I was inaccurate, this museum is a few miles to the east of Teddington
Yeah, but why the innaccuracy? You won’t find it listed anywhere as being in Teddington, since it isn’t. Are you just making this stuff up?
also there should be millions and millions of bones for evolution to be true on the scale you claim it to be.
There are. Since there’s too much to chose from, perhaps you could be specific: let’s focus in on some major bit of evolution. What do you fancy? Fish getting onto land and becoming four-legged, air-breathing things? Reptiles becoming mammals? Land mammals becoming whales? Dinosaurs becoming birds? Horses? Humans coming from an ape-type creature? All of those are pretty major evolutionary transitions (except the last, which is actually mere tinkering). And for all of these I can offer hundreds of bones.
I hereby challenge you to dispute any of these. Be specific, or kindly go away.
But you need to realise, though, that ‘milllions and millions’ of bones, is rather optimistic. Fossilisation is a rare and chance event, requiring a dozen or more circumstances to come together for each specimen. Then the fossil has to survive for many, perhaps hundreds, of millions of years, while all around the strata may be bent, split, up-ended, heated to melting, and/or eroded. And then, they have to be found.
So there are indeed one helluva lot of fossils. But it is pointless and ludicrous to expect that every thing that’s ever lived would be in a museum somewhere... which is what you are implying we should have in order to demonstrate evolution.
The problem I have with the real bones and fossils is that they are locked away just like the Catholic Church locks away their treasures in vaults,
No, they are not. Many are on display, and those that are copies are not inventions or scultures, but are taken from the real thing that happens to be elsewhere. Also, remember, that a museum is a research institute,
but also a place of public exhibition. They have to get people, the ordinary public, in through their doors. And an awful lot of really important fossils are pretty uninspiring to look at.
The tetrapod shoulder I mentioned earlier? Per was using it as a paperweight in his office when I saw it. He pointed it out to me in the (mostly vain, sadly) hope that I’d ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over it. But till he pointed out the relevant bits to me, it just looked like an oddly shaped chunk of light-grey rock. Once he’d indicated what I needed to look for, though, its nature was easy to see.
Museums do not tend to have staff on hand to individually explain each and every specimen to each and every inquisitive person who drops by. Since most fossils look like chunks of rock, only the most easily understood ones get put on display. There’s not many of these, hence museums displaying casts made from the originals, which are in some other museum.
which means we have to take someones word about the authenticity,
Nope. It may take some persistence -- like considerable globe-trotting -- to get to see the real things, but they are available for anyone to find. Try writing a few letters. But remember that with a few million specimens in somewhere like the NHM, someone is going to have to take the time to get it out of its drawer and sit down while... some bozo wandering in off the street... looks at it. Which is why it might be difficult to get to see many fossils -- one needs to have a decent reason to do so... and I suspect merely verifying their existence isn’t one of them. That’s plain logistics.
which sounds to me like the same criticism that science levels at religion for having to take their word on it.
With science, nobody has to take anyone’s word for it. There are books stacked with photos and detailed drawings of the specimens. (Drawings are actually more use, because as I say many just look like bits of rock to the layman’s eye,
especially in a photo, by its nature a 2-D representation.) Each issue of
Nature and
Science -- and all the other peer-reviewed journals -- will also contain these when there’s a fossil reported. And there’s plenty of photos of fossils on the web too. I’ve shown you some already. I note with dismay and disdain that you have ignored them.
Just what are we supposed to do
other than photograph, draw and note down every detail and publish it? Perhaps you would have us courier each and every new fossil -- and all the already-found ones -- around to each doubting creationist?
TTFN, DT
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