Land Mammal to Whale transition: fossils Part II

I draw the conclusion that you are confused when you say the the constancy of the molecular clock is not possible.In fact, it isn't terrifically constant, but it appears to be constant enough to give meaningful results.I concluded that you are confused about this because you jump from mention the molecular clock to speciation. Perhaps this is just jumbled writing on your part. It appears that you, rightly, think that the clock can not be constant if the mutations have to be there to support eventual speciation and this, of course, can occur at different rates.However, if you have jumbled up the two idea then you are, indeed, confused.

In what way? Specifics? Explained this half a dozen times. Whales can sometimes breed across genera, and maybe even across a sub-family.Moreover, and not stated before, certain "species" such as Pakicetus are now described as a group, a family of species, and in general the line for transitionals in what I have noticed seems to be more on the family level, and I can go along with that as fossils are not always the whole creature, and there is no need to nitpick. If the transitional forms are shown via families, that would suffice.Furthermore, it has been easier to find fossil data on whale families. For example, I provided a quote on the other thread where evos claimed current whale families date very far back and appear fairly often in sediments. The evo scientists did not define further, but I could only find similar claims, and not specifics on every single whale species. There was nothing to suggest all the whale species were not seen, and specific whale species were mentioned, which you could have just paid attention to in the quoted section, but thinking about the overall picture whale families is sufficient.Successful forms, it seems likely to me, would have branched out into families, and so we should see those forms.But the fact whales can interbreed across genera, the pseudoorca and bottle-nosed dolphin suggested to me that trying to use fossils to distinquish species, as I defined them being able to sexually reproduce with one another, could be too picky, and just sticking with the family level would be more helpful.Why do you not agree?

Same thing. The discussion was over very long time periods, 10-50 millions of years and my rebuttal was against the notion that anything close to resembling a molecular clock was not feasible.Your comment was totally confused and out of place. A good analogy is if someone said, hey, we can't estimate how long it would take to get to such and such place (not even a range), and somehow this is even a lunatic idea, etc, etc,....And I say what about the odemeter, and you jump in there and say, hey randman, you are a confused idiot because everone knows the odemeter is not exact.So freaking what!I am even one that thinks the molecular clock assumptions are wrong in some respects.But the point is scientists do indeed try to assess rates of mutations over long periods. They don't consider it an absurd idea.

I have a major problem with your assumption that because a known, regularly occuring process is "pot luck" that it is not subject to statistical analysis.The fact is you are wrong as Mick's link shows. Scientists are apparently studying the very concepts of fossilization via statistical analysis and a different method of molecular analysis which you, Ned, and some others have scoffed at, as if I were the fool instead of your claims being the absurd one.I stand vindicated by Mick's links.I have not found yet where the analysis have been applied to the land mammal to whale theorized transition, but maybe Mick has. We'll see.

How do you know that? Please back that up with something, peer-reviewed studies are not really necessary for me, but some sort of scientific analysis that shows that.If you cannot back that up, then retract it, and admit you don't know if the lack of fossils suggests the forms did not exist or not.

My position is quite simple. It does not appear that the transitional species ever lived, or if they did live, they did not appear to follow a pattern predicted by naturalistic ToE models.I would suggest considering the following possibilities:a modification of ToE to include and explain some sort of new mechanism involvedan ID model where specifically directed and aided evolution took placean ID model of special creationa creationist model Can you clarify exactly what you are talking about?What whales? Are you referring to the land mammal, Pakicetus, that had hooves and looked like a big rate?This message has been edited by randman, 08-13-2005 02:27 AM

Ned, I'm getting tired of you making false claims about me. You need to start retracting them if you want to act honestly and fairly here. You have repeatedly make similar claims with no factual support, that I am basing my conclusions on mere opinion, and I have repeatedly cited scientific support for every claim, but you never retract anything but continue to make the same baseless charges.On this small matter, you could easily have verified this, and had you done some reading of the links in the prior thread, you would have noticed I was mentioning a standard opinion. BBC - 404: Not Found This message has been edited by randman, 08-13-2005 02:39 AM

Can you cite some scientific evidence for this claim?Also, junk DNA mutation is interesting, and we had a good discussion on convergent DNA awhile back, but honestly, I don't think you are right here because even if junk DNA mutated further, the species would still be very much genetically related since genes produce morphology.

