Replies

Then why are people posting fossil sequences and purporting to prove evolution? By your own admission it's uncertain and inexact.

Because many people are less clue-resistant than yourself and the display you are making will not convince anyone who gets it better than you do.

I can come up with a lot of reasons. I would say that they're similiar creatures that lived about the same time. Or they're similiar creatures that lived at different times.

Your Nobel awaits you, Einstein.

I will here repost the standard form of the "No transitional forms" dialogue.

Tap-Dancing Science-Denier declares that the fossil record lacks instances of things changing in an orderly series from some Thing A to Thing Z. As this kind of evidence is to be expected, the lack of it must weigh against evolution having happened. By the very statement of this objection we are invited to believe the Tap-Dancing Science-Denier would accept such evidence IF ONLY IT EXISTED but the thing is it doesn't exist.
Someone who disagrees demonstrates many instances well known in the literature of fossil series intermediate in form and time between some Thing A and some Thing Z.
The Tap-Dancer then declares fossil series evidence to be irrelevant. How do we know ... various things? The dates of the fossils? Whether fossil A lies exactly on the ancestral line of fossil B?

But wasn't all that evidence relevant when it was supposedly missing?

Then why are people posting fossil sequences and purporting to prove evolution? By your own admission it's uncertain and inexact.
Because many people are less clue-resistant than yourself and the display you are making will not convince anyone who gets it better than you do.

I'm not making a display. I'm asking genuine questions and generally getting insulted for asking them. Trying to pin down the evolutionary arguments presented is like trying to squeeze jello. Transitional fossils shown to prove evolution may not actually be transitional fossils, but are presented to show that transistions in evolution exist. Does that sound weird to anyone else?

The Tap-Dancer then declares fossil series evidence to be irrelevant. How do we know ... various things? The dates of the fossils? Whether fossil A lies exactly on the ancestral line of fossil B?

I'm serious here. For the life of me I can't figure out why actual dates seem like an afterthought to evolution. Now I find out that it's not important because things may devolve, and not evolve, so dates mean nothing. Is that about the argument?