A more thorough analysis of evo's supposed transitionals can be found here:
Posted on 11/19/2003 10:15:28 AM PST by yonif
Medical student John David Johannessen and the leader of the Christian Medical Students Circle have petitioned the medical faculty at the University of Oslo for lectures "that not only argue the cause for evolution, but also the evidence against", student newspaper Universitas reports.
"The theory of evolution doesn't stand up and does not present enough convincing facts. It is one theory among many, but in education it is discussed as if it is accepted by everyone," Johannessen said.
Johannessen is a believer in creationism, based on the biblical account.
"Of course one has to know the theory of evolution, it is after all part of the curriculum. But certain lecturers demand that one believe it as well. Then it becomes a question of faith and not subject," Johannessen said.
Johannessen told the newspaper that he and his fellows are often compared to American extremists. Besides not being taken seriously or being able to debate the topic relevantly, Johannessen said that 'evolutionists' practically harass those who do not agree with them.
Dean Per Brodal said it was regrettable if any university staff were disparaging to creationists, but that there was no reason to complain about a lack of relevant evidence. Brodal also felt that evolution had a rather minor spot in medical education.
Biology professor Nils Christian Stenseth argued that instead of indulging an 'off-topic' debate the medical faculty should offer a course in fundamental evolutionary biology, saying that nothing in biology could be understood out of an evolutionary context.
The Christian Medical Students Circle want three basic points to be included in the curriculum:
1 According to the theory of evolution a mutation must be immediately beneficial to survive through selection. But many phenomena explained by evolution (for example the eye) involve so many, small immediately detrimental mutations that only give a long-term beneficial effect.
2 There is no fossil evidence to indicate transitional forms between, for example, fish and land animals or apes and humans.
3 Evolution assumes too many extremely improbably events occurring over too short a span of time.
Ham is VERY convincing! He uses things we take for granted, e.g. so-called "millions of year old" rock formations, to make his case. Watch out, though, he may convince you or someone you know.
RONLDSMYTHE RESPONDED: "I don't believe in the bibull's account of creation. It's your [Last Visible Dog's] myth, you prove it."
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I AM RESPONDING:
Check out http://www.answersingenesis.org and see my previous posts. Ken Ham & co and AIG's DVDs are VERY convincing regarding the "6 day" case. I went from a "millions of years" believer to a "6 day" believer a little over a year ago, as a result of Ken Ham's lecture and DVDs.
If you think that's good, try this: TIME CUBE .
She loves dives, but doesn't swing? (Shakes head.)
A more thorough analysis of evo's supposed transitionals can be found here:
The answer is that you don't know what you're saying. You were told at the seminar that cranks you out like identical sausages that if anyone says "Archaeopteryx" you say "A bird! Just a bird!" and if they say anything else you say "Protoavis!"
The mangled remains are very poor shape. Chatterjee has been criticized for the fancifulness of his interpretation. But even your posted uncritically accepting rendering of Chatterjee's announced bird reveals unfused saurian handbones, a long, bony tail. No bird today has such a tail. The South American hoatzin retains unfused hand/arm bones as a hatchling, as close as you get to Protoavis. But Proto also lacks the avian keeled sternum, which is hard to shrug off to incomplete preservation since it would be huge if it were modern in form.When this Triassic creature was first discovered, its describer declared it the earliest bird. This has been met with some skepticism, since the next bird (chronologically) does not occur until the Late Jurassic (Archaeopteryx). Some believe Protoavis to be a chimera, made up of parts of different animals. Some bones may belong to a pterosaur, others to some kind of theropod.
I'm saying that Protoavis would still be evidence for evolution if it were evidence for anything, but it's what creationists like to pretend all the good fossils are, a pile of very crushed bones. Funny they would turn their standards inside out in their zeal to make the wonderfully preserved Archaeopteryx and feathered dinos of China go away.
As for your link, the fallacies should be obvious for anyone with a brain. As you are a creationist and a Young-Earthie at that, I will explain in more detail than I might otherwise. We'll start here.
It should be noted that purely natural processes do not rest their feet solely upon evidence from the fossil record. For example, one might claim to have transitional fossil that led from some land-dwelling animal to the whale. However, if the fossil record indicates that the evolution was impossibly rapid, or the necessary change was beyond genetic limitations, or that it took place in the sort of populations which could never undergo large scale macroevolutionary change, then it might be possible to exclude common desent through purely natural causes, regardless of what fossils may or may not be found.The quoted section reserves in advance the right to make known fallacious arguments to reject fossil evidence if any transition anywhere looks "too fast" or presents any difficulty at all for the creationist in understanding the results. In other words, the author of this page intends to argue exactly as Last Visible Dog and Abe Froman are doing on this thread, by bludgeoning with a truculent unwillingness to understand or remember what has been explained to him 274.32 times if he is an average creationist with an average FR shelf life.
