Transitional Fossils Show Evolution in Process

Hi Sailorstide,I don't think anyone is much concerned about people's personal beliefs, even if they involve science. It's only when people advocate teaching Bible-based views as science that controversy erupts.So if one of your convictions is that transitional fossils comprise a scientific argument against evolution that should be taught to students in science class, then you're not just choosing our own path, you're trying to choose other people's paths, too.--Percy

Note the subtitle of your message: "On the Absence of Fossils." That doesn't mean references to fossils are supposed to be absent from your messages.Get on topic.--Percy

Hi Kaichos Man,You're adding more off-topic commentary to a subthread where people were making an effort to coax Sailorstide back onto the topic. If you want to post messages not about fossils but instead about teaching religion in public school science classrooms then you should raise the issue in threads where it would be on topic. Or you could propose your own topic over in Proposed New Topics. Thanks.--Percy

Hi Kaichos Man,Here's a link to the article by Pawlowski and Holzmann whose abstract you quoted from: Where does it say anything supporting your claim that Arnold and Parker confused morphological differences with species differences?You appear to be taking your argument (and your image) from The Fossil Record: Foraminifers by Sean D. Pitman M.D. Why don't you cite your sources and throw this guy, and Pawlowski and Holzmann, too, some credit?If Pitman or Pawlowski and Holzmann have any arguments against the Foraminifers as an example of a continuous fossil record of evolutionary change then you haven't reproduced them here in a way that makes any sense. We understand the ecophynotypic argument, but you never show how Arnold and Parker committed that particular mistake.--Percy

I didn't think your original point had all that much to do with the frequency with which ecophenotypic variation is found in foraminifera. I thought that Kaichos Man was claiming that Arnold and Parker had confused species differences with ecophenotypic differences, which isn't true, and which KM's evidence doesn't touch on anyway. The extent to which ecophenotypism is actually exhibited by the foraminifera doesn't seem very relevant.--Percy

I don't think this is true, and I'm wondering why you think it is true.Google scholar gets 104,000 hits for "foraminifera" and only 456 for "foraminifera ecophenotypic". This means that the term "ecophenotypic" appears in less than half a percent of articles about foraminifera. The word "ecophenotype" appears in only a little over half a percent of the articles. "Morphospecies" in about half a percent. "Plasticity" one percent. "Cryptic genetic diversity" and "cryptic genetic variation" about .7 percent (and that's with a search only for the presence of these terms, not their order). "Intra-species variation" less than half of a tenth of a single percent. "Clinal morphology" about half a percent.Would you believe that the words "clinal morphology" appears more often in papers on astrophysics than on foraminifera? Well, believe it!How are you defining "frequently?" Perhaps to you "frequently" means "not completely absent from papers on foraminifera?" If you have any evidence at all (as opposed to making stuff up) supporting your claim that Arnold and Parker (not Palmer) mistook ecophenotypic diversity for species diversity, then please cite it now.--Percy

The type of evidence I was asking for was actually what you've been trying to provide, namely the identification of issues and problems with Arnold and Parker's work, but your last message made a false claim. It claimed that a particular set of terms and phrases indicating morphological flexibility were "used frequently in the study of foraminifera," and you offered this as evidence of a problem with Arnold and Parker's work.Even if true this wouldn't constitute an argument against their work unless you additionally showed how they failed to properly take this factor into account, but it isn't true! Only one of your terms and phrases appeared in as many as 1% of the papers on foraminifera, the rest much less, so the only way you could claim that they appeared "frequently" was to have made it up. Naturally since your only argument in that message was made up, I included a request for actual evidence, perhaps not the best choice of words, but by which I meant stuff that is actually true. It wasn't one of those invalid requests for proof that something doesn't exist.So I'm asking you to support your contention of problems with Arnold and Parker's work, so now let me address the rest of your message where you appear to be trying to make a valid attempt to do that, in contrast to your previous message where you just made stuff up.Actually, I see that RAZD has already addressed your claims in detail, so I'll just say that you still haven't even come close to supporting your claim that Arnold and Parker confused ecophenotypic diversity with species diversity.I'm curious what you think you gain if you're eventually successful in invalidating Arnold and Parker's work. Fossil progressions are found the world over. What does it matter if some progressions are a more detailed record of species change than others?--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Hi Foxdog!You must have worked hard to cram so many fallacies into a single post. I see you have already drawn three responses, but fallacy bashing is so much fun that I just can't resist responding myself. The book introducing the theory of evolution to the world, The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, presented evidence about variation under domestication, variation in nature, competition between species, geology, paleontology, morphology, embryology and more. You should try reading it sometime.And of course, scientists have added massively to the evidence supporting the theory of evolution, including in the area of population genetics that drove the modern synthesis between Darwin's conception of evolution and genetics. The majority of evolutionary biologists are theists. Only a tiny proportion of the world's population are atheists. Even according to the Evidence For God website, which undoubtedly overstates the case, only 41% of biologists are atheists (see Why are Most Scientists Atheists If There is Evidence for Belief in God?). Ken Miller, probably the best known living evolutionist, is a devout Catholic. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, is an evangelical.Scientifically, except for a tiny group of evangelical scientists, acceptance of evolution is based upon the evidence, not upon religious belief or lack thereof. That is why scientists of all religions and no religion accept the theory of evolution, and why it is primarily only literalist-minded Christian evangelicals who reject it. But there is no meaningful disagreement among scientists about evolution as the unifying principle within biology. There's a public controversy brought about by evangelical attempts to teach their religion as science, but there's no scientific controversy. Creationists would have to actually publish their work in scientific journals and attend scientific conferences for your claim to be true, but by and large they don't do that.Nice oh-fer! Can you keep it up?--Percy

