Transitional fossils not proof of evolution?

something to be aware of: evolution is not a straight line. it's a tree. even a chimp 5,000 years ago (or TODAY) tells us alot about human evolution.no fossil we find is ever a node on the tree -- we'd have to find the exact ancestor individual, and that's very, very unlikely. rather, we find specimens on various branches, some closer to the branch that we're looking for than others. with enough data, we can draw the important parts of the tree.most of the hominids in that graphic are not actually in the line of human descent, so the transition that presents is really kind of deceptive. but they ARE indicitive of the changes that were going on.the "chimp" branch just forks off lower on the family tree than the neanderthal branch, and a chimp specimen of any age would tell us that. older ones would just be closer to the trunk.

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people who say this sort of thing, in my experience, are really in the dark about the fossil record in general. i'm also annoyed by people (as above) that say it's "spotty." it's not. there are a few missing ancestors here and there, but there are far, far more links than holes. the problem isn't that one species looks like another. it's the pattern of similarties. speculation?tell me about your family. do you have a mother and a father? brothers, sisters? does your mother have a mother and father? brothers, sisters? your father? if we wanted to draw a diagram of who is related to whom and how, what would we call it?life *IS* a tree, because of variation in sexual reproduction. i can't actually think of a single case of a "missing link" that's actually missing. i'm trying -- but if what you say is true, we shouldn't see slightly varied ancestor species, or at least they should be much less common.even the so called "cambrian explosion" doesn't indicate this. we have quite a few prominent pre-cambrian fossils, which looks nearly exactly like cambrian organism with one marked difference: no hard parts. i wonder why we have far, far more cambrian fossils? could it be the development of hard parts, allowing for better fossilization? the "explosion" doesn't mean they came from nowhere, it means we have more fossils, all of a sudden. every so often, someone here will post an image that looks like this: the only deceptive part is how much it looks like it does go in a straight line. isolated like this, it sure looks like it clearly indicates a gradual evolution. it's based on reasonable inference. we know things have sex. we know that they produce offspring that are not exact duplicates of themselves. and we have a bunch of fossils that when arranged chronologically, seem to show a succession of slight modifications.how many points would you like before you can draw the line? we could have a record of every single individual ever born, and the creationists would still be saying that we can't prove the mother and the daughter are actually related. they just look a lot a like, but were created entirely separately.i think it's the creationists who are biased, and not willing to look at the solid scientific evidence because they'd find it hard to draw the conclusions they want.Edited by Admin, : Reduce width of image.Edited by Admin, : Additional width reduction.

