Fish on the Ark?

Hi imageinvisible, Sure they did, just not as recently as has been playfully suggested. Just for clarity, here is a grossly simplified version of events;
fish ’ amphibians ’ reptiles ’ mammals ’ dolphins
OK?
As for your answers about the flood, it is not enough to just post a link, without explanation, and say "here's your answer". The way things are done on this forum, is to put the argument into your own words, not just to paste links. You're doing your own argument a disservice by doing this; since most people won't click that link, you aren't going to persuade people by posting it.

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Mutate and Survive

So your argument regarding fish and the flood boils down to two basic claims;
1) Fish at the time of the flood were different to modern fish, in that they were able to survive rapid changes in salinity.My question is, what evidence do you have for this claim? For instance, which fish fossils do you propose were pre-flood, which post-flood? Where does the change occur and how can we tell the difference? Without evidence, it just sounds like special pleading.2) The pre-flood oceans were freshwater, and salt-water oceans are the result of minerals dissolving into the water during and since the flood.Again, how can we tell if this is true? Also, why did the mineral solution not affect inland bodies of freshwater, such as the Great Lakes or Lake Baikal?Edited by Granny Magda, : corrected point 2 ("and since")

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Mutate and Survive

OK, I'll buy that, but you still haven't expanded upon how we know that the ocean was freshwater. It is certainly true that salinity is due to the dissolved minerals carried in by erosion, but what you need to demonstrate is that this process was strong enough to account for current salinity levels in a mere 4500 years. Give me some numbers. So why do we see such incredible similarities in the fossil record between modern fish and fossilised fish from more recent strata? Why are fish fossils so from older strata so different to modern fish? Why are they even in distinct strata, not jumbled together in the geologic column, if they lived at the same time? You haven't provided any evidence for your claim, you have merely repeated it with a bit of added detail. I was hoping for something a bit more substantial. What actual evidence do you have to support this claim?
Also, you keep mentioning that some species of fish can tolerate changes in salinity. This is a red herring (sorry), because many more cannot. It is those species that we are concerned with here. The sudden influx of dissolved minerals that you propose took place at the time of the flood would surely have been far to fast for anything to "adapt" to it. You appear to be suggesting that fish adapted overnight to living in the flood water, yet did not change appreciably in appearance over the next 4500 years (if the fossil fish are anything to go by). That seems a little odd.
By the way, if you want to talk about uniformitarianism, there is a thread open for that very purpose.

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Mutate and Survive

Hi imageinvisible,
I can only echo what PaulK has said; what you have here is a hypothesis. The next step is to look for relevant evidence, and see how it fits your theory. You say that you are still gathering evidence for salinity, so we'll leave that for now, but let's take a look at your theory about marine fossils. Well I'm no expert, but as I understand it, some of the very oldest fossils are stromatolites, and they are shallow-water organisms. The fossil record just isn't consistent with your model. If the order in which organisms appear in strata is based on their ability to avoid the tidal waves, why do small fish and invertebrates appear higher up in the column than bloody great plesiosaurs? Why do land animals often appear lower down than marine?
As for your unvarying Lazarus taxa, PaulK has already blown your coelacanth example out of the water, so I'll take the wollemi pine. Here's this from the all-knowing wiki;

quote:

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Fossils resembling Wollemia and possibly related to it are widespread in Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica, but Wollemia nobilis is the sole living member of its genus.

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Not identical then.

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Mutate and Survive

Re. the wollemi pine;

quote:

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Fossils resembling Wollemia and possibly related to it are widespread in Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica, but Wollemia nobilis is the sole living member of its genus.
  —Wiki

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That's "resembling", OK? Not "{doesn't} exhibit any morphological differances" as you said. Got that? As for this nonsense; Are you saying that all humans are genetically identical? Because that would be retarded. Of course, if all humanity really were descended from Noah an co, we would indeed see a genetic record of a bottleneck. We don't.

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Mutate and Survive

So let's take a look at your evidence; I saw nothing in your post, or in the page you link to that resembled evidence. I saw a number of unsubstantiated claims, but no actual evidence of a "DNA bottleneck". That is not what you previously said. You took this quote from Wikipedia ;

quote:

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Genetic testing has revealed that all the specimens {of wollemi pine} are genetically indistinguishable

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and claimed that; All being of one species is not comparable to an entire species being genetically indistinguishable.As for your salinity claims, I was intrigued to read this section of the Austin and Humphries paper that your AiG link seems to be basing its argument upon;

quote:

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The world inventory of modern marine halite deposits must be accumulating today at a rate of less than 1 x 108 kg/yr. Thus, the flux of Na+ in modern marine halite deposition is: B4 < 4 x 107 kg/yr. Today's oceanic output of Na+ as halite is trivial when compared to the modern river input.

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Original source here.They seem to be assuming that because they see little halite deposition in modern oceans, that means that they can safely extrapolate backwards, and work out what the rates were in the past. This sounds just like the nineteenth century uniformitarianism that you are so critical of.
It is also deeply misguided, since it ignores the vast halite deposits that have been laid down in the past, as is evidenced by the deposits exploited by salt mining.

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Mutate and Survive