Does evidence of transitional forms exist ? (Hominid and other)

I copied the entire message to a more appropriate topic, at http://EvC Forum: Mesonychidae to Whale Question -->EvC Forum: Mesonychidae to Whale Question. While it is very good, it is off-topic in this string.(Ad)minnemooseus (in the semi-admin mode)

Qoute: "Excuse me redstang281,
But were your words just idle chatter when you requested we post evidence for transitionals so that the YECies could "research and rebut" ?Can we conclude that the Young Earth Creation model is BUST ? and completely incapable of explaining the evidence presented here ?
...and the YECies are overjoyed that this embarrassing question has rolled off the page ...from their neglect ?Well Alrighty, then !!Creationism has conceded defeat. This anti-Intellectual excercise has ended with victory to science !!next." JeffAnd in this corner, weighing in at 165 pounds, YEC the conquerer. We need not explain the "EVIDENCE" here because you assume that what you have submited is evidence. "Darwinists claim that the reptile-to-mammal evolution is well documented. But for reptiles to evolve into mammals at least some of these transformations must have happened:
Scales had to have mutated into hair.
Breasts had to have evolved from nothing.
Externally laid eggs had to evolve into soft-shelled eggs that were nourished by an umbilical cord and placenta in a womb."Transitional Forms:
One, transitional means we can see a clear line of change from one SPECIES to another SPECIES. You haven't shown this. You have shown adaptations WITHIN a SPECIES. In order for a transitional form to acure, the DNA must change. We know that DNA does change but its method of change is through degradation of the genetic information not additions to it which is what would have to happen in order for a transition to occur. This simply does not happen. Another thing, if the so-called transition were to occure, it would have to occure in both a male and female member of the species for that new form to carry on. Second, the theory of evolution being a natural science HAS TO FOLLOW NATURAL LAWS. The Second law of thermodynamics states that ALL THINGS move toward entropy. The idea that information is added to our DNA defies this law. Further, "The leading mathematicians in the century met with some evolutionary biologists and confronted them with the fact that, according to mathematical statistics, the probabilities for a cell or a protein molecule coming into existence were nil. They even constructed a model on a large computer and tried to figure out the possibilities of such a cell ever happening. The result was zero possibility!" - Wistar Institute, 1966DATING METHODS:
The ...ologists who date rocks make several assumptions. The two largest are. 1. that carbon decay is a steady process and that 2. no external force influenced the material being dated. The first point has been demonstrated in a labratory to be false: the decay rate does show variation. The second point: Catastrophies like a flood would reset the clock because much of the material would have been washed away.The fact of the matter is this. We were either created by something or evolved from nothing. When you see how impossible the evolution model truely is, you are left with one conclusion. We were created. Now you just need to find out by whom. And, lets be honest her, most people who don't believe in a creator do so merely because they do not believe in the supernatural but, for God, the supernatural is natural.Sorry science buffs. And the winner is...

I'll allow the biologist to address the issues in the beginning part of your reply, and instead focus on correcting a bit of misinformation in the middle to end portions: No, it doesn't. The 2ndLoT describes the behavior of energy, and information is not energy. There is no law of information conservation, and there is no law that says all information degrades into less information.BTW - do us a favor and supply us with your definition of "information." Show me these calculations. False dichotomy. Those are not the only two options. How "impossible" is the evolution model, exactly? Please support your statement with a presentation of your beginning assumptions and subsequent calculations. That's about as nonsensical as saying that for God, a circle is a square, or bachelors are married, or up is down, etc...

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One, transitional means we can see a clear line of change from one SPECIES to another SPECIES.

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reptiles to mammals; note how the repitilian jaw joint evolves into the mammalian inner ear, just like evolution predicted it would, even though creationists insisted this was impossible. apes to humans; look at the picture - can you tell which belong to ape-kind and which to human-kind? whales some good stuff on how whales evolved.

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Another thing, if the so-called transition were to occure, it would have to occure in both a male and female member of the species for that new form to carry on.