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no, i'm correcting their error. while there are holes in the fossil record, the sorts of holes the creationist imagines out ignorance and the sort of holes the paleontologist looks to fill are vastly different in scale. there are no large gaping holes like the creationists contend. there simply aren't. variation IS evolution. what mechanism do you propose keeps genetic variation from compounding? or maybe because i have a passing interest in paleontology, and have seen a good deal more than you think. the point is that we have good transitions from invertebrate to vertebrate, from early vertebrates to fish, from fish to amphibian. from amphibian to early pre-reptiles. from those to mammals and dinosaurs. and from dinosaurs to birds. the problem is not that i don't know where the holes are -- it's that there is no example you can think of that i can't fill with at least a few "transitional" species. (i dare you) you missed the condescencion in the basic logic of that statement. it's a basic fact that the harder an object, the longer it remains in sediment without decomposing, and the better chance it has to fossilize. VASTLY better chances, actually. that's why we see a lot of fossils of dinosaur bones, but not so many of feathers and skin.so when we see a few fossils of soft creatures, and then tons and tons of harder creatures -- it's not really a suprise. there's no mystery here. that god created the soft pre cambrian creatures, and then suddenly created scores of similar harder cambrian creatures? um, the development of hard parts explains it rather well. hard parts fossilize better, thus more fossils. ta da. if you're still talking about the cambrian explosion, it's because those organisms didn't just appear out of nowhere. they existed prior to the cambrian explosion in softer forms. this is NOT speculation, we have some nice examples of them. because there's no mystery to paleontologists. only the creationists make a big deal out of this -- no one's refuting that there's a lot more cambrian fossils than precambrian fossils. there are. and we know WHY, too. what's imaginary here is the notion that humans are NOT apes. all of those skulls belong to apes, including the cromagnon one. but at what point do YOU say that it's an ape and not a human? each skull is remarkably like the one before it. if i ever kill a man, i want a creationist as my attorney. they could have me on video, for all i care. you would hold up each frame of the security camera footage, and say "look, they're all still pictures. here is my client holding the gun. and here is the muzzle blast. and here is the bullet in the air. and here is the bullet partially through the victim's skull. now, you can't scientifically prove that any of these are actually related. where's the evidence that this bullet came from this gun? how do you know these weren't all separately posed pictures, and completely isolated?"nevermind that the bullet matches the gun. nevermind that i'm at the scene of the crime, with a gun in my hand. nevermind that i have gun powder on my clothes and the victims blood in my hair. there's no signed confession, so i can't have actually done it. it's just one big conspiracy, and there's no real evidence.in my experience, this is the creationist argument. nothing is ever good enough, because you so heartily wave away common sense, logic, and basic testable inference.with evolution, we can place species at the scene of the crime. we can match bones and prove homology, and even relation. we can easily map out a tree of relation -- and we have millions of snapshots frozen in time. like i said, even if we had a record of every individual plant and animal that ever existed, and which individual was created by the union of which other individuals, it still wouldn't be enough -- maybe they were just created to LOOK that way, right?at a certain point, it really requires more mental gymnastics to think this way than anything else. it's an excuse to discount evidence, and ignore logic. yes, actually, you can. it has been observed in laboratory conditions. many, many forms of live reproduce and create successive generations much faster than humans. it's not a proof of evolution. it's the premise. the logical inference that, given enough points on a graph, one can draw a good approximation of the function. or, simply, given enough points, you can draw a line. where in "natural selection" did you get "random?" evolution is anything but random. variation has a random aspect to that. but you accept that part. evolution is the combination of that, and the idea that there are factors (environmental, sexual, inter-species) that help "decide" who gets to pass their genes on, and who does not.it's a relatively simple idea. and sexual selection is one we should all be familiar with, if we've ever been interested in the opposite sex.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

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if i see another thread on whale evolution, *i* might just grow flippers and swim out to sea.

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yeah? speaking of whales, i posted an interesting diagram of a sequence a while back. what's your interpretation and speculation?yes, frankly, it is that obvious biologists and paleontologists. *buzzer* sorry, you lose. bats wings are in no way similar to bird's wings. no, i'm sorry, they would not.bats are mammals, anapsids. birds are dinosaurs, diapsids. bats are five-toed. dinosaurs and birds are three toed. bats have wings formed out of membranes stretched all five fingers. dinosaurs have at most three fingers, and birds have wings formed out of feathers extending from these three fingers, fused together. bats have mammalian clavicles. birds and dinosaurs have a single furcula. bats have a mammalian sternum. birds have keeled breastbones (some dinosaurs have similar smaller breastbones). bats have varied mammalian teeth. dinosaurs and birds have one kind of tooth (if any). bats have mammalian cheekbones, suborbital ridges, and eyes towards the top of their skull. birds and dinosaurs do not, and have skulls flattened vertically. bats have sacrums (like humans), birds and dinosaurs have tails. (birds' tails are short, and end in a pygostile. this condition exists in some dinosaurs). bats have mammalian hips, much like ours. birds have flattened plate-like hips, more similar in arrangement to some dinosaurs.this are the things i see as grossly obvious features WITHOUT a biology degree. the connection to "reptiles" and birds is far, far more obvious using only skeletons than the connection between birds and mammals. a less insulting assertion would have bats and rampharyncoid pterosaurs.and actually, while we're at, bats aren't rodents either. you seem to have this impression that paleontologists just make stuff up. they don't. the outrageousness of your assertion that scientists would mistake bats for birds shows a truly medieval understanding of science. scratch, a biblical understanding.it's not according to science that bat are birds, but according to the bible:

quote:

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Lev 11:19 And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat.

