Posted on 01/18/2005 9:49:17 AM PST by Laissez-faire capitalist
You make a big to-do of the absence of this or that fossil, but the finding of same means nothing. I don't really believe you don't understand that this can't be science.
That demonstration in no way shows 'progression-in-small-steps'. It only shows the progression of some peoples extreme bias for evolution. They believe evolution occurred so everything has to be crammed into that world view no matter what.
I can't tell you how funny that looks in light of the stupid game you play down the page in the same response. In fact, let's go get that right now.
... the fossil record should be awash with fossils from every small step, as it starts to evolve eyes, limbs, mouths. etc. The fossil record fails in this area, as your examples have shown.
"Everything we find, and everything we will ever find, means nothing. But where O where are the missing transitions?" I called you on this two or three posts ago, and you simply brazenly repeat.
You write well enough that you can't be as stupid as you are pretending to be. You pretty much have to be lying about what you can understand, here. I sometimes pretend to blame God for the bad behavior of the people who misbehave in public for him (beheadings, suicide bombings, witch trials, and creationists lecturing school boards about "the REAL science").
That's sarcasm. I don't really think some supernatural creator of Heaven and Earth is telling people to do those things. Your parents didn't raise you right. Now, any kids you may have are getting a bad example from at least one parent and so it goes.
I mentioned before that science considers prediction and theory to be in great agreement concerning evolution. It's true, and even a high-level summary of the lines of evidence pointing to evolution is impressively large.
Those lines of evidence include the fossil record. That the fossil record is rather jerky and discontinuous is mostly a matter of the disruptive influence of plate tectonics, which tends to assure that over the long haul periods of deposition in any one spot will be interrupted by periods of erosion.
In fairly recent decades, we have examined sea cores from bottom regions where deposition has continued uninterrupted for millions of years. We routinely see perfectly smooth change in such sediments (and here and there elsewhere despite the geological difficulties).
Here's a web page on what punk eek really is. Learn what you're talking about.
This page add some material, including the extent to which Darwin himself anticipated Gould and Eldredge. Not only is punk-eek a Darwinian theory, but Darwin went most of the way there himself in some neglected paragraphs of Origin.
We have the fossil record geology and evolution predict. Those predictions began when the tree of life was based almost entirely upon living species, the mere branch tips with almost no information from the trunk and larger branches on down the fossil record. Nevertheless, evolution said there is a scenario, a historical tree of common descent which the fossil record will outline.
Certain things were forbidden, flatly stated to have never lived, under this scenario. As I explained already on another thread, we find only the transitionals predicted by evolution and none of the falsifiers.
There is no possible scenario about which you cannot hypothesize, one thing evolved from another thing.Because of the preceding, evolution is a much stronger and tighter theory than creationism's pathetic squawk of "We can account for that, too" every time the tree of common descent is further outlined. You don't particularly predict that it will be in any future finds. We've been doing so for almost 150 years and it's still looking good. You missed the boat.False. We have an established evolutionary scenario. Say, in the case of vertebrates it would be fish to amphibians to reptiles. One reptile branch (synapsids) gives rise to mammals. Another (diapsids) gives rise to dinosaurs and birds. Mammals and birds diversified along a certain scenario.
There are some uncertainties, some play, in the scenario, but there are things which evolution does not explain if they ever turned up. You can't have a seemingly direct amphibian-bird transitional, or amphibian-mammal, or bird-mammal, or fish-mammal. These things are flatly stated to have never existed.
Thus, for instance, we KNEW to look for land animal ancestors of whales even though they live in the water among fish and are basically shaped like fish. A separate mammalian evolution in water for cetaceans directly from fish was obviously false. Sounds trivial, now, but creationists scoffed right up until Pakicetus, Ambulocetus, Rhodocetus, etc. were found. Now they have to lie about what they're able to understand. Sad. God shouldn't tell people to behave badly in public. You'd expect the creator of Heaven and Earth to refrain from malicious mischief.
Evolution says some things (which further outline the tree of life) must once have lived. In fact, we make new finds of those and only those things.
Thus, evolution is potentially falsifiable but it's late in the game for the falsifications to turn up if evolution were indeed false. It should have happened a long time ago and it hasn't. Thus, the game is over in real science and evolution has been accepted for over a century.
Creationism scoffs "Where are the missing links?" but swears it means nothing every time we fill another one. This is trying to have it all ways.
So, yes, your "science" predicts everything and nothing and is as worthless as the effort of correcting the falsehoods of back-again-dumb-as-a-stump creationists. The same thing is NOT at all true of evolution.
You can always say that you have an answer for what we DO find (no matter WHAT we do find), but mostly you try to say we'll never find another one. You have no science. Hell, you have no integrity.
Surgeons still take knives, cut holes into people, and insert or remove objects; sounds kind of "pickaxe and shovel" to me. But do I think surgical technique is much more sophisticated today than in the recent past? Of course.
Who's Jack Chick?! - Man, you're missing one of the finest minds of the century. LOL. Big Daddy - a modern classic.
You don't make the findings of science go away with a moldy collection of out-of-date and out-of-context quotes. G. G. Simpson was before everything, and he still went on to add we have plenty enough examples of evolution in the fossil record. Gould before he died specifically denounced the twisting efforts of pseudoscholars like Camp.
Again, you can't be telling the truth about what you understand. This is just shameless. What bothers me about creationism isn't that it isn't true. What bothers me is that it's a lie.
Evolution is not founded upon abiogenesis research, a fairly new field of endeavor which began almost a century after Darwin published. Still abiogenesis research continues oblivious of your claims that it somehow shatters evolution.
More recently there was this lovely thread. MuwahHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! (Just reliving the moment!)
Against this real work, Ashby Camp and his T.O. site are basically heckling from their seats on the crates around the pot-bellied stove at the ol' General Store, yokel grotestques from some old movie.
Quotes don't count as evidence in science.
Actually, there's literally only about five actual scientists (meaning people who have done actual peer-reviwed scientific research) on the anti-evolution side. That's five out of several thousand.
Evolution does not have anything to do with the origin of life. It has to do with how life changed over time.
Well, then, please give us some proof on here that definitively and conclusively shows evolutionary theory being the best explanation for the origin of life.
See above.
Apparently what you don't like is the fact that there are a lot of quotes from evolutionists, which undermine evolutionary theory, that never make it to print for mass consumption.
This is science, not theology. Science journals are not sacred scriptures. Hence quotes have zero value in science.
Science relies on empirical data, and nothing else, for evidence.
>> Quotes don't count as evidence in science.<<
You are correct. They do expose the perceptions of the person being quoted.
Like the scientist in a Scientific American article that said, and I paraphrase, "the more we look at DNA, the more it looks like someone designed it."
Or Einsteins famous quote about science without religion being lame.
You see, even if one had all the knowledge of the entire human race in his head he would be the smartest ant on the ant hill - which is not much of an accomplishment.
Evolution apologists need to get over themselves.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.