Transitional fossils not proof of evolution?

I'm sorry, I wasn't really speaking of the Coelacanth. There are 1000's of discovered animals, that were once thought to be extinct quite some time ago that do not have any observable changes, many of them being millions of years old. It seems illogical to think that all these observable changes supposedly occured from a common ancestor to homo sapiens in a shorter time than these million year old animals, such as Limulus polyphemus(horseshoe crab)

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It seems illogical to think that all these observable changes supposedly occured from a common ancestor to homo sapiens in a shorter time than these million year old animals, such as Limulus polyphemus(horseshoe crab)

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Why is this illogical?At any rate, are you sure that the known fossil specimens of horseshoe crabs are the same species as the modern ones? I suspect, like the Coelecanth, that there are probably some differences.

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"These monkeys are at once the ugliest and the most beautiful creatures on the planet./ And the monkeys don't want to be monkeys; they want to be something else./ But they're not."
-- Ernie Cline

The member you want to watch for on this specific issue is Lithodid-Man. He will be happy to expound on horseshoe crabs.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

It may be illogical if the word "resolved" circumscribed below IS NOT because the polytomies spatially cross a temporal actuality restricting the attribution to Wanger and Erwin further. I do not know that this has even be theoretically supposed anywhere in the literature.

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quotes from Gould's Structure of Evolutionary Theory on the pages indicated

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Edited by Brad McFall, : spellIng

First, as others have said, the species extant today are not the same species as millions of years ago. If you want to focus on something specific, such as horseshoe crabs, then we could do this, but keep in mind that horseshoe crabs is a class, not a species. Though the class of horseshoe crabs is very ancient, specific horseshoe crabs species alive today are not.Second, even if you did find a modern species that appeared the same today as millions of years ago, the fact remains that without ancient DNA samples you simply cannot make the statement that the DNA is unchanged between millions of years ago and today. Our expectation would be that the non-coding portions of the DNA would pick up random genetic changes at a relatively constant rate, but without ancient DNA samples this cannot be checked directly. However, comparisons of non-coding regions of DNA of species across a broad spectrum of relatedness supports this view. It is familiarly known as the molecular clock.--Percy

mr matrix writes:

The Camberian explosion has established more than 60 different phyla. This means tens of thousands of species that exploded into life fully formed.[....]

Your entire post makes a bit much of the word 'explosion.' The word only applies in the context of geologic time. In this event a variety of new species appear in the fossil record in the relatively short time span, geologicaly speaking, of around 40 million years. That's still 40 times the amount of time the human species has been on this earth--and unspeakably vast, please note, compared to the amount of time Young Earth Creationism allows for anything. The event is not an instantaneous, miraculous Ta-da! It just happens to be an extremely fertile moment--all multiple million years of it--in earth history.

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Archer

No, i think you don't understand what i'm saying. We have lots of fossils of horseshoe crabs, and we have live ones that match the fossils. Now sure, there could be changes in the DNA, but humans look different than their supposed ancestors. (according to the theory of evolution) Now, the time between humans and their ancestors is much shorter than the time between the million year old horseshoe crab, and the ones alive today. Wouldn't you think they would have some sort of OBSERVABLE change that we wouldn't need DNA testing to see? Thats the only way evolutionists use fossils as "transitional evidence" anyways.Edited by Chuteleach, : Added information

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Wouldn't you think they would have some sort of OBSERVABLE change that we wouldn't need DNA testing to see?

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I don't understand what you mean here. Of course there are observable differences between contemporary and ancient horseshoe crabs. That is why paleaontologists put then in different genera.

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"These monkeys are at once the ugliest and the most beautiful creatures on the planet./ And the monkeys don't want to be monkeys; they want to be something else./ But they're not."
-- Ernie Cline

I'm not sure where you got this misconception. The Cambrian explosion constitutes less than 25 different phyla, which together represent only 1500 different species known to exist in the Cambrian time period.No "60 plyla", no "tens of thousands of species." The Cambrian "explosion" was merely the development of a few phyla containing a few hundred species each. That diversity expanded over time to the billions of species we observe today. It's not that they had no ancestral species; obviously they must have had ancestors. They simply had ancestors that could not easily fossilize - the Cambrian is the earliest time that we see hard-shelled organisms.I doubt that you have family records dating beyond a few generations. Certainly you don't have a photograph of any of your family members from before, say, 1800. Are we supposed to conclude that none of your ancestors before 1800 had faces? That the Mr.Matrix family springs into existence "fully formed" sometime after 1800?Or, knowing that organisms are almost always born of other organisms, isn't it much more reasonable to simply conclude that you have ancestors that we simply don't know anything about?