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nevermind that it's been observed and even prompted by human beings. no species adopts traits from other species. what you're thinking of hybridization.hybrids also exist, btw. the popular napoleon dynamite example is the liger, but we've been cross-breeding horses and donkeys for millenia to create mules.so in other words, even though your assertion isn't an accurate portrayal of evolution, it's wrong anyways. horses are tetrapods. actually, all land animals are tetrapods. find me a single vertbrate with more than four limbs. and in english, we are limited to 26 letters. look at what we can say. so my speculation is based on my speculation?i would challenge you to provide me with a hole in the record. but it's obvious that you wouldn't present me with anything evolution is actually claiming -- just bats into birds and horses with wings and other things that demonstrate you don't actually have the foggiest idea WHAT evolution is. wow. just, wow. ok that proves it. darwin was a liar and fraud! and we all just have over-active imaginations!look. we have history in rock that agrees with the theory. in geology, we have something called the LAW of superposition. it states that the further down you go, the older the rock. radioactive (NOT CARBON) dating confirms this. some things angular unconformities demand this law -- and i have never, ever, ever seen a creationist even take a SHOT at explaining away angular unconformities.when we have the rock grouped by ages, and pattern of the development of life becomes obvious. we see more diversity in younger rock than we do in older rock. there are more fossils, more species, and more "complex" species the higher we go. in the precambrian we have NOTHING to small, soft, barely multi-cellular creatures. in the cambrian, we see those creatures with hard parts. as we go higher, we see bigger multicellular creatures. first invertebrates with shells, then vertbrates. as we go higher, we start to see primitive fish. no, i never said there were only hard fossils in the cambrian. i'm sure somebody's found a few soft creatures. but there are *NO* hard creatures in precambrian. none. at all. only softies. the "sudden explosion" is a product of the development of hard parts -- letting animals fossilize better. the last skull in that image is a modern human. the second last skull in that image is a cromagnon, which are all modern humans (just older). this is less insulting that your above assertions. crocodiles are dinosaurs' closest living relatives (birds ARE dinosaurs). in fact, these guys have skulls that look a lot like a crocodile's.but there are of course many, many differences that should be obvious to you... well, to me anyways... that point to the fact that he is not a crocodile, but rather a baronyx with spines (spine-o-saurus), and a theropod dinosaur. that "walking on two legs" is a big one. reptiles splay their legs, to remain close to the ground for warmth. there is no cold-blooded animal alive today that walks with straight legs, distancing itself from the ground: spinosaurus had something every different from crocodilian blood flowing through his veins. "laboratory conditions" means controlled, observed, documented, and experimented upon. it doesn't mean it doesn't happen outside the lab, where things are much more complicated. defy genetics? you're the one defying genetics. genetics tells us that we share about 99% of our DNA with chimps. heck, we share about half of our DNA with the banana the chimpanzee is eating. sorry, no giant robots here.

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both sets of wings contains arm, hand, and fingers. just in different ways. bats have five digits, birds have one (or sometimes two (or something three when they're very very young)). a bird's wing is a carpometacarpus, resulting in the fusing of three digits (two were lost in the more reptilian dinosaur ancestry). bats have all five digits, and all are extended except the thumb. the only bird-like animal that even HAS a "thumb" is troodon. and i'm not sure that's even the same digit.here's a fun diagram i found searching the interwebs:

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(but not into x-men or ninja turtles)

i can't tell you about bats, but i can tell you about birds. well, this is a standard creationist/id fallacy. the original purpose of the elongation may not have been flight, and it probably was not powered flight.there are very many animals even today that use membranes to glide from tree to tree. the popular one is the flying squirrel. such an animal probably began by jumping from tree to tree. larger and larger membranes were selected for, because the longer it can glide, the more chance it has of surviving and not being eaten. from a stage similar to flying squirrels, bats would have had similar selection factors:the longer the fingers, the larger the membrane surface, the longer the glide time. and once you get a successful glider, powered flight is not far off. flight need not be perfect, and adaptations need not be complete. even know, flying animals run into stuff all the time. the adaptation just needs to be slightly more effective at the selection factor than the general population. well, i dunno about that. i don't think they're lift-generating on their own, like bird wings.Edited by arachnophilia, : changed subtitle

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that's a pretty egregious misrepresentation of hominid paleontology.