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Of course, any organism's genome will come from both mother and father. Except for sex-linked traits, no gene will remain confined to either male or female.

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The Second law of thermodynamics states that ALL THINGS move toward entropy.

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When you can pass gallo's thermodynamics test you can then lecture us about the second law.

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"The leading mathematicians in the century met with some evolutionary biologists and confronted them with the fact that, according to mathematical statistics, the probabilities for a cell or a protein molecule coming into existence were nil. They even constructed a model on a large computer and tried to figure out the possibilities of such a cell ever happening. The result was zero possibility!"

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I can demonstrate that the probability of all the cells in your body coming together to form you are essentially nil. So what?

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The first point has been demonstrated in a labratory to be false: the decay rate does show variation.

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Care to give details? What laboratory experiments demonstrated this?

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Catastrophies like a flood would reset the clock because much of the material would have been washed away.

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This is false. The flood does not explain why all radiometric methods give consistent dates. The flood does not explain why certain fossils are only found in strata of certain ages.

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When you see how impossible the evolution model truely is,

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An assertian you have failed to demonstrate.

The information I am refering to is DNA so I guess I should have said the 2nd Law would degrade the DNA as energy was lost (aging)not the other way around.Second request:
Here are the calculations Page not found | Creation SafarisThird:
What other options are there? Spontaneous generation?Fourth:
See second request.Fifth:
Yes, a generalization but not nonsensical scince I have heard unbelievers state so much several times.

Except that no one has EVER tried to use carbon 14 dating to date "rocks." It's used to date recent, unfossilized organic remains. You've been listening to "Dr Dino", or someone equally misleading.

Quote: reptiles to mammals; note how the repitilian jaw joint evolves into the mammalian inner ear, just like evolution predicted it would, even though creationists insisted this was impossible.apes to humans; look at the picture - can you tell which belong to ape-kind and which to human-kind?whales some good stuff on how whales evolved.The first one and the third one were drawings. My neice has created some preety amazing animals too in her sketch book. You should ask yourself WHYARE THEY GIVING ME A DRAWING INSTEAD OF THE SO-CALLED FOSSIL? The second one Ape to Man. What am I supposed to notice? Simularities? Well of course they are simular. Apes lokk like men men look like apes; some more than others. It does not however prove that we were once apes. If anything we (homo Sapien)existed alongside these apes just as we have now found out to be true about the neanderathals. Remember about twenty years ago when the evolutionists were saying neanderathals were a direct descendant in our evolutionary chain. Until they found a homo sapien skull from the period they said the neanderathals reigned.Quote:"Of course, any organism's genome will come from both mother and father. Except for sex-linked traits, no gene will remain confined to either male or female."You misunderstand. I am speaking in reference to mating the changed organisms.Quote: "When you can pass gallo's thermodynamics test you can then lecture us about the second law."Don't even go there.Quote: "I can demonstrate that the probability of all the cells in your body coming together to form you are essentially nil. So what?"You prove my point.

