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To: OrthodoxPresbyterian
So what your Kentucky Fried Hoatzin has to do with Bats, is still beyond me.

Gee! Imagine that! You still don't understand, even though I told you exactly what it has to do with bat evolution. It demolishes the particular eyes-jammed-shut thought-experiment that you can't have a wing that's only halfway a wing and halfway something else. The_doc clearly and unambiguously made exactly that argument. It's a perfectly ridiculous example of creationist science in action and I demolished it with one picture of one fossil.

Granted, bats have a lousy fossil record. This may mean no more than that much of their evolution took place in an upland forested environment which is very unlikely to have left any fossils at all. When you look at the fossil record, you see mainly lowland/tidal swamps, sea bottoms, lake bottoms, and maybe a lowland river floodplain. Other topographies, especially the more raised ones, tend to wash away over time. They have essentially no fossil record. The mountains where I live have been eroding since before the Permian-Triassic extinction. That's what mountains do. They wear down.

That's a big gap in the fossil record between the topsoil layer and the first solid rock. There is no fossil-record proof that anything lived here between the time when salamanders ruled the earth and the Indians dropped a few stone arrowheads, but it's ridiculous to suppose that nothing did.

The absence of early bats only means something if you buy the creo nonsense that all absence of evidence is evidence of absence. (Especially when you consider that the fossil record of practically everything else is so much better. You're basically like the old High School bully at the 20th class reunion picking on the only guy left who hasn't bulked up bigger than he is.) If you were going to be consistent about that, the finding of a new fossil to fill a gap would prove something to the gap-gamers. Presence of evidence should be evidence of presence (or the absence of absence, whatever).

But the finding of a new fossil never proves anything to the gap-gamers. What does that tell us? For them, it's clearly not about the actual content of the fossil record at all.

When Darwin first wondered where all the missing links were (and skeptics took up the mocking chant), he was boldly predicting that the very sketchy evidence of his day would be fleshed out further. He said that some kind of Precambrian life would turn up, some kind of link from land animals to whales would surface, some kind of link from apes to man would be found in the fossil record, some kind of link from dinosaurs to birds was likely ...

So was he the luckiest charlatan of the 19th century or what? The actual track record is better than what I outline above. Compare this link to the teats-on-boar-hog "God could have done that" one-answer-fits-everything retrodiction of creation "science."

Note the difference between saying that bats have no fossil record and that bats cannot have evolved. Note the difference between rejecting something on an intellectually honest basis and bludgeoning with how many different ways you can misunderstand and mischaracterize it.

I think your opinions are idiotic. You think the same of mine.

Your opinions are understandable to me, but only in psychological and historical senses. You're stuck in the cultural heritage of an oogedy-boogedy magical past, a 21st-century witch-doctor shaking his rattle at devils and denying both science and logic. The cognitive dissonance of all the evidence against what you believe has driven you nuts. I'm fascinated by the pathology, can hardly look away.

I thought the latter half of your Post was burdened by the same assumptions as the former half. Lots of Assertions, little Argument.

I'm not going to repeat everything in every post, but I have, since your reappearance on this thread, posted to you links to a library worth of evidence that transitional fossils exist and that independent lines of evidence converge to point to evolution. You have only your ability to ignore, wish away, and mischaracterize.

278 posted on 06/26/2003 8:50:13 AM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: VadeRetro; OrthodoxPresbyterian
I'm not going to repeat everything in every post, but I have, since your reappearance on this thread, posted to you links to a library worth of evidence that transitional fossils exist and that independent lines of evidence converge to point to evolution.

Let me make sure this one is thread-level and not buried in some sub-link somewhere: 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution.

279 posted on 06/26/2003 10:24:18 AM PDT by VadeRetro
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