Where are all the missing links?

Opps And I have not noted that. Excuse me.

Obviously wrong. You have had posts in reply to you discussing this in a number of ways. You, yourself have, talked of branching.If you continue to exhibit little to no ability to learn you will be suspended for longer periods until you have had time to read and think.Your posts exhibit no evidence of you learning or thinking about any of the discussion. That is becoming frustrating for a number of individuals. It is getting to be near the end of the time that should be wasted with you, IMO.

You aren't even making me try hard. Link
MoreThe human brain is obviously a slightly differnt version of the same organ found in countless creatures, withthe most striking similarities being found in the brains of the various missing link species. Some modern great apes are pretty bright, too, with brains that are awfully similar to ours in form and function - just not quite as advanced.

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Koko the gorilla has been taught nearly 2000 words of spoken English. As her language skills increased, her ability to communicate emotions and concepts has leapt far beyond the rote mastery of words. Koko adopted a cat as a beloved pet and expressed grief when it died. She even learned to fib, using sign language to distort tutor Penny Patterson’s perception of reality, then skillfully resorted to Kipling’s why when Patterson expressed misgivings. When Koko was asked by a journalist if she was an animal or a person, her response was "fine animal gorilla."

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Nowhere else, hm? Sentience in certain animal species is debatable. None of them certainly have the degree of communication and tool-using that we do, but there are aspects of each as well as other examples of sentience exhibited in various whales, dolphins, and great apes.Koko certainly seemed to be self-aware. She was very human-like.Our true evolutionary ancestors are all extinct, of course (we simply share a common ancestor with todays simian species), but as my earlier links show, Neandertal brains were basically identical in structure to modern human brains. Why must there BE anything "past" the fact of trait similarity? How is it NOT evidence of common ancestry? See, this is a bit better - you are proposing a differnt hypothesis to interpret the same data. In this, of course, you admit to the observable fact that all features are slightly altered versions of pre-existing features, and that no feature is unique.As to intelligent design - well, that's not really the tpoic of this thread. The topic is transitional species, and I think I've provided plenty of examples.But if you really want to test the ID waters - why is the designer so insanely stupid? Why do we use the same tube to breathe and eat, so that we can easily choke? Why do vestigial organs even exist? Why are preybird and octopus (among others) eyes so much better than ours? Why are certain parts of our eyes actually backwards? Why do chickens have wings if they can't use them to fly? If they are used to run faster, why are their legs so horribly designed for running? Why is the panda so horribly adapted that it can barely reproduce even under the most perfect conditions? (Pandas mate VERY rarely, eat a very specific food, and are extremely sensitive to any change in their environment. The slightest change can kill them. Mother pandas purposefully leave offspring to die, protecting and caring for only the strongest one of any offspring that are actually born. It's no wonder they are endangered.) Any engineer will tell you to keep any and all designs as simple as possible - extraneous complexity leads to disaster. So how would and "Intelligent designer" fit here? It doesn't seem to fit the data. But the data fit every single one of the predictions of the theory of evolution.ID is bunk. Your attempt to refute me was proven wrong. Would you care to try again?

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Every time a fundy breaks the laws of thermodynamics, Schroedinger probably kills his cat.

Well I may have mispoken on the "bone extension." I meant to say the ancestors had the bone but it wasn't extended the way it is for pandas. Also, it is not just an enlarged bone but a pad above the bone which opposes another pad on the panda's paw, enabling the panda to grip the bamboo.
Secondly, examination of stomach contents is not the only way that diets can be ascertained - teeth wear for one thing can tell us a lot about diets - plant fibers are really hard on teeth, particularly something like bamboo, compared to say meat or even berries.
Finally, the point is that the cousins (as determined by structural and DNA homology} of the panda - bears, for example - do NOT have this particular morphological feature. And bears are omnivores while pandas eat mostly bamboo. All of this information was in the link I supplied in the first post I made about pandas. Plus the panda's thumb has been written about extensively by evolutionary biologists. Stephen Jay Gould wrote a whole book with that title - though the book was about a lot more than panda thumbs. If you would have done any reading in evolutionary biology at all you would have been familiar with the panda thumb.This message has been edited by deerbreh, 08-15-2005 08:23 PM

Koko tells jokes! One of her caretaker's discusses it in this fascinating thread:Oops! We ran into some problems. | Internet Infidels Discussion BoardHere are some more design flaws in nature. I don't suggest reading about the Spotted Hyena's reproduction [shiver]This website is frozen.

