Where are all the missing links?

That's part of it. The rest is that various pre-human fossils show a gradual increase in brain complexity as well as the formation of the structures we have. The closer to humans in the simian fossil record, the more similar the brain structures become. It's an obvious case of slow, slight alterations of an existing organ.

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

Evopeach, there is some confusion here. Evolutionists are not proposing that the human brain is just a "few minor genetic mutations away from an extant species brain". So this is a needless argument on your part. Now as to transitional forms, again, no evolutionist is claiming that there is an extant ape-human transitional form. So just what is it that you are arguing about? If you are arguing about whether non-human primates have consciouness then that argument does not belong here, as this is a missing links thread. Why don't you see if there is a topic on that subject and go there or propose a new topic if there is none?

I don't recall saying or implying that scientific investigation was in general suspect even considering the Java man, Nebraska man, Peking man deliberate hoaxes of the last century.It does pay to be considered as to cold fusion and other perpetual motion machines presented.The point was that scholarship is extremmely skeptical of these smart gorillas, pigeons, parrots et al and with good reason.... entire studies over a long period of time by reputable people have demonstrated at least to a significant part of the community that the claims are way overblown and explainable by other theories which are not remotely questioned.That in direct conflict with the self serving posts herein claiming some intellectual indisputable victory and subsequent cynical remarks.It turns out to be a tale of pretense and misrepresentation and identified as such by the majority.

This is so hopelessly off-topic maybe an administrator should administer a lethal dose of morphine.

As long as I'm responding I should issue a "thank you" for your recent contructive contributions to this thread. I wanted to address this: If it can be relied upon that your own tendencies in this regard are no longer a concern, then I don't see any problem with moderators holding everyone else to the same standards. It's only when one or more members begin posting in, shall we call it, an extravagant fashion that skirts the boundaries of the Forum Guidelines that fairness becomes an obstacle to even-handed enforcement. It might not seem it sometimes, but we're reluctant to suspend, and for as long as someone is disrarding the Forum Guidelines the moderators find it difficult to caution other members when they begin replying in kind.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

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considering the Java man, Nebraska man, Peking man deliberate hoaxes of the last century.

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Actually, the only deliberate hoax was "Piltdown Man" (which is conspicuously absent from your list). "Nebraska Man" was the case of the sensationalist popular press overblowing the initial, tentative suggestions of a scientist; "Java Man" and "Peking Man" were and remain legitimate scientific findings; in fact, the two are examples of one of those transitional species you claim don't exist.Speaking of transitional fossils, you asked: To which I replied, giving links to a discussion of the very transitionals for which you asked.So far, you haven't really commented on this.Edited to add a link for "Nebraska Man". You know, in case someone might want to educate himself as to the actual facts.This message has been edited by Chiroptera, 16-Aug-2005 07:03 PM

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"The cradle of every science is surrounded by dead theologians as that of Hercules was with strangled serpents" -- T. H. Huxley

This post is off topic. Ring species were used as an example of the difficulty in identifying boundaries between species, and Evopeach is replying as if they had been offered as evidence of evolution and is touting ID, which is not the topic of this thread. Missing links are the topic of this thread. Please, no replies.This is I think relevant because it deals with speciation and transitional forms between same.First I recall that the peppered moth and white moth was used for decades as the primal example of evolution in action mutation and natural selection in every venue. Until it became clear that the experimental data was doctored and fraudulent with full intentionto deceive. There ere both types of moths befora nad after the industrial revolution in England and they all moths... good old pllaon moths.Next in the instant case note the following:In the example we looked at, there is no reason to believe that the differences between the two gull species are the result of any new, more complex, functional genetic information not already present in an ancestral, interbreeding gull population. Because there is no evidence of any such information-adding change, it is misleading to say this gives evidence of evolution, of even a little bit of the sort of change required to eventually turn a fish into a philosopher.Ring species and similar examples actually highlight the great variety and rich information which must have been present in the original created kinds.5 They can be said to demonstrate evolution only to the gullible (pun intended)."References and footnotes
New Scientist, 5th June 1993, p. 37.See C. Wieland, ‘Variation, Information and the Created Kind’, Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, Vol. 5 Part I, 1991, pp. 42—47. The usual mechanism proposed is the cumulative selection of ‘uphill’ copying mistakes. However, the observational evidence for such information-adding mutations (as opposed to the occasional loss/defect giving survival valuee.g. eyeless fish in caves) does not appear to exist. On information-theoretical grounds one would expect them to be vanishingly rare if not non-existent.Columbia University Press, 1974, p. 186. Lewontin refers to ‘new mutations’, as he believes that all existing variation came about by copying accidents (‘old mutations’) in the first place. However, that is belief, not observation. Note that a ‘downhill’ mutation can theoretically cause a reproductive barrier (and speciation) without adding any new, functional information.For evidence that this can happen very rapidly, see ‘Darwin’s finchesevidence of rapid post-Flood migration’, Creation magazine Vol. l4 No. 3, June—August 1992, pp. 22—23.It requires enormous amounts of variation to be already present for selection to result in ‘new’ types. A farmer cannot select for bigger eggs from his hens unless the information for this is already in the genes of some of them.Note that the common ancestor of these two gull species was likely already split off from (and genetically depleted compared to) the original kind and it was a bird in every respect.Thus gulls were gulls, fully birds as in moths were just moths both varieties alway there ... is this the best you can do?This message has been edited by Admin, 08-16-2005 07:06 PM

