Posted on 05/04/2005 12:32:23 PM PDT by MeanWestTexan
Actually, what we should see is the cockroach being the common ancestor to a bunch of critters. Has anyone tried to construct a descent tree back to the living cockroach?
Creationist Quote Science is so much fun, I don't see why we can't argue everything that way.
For the same reason we can see stars at all stages of their lives even though individual stars take billions of years to complete their life cycle.
For the same reason I can take a photograph at Disneyworld and see a human being in every stage of life, even though birth to death takes, on average, 75 years.
In statistics, it's called population sampling, and is commonly used when you want to study a steady state process. Time reduces to a percentage rate of change in the equations.
So, it shouldn't matter that evolution takes a billion years, if the sample is large enough, I should see dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of examples occurring at the moment the sample is taken.
Strawman I see.. You could use a brain.. but OZ is a fabrication also..
You going from tinman to strawman to cowardly Lion is cute..
and effectivly evades my question/statement.. unless I pose it again..
AND DO...
"Actually, what we should see is the cockroach being the common ancestor to a bunch of critters"
I don't think that is necessarily correct.
The cockroach has hit upon such a good design that --- with little modification ---- it almost always has a niche.
Hence, few braches off the family tree (unless one considers the 4-6 inch nastiness in Brazil and the 1/4 inch nastiness from Germany completely different beasties).
Look. At some point it has to happen. If you have a dino that has flat teeth and all its ancestors had pointy teeth, then at some point in time, a baby dino was born with flat teeth.
We don't see piles of bones with dinos have less pointy and more flat teeth in a gradual change over eons, we see pointy teethed dinos, then, woah, two layers up we see the same dinos with flat teeth.
This is what people mean when they say the critters appear fully formed. The minute changes over time you keep mentioning don't exist.
We don't see that anywhere.
This is why puncutated equilibrium is back in vogue.
And so, yes, at some point we should see a salamander born who has a major morphological shift from it's parents (an exoskeleton for example).
You can't just keep saying minute changes too small to see that eventually lead to a major morphological change. You are simply rephrasing Zeno's Paradox, and that was solved a long time ago through the discovery of limits in mathematics.
You're stretching, here. It's obvious the distinguishing characteristic of the Cedar tree is its size, not its shape. The normal inference to anyone painting the analogy would be size.
If I were to say a tail like a Redwood, there's no way you would think I was describing something straight and red with a green tuft at the end. You'd immediately visualize something massive and huge.
Just my wildly elliptical sense of humor.
And what percentage of dinosaurs that lived and have been found as fossils.
This is not a cheap evasion. How many fossil dinosaurs have been found, and how many dinosaurs lived?
When you do find fossils, you tend to find a lot. Chances are they were preserved at almost the same time by some flukey conditions. Oddly enough, they all seem to belong to the same era.
You fail to mention two things. Fossils never appear out of their expected sequence, and new ones are found every year that fill expected gaps.
Yes I do...
another diversion I see...
Strawman.. = a man made out of straw..
Like Darwin was a man made out of straw.. pre-Bull Sperm..
Bulls like it though..
Okay, you're a complete idiot in addition to being a liar. I'm through with you.
Yes I do...
another diversion I see...
Strawman.. = a man made out of straw..
Like Darwin was a man made out of straw.. pre-Bull Sperm..
Bulls like it though..
Ditto... except I'm NOT through with you...
You fail to mention two things. Fossils never appear out of their expected sequence, and new ones are found every year that fill expected gaps.
And you fail to mention that fossils are often dated according to where they would fill a plug in the sequence.
Fossil dating is an imprecise science at best. Strata dating is not always reliable, radioactive dating has its own issues.
More often than not it comes down to something like: We're pretty sure the critter is here, but it could also be here. Which one fits the evolutionary sequence? B? OK. That's probably the correct date, then.
You also failed to mention that every year, fossils are found that do not fit the expected sequence. How many times now has hominid history been revised back because of new fossil finds?
It's not quite as clear cut as you maintain.
You realize, of course, that quote is falsely attributed to P.T. Barnum. He didn't say that.
Interestingly, it's not well known that a major scientific undertaking in the early to middle years of the 19th century was isolating the sucker reproduction rate.
True, except that is the single characteristic, out of several, that points to "dinosaur" rather than "hippo".
The Occam's razor answer is that it's a hippo, as there are no other references in the Bible to dinosaurs. There were none alive during the era encompassed by Biblical stories. And peoples of the middle east had no archaeological knowledge to base such a story upon. But they DID have knowledge of the hippo.
It's a hippo.
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