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well, it's more than that. modern humans other primates have a lot of things in common. but the fossil hominids, i assure you, are not monkey skulls on human skeletons. while chimeras DO happen in paleontology from time to time, they are generally recognized very easily.the fossil hominids we have are indeed somewhere between modern humans, and other primates, even in their shapes. bats are hard, yes, because we have very, very few bat fossils, and no actual record of the transition. why do you say that? all birds have bony tails. the modern ones are very short, and end in a pygostyle. earlier "birds" range from nearly identical to other dinosaurs to very similar to today's birds. many do have long bony tails, as well as actual hands and claws.

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not so.it is, however, true that evolution is absolutely the foundation of modern biology. the factuality of it is so obvious and apparent that it is the method by which many things are explained. the problem you are having, it seems, is that the "interpretation" of the fossil record relies heavily on the basic principle of variation, speciation, and change over time. we can say that because we know evolution happens, there is an explanation for the pattern in the fossil record.the problem is, of course, that even without the knowledge of evolution -- we would be forced to draw the same conclusion from the fossil record alone! seeing the gradual introduction of most everything, and subtle changes over time, and the branching tree of life that any sort of grand cladistical study would yield would have defined evolution had darwin not. you said above that the bird evidence is convincing -- though honestly it sounds like you don't really even know the first thing about it. i don't mean that in an insulting way, just that there is so much more than you imagine. it's a bit like looking at a snapshot of something in motion. you can't PROVE it was moving, but if you have enough snapshots, it's a very reasonable inference. in fact, if you have enough snapshots, and you display them in quick succession, it's convincing enough that our brains no longer register still images, but moving pictures.it's not eohippus, but it and all of the other early horses, in context. one transitional is a good hint, especially if it is morphologically between the two forms in question. but a dozen in succession make for a very reasonable inference.i recommended a book to christian a while back, vertebrate paleontology and evolution. try and find it in a library or something. i recommended it because it's full of pictures. it's not a low-level text, but it's not a heady 4000-level paleontology course either. it doesn't go into a ton of detail about everything, but it does give a broad and generalized picture of the history of evolution of vertbrate animals on this planet, using technical drawings and skeletal reconstructions. flipping through, it's relatively easy (at least for me) to see the grand pictures, and how things change through slight modification. everything in the book looks like something else, which in turn also looks like something else, etc.

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i'm sure they glide about as well other membraned "flying" mammals, which sort of really parachute... but generating lift without flapping would be out.

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nah, if we were annoyed by general debate of this topic, we wouldn't be here would we?i could point you to a member or two that annoys the hell out of everybody, but that would probably violate the forum rules...

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usually, breaking the forum rules. what?