This post is off topic. Please, no replies.Actually the quotes are from the work at Columbia in the literaturre and rather straight forward in meaning. One might rehearse Skinners work as well. They had nothing to do with any creationist publication.Your caustic and demeaning sidebars are of no import to the inquiring mind and I suspect they are not in the spirit of the forum.It is irrational and unintelligent to condition debate on not referring to other bodies of work on the basis of subjective judgment of intent and character. Everone learns most of what they know and understand from others work.Unless there is some fundametal objection to permitting both sides to refer to established works by reputable people I intend to continue and to do so respectfully.I say this believing that there are some on this forum who can maintain an air of decorum and understand that it is possible to become knowledgeable on a subject yet not have a formal degree in each speciality.........or was Lincoln not really a lawyer.This message has been edited by Admin, 08-16-2005 06:59 PM

Much of your message is simply a cut & paste job from AIG without even giving the attribution. This is a violation of forum guidelines. Please understand that most folk here are already very familar with the stuff over at AIG.

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What you actually have say in the beginning of life .An unknown unfossilized imagined construct of a one celled something then absolutely nothing for millions of years except drawings and dashed lines until a sponge skeleton appears.Now if you believe an imaginary unicelled something can evolve into a sponge with absolutely no evidence of anything intermediate not ever a just so story that is credible ... well thats a faith I cannot myself identify with.Thats not asking for 4.5 thats asking for a few numbers between 1 and a billion.

Not at all.First the idea that most speciation was dependent on being trapped in a box canyon for a million years is fairly unique in human cognition.Second if a small population means breeding between closly related relatives I think we know how advanced those results are advantageous and all that.The adaptations between the trapped in a canyon, incest crowd and the wide ranging larger and more adventurous crowd would hardly be the same since mutations have no interest in anything.
Further the big picture crowd being exposed to a varied and dynamic environment compared to the canyon crowd whose vision and experience is quite limited would be more rigerously examined by natural selection pressures and the odds would be overwhelming that from one common gene pool those so adapted would be the dominate group when the others escaped from the canyon. But these are precisely the group that have resisted change, remaining about the same except for the few really advantageous changes.So in order for the two groups to declare speciation they have to remix for a while otherwise you don't know if they interbreed... definition of speciation.So the degree of change is sufficient to clearly favor the advantages of the big picture crowd but those being so slow and massive in nature as to not leave any intermediate fossils while the quick changing canyon dwellers just didn't die at the right place to be seen in the record and this is the common practice over 3 billion years.I think this should be named the Flounders effect.

Nope. What abiogenesis claims is that self-replicating molecules, like some kind of early primitive version of DNA or RNA, were the first forms of "life." They were not truly alive, but they did reproduce - and eventually, through the process of slight variation in each generation and natural selection, eventually these molecules evolved into the first truly living single-celled organism.There could never be any fossilized evidence of any of this - molecules do not form fossils, and neither do single-celled organisms. Please remember that abiogenesis is a different subject entirely from evolution - even if abiogenesis were proven wrong, evolution, being simply a mechanism by which new species emerge from pre-existing species, would still stand. As such, perhaps we should step away from abiogenesis -we are likely to get into a lengthy off-topic debate on such a loaded subject. If you would like to discuss it, please form a new thread. This is more appropriate. You are speaking about the evolution of single-celles organisms into more complex multicellular organisms like sponges. Here is some evidence regarding that subject.

