I haven't much time at the moment but will try to reply more later.
But as I said I well know there are lots of people who assure me that its true -- but for me to know it rather then at most believe it, I need to see the evidence myself.
That nice chart tells me that somebody thinks they've got it all figured out -- but I can't see the actual fossils. The few I searched for seemed far too lacking to determine their relation, so in order to even know if the named fossils did make a convincing case I'd have to see them or see to scale photos of them. But even then I still have to trust the accuracy of the people who handled the fossils.
You know, just think how great of a tool for the evolutionist side that list would be if it contained photos of the actual fossil evidence. But here I am again trying to find the evidence for your side of the debate :-)
But just by reading that post you refer me to, I still cannot tell which of the listed sequences are very similar, which are great gaps, and the existence of which are supported by hundreds of fossils and which are supported by just a few bits of bone or tooth or whatever.
Another problem is that 50 intermediate fossils over millions of generations is a very sparse picture. We have more species then that alive today.
If you gave me a bucket full of a million little wooden blocks, each with a random number on one side and each colored a random shade or color on each side, I could select and order some of them in a row so that the numbers all counted up from right to left and the colors went from left to righ. But by selecting and ordering differently, I could demonstrate that dark colors were low numbers and high numbers were bright colors, or I could show just the opposite -- all by selecting the "evidence" I was willing to accept.
Similarly, when I have seen the religious fervor with which scientists preach evolution and denounce any dissent, and when I've seen the other questionable tactics used in trying to argue the side of speciation by evolution, I have to wonder if the fossils that I get to hear about are carefully selected and ordered -- showing something that isn't true. For example, (And yes I realize there are more dimensions to the comparisons then this, but this is only a simple example. My point is still valid.) if I were arranging fossils by size and asserting ancestral relationships, I could show that the horse descended from the dog by starting out with all the dogs that are alive today, and sorting them tiny to big. Then starting out with all the horses today, tiny to big. Then I could say the tiny dog was the original granddaddy of them all, and I could then place the tiny horse as the descendants of the biggest dog. (Actually, the biggest dog is bigger then the smallest horse, so I could eliminate some in the middle there.)
Now of course scientists also take into account the shape of the bones and skull and number of bones and in what structure -- but the principle is still the same -- if you take any two similar species, whether or not they are related to eachother, and if you collect their bones for long enough, you will be able to take advantage of the random change in skeleton and find a skull of one species that was a freak incident in one direction (big, small, wide, etc.) and then find the skull of one of the other species which was randomly abnormal in the opposite way, then put them side by side and say "See here! Das mizzing lingk!
So in order for the evidence to be most meaningful, I'd need to see all of it -- not just that which fit nicely into the global common descent tree. (by global I mean the idea that all life shares one common ancestor.)
So in direct answer to your question, (what I think about the post you referenced), I'd say someone did a pretty nice job of gathering together the info, but I'd have to see the evidence it talks about in order to know whether it was good evidence or not. In and of itself, the post is not evidence. Only with much more research on my part would I know whether it was referring to good evidence or not. If I thought it might be useful, I would research it more. But I'm busy enough that I don't generally feel too compelled to try to find the evidence to support your side when your side won't provide good solid evidence or even give straight answers.
Remember, if the best evidence I have is somebody telling me that "it's so," I cannot honestly say that I know, only that I, at best, could believe. But belief alone isn't really science in the purest sense.
But what do you think about the post you listed for me? (142)
Also, I'm still curious -- the other day you mentioned something about your line of work or whatever -- what do you do? I design electronic circuits and kludge together occasional scripts, just to be on the fair side.
Thanks,
-Jesse
PS: Something else I recently heard of and found very interesting was about inherited dead retrovirus code stuck in DNA. (You might have put me onto that, although I can't find it at the moment. Thanks!) I'd never heard of that before, and quite frankly I'm quite surprised. If true (and again, I'd need to be able to test the data myself) such a thing would be a very thought provoking evidence.
Why Of course. Consistent with your refrain of "not enough" and "too much!" -- this is "not enough." You need more. You need all of the evidence. The whole of it that exists in archives, libraries, fossil data bases, genome sequences, etc., etc., (and all of it apparently packaged neatly in an impossible to accomplish three sentence post on an internet chat forum.)
But this most recent "I-need-to-see-all-the-evidence" hogwash of yours is just more of your mendacious song-and-dance. You're not in the least interested in the evidence. After all, as you previously complained -- "Ahh, just as I thought. There's mountains of solid evidence, and yet no-one can give me one good evidence." and "How come it has to be 93,000 [journal articles] or nothing?"
Your childish dishonesty in this correspondence notwithstanding, I will provide you (courtesy of Ichneumon, who was at the time responding to a poster playing precisely your ridiculous game) with the following small sample of readily available evidence.
Unfortunately, some of the images in the foregoing link have been lost over time (principally in the "Theropod dinosaur to bird evolutionary transition" section), and a few of the links are presently inoperative. It nevertheless remains a reasonable, summary resourse, with a wide variety of internal links for you to follow and study.
You can also re-acquaint yourself with the main NCBI archive and its ancillary free access archive that I directed you to previously (you remember, the life sciences archives that you bizarrely labled "propoganda sites"), and you can actually make use of their internal search engines on this go around.
You can then read through (and follow the links within) the sites available here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and you can peruse some of the many fossil databases available:
here, and
here, and
here, and
here, and
here, and
here, and
here, and
here, and
here, and
here, and
here, and
here, and
here, and
here, and
here, and
here, and
here, and
here.
The foregoing, of course, is just a start, the proverbial tip of the iceberg. But once you've familiarized yourself with these resources, get back to me.