the vast bulk of the scientific community" simply accepts what a small group of the scientific community tell them! What certainty is there that they are hominid? None - they could as easily belong to any extinct primate species, or have been placed in a group classed as hominid because that's where its convenient for them to be.
What are your criteria for calling homo sapiens a hominid?
Clanad, to quote you:
you would clearly see it is the evolutionists that require the transitional forms, of which there are none... You are right in one thing though, millions of fossils have been located, classified and files... yet not one undisputed transitional form... Go figure...
Try reading this: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.html#morphological_intermediates
Pay particular attention to the dinosaur-bird transitional fossils, with no gaps.
Then come back to me on whether or not you think there are, as you say 'no transitional forms'.
THE FACT OF EVOLUTION IS SUPPORTED BY A RATHER WELL FORMED SEQUENCE OF INTERMEDIATE STAGES IN THE FOSSIL RECORD
This comment by the famous Harvard evolutionist Stephen J. Gould when he testified before Judge Overton in the Arkansas Creation-Evolution trial suggests that the countless intermediate stages in the evolution of one organism into another, really are visible in the fossil record as indeed they should be IF evolution has occurred. This same Dr. Gould, however, in one of his regular columns in Natural History magazine (May 1977) said: "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology (study of fossils) -- In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors, it appears all at once and fully formed." The paleontologist Dr. David B. Kitts agrees: "Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them"(Evolution 28:476). Dr. David Raup, a paleontologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, recently pointed out that Darwin himself was: "embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn't look the way he predicted it would -- different species usually appear and disappear from the record without showing the transitions that Darwin postulated -- we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much -- We have fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwins' time.
Contd.
...By this I mean that some some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information" (Field Museum Natural History Bulletin 50:22- 29). The evolutionist Dr. Steven M. Stanley put it bluntly: "The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition -
Contd.
Contd.
The geneticist and speciation expert M.J.D. White has pointed out that:
"Speciation can only be detected post factum, when subsequent genetic changes that have had nothing to do with the original dichotomy may have accumulated. Moreover, to a considerable extent we do not know what we are looking for." (in Mechanisms of Speciation pp 75-103)
The population biologist Alan Templeton makes the same point:
"It is virtually impossible to sort out which differences are actually associated with the process of speciation and which are consequences of evolution subsequent to the speciation process. Hybridization experiments have shown this to be a real problem: Many species differences - morphological, karyotypic, isozyme, etc.- contribute little or nothing to reproductive isolation." (in; Mechanism of Speciation pp 105-121)
Additionally, Robert Locke, emminent evolutionist states:
Evolution also suffers from the problem that many putative sequences which look logical based on the progression of one set of anatomical characteristics suddenly look illogical when attention is switched to another set. For example, the lungfish superficially seems to make a good intermediate between fish and amphibian, until one examines the rest of its internal organs, which are not intermediate in character, nor are the ways in which its eggs develop. And if different species have common ancestors, it would be reasonable to expect that similar structures in the different species be specified in similar ways in their DNA and develop in similar ways in their embryos; this is frequently not so. So evolutionary relationships depend upon an arbitrary choice of which characteristics of the organisms in question are considered most important, and different relationships can be "proved" at will.
Contd.
And then there's birds...
Archaeopteryx has been described as a link between birds and dinosaurs, although it is remarkably similar to modern birds. Attempts to find more primitive intermediates have been unsuccessful - until now - so say a group of paleontologists (see the July, 1998 issue of National Geographic). The group has found two turkey-sized dinosaurs that have both downy and modern flight feathers on their arms and tail. Their skeletal structure is similar to theropod dinosaurs (short arms - too short to be useful in flight, serrated teeth, theropod-like pelvis, etc.). The conclusions are obvious. Right? However, other researchers dispute the claims. They point to shortened tail and fused sternum, arguing that they are more advanced than Archaeopteryx. These researchers believe that the intermediates are actually flightless birds. Oh, did I mention that the new fossils are dated to have appeared at least 20 million years after the appearance of the first Archaeopteryx? Those little details do get in the way of evolutionary theory, don't they!
Archaeopteryx has been described as a link between birds and dinosaurs, although it is remarkably similar to modern birds. Attempts to find more primitive intermediates have been unsuccessful - until now - so say a group of paleontologists (see the July, 1998 issue of National Geographic). The group has found two turkey-sized dinosaurs that have both downy and modern flight feathers on their arms and tail. Their skeletal structure is similar to theropod dinosaurs (short arms - too short to be useful in flight, serrated teeth, theropod-like pelvis, etc.). The conclusions are obvious. Right? However, other researchers dispute the claims. They point to shortened tail and fused sternum, arguing that they are more advanced than Archaeopteryx. These researchers believe that the intermediates are actually flightless birds. Oh, did I mention that the new fossils are dated to have appeared at least 20 million years after the appearance of the first Archaeopteryx? Those little details do get in the way of evolutionary theory, don't they!
Lastly, the results of recent studies show that the hands of the theropod dinosaurs are derived from digits I, II, and III, whereas the wings of birds, although they look alike in terms of structure, are derived from digits II, III, and IV. If birds were descended from the theropod dinosaurs, we would expect homologous structures to be derived from comparable regions. One could propose that bird wings were originally derived from digits I, II, and III, but later developed another fourth digit, while the first digit regressed. However, there is no fossil evidence that this ever happened (and would be extremely unlikely, since the bird wing was fully developed, even in Archaeopteryx).
The second study shows that the theropod dinosaurs did not possess the correct skeletal structure or lung structure to have evolved into birds. The evolution of theropods into birds would have required the introduction of a serious handicap (a hole in their diaphragm), which would have severely limited their ability to breathe. As Dr. Ruben said, such a debilitating mutation "seems unlikely to have been of any selective advantage," which is quite an understatement. (Source: A.C. Burke, et al, Development Patterns and Homologies in the Avian Hand and others)
Unfortunately, this valuable information is missing in your references...
Enough for tonight... I imagine willow27 has disconnected her e-mail notifications by now...
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