He's been presented with all of this evidence before. His arguments in this thread are his usual intellectual dishonesty. He knows that his arguments aren't valid, but persists with them anyway. Don't waste your time with him.

You guys are the ones who are intellectually dishonest or maybe it's just simple minded self delusion. From Darwin to Dawkins evolutionists insist that all biodiversity has been achieved with what amounts to billions of small, gradual changes. All we ask is for one example of such a progression - just one from the millions and millions of species changes that had to occur. It doesn't even have to be a complete progression, just some solid, clear fossil evidence that such gradual changes did in fact take place. Just one instance of a leg transforming into a 1/4 wing, then a 3/8 wing, etc. Just one. Instead, you pick fossil A from 50 mya and fossil C from 25mya which have no resemblance to each other whatsover, then you trot out fossil B from 37 mya which has almost no resemblance whatsover to either A or B and say, because it occurred half way between the two, it's a transitional fossil. How honest is that?

I was responding to Jib who got upset when someone didn't think it was clear what was meant by the term. It's obviously not widely used outside of creationist circles.

But it is wildly used on this forum. See my example of "wtf"

GOOD GRIEF. It's a synonym for Darwinian
volution in general, for natural selection in particular, it's used by Dawkins, it has NO PERJORATIVE CONOTATION WHATSOVER. IT'S YOUR PHRASE, for crying out loud. GOOD GRIEF.

Edit:

No wonder we never get anywhere on this forum. Debating obvious trivia like this demonstrates the futility of even thinking about serious subjects.

Humans
Whales
Horses

I'm not even going to look at those until you prove you've read my post then give me the specific fossils that meet my requirements.

You ARE arrogant aren"t you? The wiki entry I linked a few posts up includes a transition to birds.

You asked for something like a leg turning into a wing.

The horse one shows going from five toes like we have to one big middle toe (hoof) and four useless tiny ones.

The whale one shows hind legs getting smaller to become the useless vestiges they are now.

I don't have an example of a leg turning into a wing, but if you want to see a half wing you can look at one of many examples in modern flightless birds.

If you believe that this is how science is done, then I don't know how you find the courage to get out of bed in the morning. The fact is, the theory of evolution predicts a series of gradual changes over time. The fact is, hundreds of millions of fossils fit that prediction. It's not simply "we found a fossil before this one and after that one, so it is a transition." Just because you can't see the "resemblance", doesn't mean it isn't there. And there is much more to this than appearance.

Again, rather than look for the one unlikely fossil you claim would finally support the theory - and ignoring the overwhelming evidence already available from fossils and many other fields of science - and ignoring that a fossil halfway between two accepted species would be seen by you as too different, while a fossil close to either end would be seen as not different enough - just point to the fossil evidence that is inconsistent with evolution. Haldane's simple rabbit in the pre-Cambrian would be a start, and on from there. There's no reason to seek one more fossil that supports the theory of evolution. Just point to the millions upon millions of fossils that contradict it.

Nice links. IIRC, NotReady has also been shown evidence of the migration of the whale nostril from the front to the top of the head. While I have long suspected that NotReady believes fully in the theory of evolution, I don't think he would admit it even if he found his "missing link" fossil himself.

Your way is more ideal, but the probability of Jib doing this is virtually zero. There's about a 5% chance Jib would read a pop science book and that's huge.

That would be epic.

Are you ******ed slow in the head?

It is obvious that you will ignore this, just as you have ignored all the other evidence posted.

You asked for evidence found within a much shorter time span than 25 million years ago. This paper covers fossils found within a period of about 5 million years, which on the scale of geological time is a very short period. The paper looks at the evolution of gastropods from the Cretaceous period and changes were noted in diameter, height, shoulder angle and apical angle (the angle from the pointy bit of a cone). Does this meet your definition of 'progression'?

You won’t find ¼ wing turning into 3/8 of wing in a gradual jump, that is not how evolution happens. If you do some research for yourself at the fossils of archaeopteryx, you will find see a brief glimpse of how an arm turned into a wing. Look to Hoazins in South America (Attenborough did a wonderful piece on them) to find their residual claws for a vestige reminder of their evolutionary history, which I’ve been told is actually an atavism, (but just searching now, I find no evidence for it being an atavism) And you can look to modern species that are at every stage of the evolution of the wing.

If you want evidence for human evolution in the very recent history, search for Hxmo sapiens Idaltu, basically they’re ancient Hxmo sapiens and have larger teeth than us (obviously for some reason there has been no necessary pressure for us to retain large teeth) and have more archaic features. If you say, that their fossils are just human fossils (which I suspect you will) then we can say ‘exactly!’ Just like scientists have trouble defining Australopithecus from other species, scientists are having trouble defining recent humans (continuum fallacy)

And of course I’m sure you’ll be aware of observed change in the lab. So there’s no need to post those, as they’ve already been provided for you, but of course you’ve ignored them.

