Posted on 07/29/2002 6:35:04 PM PDT by Tribune7
Printer-friendly format July 26, 2002, 6:11PM
A bone to pick: Missing link is evolutionists' weakest By JEFF FARMER
It has been said that if anyone wants to see something badly enough, they can see anything, in anything. Such was the case recently, but unlike some ghostly visage of the Madonna in a coffee stain, this was a vision of our ancestral past in the form of one recently discovered prehistoric skull, dubbed Sahelanthropus tchadensis.
Papers across the globe heralded the news with great fanfare. With words like "scientists hailed" and "startling find" sprinkled into the news coverage, who couldn't help but think evolutionists had finally found their holy grail of missing links?
For those of us with more than a passing interest in such topics as, "Where did we come from? And how did we get here?," this recent discovery and its subsequent coverage fall far short of its lofty claims. A healthy criticism is in order.
Practically before the fossil's discoverer, the French paleoanthropologist Michel Brunet, could come out of the heat of a Chadian desert, a number of his evolutionary colleagues had questioned his conclusions.
In spite of the obvious national pride, Brigitte Senut of the Natural History of Paris sees Brunet's skull as probably that of an ancient female gorilla and not the head of man's earliest ancestor. While looking at the same evidence, such as the skull's flattened face and shorter canine teeth, she draws a completely different conclusion.
Of course, one might be inclined to ask why such critiques never seem to get the same front-page coverage? It's also important to point out that throughout history, various species, such as cats, have had varying lengths of canine teeth. That does not make them any closer to evolving into another species.
A Washington Post article goes on to describe this latest fossil as having human-like traits, such as tooth enamel thicker than a chimpanzee's. This apparently indicates that it did not dine exclusively on the fruit diet common to apes. But apes don't dine exclusively on fruit; rather, their diet is supplemented with insects, birds, lizards and even the flesh of monkeys. The article attempted to further link this fossil to humans by stating that it probably walked upright. Never mind the fact that no bones were found below the head! For all we know, it could have had the body of a centaur, but that would hardly stop an overzealous scientist (or reporter) from trying to add a little meat to these skimpy bones. Could it not simply be a primate similar to today's Bonobo? For those not keeping track of their primates, Bonobos (sp. Pan paniscus) are chimpanzee-like creatures found only in the rain forests of Zaire. Their frame is slighter than that of a chimpanzee's and their face does not protrude as much. They also walked upright about 5 percent of the time. Sound familiar?
Whether it is tooth enamel, length of canines or the ability to walk upright, none of these factors makes this recent discovery any more our ancestral candidate than it does a modern-day Bonobo.
So why does every new fossil discovery seem to get crammed into some evolutionary scenario? Isn't it possible to simply find new, yet extinct, species? The answer, of course, is yes; but there is great pressure to prove evolution.
That leads us to perhaps the most troubling and perplexing aspect of this latest evolutionary hoopla. While on one hand sighting the evolutionary importance of this latest discovery, a preponderance of these articles leave the notion that somehow missing links are not all that important any more.
According to Harvard anthropologist Dan Lieberman, missing links are pretty much myths. That might be a convenient conclusion for those who have been unable to prove evolution via the fossil record. Unfortunately for them, links are absolutely essential to evolution. It is impossible for anything to evolve into another without a linear progression of these such links.
The prevailing evolutionary view of minute changes, over millions of years, is wholly inadequate for the explanation of such a critical piece of basic locomotion as the ball-and-socket joint. Until such questions can be resolved, superficial similarities between various species are not going to prove anything. No matter how bad someone wants to see it.
Farmer is a professional artist living in Houston. He can can be contacted via his Web site, www.theglobalzoo.com
You are not following the discussion. The discussion, the entire discussion was about new duplicated genes. It was a long discussion which started here . I showed that you need more than a the gene to get a new function - the control mechanisms, the regulators, the messages, and the code to tell it when to produce protein. You cannot construct all this and have it work together stochastically. Now there may be duplicate genes in many places, but we do not know how they arose. Just because something happens does not tell us how it happened and the whole discussion about evolution is about 'how did the giraffe get its long neck', not whether it has a long neck.
Jeez, from a year ago? Well, it's quite simple really. How deep is the ocean at its deepest? Some 30,000 feet, but it only covers 2/3 of the earth's surface and is not nearly that deep in 99% of the places. Now airplanes travel at some 30,000 feet and that is not the top of the atmosphere, but it is certainly considered to be the atmosphere. It covers the whole earth so right there the atmosphere is bigger in volume than the oceans. Note that in addition because it is above the earth and oceans it is also bigger due to that. Also, as I said it goes higher than 30,000 feet, most people consider it to go at least 60,000 but it slowly ends so there are arguments about what is 'atmosphere' and what is 'space' as you go higher.