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The beginning of the Cambrian era saw a widespread arrival of multi-cellular organisms, particularly in the form of sponges. These species, who inhabited the Earth around half a billion years ago, could grow up to 1 metre across, making this distinctly different from the previous unicellular organisms.

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This was the beginning of cell specialisation into tissues, where particular tissues could perform functions to the well-being of the organism at large.

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The interesting thing about specialisation at the time is the fact that if you segregated the cells of these organisms, each cell could still live independently. This is a prolonged example in evolution where characteristics within organisms are similar to that of whole organisms, as in the mitochondria example mentioned at the foot of the previous page.

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Note the bolded section. The individual cells could still function as single-celled organisms. Here is more info about the development from unicellular to multicellular life in general.

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"The path from a unicellular condition to a multicellular one has been well-traveled. Of the same 23 monophyletic protist groups, fully 17 have multicellular representatives. The path from multicellularity to cellular differentiation, however, proved a far less porous filter. Of the 17 multicellular taxa, only 3 groupsthe plants, the fungi, and the animalshave developed cellular differentiation in more than a handful of species. With the evolution of cellular differentiation, kingdoms were made of some protist groups; yet we know virtually nothing as to why this transition was closed to all but a few taxa." (Buss, 1987, p. 70

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We've got some pretty solid evidence concerning the formtion of the first multicellular life forms. It's just not fossilized - the earliest versions of these organisms were not really solid enough to leave fossils, and unicellular organisms don't leave much of a trace themselves. Evidence can come in many forms - fossils are a small portion of the evidence for evolution.Let's try to use an example. I'm sure everyone here has played the game "telephone" in the past. By the end of a relatively short chain of people, the original message typically winds up pretty different from the original. Imagine a telephone chain millions of players long. The beginning of the chain is so far away that we can't possibly find out what the original message was. All we can do is sample the last, say, hundred versions of the message, as well as 1000 random messages from far further down the line.Do we need every message along the way to show the mechanism at work? Even just the last 100 messages (representative of curent species) would be plenty to show us that each iteration is an imperfect copy of the last, The 1000 random messages from far down the chain would simply support that theory, as well as showing more of the degree of change that the mechanism can produce over so many iterations. In no way do we need the original message, or even every message in a given set, to show evidence for the mechanism.This works as a simple representation of evolution. Evolution is not linear, it's more like a complicated tree structure, but the point - that we don't need every iteration to ascertain and prove the mechanism, and that older iterations, while nice, are totally unnecessary - stands. We don't need fossilized unicellular microbes. We don't need examples of the first multicellular organisms. All evolution needs is proof that its mechanism is at work - evidence readily available in every species that has ever existed. The mechanism of evolution - imperfect copies over many generations combined with natural selection produce new species - predicts that each generation should be slightly different from its parents. This much is obvious, and is observed every day. Carried further, the theory predicts that every feature of every organism shouls be a slightly different version of the same feature of a previous species close to it on the evolutionary tree. This also is borne out by countless observations - no feature of any organism is truly unique.All you have to do is refute these claims, Evopeach. Show an example of a feature or entire organism that is clearly unique and is not a slightly altered version of a predecessor.

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

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I'm sure everyone here has played the game "telephone" in the past. By the end of a relatively short chain of people, the original message typically winds up pretty different from the original.

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I wonder if this would be an interesting variation on the game.Have the first person tell the message to two other people. Each of those people tells the message to two others; each of these four people repeats the message to two other people.After enough iterations to get some different messages, it might be illuminating to see what kinds of patterns arise. Could another person, who didn't observe this game in progress, be able to arrange the messages in a hierarchical pattern?

I've been thinking of that exact scenario for a couple of weeks now. I figured the plain-jane linear version would be easier to grasp.But a tree-structure version of the game would be HIGHLY interesting. Messages closer to each other (meaning a common ancestor closer to them in the tree) should bear far greater similarities than messages whose only common ancestor is the original message. It would be a GREAT representative of evolution, with the caveat that natural selection is not shown. Perhaps. But I would imagine that a 3rd party would be able to deduce that each message had a common ancestor.

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

This post is off topic. Please, no replies.I'm sorry? I don't understand how any of that is a response to any of my posts, or indeed how the above slanderous, demeaning remarks are in the least appropriate. Lincoln was admitted to his state's Bar like all lawyers. Relevance?This message has been edited by Admin, 08-16-2005 07:09 PM