To: PatrickHenry I thought you were leavin'......... 72 posted on 12/05/2003 10:50:11 PM CST by Elsie
Posted on 12/05/2003 3:26:16 PM PST by bondserv
New Record-Setting Living Fossil Flabbergasts Scientists 12/05/2003
A remarkably-detailed fossil ostracode, a type of crustacean, has been announced in the Dec. 5 issue of Science1 that is blowing the socks off its discoverers. Erik Stokstad in a review of the discovery in the same issue2 explains its significance in the evolutionary picture of prehistory:
Over the past half-billion years [sic], evolution has dished up [sic] an almost endless variety of novelties: lungs, legs, eyes, wings, scales, feathers, fur. So when paleontologists find a creature that doesn’t change, they take note. (Emphasis added in all quotes.)Two things about this fossil are exceptional. (1) It has a “jaw-dropping” amount of detail, such that even small fragile parts and soft tissues were perfectly preserved. (2) It is indistinguishable from modern ostracodes:
What’s most amazing, ostracode experts say, is how eerily similar the soft-tissue anatomy is to that of modern relatives. “I was flabbergasted,” says Koen Martens, a zoologist at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.This fossil, found near Herefordshire, U.K., was found in Silurian deposits estimated to be 425 million years old. That means that its modern counterparts are living fossils, virtually unchanged for all that time:
Some ostracode specialists are stunned. “This is a demonstration of unbelievable stability,” says Tom Cronin of the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia. Whereas ostracodes diversified [sic] into some 33,000 living and extinct species, “these guys have just been plodding along totally unfazed.”This fossil, named Colymbosathon, is also upsetting those who look for evolution in the genes:
Finding a modern cylindroleberid in the Silurian clashes with molecular data, which suggest that the group and related families originated relatively recently, says evolutionary biologist Todd Oakley of the University of California, Santa Barbara. There’s no conflict for zoologist Anne Cohen, a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, who thinks Colymbosathon actually belongs to a long-extinct family. In any case, the new fossil indicates that a basic ostracode body plan was already present in the Silurian. It could also help [sic] sort out evolutionary relationships of fossil ostracodes.David Horne (Queen Mary College, London) predicts more “long-lost evolutionary blueprints” [sic] may emerge from these deposits. “The probability that they will find similarly preserved representatives of other ostracode lineages, and of other arthropods, is both high and extremely exciting.”
This is just one more of many remarkable, astounding, flabbergasting examples of living fossils. “Unbelievable stability” is not a prediction of Darwinism. The Darwinian world is supposed to be a fluid world, filled with diversification, radiation, and innovation. During the imaginary 425 million years, the continents moved all over the world, animals crawled onto the land and became geckos and crocodiles and birds and caribou. Mountains rose and valleys sank, and glaciers repeatedly advanced and retreated over much of the planet. Some animals moved back into the oceans and became whales, porpoises, manatees and sea lions in just a small fraction of this much time, and humans emerged from grunting chimpanzees, invented language and abstract thought, and conquered space. Is it reasonable to assume that in this slow whirlwind of continuous dynamical change, these ostracodes just reproduced themselves over and over millions of times without any change whatsoever?
Darwinists are caught in a crossfire of antagonistic evidence. Only a well-armored Darwinist could be excited about incoming bombshells like this. Only by wearing Kevlar-lined lead helmets around their brains can they keep the bullets from penetrating and the insides from exploding.
I wonder if it will do its legendary self-correction this time.
That tells me that the usual suspects are not real scientists.
To: PatrickHenry I thought you were leavin'......... 72 posted on 12/05/2003 10:50:11 PM CST by Elsie
To: John Valentine Save it for the idiot echo chamber. You guys play rough! 79 posted on 12/06/2003 2:14:39 AM CST by bondserv (Alignment is critical.)That's not rough, it's their best evidence for evolution.
Nowhere did he say, or suggest, that he was leaving, as in going away.
Don't need to resort to fossils, consider:
Horses and jackasses--mate one way, you get mules, mate another way, you get jennies. West Atlantic Herring gulls--mate east to west, you get viable offpring, mate west to east, you don't. Dogs and cats--mate them, and you get occasional live offpring. Chihuahuas and Great Danes--genetically, they are one species--so you should be able to mate them, and produce viable offspring, right?
I guess you never saw a longhorn.
Armament is expensive to maintain and support, and has to justify itself economically in the real world, not in batman comic adventures. Ruminants largely concentrated on outbreeding, or outrunning their predetors, or being too big and ugly to kill easily, and running efficiently on low-octane, easy to obtain fuels. Slow-breeding social predators are more of a boon than a threat to the ruminant gene-pool, so there's inadequaate genetic payback in getting into an arms race with them.
That is not accurate. This notion has come to the surface repeatedly since humans took to writing their head-scratchings down. Hoyle brought some newly available evidence to bear on the question, to gave it a SLIGHTLY less marginal scientific reputation than it had theretofore enjoyed.
That is a good question, and one molecular biology can probably soon answer.
Recent science has been singular unsuccessful in supplying evidence for any branch of darwinian theory. An excellent book on point is Darwin's Black Box: the Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, which shows how recent advances in biology undermine rather than support the hypothesis of evolution.
LOL. Please supply evidence for this fancy.
Proof by invisible sledgehammer, eh? Would you like a quick lesson in posting links to URL's? I assume you've noticed by no that these didn't succeed.
See Miller's "Finding Darwin's God", for an exquisitely detailed tour of all the things Behe predicted could never be published in biological journals due to unreachable complexity--which had already been published before his book went to print. Behe's basic thesis can be fairly summed up like this: "If I can't think how it could have happened, it must be impossible."
It is arguable that he was a "devout" christian, but he was a christian--in school, he studied to take the cloth, and his early writings do contain a few dispeptic scrapes of Anglican theological ponderings.
Nobody of consequence in biological sciences believes that's what happened to create life. That is just a gross over-simplification for elementary textbook consumption. Until you have a smoking gun in the form of a burning bush on video-tape, or eviction notices from tax-collectors from Venus, the evidence points best at non-surprising, non-miraculous explanations, the details of which we do not know, and may never know. There's an unwritten rule in science--don't bet on a miraculous intervention--it ain't never been a winning bet yet.
Not according to the Bible, as post 33 points out. The Bible says that men who claim not to know God are "without excuse" because "that which is known of God is manifest in them" (e.g. in their sense of right and wrong, appreciation for beauty, etc.) and because God's "eternal power and Godhood" are "clearly seen" in nature.
Some readers of this thread don't recognize the Bible as God's word, but those who do should not say that the evidence of God's existence is insufficient.
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