No way! Why should I spoil the fun of all the evos? What will evos talk about then? They might be rendered mute. No way at all!
Every once in a while something is so wrong, so silly, I just can't hold off. Maybe I'm pointing out how silly Tribune and Mikey-Mike are being trying to pretend that gore is cleaning our clocks.
For the record, what I said still goes and gore's "rebuttal" simply repeats the original indefensible wild-man assertion. You can't get there from the fossil record and the facts we have. You have to be very ignorant of the facts or, failing that, you have to lie.
Life flourished during the Carboniferous and Permian. Crinoids, ammonites, corals and fish diversified and flourished in the seas, while amphibians and reptiles continued their invasion of the land. But after more than a 100 million years of relative stability, the end of the Permian (245 million years ago) saw the largest extinction event in the Earth's history - far more devastating than the much more famous Cretaceous extinction, when the dinosaurs died out. It has been estimated that as many as 96% of all marine species were lost, while on land more than 3 quarters of all vertebrate families became extinct.The Mass Extinctions.
Survival Benefits of Evolving After a Mass Exctinction.
To be fair, there are still catastrophists:
Mass Extinctions (every 26 million years?),
and extreme uniformitarians:
Mass Extinctions May be a Myth. (The latter should not be construed to mean that trilobites, ammonites, and Anomalocaris are hiding out in your farm pond.)
I'm saying you can't find anyone but gore (and maybe Duane Gish, with whom gore agrees more than he admits) saying that the fossil record is full of the kinds of life, even right down to the species level, we have today.)
And I still say that there is no species called "Dinosaur." He gets wild with the meanings of words every time he's caught out on something silly like this. Clinton didn't know what "is" is when he was caught with an intern.
The Ultimate Creation vs. Evolution Resource [19th Revision]
TUCvER is over a year old!
August 2002 Crevo Threads
Earth "Getting Fatter" (2002-08-02)
UGA Study of Retroviruses Shows Human-Specific Variety Developed When Humans, Chimps Diverged (2002-08-02)
Skulls Found in Africa and in Europe Challenge Theories of Human Origins (2002-08-06)
Proofs of Evolution Examined - Answers to My Evolutionist Friends (Excerpt) (2002-08-07)
Einstein's Relativity Theory Hits a Speed Bump (2002-08-08)
Our African ancestry: Puzzling Over Human Origins (2002-08-08)
Skeletal Remains May Be 11,000 Years Old (Lake Jackson, Texas) (2002-08-09)
Creation/Evolution in the News (2002-08-10)
I never said that. I just said it looks that way. :-)
If you want to see a good example of a refutation check this thread No name calling, no "blue slime," just someone making her point in an articulate manner.
Maybe GK3 will have a good comeback. Maybe not, ExDemMom -- unlike some, ahem, others -- seems to have a pretty conclusive argument on this particular point.
My belief in God allows me to accept that reality could be common descent.
If He did it that way who am I to argue? On the other hand, it's fine by me if He didn't.
Right now, I don't see common descent as likely or logical.
LOL. Why stop now?
I will prove you a liar. Here are the posts…
Wow. That 5000th posting of the platypus really showed us (Not).
No. Its called reading comprehension.
It doesn’t say anything about survivability. They are just looking at the kinetics of an enzyme. No growth assays in "normal" conditions. You are extrapolating big time.
Yup, for the original nutrients it works less well.
The bacteria have the metabolic pathways necessary to utilize those other substrates. The mutations to ebgA allow them to grow on lactose only conditions.
It’s pretty simple….you really don’t get it?
That would be a first.
Maybe not, ExDemMom -- unlike some, ahem, others seems to have a pretty conclusive argument on this particular point.
It doesn’t matter. That math was already convincingly demolished several times already.
Don’t you see a pattern here? G3K is just going to trot out that same stale post in newer threads. ExDemMom probably has better things to do than answer the EXACT same flawed argument 100 times.
G3K will say just about anything to avoid admitting error, including shouting his fallacies even louder. Being anti-evolution is one thing, but to say there are no examples of beneficial mutations or that duplicated genes are never expressed? Not even the most staunch proponents of ID theory (i.e. Behe, Dembski) would ever make such claims. The experimental evidence is too abundant to dispute.
Right now, I don't see common descent as likely or logical.
I hope this is based on something more substantial than the voluminous cutting and pasting from the blue one. Elaborate on your skepticism.
[the guy who named himself after a thousand-year-reich run by a D*m*cr*t]: (paraphrasing, from*many* similar exchanges) Darwinism is disproved by science, especially Mendelian genetics and biochenistry.
Me: Isn't sickle-cell disease an example of Mendelian and Darwinian processes working together?