Let me try explaining this by way of example. Let's say we have two similar species A and C, and that from stratigraphy and radiometric dating it is obvious that A preceded C, and that therefore C must have evolved from A or from some similar cousin. But A and C are sufficiently different that it seems reasonable to think that there should have existed an intermediate species B. But species B is nowhere to be found. How could that be?There are many possibilities, but I'm just going to mention a few:

• Species A was decimated by some catastophe, and the survivors evolved over a relatively short time period into species B, which was marginally successful, and then into species C in a small geographical region leaving some fossil remains behind, but we haven't discovered them yet because this region is currently buried under a mile of geological strata. Species C was very successful and repopulated the area formerly occupied by species A.
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• Now imagine the same scenario, except this time the survivors of species A are in small geographical region off a continental shelf. The same thing happens as before, but this time instead of the region being buried deep beneath geological strata, the region subducts under the continent and is gone forever, including all fossils of species B.
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• Now imagine the same scenario, except this time species B doesn't happen to occupy a region where fossilization is likely. No fossils of species B exist or ever existed.
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• Now a different scenario. In this one it is simply that the intuition of paleontologists are wrong in this case. Because of environmental pressures, species A or a cousin evolved in gradual (but short geologically) stages into species C, never pausing for any extended period at a particular stage of development. This happened quickly enough that too few individuals were ever fossilized to make discovery likely.
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• Just for completeness and not because I think it a realistic possibility, species A somehow became species B all at once in a sudden jump.
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• And lastly a scenario I consider completely unscientific, species A went extinct and species B was created by some intelligent agent.

Given this information, what makes you think that you can arrive at any definite conclusions about what happened to species B, or whether there even was a species B?Moving on: No, because large populations swamp small changes. It's like if you shout at a chamber music recital then you'll easily be heard, but if you shout at a rock concert then only the people nearby will hear and your voice will be drowned out after any distance. Or if you throw a large rock into a small pond it has an enormous effect, but if you throw the same rock into the ocean it has a negligible effect.In the same way, a mutation or rare confluence of alleles can have a significant impact on a small population. But the same change will likely get swamped out in a larger population and disappear.Another factor at work is that a very large population implies a very stable and conosistent environment across a large region, and the evolutionary pressures for change in such a situation are small and probably cyclical, in that the pressures first shift a little one way and then the other way from year to year, but pretty much stay fairly near a mean. Any significant environmental change, even if it affects the entire region, is not going to affect the entire region in the same way, and so environmental change has the tendency to split large populations into many smaller populations, each experiencing different environmental pressures.There *are* some fossilization patterns I can think of that would correlate with larger population size, such as appearance across a broad geographic region and/or through many geologic strata of time. There must be others, too. You're not specific enough for me to follow your meaning, but I don't see how you can conclude anything about numbers of species or numbers of individuals just from the fact that evolution is actually a continuum rather than a sequence of discrete species-sized steps. Can you explain how you arrived at this conclusion?AbE: Later it occurred to me what you mean. You mean that if a species blends smoothly into succeeding species, how can branching ever occur? How can one species ever become two species or more?There must be many different ways this can happen, but the one that gets mentioned most often in these discussions is that a population's range becomes somehow divided so that one large population becomes two smaller populations. A river changes course, a migration route becomes temporarily blocked, gradual elevation changes occur, marine incursions happen, predators migrate into a central region, weather patterns make a central part of the population's range that use to connect them untenable, a desert once narrow enough to easily traverse becomes too large, competition from other creatures at one end of the range differs from creatures at the other end, and so on. There are literally a huge number of things that can divide a population.Once a population is divided and is no longer sharing the same gene pool, the differing environmental pressures cause the two populations to evolve in different directions, and the gene pools, both in terms of mutations and allele frequency, also become more different.It is also amazing to realize that even if the separated populations are subjected to identical environmental pressures (as much as is possible), they'll still evolve in different directions. That's because which mutations occur and which alleles get combined is largely random (except for unsuitable individuals which die and remove themselves from the gene pool - natural selection is not random). Mutations are of course random, and which mates choose each other is largely random, and mating is of course fairly random at the sperm/egg level. The genetic evolutionary engine of change will often arrive at unique solutions to identical problems, because it is working from scratch every time with no knowledge of how other species might have solved similar problems (unless the species was an ancestor, in which case the solution might still be lurking around somewhere in the DNA just waiting for some genetic change or circumstance to turn it on).--PercyThis message has been edited by Percy, 08-16-2005 04:55 AM

LOL, gotta love the stamina and sheer brazenness of some evos declaring the fossil record is now inconsequential.

