To: f.Christian
I'm not sure what that post has to do with anything I wrote, I have not addressed 'transitional' fossils at all. I'm not going to argue with you over the age of the Earth.
I'm only interested in the fact that you *do* believe species evolve but deny that you believe in evolution.
To: Dominic Harr
A sequence of fossils spans the evolution of modern horses from the tiny Eohippus.
Again, this doesnt hold up. Even informed evolutionists regard horse evolution as a bush rather than a sequence. But the so-called Eohippus is properly called Hyracotherium, and has little that could connect it with horses at all. The other animals in the sequence actually show hardly any more variation between them than that within horses today. One non-horse and many varieties of the true horse kind does not a sequence make. See The Non-evolution of the horse.
Whales had four-legged ancestors that walked on land, and creatures known as Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus helped to make that transition [see The Mammals That Conquered the Seas, by Kate Wong; Scientific American, May].
If Rennie can hurl elephants throughout his article, then I can be excused for referring to my analysis of whale evolution from my PBS-Evolution rebuttal, showing the fragmentary nature of the evidence. More recently, John Woodmorappe analysed the alleged transitions and found that their various characteristics did not change in a consistent direction. Rather, they are chimerasnon-whales with a few minor cetacean modules, inconsistent with the evolutionary prediction of a nested hierarchy but consistent with a common designer.18
Fossil seashells trace the evolution of various mollusks through millions of years.
Again, what does Rennie mean? One must wonder if he believes the old Ostrea/Gryphaea story, i.e. that a flat oyster evolved into more and more coiled forms till it coiled itself shut. Once this was regarded as a key proof of an evolutionary lineage in the fossil record. But now it seems that the coiling was the oysters built-in programming to respond to the environment, or ecophenotypic change.19 So the anti-creationist neo-catastrophist geologist Derek Ager wrote:
It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student, from Truemans Ostrea/Gryphaea to Carruthers Zaphrentis delanouei, have now been debunked. Similarly, my own experinece [sic] of more than twenty years looking for evolutionary lineages among the Mesozoic Brachiopoda has proved them equally elusive.20,21
Perhaps 20 or more hominids (not all of them our ancestors) fill the gap between Lucy the australopithecine and modern humans.
First, this is covered earlier. Second, how could these alleged 20 or more hominids fill the gap if they are not all our ancestors? That is, they are out of the gap and into a side alley.
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