You also say this,

Could you provide the post where someone has done that?

I've looked at those "progressions" before. I've even debated whale evolution on SMP, which included a fair amount of research into the subject.

The central problem is that Darwinism claims evolution proceeds by many small, gradual steps. Any one or few of these steps shown in the fossil record only demonstrates microevolution which is noncontroversial, for instance, micro can be demonstrated by living organisms, such as dogs, pigeons, etc. What is required is a series of small, gradual steps that moves from one distinct organism type to another. And I don't know what that would be, species level or higher, who knows? It's your theory. All I can say is there is no fossil or living evidence that is convincing, using small, gradual steps, that macro has occurred. I'm not saying it hasn't. I'm only agreeing with many scientists, including Darwin and Dawkins, that the fossil record doesn't show this gradual progression.

NR,

Pretend we never categorized animals into species before.

Now look around the world at all living creatures. Look around at all the fossilized (extinct) creatures. Look at all their DNA and compare it to all the others' DNA.

What do you see?
(remember, there is no "horse" or "whale" or "dodo bird" yet because we didn't classify them as such)
Does it look like macro evolution or not?

You could have just used finch beaks or Great Danes to poodles - this is just 4 or 5, to the lay eye, almost identical snails.

What I've seen from evolutionists is either the proof that organisms change, as above, or one single fossil that has only slight similarity to anything before or after and is claimed to be intemediate.

It may seem unreasonable to require an actual progression from one organism to another. But we're told there have been millions of species that have gone extinct. If gradualism is true there must have been trillions of small, gradual changes. Again, I'm not saying it didn't happen that way. All I'm saying is there's no fossil proof showing it.

This is on par with following. Imagine we don't know anything about gravity.

Then someone presents the following - there is a 100ft opaque screen and someone behind it drops a ball from the top. There is also a tiny slit on the bottom so you see the ball hitting the ground a couple of seconds later.

Now Darwin comes and says - you know what folks - what actually happens is that the ball moves on a straight line from the top to the bottom. Others say - well what evidence do you have - we don't see any transitional states?

So a few years later the screen wears off in the middle and there is another spot we can see the ball go through - and it's right on that straight line Darwin predicted. But people keep saying - what if it just wiggles around a bit before it gets to those points.

A few more years later the screen wears off in a couple of more points and the ball still seems to go through a straight line. But we're still not 100% sure, as we don't see the COMPLETE path of the ball. So the people who object still keep saying - nah there's gotta be wiggles, we just haven't uncovered them.

Then a few more years later somebody else actually gives a law for the path the ball follows (DNA evidence, retro-viruses, etc) making other paths extremely unlikely, and it STILL doesn't convince those "non-believers".

Sounds familiar?

Actually, NotReady would claim that God made the ball magically appear at the bottom, no wiggling or falling required.

I've explained before that DNA can be reasonably interpreted from a creationist viewpoint. For that matter, we're all made of the same "stuff", notably carbon. Which we expect from the Bible (God created man from the dust of the earth).

So just looking around at current life forms, no, macroevolution isn't obvious to me. But Darwin wasn't the first to propose it. Even some Christians, before Darwin, thought God's creation of life forms is progressive, going back to the 4th century and Augustine. I recently did some research on Aquinas who lived in the 13th century. Some very knowledgeable Thomists showed that he would have been comfortable with evolution based on his approach to science and revelation. So there's no real conflict between creation and evolution as such. The conflict is between naturalism as a worldview and theism.

There is a connection of some kind between all life forms. What I question is that natural selection through small, gradual changes explains what we see. And as I've said before, I doubt we've even scratched the surface of what has actually happened. There may even be sufficient naturalistic explanations for biodiversity. It may well be something very different than Darwinism. I don't know how God accomplished His creation. Since the Bible doesn't say, it's of little or no spiritual importance. The point of the various creation accounts in the Bible is that God is the one who created everything, and in Genesis there is even some hint of progression or growth. I'm also certain that if Darwinism was completely debunked today every atheist would still be an atheist tomorrow.

Yes, I've heard that disanalogy many times.

No, that's how Darwinism is done.


I already explained this. One fossil at most will show microevolution. What's lacking is the smooth transition that is claimed to have occurred millions of times - just one progression out of those millions, of reasonable length.

And it's a "disanalogy" because...

We already know motion occurs in a straight line continuum. If you had never seen anything move before the theory that it occurred in a series of jumps would be just as reasonable as the continuum.

If I showed you a picture of a healthy man, then the same man all bloodied up, broken bones and guts spilling out, then the same man all dressed up in a coffin, and said these changes occurred in small increments, would that be as plausible that they occurred in single jumps?

Your analogy is valid if Darwinism is true, but that's the question, isn't it?

NR: does the chicken story not mean anything to you? They didn't add anything to the chicken, they just tweaked something in the dna to awaken a long forgotten attribute. They are able to tweak out dinausaur properties in these chickens, again awakening the long forgotten code.