Quote:How about common element of design with particularity of non-common function from the get go as an illustration of efficiency in design principles ... all pipe threads turn to the right to tighten a device. Are all devices using threads related in purpose by a few little differences.Okay, gotta start using punctuation, Evopeach. Had to read this 3x and I'm still not sure I understand what you are saying.I'm either about to make your point, or disprove it, depending on what the heck you are trying to say.You are asking the wrong question. You are asking, "Do all devices with threads have a similiar purpose?" That's over generalization.The proper question is this: "Do the threads on different devices server a similiar purpose, namely to tighten through rotation?"I would suggest yes, though given the thousands and thousands of threaded devices, I'm sure you'll find one or two that don't fit that purpose.I've gone back over a number of your posts and you're making a lot of the same arguments I see from many Creationists and Intelligent Design guys (is there really a difference?).You seem hooked on "lack of transitional forms".I think this sums up your arguement -- Species A is an ancestor of Species B. Both Species A and Species B have wide ranging habitats and enjoy high population density. You're looking at lots of examples of A and lots of examples of B, but no forms in between.Now, people on the list have posted links to various series of transitional forms. There are a number of fish transitionals, the whale transition is well documented, and the Dino-Bird transitional fossils coming out of China are stunningly self evident.But, you say, that's only a few of them. Where are all the others?This is just a misunderstanding (lack of understanding) of the basic mechanics of evolution.When a species (Species A) is spread over a wide range, it's very hard for a single mutation to be reproduced throughout the population as a whole. Unless the mutation is radically more advantageous, the law of averages works against it's spread.However, animal populations generally don't work that way.Frequently clusters of animals get isolated from the whole, whether on an island, in a canyon, cut off by a glacier, etc., etc.When a mutation occurs in an isolated group, the lower population numbers help insure that the change spreads through out the whole group.Additionally, isolated groups tend to have hardships not faced by their original founding population. Limited resources, highly specific resources, highly selective predation, repeated exposure to climate problems, etc. So, mutations which might be of only minor advantage to the greater population, may be a huge advantage to an isolated population.Given these factors and time, it's easy to see how this group could go through a whole series of changes, becoming Species B.Now, while these changes are happening to the isolated group, the larger population of Species A as a whole hasn't changed much if at all.Eventually, whatever has created the isolation will be breached, the founding population will face competition from Species B. If the changes have provided the new group with a great advantage, they can quickly (geologically speaking) replace species A.IF (big IF) the isolated area where this change took place happened to be a good place to create fossils, AND (big AND) people happen to have discovered those fossils - then yes, we will find a whole series of transitional forms (see the list above).However, the odds are that we're looking someplace other than the specific location where this group was isolated. In which case, over 99.99 percent of the world, we'd see Species A in the fossil record, then with almost no overlap whatsoever Species B would replace it.Hopefully that clears things up for you

I didn't read anybody saying it was inconsequential. It adds a lot of additional supporting evidence.Primary evidence for evolution: what can be seen in the currently existing species, together with what is known from artificial selection.Secondary evidence 1: the fossil record, and its consistency with ToE.Secondary evidence 2: the DNA evidence, and its consistency with ToE.If ToE were wrong, then there would be no reason to expect the degree of consistency that is seen.

Sure there would. Commonality of design explains it just as well, but that's a different thread.

In that case, you can have theistic evolution. Where is the problem?

It is a different thread! Not here.

Dammit, Clark, you tied me up all afternoon on that thread. Hilarious, though. At least until the linguistic loon came on.

AND back it up with evidence of fossils that are identical from many different ages. Any thing less involves change and change is ...... transitional.This is what a valid alternative interpretation of the fossil record would entail, btw.Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

EvopeachHere are two Links showing similarities between human and chimp brains. As others have said there transitionals alive and well today. It is on you to show us how they are not transitional.
MRI reveals similarities between the human and chimpanzee brain
http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/1998/01/980107104521.htmOf course you are welcomed to read them too randman.

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"A Dwarf on a Giants Shoulder sees the Furthest of the Two!"