I am currently engaged in a debate with a Creationist who holds that transitional fossils are not proof of evolution after I posted this
http://www.talkorigins.org/...mdesc/images/hominids2_big.jpg. His example goes thusly:
"If I pulled a fossil of a chimp from 5000 years ago and a compared it to the
skull of a man I can make the conclusion that one came from the other because of
similarities, but I would have no proof of that only an assumption based on a
preconceived idea."
My response was this:
"As fossilisation is an extremely rare process, it's not really suprising that smooth
transitions are also rare. But they still exist, like the hominid skulls I showed. You know
as well as I do that 5000 years is too short a scale, and in this case it's being
manipulated because for some reason, the bloke pulling up the chimp fossil cannot see
chimps today and thusly have his hypothesis falsified, and cannot see the humans from
5000 years ago.
What's your explanation for the hominid skulls if not evolution? Did the different species
of hominids just happen to leave fossils that, when taken in a chronological order, show
(what appears to be) an evolutionary sequence?"
Am I responding to him correctly? Thoughts?