[VadeRetro]

And you accuse me of "white-hot emotionalism"? Around here, equating someone with the same mindset as a Clintonista loyalist is about the worst insult available.

Thread after thread after thread, subject after subject, there turn out to be "other ways" of interpreting the evidence. Anything but evolution. This is just another one. Why am I not allowed to notice what is going on? How could anyone not notice what is going on?

I won't trade insults with you, especially meaningless ones. I remind you that on a recent thread I was ready to "write my concession speech" on an important aspect of human evolution.

I can't tell how big the concession was which you would have made, since you didn't wind up making it. I'm more impressed that, despite accepting an old earth, you don't concede a non-human ancestry for humans. You chose, instead, to defend a 40K gap interval which had Neanderthals but only a couple of controversial non-Neanderthals.

Here's the problem for claiming that you're not really evidence-proof. You use that gap to claim that humans and apes are unconnected and don't intergrade at all in the fossil record. This is the particular array of hard evidence that you were wishing away.

From here.

It was really a two-pronged defense. 1) "There are Neanderthals in there and Neanderthals are offline." 2) "There's a gap in the stuff that can't be shown to be offline."

Point one is feeble. With any fossil series, potentially all of it is offline. Nor is it clear that Neanderthals are offline, despite what you may have heard. The point of the figure is that human and ape skulls intergrade in the fossil record. And my point again is that you refuse to connect dots. I don't think the case you cite reflects well on you at all as someone who is objectively considering and responding to the evidence.

In fact I posted those very words. It turned out that the two most critical finds that prompted my retreat were very controversial in their dating. You could not give me any more in that 50-90K critical window.

And at least in your own mind you escaped recognizing the obvious implications of the evidence. I leave it for the reader to examine the figure above and wonder if he or she would do the same. Except for the modern chimpanzee on the upper left, all skulls are in chronological order (upper left to lower right) as they appear in the fossil record.

I remind you of these things because you are quick to accuse me of refusing to see things.

Let's see how you helped yourself on this thread.

1) You read the main article and announced that the study had neither grown feathers on a lizard or scales on a bird, although the latter would have been a loss of function yada yada yada. Anyone who read the article knows what the study was, and by elimination what it was not. Duh!

2) You commended gore for posting facts, facts, facts after he set up a strawman involving Shh and spent several posts knocking it over. The article does not mischaracterize the role of Shh. Moreover, gore's posts concerning its varied role in vertebrate development do not in any way undermine the study reported here. You would rather slap high-fives with a creo who is wrong than correct or ignore him.

The things I am refusing to see ARE NOT THERE.

The evidence against Clinton wasn't there, either. There was no evidence. Half the callers to CSPAN said so.

If you could have shown me even a half-dozen finds whose age was clearly within the time frame under discussion I would have written that speech.

Would you have conceded human ancestry from apes? Or just that there are fossils in that gap?

Just like I conceded on that fish-amphibian fossil debate almost two years ago.

I have no memory of this. Are you saying you actually conceded and still concede that amphibians arose from fish but are hiding from a rather better evidence trail for the ape ancestry of humans? What's the big deal about humans?

I DO concede when the facts are clear. You haven't got the facts on your side here. This experiment does not demonstrate what the evos on this thread are claiming it does, and no amount of your fuming and insults can change that. Got it?

The experiment suggests a scenario for feather evolution from scales. That is true even though you don't like it.

Would you ever be willing to write such a speech? Have you ever?

Being a basic screw-up, I have had to eat crow on details being argued many times. I don't like the feeling of having the facts against me. I thus try no matter how it may hurt to emulate science as a whole by staying as square with the evidence as possible. OTOH, I have not had to eat crow on major evidence for creation/ID or against evolution. There isn't any.

[PatrickHenry]

This is the particular array of hard evidence that you were wishing away.

The most remarkable thing about that display of skulls is that none of them (other than the presently existing man and monkey specimens) existed at the time of Darwin's work. I think Neanderthal was discovered very shortly thereafter, and all the rest came later. Yet evolution theory predicted that, because these then-unknown and unsuspected intermediate species had once existed, evidence of them might be found. And now the evidence has in fact been discovered. When a theory makes predictions about previously unknown phenomena, and then future discoveries demonstrate that those predictions were correct, that is very powerful confirmation of the theory.

Conversely, the creationists had been running around saying that "the missing link" would never be found because -- according to creationism -- there was no such link. So creationism's one big prediction has been a total failure. No wonder they spend so much energy denying the existence of the evidence.

[Ahban]

Your diagram is even more misleading than I had thought at first. It turns out J, K, and L are ALL Neanderthals. DNA analysis has ruled out Neanderthals as contributing to modern man's gene pool. That means you go from Egaster (I) to Cro Mag (M). Trouble is, egaster's descendents forgot to leave any fossils within the last 100K - Excluding perhaps the Neadertals who have already been ruled out as a source for mankind. There was no one around for modern man to evolve from.

Because human beings are wired to look for patterns, any graduated series has suggestive power. Your series has that power, even though it consists of dead ends and a critter placed out of order (chimp). It does not prove human evolution, it proves humans respond to the visual of a graduated series. They leap to conclusions. Most will reconsider those conclusions when presented with contradictory evidence.

Culturally, with tool making, social group size, religion and art, man shows up with a 'big bang' or creativity around 40K. Behaviorally modern humans show up suddenly.

DNA evidence shows that all humans are amazingly closely related. We disagree on the amount and implications of this evidence, but to me this far outweighs your small pile of disparate bones.

Bones are too easy to dispute, even among evos (ever read a book called "Bones of Contention"?) I could get a series of horse, dear, pig, dog and ape skulls that could show them 'evolving' from horses to apes. I could get a bunch of monkey and ape skulls, all extant species, and show modern monkies 'evolving' into apes.

[Ahban]

Let me refresh your memory then. I conceded that the fish-amphib bones you showed did look like what an intermediate between the two should look like.

That is not the same as conceding that amphibians evolved from fish, since most of the differences between the two are in the soft tissue. In addition I vaguely recall that someone after me came along and pointed out some differences that I had missed.

The more I look at the macroevo case, the less there is to it.

If you want to say the article produced a new hypothesis of how feathers could have evolved, I will agree with you. OK? What it did NOT produce was evidence that feathers evolved in the first place. They can now say "IF feathers evolved, they must have evolved differently than most of us previously thought". That is not the same as saying, "This is evidence that they evolved". Its not. Its just finding the genes that control certain aspects of feathers.

Yeah, IF they evolved then it has to come through those genes, but the evolved part is pure assumption. These findings do nothing to make that assumption more likely to be the truth. All sides in this debate knew that certain genes must control feather development.

[Ahban]

What's the difference between conceding that amphibians evolved and humans evolved? There are serious philosophical consequences from believing "an boy is a fish is a rat is a pig is a dog". It is a big deal whether or not you beleive human life is created in the image of the Almighty or is a Cosmic Accident. It has implications that boil over, conscoiusly and subconsciouly, into how we treat the people in our life. It has implications on the just limits of government power too.

When the stakes are that high, we have to be sure. We need more assurance than the contrived diagram presented here.

Genesis Chapter One uses the strongest creative word possible in only three places. The creation of the universe, the filling of the sea (and later in the period of the verse the sky) with life, and the creation of man. In all three places, at a minimum, a fiat miracle is presented as having occured. Its not limited to those verses, but the Hebrew term used is less strong and does not demand creation of a new thing from nothing.

You asked me, so I told you. No doubt you will say my committment to the Word is blinding me. What is blinding you to the possiblity of its Truth?

[gore3000]

When shown that your theory is nonsense you always bring out a bunch of bones. Well, those bones do not prove anything. They raise more questions than they answer. Most of them are totally unclassified but what the heck, they make a nice picture don't they?

Well here's something a lot more real - some species for which evolution can in no way explain how their unique features could have descended from anything. They totally disprove the assumptions of evolutionists and are like the 'crazy aunt' which evolutionists want no one to see:

Top: Euglena, Hymenopimesis Wasp, Butterfly, Platypus
Bottom: Bat, Fugu, Cambrian species