If you provide some specific statements I have made, I would be glad to respond to them. Since over the course of these 2 threads, many things have been said, I would prefer you provide the actual quote, and I will then show you what I was saying there and my evidence.You mention the following: Maybe I am missing something, but I have not included generally Pakicetus as a whale at all.The collector's curve comments did, if I recall correctly, include all the fossils and thus Pakicetus, and I gave that not as the primary claim, but as a way to statistically estimated the completedness of the fossil record. I beleive some others followed up on the idea of the collector's curve, and it did in general seem favorable to the idea of a high percentage of species being found, but like I said, if you can go back and find the specific statements, it would be easier to respond.This message has been edited by randman, 08-13-2005 02:50 AM

I suppose it's too late now, but replying to 10 or 20 old posts in a thread, some of which you already replied to more than 50 messages ago, is likely to sow more confusion than anything else.It would be good if there could be a fairly tight focus in this thread. Could you write a single short post identifying what you believe are the important issues at this point? You can provide links and/or excerpts of old messages if you think that would be helpful.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I never said it was impossible. If you read my post you would have noticed that Mick's article was done by several scientists from different fields! Everything from geology, statistics, mathmatics, phisics, etc. Went into that study.My whole point was that you are not going to get a good answer by pulling numbers out your butt on a web board. Your crazy if you think idle speculation is equivelant to months of work done by several dozen scientists at some of the finest instatutions in the country.

Let's see.From fossilizations processes thread, message #17
From fossilization processes message #27 From Land Mammal to Whale transition:fossils thread message #97 Message #102 Message #130 message #160 I have given you a link in message #81 of this thread to the taxonomy of archaeocetans so that you can create a collector's curve for this sub-order of fossil cetans and test your assertion about "at least 90% or more" of major fossilized forms having been found. Your opinion is irrelevent to the exercise. Pakicetus is one of the families included within the taxon of archaeocetus. We are talking about the pattern of new fossil species found which are allocated to that taxon. As has been pointed out to you previously, the curve you cited was a theoretical curve and was not formed from any real data. You have not provided any data on a collector's curve that can be created for whales or the extinct cetacean species.Time to put up or shut up.

Pakicetus, Duradon, Basillosaurus, Rhontocetus. These crits are found in places where whales don't live. How the hell did these creatures get into the middle of huge deserts, high atop mountains, and everywhere else whales don't swim?

It is a principle of logic.It is equivalent to trying to show a negative by lack of evidence for the positive. It is a fallacy.http://www.sunspot.noao.edu/sunspot/pr/science-11.html
http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsID.552/news_detail.aspWhile sometimes it can be used innappropriatly in the same way people continually use the word "straw man" here, in this case the usage is apt.This is in particular because we have learned that fossilization is a rare process.
FossilizationFossil - WikipediaThe Skeptic Files - SkepticFiles Settinghttp://www.msnucleus.org/...n/Pleistocene/FossilAreRare.htmlhttp://home.tiac.net/~cri/1998/taphonomy.htmlCertainly some environments can preserve better than others but it is pretty widely agreed upon that most animals do not fossilize when they die, therefore we should expect and absence of these animals in the fossil record.--We couldn't find that Web page (Error 404) - Government of Canada Web Usability theme / Nous ne pouvons trouver cette page Web (Erreur 404) - Thme de la facilit d’emploi Web du gouvernement du Canada

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To everyone,I think I discern two issues that we need to have better agreement upon before this thread can become productive:

1. Randman does not believe fossilization is rare. Because he believes fossilization is common, he also believes that known whale fossils comprise a sufficiently complete record of whale evolution to conclude that there are insufficient transitionals.
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2. Randman does not accept that speciation is the result of the accumulation of many tiny changes. This causes him to use a different definition of "transitional" from everyone else.

I can't see much constructive discussion coming out of this thread until there is agreement on these issues.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director