G3K: (direct quote) Since we do not have the vaguest idea how the disease started, it cannot be called an example of Darwinian evolution. In fact to call something which kills people an example of evolutionary 'progress' is pretty ridiculous.
How can one have a discussion with this? We *know* that it's caused by a single point mutation of one of the genes needed for hemoglobin. (discussed at length on another thread). We *know* it's selected for by malaria.
How it started? not 'progress'? The point was that the *fact* that this mutation is a counterexample to G3K's oft-repeated claim.
This, as usual, wasn't addressed at all
Evolution, as taught to me, declares that all life -- plant, animal and otherwise -- descends from the same single-celled, asexual organism; and that life became varied because progeny from this organism adapted to changes in the environment due to natural selection.
Why would this progeny ever have to adapt? Single-celled life is arguably the most resiliant life on earth. Some say it can survive in outer space.
And why would varied progeny adapt differently to the same environment -- even ignoring the fact that their grandparents are thriving quite happily in it.
Why would sexual reproduction develop? How could it develop at random? I've seen explanations, I just can't take them seriously. I've heard better reasoning from a football fan saying how his 0-7 team can still be expected to make the playoffs.
Then there is the lack of evidence. I can perfectly accept that tigers and housecats share a common descendent. I can't accept that housecats and horses do. And I can't accept the fossil record as being definitive about much of anything.
And then there is irreducible complexity. Somebody is going to say that Behe has been refuted. I'm going to say I can't see how. Then somebody is going to say Behe is a fool and I'm a fool for considering his argument. Sorry, I'm not buying that.
Then there is a religious aspect. No offense meant to anyone on this thread, but there are those who use evolution as an excuse to deny God's existence.
God exists.
If you argue that God exists and evolution is how he did it that's fine. You won't get mad at those with whom you dispute.
It often seems, however, that the argument is "that God doesn't exist so this is how it must have happended," or "it doesn't matter if God exists," which is really stupid position.
The above does not refute my statement that:
In fact we still have examples of just about every single species that has walked on earth except for the dinosaurs. If species did indeed change over time, if they were constantly mutating, such would not be the case. 1192 posted on 8/12/02 6:41 PM Pacific by gore3000
You are engaging in semantic sophistry. I said examples, meaning closely related species, so your long laundry list does not disprove my statement. I also did not say the word 'all' either, so you have refuted nothing.
Now that we got past the semantic nonsense, perhaps you will wish to deal with the rest of my statements regarding species:
From post 1192:
The simplest organisms known - the eukaryotes, the prokaryotes and the archae have been shown to be genetically incompatible and to have in no way been able to descend one from the other. In addition to which I have given you the examples of the platypus and euglena which are chimeras of many different species and could in no way have descended from any species. If that is not bad enough, evolutionists have never been able to show a single species which has definitely transformed itself into another even though such examples should be extremely common if evolution were true.
From post 1198:
A jawbone is not a species. Evolutionists play very fast and loose with the term species. We have examples of fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, all sorts of plants, all sorts of microscopic creatures also. All these have shown very little or no change since their first discovery. The only major categore we have no examples of are the dinosaurs as I have said, and that is why we know so little about them. Bones don't tell us beans and the numerous fragments which you and evolutionists call species tell us even less. Did dinosaurs have mammary glands? What evidence (not evolution says, I mean real honest too goodness evidence do we have) that they either did or they did not? None at all. Oh, and one more thing, the only true definition of species is that the individuals could not mate and produce fertile young with each other. What proof do you have that those bones could not produce young with existing species?????????????????????
BTW - how many marine species were there before that destruction, how many after? How many vertebrates were there before the extinction, how many after? Oh, and does the number of extinct species at sea include single celled creatures? Oh, and one more thing, since supposedly we are finding new extinct species every day, have those perecentages changed in the last year or two?
One last thing, who was the evolutionist idiot that wrote that stupid paragraph? Your buddy Don Lindsay?????
Nope, there are more than half a dozen scientifically factual posts which have been thoroughly ignored and gone unrefuted by evolutionists in Post# 1187 . So you are proving yourself a liar again.
No. After the mutation the gene works less well on other nutrients. Lactose is not a normal nutrient for it, and it will be less viable outside the test tube. YOUR ARTICLE specifically said "These changes were very specific for the selected substrate, often being accompanied by decreased specificities for other related substrates."
More lies? Where was it destroyed Nilla? Like Gould, you folk always 'refuted' what I said somewhere, but no one knows where. Like McCarthy, you folks have the proof right here in the palm of your hands, but you will never show it. Let's see it Nilla. Let's see the refutation to my post below, we went through it once already, since you want to lose the argument again, go right ahead and refute it: Post# 683
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