In that case I think you meant "prominent" or "highly visible". In my previous post I gave you two examples of prominent evolutionists who are religious.Many on both sides of the creation/evolution debate, including myself, find Dawkins an acerbic, divisive and alienating influence who we could best do without. The most helpful thing he could do, in my opinion, is to shut up.But even if all evolutionists *were* actually atheists, judging evolution on that basis is simply committing yet another fallacy, guilt by association. And probably an additional fallacy as well, the conspiracy fallacy, i.e., that the theory of evolution is not science but just an atheist conspiracy to bring about the end of Christianity.--Percy

You can find the whole paper here: Repeatability of taxon longevity in successive foraminifera radiations and a theory of random appearance and extinction. I read the paper through could find no clarification of the statement you quoted, unfortunately.But for creatures as simple as foraminifera the occupation of some specific ecological niche will very likely require a very specific morphology. They identified very similar morphologies, precisely what is predicted by evolution, not identical repetitions of morphological radiation, which would be unlikely in the extreme. A repetition of general patterns of radiation would absolutely be expected when conditions are the same, but the specifics will always differ dramatically. It's like what they say about human history repeating itself, meaning general patterns, not specifics.--Percy

Uh, no.RAZD was talking about when a population that has divided into two populations actually becomes two different species, and he was trying to explain to you why the granularity of this detail at the "transitioning from one species to the next" level isn't relevant to whether a progression of species is unbroken or not.You can't draw a circle around Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) and Homo Sapiens and call it the speciation event because we already know there were other speciation events in that circle.These two very short replies (this one and your non sequitur fallacy-of-argument- from-authority reply to Wounded King in Message 118) tell us that you do not understand the explanations but feel the need to reply anyway.--Percy

If by "prove" you mean "prove beyond any doubt and uncertainty" then no field of science ever does this. The possibility that current views are wrong exists throughout all science.But species transition is what the evidence of the fossil record indicates. There can be no doubt that the fossil record represents a series of species that become more different the greater the span of time, and the inescapable conclusion is that the inexact reproduction (descent with modification) we observe in all modern species is a process that has been occurring since the beginning of life.Now we all understand that you prefer a different interpretation. I don't know the specifics of your views. Maybe you think each successive species in the fossil record is a special creation. Maybe you think all life captured in the fossil record lived at roughly the same time, maybe a span of a couple thousand years before the flood. But whatever your views, the order and dating and successive change of fossils found in the geologic column does exist, and evolution explains this evidence.What you must recognize is that pinpointing precisely when species change took place is not necessary to knowing that it happened. First there was one species, then there was a different but similar species, then there was yet another different but similar species, so obviously species change is taking place.What you must further recognize is that it is impossible to pinpoint when species change took place because evolutionary change is gradual. Just as you can't pinpoint when foothills becomes mountains or when harbor becomes sea, you can't pinpoint when species A became species B because the change is so gradual. Species are always in a state of transition. All species are transitional. What we call species are just phenotypic categories applied to a population of organisms at a specific point in time, and with fossils those points in time are usually chosen for us by the serendipity of when and which creatures happened to get preserved, survive to the present, and then become accessible to paleontologists.In other words, you're desire to "pinpoint" when species change occurs indicates a severe misunderstanding of the evolutionary process As I stated once before, whether or not sheer luck allowed an unbroken progression in the fossil record to survive and eventually be discovered isn't terribly important. No scientific finding is without uncertainty, and that includes this claim of discovering an unbroken progression. If in your opinion the evidence is insufficient that the progression is unbroken then I don't think anyone cares, but the entire fossil record is a clear and unambiguous progression, even if it isn't unbroken, and evolution is not only consistent with but explains this progression. Evolution is a theory that successfully explains the evidence and that makes predictions that have successfully proven out time after time, and this is what successful theories are expected to do. No one here is arguing that Lucy is in the direct ancestral line leading to Homo sapiens. You just introduced Lucy into the conversation out of the blue.Anyway, briefly and not to change the subject, paleontologists involved in hominid research are a remarkably diverse and opinionated group. Which ancient hominid species are and are not in our direct ancestral line will likely be debated for decades to come. But there can be no doubt that there were many different hominid species prior to us, and something must have happened that caused the old species to disappear and new ones to appear. The theory that successfully explains what happened is evolution. If you don't want to be criticized for posting 2-sentence drive-by potshots then don't do it.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Wouldn't someone reading the quote you provided conclude that Patterson agrees that there's a lack of transitional fossils? And isn't it true that in reality Patterson disagrees that there's a lack of transitional fossils? And isn't this misrepresentation of Patterson's views what RAZD was actually referring to?I agree that pausing to reflect on a quote can be rewarding, but when the quote is inaccurate or misleading then the reflections will likely be about that.--Percy

I will vouch for the fact that the software development process does not produce a nested hierarchy. "Dependency chaos" might be a more accurate term.At any time a software developer can incorporate software from a completely different lineage, and in fact I did just that last week when I released a new version of the software for this board's control panel (not visible to non-directors, sorry) that takes advantage of a software package called "jscolor". This would be analogous to a cow giving birth to a calf with hands.--Percy

Seeing this explained in this context reveals how obviously God designs differently from people. People think of genes from existing species as raw material with which to play around through insertion with the genes of other species. If God designed life then he did not design the way people do.--Percy