So, then, according to you, how does DNA replication not violate the 2ndLoT? Obviously DNA replication is the creation of a highly ordered piece of matter from many smaller disordered constituent parts. If DNA always degraded, this shouldn't happen, right? As I suspected, these calculations focus on a specific outcome presuming that the observed outcome was the only possible one. It's not a valid argument against something like evolution.Let me illustrate:I have in my hand a deck of cards. I'm going to turn over a card:4 of hearts.The probability of that card turning up is 1 in 52. Now, I'll turn over another:Q of diamonds.The probability of that card turning up is 1 in 51, and the probability of both cards turning up as they have is 1 in (52 x 51).Now, I'll keep turning cards over until the entire deck is laid out in series, and calculate the probability of that order. As should be obvious, it is 1 in (52 x 51 x 50 x 49 .... x 3 x 2 x 1) or about 8.1 x 10⁶⁷.As it just so happens, I have 9 more decks of cards here with me, and I'll proceed to do just the same with each of these decks, and calculate the probability that they all end up as they do. Obviously, if we can calculate the probability of the order of one deck, we can simply multiply those probabilities together for each deck, so we bascially have:(8.1 x 10⁶⁷)¹⁰ = (8.1)¹⁰ x (10⁶⁷)¹⁰ = 1215766545.910569 x 10⁶⁷⁰ = 1.2 x 10⁶⁷⁹If I had used 100 decks, the probability would be 1 in 1.2 x 10⁶⁷⁹⁰.Your argument is basically saying that it should be impossible for 5200 cards to come up in the order in which I find them when I finish because the odds are so obviously against it. Yet it would take me just about 1 hour to lay out 5200 cards from 100 decks and I would prove you wrong.If I can acheive such a statistically unlikely event in only an hour, what do you think nature could accomplish in 4.5 billion years? Panspermia, for one. That and the fact that the "from nothing" part of your original dichotomy is not necessarily the case. BZZT! Logical error: Ad Hominem Tu Quoque. It's not acceptible for you to make a false statement simply because someone else has.[This message has been edited by ::, 01-20-2004][This message has been edited by ::, 01-20-2004]

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Apes lokk like men men look like apes;

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Why should this be true? Why would God create animals that look so much like humans? Why should a heirachical, branching classification of the species be possible?Look at the picture again. (link added in edit.) The first skull is a modern chimpanzee. The last one is a modern human. Look how different they are. Look at the second skull. It looks a lot like a chimp, but this is a fossil that lived several millions of years ago, and it is definitely not a chimp. Look at the next, and then the next. The point is that the form of the skulls fairly gradually change from very chimp-like to very human-like. These skulls are also placed in order of age.Now why did God create all of these different species, with just the right in-betweenness, to make it look like a gradual evolution of apes? Or if there are only a couple of species, why did the species vary so much so as to merge into one another? How did the flood put the skulls in strata with just the right radiometric ages so we can put them in the right order? That is the important question!Over a century and a half ago, evolution predicted that skulls exactly like these should be found. They have now been found. The creationists scoffed, saying no such thing existed - calling them "missing links".[This message has been edited by Chiroptera, 01-20-2004]

Of course, carbon decay is not used in dating rocks.But the steady decay of radioactive elements is, in a way, an assumption of radioisotope dating. It is an assumption in the sense that it is not checked by the process of dating. Of course, the steadiness of radioactive decay is not assumed by physicists, and has been tested and measured and analyzed six ways from Sunday. Radioactive decay is steady except for a very few types that are irrelevant to almost all radioisotope dating, and those very few types are steady except under conditions that would destroy the entier Earth. Bzzzzt! Wrong. Thank you for playing. Isochron methods and concordia-discordia mehtods, the most widely used methods today, will tell us when external forces influenced the material being dated. Concordia-discordia methods can often give us a good date when the material has benn disturdeb by outside forces. Only for one particular type of decay, of one particular isotope, in exactly the way that was predicted over 50 years ago, and only under conditions that would destroy the entire Earth instantly. Thousands of laboratory and astronomical and paleontological tests have, conversely, demonstrated that the decay rates of all isotopes involved in radioisotope dating are steady under any and all conditions that could possible be encountered on Earth. Bzzzzt! Still wrong. We have the home game for you: see Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective and Isochron Dating.

That almost certainly refers to the fact that Rhenium-187 decays about 10⁹ times faster when stripped of all seventy-five of its electrons (Observation of Bound-State beta - Decay of Fully Ionized 187Re: 187Re-187Os Cosmochronometry). Of course, the creationists don't like to talk aobut the fact that this only happens in plasmas, and is a type of decay that is only involved in one of the many radioisotope dating methods. And there's some more sleight-of-hand going on; see Modifications of Nuclear Beta Decay Rates: Post of the Month: March 2001 which includes a link to Woodmorappe's AIG article, which is so bad I can't stand to post a link to it.[This message has been edited by JonF, 01-20-2004]

Let's go there. You have mis-stated the second law, and in a manner that is typical of creationists whose only knowledge of thermodynamics is gleaned from creationist web sites.I got A's in both undergraduate and graduate thermodynamics at MIT. Tell me exactly how the second law of thermodnamics is incompatible with evolution.