I have already linked several resources on what Darwin himself said as early as 1859 on so-called "sudden appearances" in the fossil record. I have put quotes in-line on this thread of Darwin explaining 'sudden appearances" in the fossil record. The writer at Ideacenter (where the central idea seems to be "Get stupid for Jesus!") is making a point of not knowing what Darwin explained in 1859 and no one can ever make him understand.
Just to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, I read a little farther.
In order for purely natural evolution to be the properly inferred explanation, not only must (1) key expected fossil transitions be found, but also (2) the amount of biological change must be mathematically possible given the size, reproduction rate, and mutation rate of the evolving population, the supposed time allowed for the change in the fossil record, and the rules of population genetics, (many of these characteristics may be dependent upon one another, but the point is that in the end, the numbers must add up), and also (3) all stages of intermediate macro- and micro- morphology of the transitional organisms must be conceivably functional and advantageous to survival.Yup. We have to have found the fossils or it's impossible. Therefore, bats are impossible because lots of their ancestral line is missing. Whales used to be impossible, but now they're not. Thank God and the Leakeys that humans haven't been impossible for some decades now. Don't know about you, but I'd hate to be impossible or unnatural.
We also have to run the dreaded creationist statistical babble gauntlet, in which ingenious idiots apply made-up numbers to a bad model and announce the probability of anything being 3.9 times 10 to the googolplex power.
You can't compute the probability of a "sudden appearance" in the fossil record. The smallest problem is that the error bars in dating the strata layers themselves are as big as the time it takes (maybe 50K years) to form a new species. You also don't know where in the world the transition happened. Even Darwin, who was only the first Darwinist, knew that it doesn't happen all over the world at once. In the case of terrestrial mammals becoming whales, it turns out to have been along the shores of the Tethys Sea, the sediments of which are now part of the mountain country of Pakistan. In the case of apes-to-humans, it was Africa, east of the Rift Valley. Everywhere else is "sudden appearance" from the radiation of a successfully adapted species.
The author of the Ideacenter page should know this by now, and yet he somehow doesn't. You, Michael_Michaelangelo, should know this by now, and yet you somehow don't.
The disproof of evolution is that you can't make a creationist understand anything at all about it. There's something very ostrichy about how that works.
Forgot to get back to this one. Know how you guys are always saying "Where are the eyewitnesses?" The fossil record will never give you a movie of the whole transition, every day in every generation from species A to species B. It is not reasonably to be expected.
What the writer is really doing is reserving the right to imagine dysfunctional intermediate forms and shut down the show at the first difficulty. "If it isn't a miracle, then that's a miracle!"
It's the old wing-claw thing. What good is half a wing and half a foreclaw? I don't know, but the fossil record has several examples on Caudipteryx (dinosaur), the probable Sinornithosaurus (dinosaur) I posted earlier, Archaeopteryx (classed a bird, but very dinosaurian), and Confuciusornis (early bird with unfused foreclaw/wings).
Here's another little point. You advertized that web page to me by saying, "A more thorough analysis of evo's supposed transitionals can be found here." That was supposed to be in answer to my posting or linking references to hundreds of transitionals. ("Hundreds?" I hear someone asking. Yes. Most of them are in a single link, The Transitional Vertebrate Fossils.) So I cite a few hundred. You refute with a web page that says there aren't any. Not very impressive.
They then dive into a whole lot of wishing away. I'm just going to hit the high low points.
The above is presented as the earliest certainly identifiable bat fossil so-far known. We are to marvel that it is "A bat! Just a bat!"
Well, no. It still has its tree insectivore tail. No bat alive today has such a thing. The UCMP site that hosts the image also mentions that there are older tooth fossils that show a progression from insectivore teeth to bat teeth, but the bodies are not preserved. So, maybe the teeth evolved gradually but God zapped the rest of the body into being suddenly one day? On this rock of Gap Gaming will creationism prove Genesis!
If the material in the whale section was true when written (it is undated except for 2001 copyright), then it is very out of date and should be removed or seriously overhauled. Since their source is AiG, which makes a policy of leaving outdated claims up on their web site, I suspect the deception is deliberate.
What they say about Pakicetus:
The current truth about Pakicetus (since fall of 2000, at least three years ago):
Pakicetus on the left, Ichthyolestes on the right. There are other Pakicetid specimens, but those are first and so-far only with post-cranial bones. The several earlier finds were only skull parts.
Their treatement of Ambulocetus is just as bad. They quote the execrable scholarship of AiG and Don Batten.
"To establish hind leg function it is necessary to have the pelvic girdle to demonstrate that the leg bones ... belong to the rest of the skeleton and to determine muscle attachments. The pelvic girdle is missing."16Ambulocetus has had a pelvis since sometime in 1998. This is lying for the Lord, big time.
I won't sludge in detail through the rest of it. How many times, after all, do I have to catch someone? However, feel free to pick anything specific if you think it's a real killer. Make sure it's your best shot.
Consult a urologist.
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