They have found horseshoe crabs that have exactly the same phenotype

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They have found horseshoe crabs that have exactly the same phenotype [emphasis added]

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I doubt it, since exactly the same phenotype would involve looking at the soft body as well as the hard skeleton, which would not have been preserved.But even assuming that you mean that the preserved external hard skeleton is exactly the same as one of the four contemporary species (although you neglected to mention which one of the four), that is interesting news indeed. Do you have a cite for the journal where the discoverers reported their find?Edited by Chiroptera, : missing dBCode tag

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"These monkeys are at once the ugliest and the most beautiful creatures on the planet./ And the monkeys don't want to be monkeys; they want to be something else./ But they're not."
-- Ernie Cline

Not to mention that the modern horsecrabs may and probably are producing more efficent hormones then their ancestors. They probably have a different genotype. Not to mention that they may have different growth cycles, which is probably true given the changing temperature of the ancient oceans. A different growth cycle is a different species.

Evolution doesn't happen just 'cos time passes (well, apart from boring old neutral drift). Adaptive evolution happens because there's a selective pressure acting on the variation in the gene pool. If you think that some lineage of horseshoe crabs should have evolved into something else --- then what? And how? Into what vacant niche?By contrast, in the case of humans the origin of grasslands opened up a niche in which adaptation for bipedalism was advantageous ('cos in open country it allows you to see further: it is interesting to note that even monkeys will adopt a bipedal posture when they come down from the trees into open spaces.) There is your vacant niche: it was certain that some animals would adapt to living on the savanahs. See for example Bobe andBehrensmeyer, "The expansion of grassland ecosystems in Africa in relation to mammalial evolution and the origin of the genus Homo", Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 207: 399-420. (2004).Our lineage faced a new environment, a new challenge, and a new set of selective pressures when Africa dried and the jungles shrank. Horseshoe crabs did not.

Not to nitpick, but ... (opens small toolkit ...) There is evidence that bipedal gait predates the savannah transition -- that hominids were able to take advantage of the niche because they were pre-adapted to standing and walking:Chimp-sized hominid walked upright on two leg | EurekAlert! and
http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc97/10_18_97/fob1.htm There were quite possibly a number or hominids or pre-hominids that had bipedal gaits for a number of reasons (one being that they could do it and carry things). Also, like your example of monkeys, the Bonobos (pygmy chimp) lives in the forest and often uses a bipedal gait to walk on the ground.The savannah transition occurred over several million years and was not a constant trendency (there is also an apparent 20,000 year solar cycle of rain intensity). For long periods there were areas of savannah and areas of forest, and it appears that the early hominids took advantage of both:Whoops! Page Not Found | Discovery Thus pre-adapted bipedal hominids could have "home-based" in a forested area and forayed into the savannah for opportunistic finds that would not have been available to thier chimpanzee cousins.Also see Feeding Ecology andHuman Evolution (click) especially "The place of the Savannah biome in human evolution" (click) and A Changing Climate for Human Evolution (click) for a couple of different perspectives on this old "savannah" concept.That last paper implies that we became bipedal not to walk on the savannah, but to become more efficient killers of larger animals (using sticks and stones and broken bones).It wasn't a matter of being "forced" - hominids took advantage of the opportunity because they could, while chimps did not because they couldn't.(puts away nit-pick kit)On another note:As far as various species being "unchanging over time" and linking this to no DNA change, we are seeing the African Elephant being reclassified into two species, one forest and one savannah, due to the genetic and behavior evidence even though they appear the same.Just a moment...Once a species diverges into two non-interbreeding groups there is nothing to prevent accumulated mutations from occurring within each group that do not occur (and are not transmited by interbreeding) in the other group.However, if there is no natural selection pressure for the organism to change, then the statis trendencies will counter the genetic drift trendencies -- if the organism doesn't need to adapt it will stay essentially the same.Enjoy.

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it's funny you discredit it because the soft part wouldn't be preserved, how do scientists figure anything about fossils if all they see is the hard parts.