I hope, exlibres, that the replies to your post point out the danger of just taking stuff from creationist sites and assuming that you actually have some real idea of what the truth of the matter is.You have been mislead. If you wish to actually learn you should dig more deeply into each of the points that you seem to feel are so very telling as evidence against evolution (though even then it isn't evidence for anything.)

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Common sense isn't

ex libres, I have read the site you linked to and it proves two things.The author does not understand statistics.andThe author does not understand modern abiogenesis theories, and thus spends most of his time attacking a straw man.To take just a few points.He says

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To calculate the probability in such a case, the formula to use is the multiplication rule, the heart of probability theory.

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This is key to probability theory, but only when a particular condition - that the events for which mulipilicative probability is being calculated are independent.So, it works for coins: the probability of getting a head on one throw is 0.5, two heads on two throws in 0.25 and so on.It doesn't work for dependent events so, if you throw selection into the loop, all bets are off.Not all proteins attach at the same probability. Particular combinations are selected out.All of these calculations are nonsense on stilts - in effect randomly multiplying together some large numbers and pretending it has meaning.Another point, the calculations are nonsense as they assume that the abiogenesis result required is to produce, by random chance, a complete, highly evolved bacterial cell. This is a version of that farrago of nonesense the "hurricane in a junkyard" analogy. All abiogenesis requires is the production of a self-replicating molecule. At this point natural selection kicks in.Further, the calculations assume a particular destination, not just anyone that happens to works. As is well known from observation, protiens - even those involved in key metabolic functions such as ctyochrome c - can vary by 40% or more and still work quite happily. So, instead of lunging through probability space for a particular, unique solution, evolution can select from one of a large number of possible solutions.Edite to correct spelling[This message has been edited by MarkAustin, 01-21-2004]

Quote: "Why should this be true? Why would God create animals that look so much like humans? Why should a heirachical, branching classification of the species be possible?"I think the better question is "Why doesn't the pictures of ape/man show the inner part of the skulls roof of the mouth?" Here is your answer: Because if they did you might notice that the skulls that are ape have a simean plate and those which are not apes nor ever have been apes do not have this plate which still exists by the way in modern apes.Quote: " Or if there are only a couple of species, why did the species vary so much so as to merge into one another? How did the flood put the skulls in strata with just the right radiometric ages so we can put them in the right order? That is the important question!"First of all, we can talk about all the species here since evolution holds that all things evolve. Second, the strata is given a date dependent upon many variables not limited to erosion, continental drifts and upheavles etc. Therefore, many assumptions are made as to the actual date a specimen is deposited. Think about the fossils that are found spreading across more than one strata level. How old are they? Lets get back to this idea of progressive steps though in the evolutionary model. According to the theory, this transformation proceeds gradually over millions of years.
If this were the case, then innumerable intermediate species should have lived during the immense period of time when these transformations were supposedly occurring. For instance, there should have lived in the past some half-fish/half-reptile creatures which had acquired some reptilian traits in addition to the fish traits they already had. Or there should have existed some reptile/bird creatures, which had acquired some avian traits in addition to the reptilian traits they already possess. Now if evolution is correct, we should be able to see these changes in any given species if given enough time. Correct? If however we find that there are no changes (I am speaking of MACRO evolution here (a change from one species into another through the mechanism of natural selection not MICROevolution-changes within a species)then I think one should question what they have been LEAD TO BELIEVE to be true.
Here are some examples:http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/origin_of_species_05.htmlHere is something on your whale too.http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/natural_history_2_15.htmlRemember, everyone has an agenda. I am not trying to convince you of God's existance, I am trying to convince you that just becuase someone says a thing that doesn't mean it is true. Reality(What is real) is true.