Land Mammal to Whale transition: fossils

Coming from the guy who regularly injects his "QM = proof of design/God/the past changing/a supernatural realm/anything you want" idea into any thread going this is hilarious. Are Scientists Abandoning Evolution?
If Evolution was proved beyond doubt...
Theistic Evolution vs. Intelligent Design
True science" must include God?
Evolution: Science, Pseudo-Science, or Both?
Rejecting Intelligent Design as Possibly Science
The Existence of Jesus Christ
Is convergent evolution evidence against common descent?
Disabling Bacterial Resistanceand so on.Did I say hilarious. Sorry, I meant hypocritical.

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Just caught up with this thread (a lot of reading ) I would say whether fossilisation of an individual occurs is essentially unpredictable. How many individuals are likely to be fossilised will be affected by things like population size and habitat but even so I don't know if anyone could quantify it. Even if they could the question of whether we ever find the fossil is somewhat beyond our control (see below). Never hear of erosion? subduction? the fact that around two thirds of the surface of the planet isn't easily available for us to examine?Once a species has gone extinct all the fossils that will ever exist for it have been created. From then on it is a matter of luck how many will survive long enough for us to find them - the number available is only going down with time. We might never find any of them. I have no biological education beyond grammar school (high school to the ex-colonials ) so I am open to correction from a professional but I don't think this is true. The Theory Of Evolution doesn't say anything about how many fossils will be found. It may say that there will be many transitional forms (every individual is both a transitional and a member of a fully formed species) but it doesn't say anything about how many will fossilise, when in time fossils will be formed and whether we actually find them before they are destroyed.

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quote:

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Pakicetus, shown above right, is a Middle Eocene archaeocete from the Kuldana Formation of Pakistan; it is currently the earliest known well-preserved cetacean, and the archaeocete features are clearly visible in this replica skull from UCMP's collections. Pakicetus is so far known only from its skull, but recent finds in Pakistan have produced other whale species that show very primitive characters in both the skull and the rest of the skeleton. These animals had relatively well developed limbs, but were aquatic.

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Cetaceans

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Obviously, this is wrong since Pakicetus is not aquatic, but it's interesting how once a claim is made, as it was initially, evolutionists tend to maintain some semblance of that claim, even if wrong, if the claim helps verify ToE.

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I think you're reading this wrong.Pakicetus has always known to be terrestial even when all we had to go on was the skull because it was found with unambiguously terrestial organisms (see this EvoWiki article).The line "These animals had relatively well developed limbs, but were aquatic." refers to the recent finds of other species mentioned in the preceding sentence. I suspect they are talking about Rodhocetus amongst others.

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Sadly we don't always get what we expect.I would expect we would have warehouses full of Passenger Pigeon fossils since they were around for at least 100,000 years and existed in huge numbers. Yet actually there's only a few.It seems to be the luck of the draw. Again I'm open to correction by an expert but I don't think you can predict that. The Theory Of Evolution does predict that transitional species must have existed between an ancestor species and a modern descendant (but not whether you will ever find fossils of them) but it does not predict how wide or narrow the lineage between them will be.It might be possible for somebody to predict this sort of thing if they know the environment that existed for a given period of time - but the only way you could know about the environment was to find a representative set of fossils to allow you to describe it. Even then I doubt we'd know enough to do it.

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I don't think this necessarily follows at all. Environment is going to play a signficant factor in the chances of fossilation occurring. The marine environment, like all others, can change with time.An example of the non-linearity of fossilisation through time is the coelacanth.Coelocanth fossils have been found with dates ranging from around 350 million years ago to 70 million years ago. There are over 100 species in the fossil record and two known living species. The two living species are different to all those in the fossil record. There is a gap of 70 million years where (so far) there are no transitional fossils linking the extinct and living species.Like I've said before, it seems pretty much blind luck what you do or don't find in the fossil record.

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First off, I think - but am not sure - this falls within the thread remit. If I'm wrong Mr. Hyde (sorry, AdminNosy ) just let us know and we can take it up elsewhere.Second off, thanks to randman for introducing me to the concept of a collectors curve - it's not something I've come across before so I had to do a quick read up on them.Now on to the meat... The picture you linked to from the IDEA Club at UCSD is great as an idealised representation of a collectors curve - but that is the limit of its value.When I were a lad back in the 1970s I remember a teacher telling us that a graph with no scale on the axes and no data points is just a pretty picture. Except as an illustration it serves no purpose at all. That pretty much describes the collectors curve you linked to huh?So actually the question is where is the data on that collectors curve. The answer seems to be there isn't any. This is simply an unsubstantiated claim. It may be wrong or it may be right, I have no idea (and I suspect in reality IDEA have no idea either ).Actually doing the work to be able to produce the curve would probably be an enormous undertaking. Back in October 2004 I started a Is there a paucity of fossils ? thread. Adding together the collections of 8 large collections gives more than 22 million fossils.Until randman can come up with some actual numbers either for either specific species (or phylum, genera or whatever the right terms are all the way up to all fossils ever found) we don't know where we are on the collectors curve.P.S. Omnivorous - I know I'm basically just saying what you did but I wanted to drive the point home a bit further so randman couldn't get away with his non-answer.

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The article it's taken from is here (almost at the bottom).OOOPs - sorry I didn't think Omnivourous was still logged on when I looked (must be late over here ).This message has been edited by MangyTiger, 08-07-2005 07:29 PM

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As we are already at post 294 (if non-one gets in while I'm typing!) is it worth getting the dark one to create the continuation thread now so we can follow the real argument in a single thread?

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The curve does not need to be refuted because it has no scale on the axes and no data points! IT CONTAINS NO DATA.You could relabel the axes on that graph with anything you like and it would be a great illustration of what a collectors curve for that subject would look like. It would nothing more than convey a concept though. Here is an example of a meaningful example of a collectors curve.

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