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A classic post

You mean a classic cut and paste job from talkorg - a repository of hard-core evo essays and just-so stories.

Hunt's work has been heavily scritinized, as I am sure you are well-aware.

More on the lack of transitionals and the fossil record:

Of course, in you and your bretheren's eyes there is no disputing Ms. Hunt - and I think we can all appreciate your devotion. However, when there are so many folks who remain unconvinced, I think it is good that alternative interpretations of the evidence are made available for people to draw their own conclusions from.

Enjoy.

Old stuff whose lying lawyerisms have all been rebutted before, except the last link. Let's give it a look.

For most scientists all of this seems so obvious that it is difficult to question. It goes against human nature to challenge long held ideas of truth. However, science is suppose to do just that - challenge ideas. Why? Because often what seems obvious initially does not turn out to be true.

Science does challenge ideas, it just isn't still challenging the idea that the Earth is almost spherical, or that fire is the result of oxidation and not the rushing out of phlogiston. Some aspects of reality win acceptance and are not seriously challenged thereafter. The areas of doubt are not static but are pushed ahead as an expanding frontier. That Earth's life forms are related by common descent is no longer an area of reasonable doubt. The movement to cast such doubt is religious and political, not scientific.

The article then descends into "data anomaly soup" mode with a little question-begging thrown in. There is nothing funny about Ichthyosaur burials, nothing requiring throwing normal interpretations out the window. The age of dinosaurs is argued against by the apparent survival of some blood chemicals in T-rex bones. The mainstream scientists involved don't seem to have noticed this implication at all.

But here's the amusing question-begging:

Since a single gene pool can produce "drastic" differences in phenotypic forms, how are scientists so sure of their fossil classification models? Often only slight phenotypic differences are enough to place a fossil creature in a different species, genus or even family group than its modern-day counterpart or than its counterpart found elsewhere in the geologic column. The problem is that differences, even fairly significant differences, are known to exist between members of the same gene pool. Because of this fact, taxonomic classification models can be quite subjective and even misleading.

The same gene pool? You mean, "common descent," right? Actually, I have trouble deciding whether this is classic question-begging or giving the game away while refusing to see it.

Here's an actual good source on questions of taxononmy and the fossil record: Taxonomy, Transitional Forms, and the Fossil Record.

Moving further up the taxonomic hierarchy, the condylarths and primitive carnivores (creodonts, miacids) are very similar to each other in morphology (Fig. 9, 10), and some taxa have had their assignments to these orders changed. The Miacids in turn are very similar to the earliest representatives of the Families Canidae (dogs) and Mustelidae (weasels), both of Superfamily Arctoidea, and the Family Viverridae (civets) of the Superfamily Aeluroidea. As Romer (1966) states in Vertebrate Paleontology (p. 232), "Were we living at the beginning of the Oligocene, we should probably consider all these small carnivores as members of a single family." This statement also illustrates the point that the erection of a higher taxon is done in retrospect, after sufficient divergence has occurred to give particular traits significance.

The link points numerous instances in which forms which are now distinct begin to resemble each other as you go back and down in the fossil record which could just as easily be lumped in one taxonomic bin as the other. Nothing I've seen yet in Creationi/ID literature explains why that should be so, but it occurs again and again and again.

I'll admit that I went into skim mode for the rest of it. Here and there the author stops playing offense and tries to present alternative models for such obvious problems for flood geology as the foramenifera and layered forests. Flood geology has so many more problems than Pitman even acknowledges that I couldn't get very excited about it.

The link points numerous instances in which forms which are now distinct begin to resemble each other as you go back and down in the fossil record which could just as easily be lumped in one taxonomic bin as the other.

The link points numerous instances in which forms which are now distinct begin to resemble each other as you go back and down in the fossil record UNTIL ONE REACHES FORMS which could just as easily be lumped in one taxonomic bin as the other.

(Editor needed. Must work for peanuts.)