New Origin Views Comparison Chart - Is it Accurate/Complete or Not?...

Hi, Mark.There are some nit-picky details about the way some things were phrased, and I may take the time to bring some of them up. However, the description of Big Bang I think is a bit more serious:

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Recognizes evidence indicating that the Big Bang occurred around 13.7 billion years ago, when all matter exploded into the universe ” from what is believed to have been an infinitesimal speck.

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This can be very misleading. First, although if one extrapolates the expansion of the universe backwards, one does get a "beginning" when the universe is a singularity; however, our current understanding of the laws of nature doesn't allow us to push back before a certain point in time. Before this, our current understanding is insufficient to truly describe accurately what the universe was like -- in fact, it may very well be that there was no singularity and our ideas of what the universe might have been like might be totally off.Second, I don't like the phrase, "matter exploded into the universe". It implies that the universe existed before the singularity (which, as far as we know, it did not, and, in fact, there was no "before" before the singularity) and that matter came from somewhere else (and, by definition of "universe", there is no somewhere else).Finally, the Big Bang was not an explosion. An explosion is a sudden release of energy that causes matter to fly apart; this is not what is happening. Matter is moving apart because it is the nature of space itself to expand (or to contract). This was not a one time event; space is still expanding, carrying the galaxies within it farther apart. There wasn't a sudden, one time push that caused matter to move apart. It is simply that nature of space-time itself that matter should be moving apart (or moving together).A better description of Big Bang, in my opinion, would be:At one time the universe has a very, very small volume, was very, very dense, and very, very hot, and expanding. You can work out the wording yourself, of course, but that is the idea of Big Bang.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

Well, this list is out of date, but Kathleen Hunt wrote a pretty good essay on vertebrate transitionals. It's pretty good, because I believe that she describes what is meant by a transitional, and why they are important. Douglas Theobald also describes what is meant by a transitional; his essay is important because he moves away from the usual creationist strawman of what is meant by transitional.Finally, one of my favorite sites is Palaeos; the cladograms on this site list a lot of fossil species; once you understand what is meant by "transitional fossil" you will realize that almost all of the species listed are transitional, i.e., they give good information (and evidence) of the evolutionary lineages of various taxa.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

Unfortunately for Dr. Schwartz, the links I gave lists lots and lots of transitional fossil species.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

The links didn't work for me the first time around, so I wasn't able to read the articles. Now they do seem to work, and the articles are a bit confusing. The article seems to be about molecular biology and doesn't have anything at all to do with whether or not transitional fossil species have been found. In particular, transitional fossils have been found, and lots of them, so any claim otherwise seems a bit...odd.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

Maybe cavediver will comment on this. He and Son Goku are our resident cosmology experts, and cavediver has criticized the description of Big Bang as an explosion.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

So he's saying that some transitional fossils may not be found. Gould and Eldridge have been saying that with their theory of punctuated equilibrium. Schwartz isn't saying that there are no or few transitional fossils. He's saying that some of the gaps that exist may be real gaps. The fact is we have a lot of transitional fossils that pretty much show the evolutionary history of a lot of lineages. What do you think of the essays to which I linked?- As well as the existence of transitional fossils that flesh out an almost complete lineage for several taxa. Unless you have a cogent rebuttal against the essays to which I linked?

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

Well, okay, you can believe what you want -- it's certainly no skin off of my teeth. I'm just not sure why the statements of a person whose work is in a field that has nothing whatsoever to do with paleontology (and even reading the article itself, the conclusions about fossils don't even follow from his work) somehow overrules the work of many, many people who have actually held the fossils in their very own hands.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine