Land Mammal to Whale transition: fossils

I think the evolutionists here ought to read the following article. Mutations | Answers in Genesis

Here's the whole crux of the matter. It's about "kinds," isn't it? You think there are these immutable kinds of life forms and there can be nothing in between. There is this threshold that one crosses where a pig becomes a whale. A pig is a pig and a whale is a whale.That's your whole argument. No "speciation event," as you call it.

I thought you said there was no speciation event. All those fossils are speciation events. Do you want me quote you were you said there were no speciation events?

No speciation event is documented in the fossil record because the immediate preceding species [or even something close] is not seen.It's a pretty simple concept that illustrates the lack of data.Why is it so hard for you to grasp it?Are you just not willing to accept that fact? Because it is a fact. Evolutionists don't even claim to have found any back to back species or anything close in the theorized land mammal to whale transition, not even one.

Mods, please step in and correct Robin's nonsense and refusal to discuss the topic.No one has brought up kinds on this thread, Robin, except you. If you wish to talk about kinds, please start a thread doing that.This thread is about the actual fossil data available.is that a topic that threatens your basic belief system or something?

Fossils | Answers in Genesis I can find nothing yet from evolutionists discussing the ideas in the OP.

Scroll down on the article linked to until you get to the diagram that shows the collector's curve. What it shows is that as more and more fossils are found, fewer and fewer new species are found, indicating the fossil record is fairly complete.UCSD IT Service Portal - Information Technology

I was looking at the link provided by an evolutionist here, and it occurs to me it is an example of the extreme bias and indoctrination I have mentioned on other threads.Take a look at the early "whale", Pakicetids, according to the web-site.You may view this "whale" which looks an awful lot like some sort of wolf, run across the page, on all four legs, a fully land animal, but hey, it's a whale! Yippee!I am sorry, but honestly folks, this is pure nonsense. if evolutionists want to claim him as a precursor to whales, fine, but it's not a whale. To make that claim just shows extreme biasness and misuse of data in a propagandizing manner.Why do that?Just look for yourself.http://www.neoucom.edu/...Thewissen/whale_origins/index.html

As usual, talkorigins has a page on this one for more discussion
CC200.1: Transitional fossil abundanceThe issues of small range and low incidence of fossils due to rapid evolution are the likely evolutionist explanation of the absence of your 1000 whales.ABB

Sometimes yes, but not necessarily always. To expand a little on my previous post, a creature may inhabit a very wide area but might like a specific type of habitat, which may expose it to greater likelihood of fossilization wherever in the world it may be. For example, say a particular species has a fondness for hanging around mudflats or muddy riverbanks to feed on crabs or worms or whatever else may like to live around there. Therefore, it’s spending much of its time in conditions where there is a greater chance of being fossilized by sinking in soft mud. Soft mud is likely to be found in more than one specific place, so if it behaves like this throughout its entire range then it’s possible you may find multiple fossils in various locations. Continents were not always a barrier. Continents that are separate now were once joined, and some that are one now were once separate. There doesn’t even need to be much of a link, a relatively narrow land bridge is enough, as animals are mobile and may move from place to place. Climatic changes or lack of food in one place could arise in a relatively short time, so animals will migrate to more favourable conditions. The land bridge breaks, and then these animals find that they are now on a separate continent. As for the following species not being found, I’ll again use my hypothetical mud-loving animal to speculate. Say there is a climate change and the mud eventually dries up, animals start dying, so those remaining are forced to move away to find food elsewhere. Some of these animals adapt to living in the jungle. Another group adapt to living in grasslands. As they’re different environments, each of these groups would evolve slightly different features. However, these new environments do not easily allow for formation of fossils. So humans come along several million years later and find a bunch of fossils of the mud-lovers but none of their descendant species that moved to new habitats.I know this is not a ‘real’ example, but it is not meant to be. It is rather a speculation on a logical way that the situation you described could occur. And that is what we need to do sometimes, to look beyond what may be obvious in front of our faces, and think outside the square.On top of all this, it is important to note that we humans can only dig up so much of the earth’s surface because, to put it simply, it’s rather big. Furthermore, of it is at the bottom of the ocean, where it isn’t easy to go digging for bones. It is not reasonable to assume that we have found all the fossils that are lying in the earth’s crust. It is possible that we humans have only seen (or indeed will ever see) the tip of the iceberg of the creatures that have lived here.