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they [bat and bird wings] are in no way structurally similar, apart from the fact that they both contain arms, hands, and fingers. the differences are a lot smaller than you would think.one of the more obvious similarities is that modern birds still have reptilian scales on their feet. they have an additional non-reptilian kind of scales (scutes) as well, on the tops of their feet. but the scales on the bottom are identical to a crocodiles in every way. on the contrary, we have loads of transitional fossils that prove this transition. an even aside from the transition, there is the skeletal homology (not just similarity) between birds and theropod dinosaurs, and a number of non-avian feathered dinosaurs. if you look at the early bird fossils, you will quickly determine that the carpometacarpus (the fused apendage that formed from multiple digits, and "replaces" the hand) came very late in the came. many fully flight-capable birds lacked them. flight evolved first, then the modern bird wing. aside from the above evidence, this point is still not true. there are a few dinosaurs that lack the use of fully functional forelimbs. the advantage of bipedalism is that it takes the weight off the front feet, and lets them be used for other purposes -- or even none at all.the famous example, of course, is t. rex. his forelimbs are so puny that they were almost certainly nearly useless. he even lacks a third digit. an even more extreme example is mononykus (which, btw, probably is a chimera). mononykus has ONE finger, which is a little more than a claw the protrudes very slightly from his chest.most other theropods elvoved hands capable of grasping. troodons even had a digit that was partially opposable. but the interesting ones are the dromeaosaurs, whose grasping motion directly mimics flapping. the earliest "birds" we have (archaeopteryx, etc) are also dienonychosaurs, like dromeaosaurs. oh? on the contrary. humans are apes for the same reason that birds are dinosaurs. bats are not birds because they're mammals. many hybrids, actually, would happen regularly in natures were it not for geographic isolation. the famous example i listed above, ligers, would actually occure very regularly if lions and tigers lived in the same part of the world. while it takes human intervention to produce them, the extent of it is putting a lion and a tiger in the same cage at a zoo. they would have no disadvantage, other than generally being sterile. not in all cases. female tigons, for instance, are fertile. on the contrary, fish HAVE limbs. lobe-fined fish have even more limbs -- and some even exist today. losing limbs is not a problem, actually. if they are unused, they they tend to go away. but most snakes today have some kind of skeletal limb. wings ARE limbs no, tails turned to tails. limbs were lost. we generally transliterate. no, that's not the claim at all. this is a common creationist idea -- that evolution is like saying a cat will give birth to a dog. to illustrate what evolution claims, let's look at the history of language. take a look at wikipedia's article on the letter A: A - Wikipediasee the progression from the egyptian heiroglyph to modern latin letter? form the phoenician point, the letter alef also becomes the aramaic alef, and then the modern hebrew alef. it also becomes an arabic letter, as well. there is a similar progression in the chinese (kanji) pictorial "alphabet" through several scripts, and the babylonian (and ancient hebrew) cuneiforms. the "bush" looks like this: http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/a_tree.htmlthere are THREE question marks there. um, let's be specific about "groups" because they have ranking. all modern PHYLA appeared during the cambrian, yes. that's a total of 37 animal phyla, one of which is chordata (containing all fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds) and another of which is arthoropoda (containing all crustaceans and insects).that's NOT to say that fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds, crustaceans, and insects existed in the cambrian. they did not. two groups that would eventually contain them DID. their ancestors DID. but they did not. have a look how those phyla are categorized. it's based on things like cilia and what kind of shell they have. most are not very complex -- but you're also misinterpretting the claim. "complexity" has very little to do with. just that there are more "complex" creatures and "more complex" creatures the higher we go. we still have tons of very "simple" lifeforms, even today. in stages. before the dinosaurs, we see many creatures that begin regulating their own body temperatures by various means. several take more upright postures, such as the "reptiles" that would become mammals. many had sails or fins (dimetrodon, for instance)."warm blooded" actually refers to three separate conditions. see this part and this part of the wikipedia article on it. there are a few animals today that are "between cold-blooded and warm-blooded." it's not speculative. it's a reasonable inference. we have a few soft-bodied creatures before the "explosion" and tons of hard bodies creatures that look just like them afterwards. hard stuff fossilizes better than soft stuff. it doesn't take sherlock holmes to guess at the cause of the increased number of fossils here. the human intervention is limited to observation in many instances. speciation is a natural process. how do you propose the scientists are inventing new species in the lab, if it can't happen outside the lab? and at what point does it become something other than a fish? it's a new species, not a new genus. but if the descent is far enough, it will be. creationists have never even proposed any natural mechanism that will keep change from compiling -- only bad arguments about how it can't. how much of your dna do you shar with your brother? with your father? with your cousin? with your cousin twice removed? three times removed?dna similarity shows relation, and how distant. not descent. that's just preposterous. that's like saying "renaissance art is imperfect, otherwise no one would paint." people do what they do -- but it's still wrong. there are not major missing links that people are actively searching for. there are some minor ones, like early bats. but no one says "well, we have one example where we're missing a few fossils, evolution must be a lie! i think i'll give up and go home." the vast amount of fossils that we do have that CLEARLY indicate that evolution is a fundamental truth of paleobiology mean that one or two missing fossils do not indicate it is an error. in the same manner that all the frames of a movie are actually still. creationists have demonstrated time and time again here that NO AMMOUNT of transitional fossils will ever be enough for them to connect the dots. even if they had a completely unbroken line of fathers and sons, down to the individual animals themselves. even your grammar is circular, here. you see it as a distinct species, and not related. therefore it is. bad, bad, bad.do a search for the archaeopteryx thread. you will find that archaeopteryx is a theropod dinosaur in ever major and obvious way. many minor features are bird-like. the shape of the skull and the proportions therein are all bird-like. it's bones are hollow and it has modern feathers. many features are are actually in transition. some bones are partially fused in lesser degrees than modern birds.archaeopteryx IS the single most perfect example of the conditions you are looking for in a transitional species. to deny it as such is to do so out of ignorance (for not having studies it), or out of bias ("there are no transitional species, so this can't be one"). other people can read it.

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