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On the 7th day, God was arrested.

iiNet | naked dsl - broadband - adsl - phone - voipHow many mutations would it take to effect these changes, and can someone please explain how in the world natural selection would work for the half-way stage for the differences in milking and birth underwater?Evolution here just does not make sense.

Well, I get the habitat point, but suspect the new species probably likes the same habitat, especially concerning whales.Also, I don't buy the soft mud explanation for fossils because whales float, and don't sink into soft mud, and am not sure even if a land animal dies in soft mud, that you are going to get much of a fossil. I think you need to have it buried somehow.But flooding could explain this to a certain extent. A species likes waters, say, shallow waters where floods sometimes take place, and bury the creature somewhere by embedding it into dirt.The other thing is aquatic species like whales, it seems to me would not have such a difference in range that some should fossilize and others would not.It seems based on a curve that we are finding more fossils, but less and less new species, indicating the thousands of transitional species Darwin predicted just aren't there.

That link contains very, very little analysis and no data.For example, the claim of small range is not substantiated. Besides just substantiating that fact, which could be easy to do by showing examples of living species only found in certain areas, there is no analysis to put that claim in context.For example, what I would expect in the whale evolution claims is we see comparisons in the numbers of fossils for different whale species. For example, how many fossils do we see for a specific modern whale. Are there examples of large groups of whale fossils in one place? I have heard there are over 300 whale fossils in one place that were found in Peru and very good specimens, mostly complete.So then we could evaluate using data whether evolutionist claims are correct. We could try to assess the data, why some whales have bunches of fossils, and the thousands of transitionals needed have none.Then and only then can we realistically take evolutionist claims seriously in the sense of being able to evaluate or find supporting data for why the fossils are missing.Without that type of data, evolutionists are just engaging in a proposed hypothesis based curiously on a lack of data and an abundance of human imagination.

Here is a more detailed page...
The Origin of Whales and the Power of Independent EvidenceNote in pt. 8 "The biogeographic distribution of fossil whales matches the pattern predicted by evolution: whales are initially found in a rather small geographic area and did not become distributed throughout the world until after they evolved into fully aquatic animals that were no longer tied to the land."And the conclusion..."Taken together, all of this evidence points to only one conclusion - that whales evolved from terrestrial mammals. We have seen that there are nine independent areas of study that provide evidence that whales share a common ancestor with hoofed mammals. The power of evidence from independent areas of study that support the same conclusion makes refutation by special creation scenarios, personal incredulity, the argument from ignorance, or "intelligent design" scenarious entirely unreasonable. The only plausible scientific conclusion is that whales did evolve from terrestrial mammals. So no matter how much anti-evolutionists rant about how impossible it is for land-dwelling, furry mammals to evolve into fully aquatic whales, the evidence itself shouts them down. This is the power of using mutually reinforcing, independent lines of evidence. I hope that it will become a major weapon to strike down groundless anti-evolutionist objections and to support evolutionary thinking in the general public. This is how real science works, and we must emphasize the process of scientific inference as we point out the conclusions that scientists draw from the evidence - that the concordant predictions from independent fields of scientific study confirm the same pattern of whale ancestry."

Reading the posts here I have learned stuff. Let's see:1. The predictive power of ToE. It was able to predict that certain species existed before any physical evidence of their existence was apparant.2. We don't the exact path that whale evolution took.3. We are currently unable to determine what is the minimum/maximum number of mutations are needed for two creatures to become reproductively incompatible.4. Because of 2 and 3 we can conclude we don't know how representative the fossil record is of the whale's evolutionary path.I think this highlights a) How ToE's predictive power was tested and succeeded; Strengthening the theory and b) there is a lot of unanswered questions with regard quantifications that would be interesting to see done.Thanks to randman and Chiroptera for that.