On Transitional Species (SUMMATION MESSAGES ONLY)

The frog makes my case. Whats being dissected is a recently live creature and so its actual biological elements are still here. its not just a bunch of trivial bones.
The glory of biology and the power that evolution tries to say it has to turn a bug into a bigger bug or buffalo is what the prestige of biological research is about. bones are a trivial detail dealing with linited conclusions. certainly nothing to do with the origin of creatures without presumptions first being accepted.
come on.
Biology is about life. nOt a few bones without any life.
in fact when the creature lives i would say bones are not alive like the actual moving organism.
Evolution is not based on biological research but merely on very secondary results of biological processes.
this is why it doesn't prove its case or accept its case is proven false,.
Evolution ain't doing no biology.
most of it is founded on geology, raw anatomy, and today specuilative genetic concepts.Without the geology or the opposition of geology evolution is simply untenable.

bones can tell only details of a living creature. Yet its not telling about the actual biological reality of a creature.
biology is about living things. not teeth and bones.
In these ideas evolution must demonstrate actual use of biology and not mere casts of biological agents.
A picture of a car isn't the same thing as a great machine as the car.

The key word being "critter". How can questions about a "critter" not be biological questions? I think I'll let biologists tell me when biology is being done, thank you.

One side seems to have run out of ammunition and is offering only unsupported assertions, and this is causing the thread to turn more toward taking note of this situation and away from actual discussion, so unless the situation changes then when this thread passes 300 posts I'm going to request summations.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I'll note that this does not address what I actually said and then leave you to reply to the others who've picked up on this. Apart from the hierarchical arrangement of species, developmental biology, homology, gene sequences, endogenous retroviral sequences, gene families, protein families, pseudogenes, and on and on and on. I find school books a pretty poor source of scientific information. They're aimed at a very ill-informed reader and their primary basis for presenting evidence is heavily constrained by time and the need for the evidence to be understandable to its audience. This is simply incorrect. Most lines of morphological evidence require no fossils (although fossils may support them), and many lines of morphological evidence are used in the absence of fossils - as they were in Darwin's time.

Right here you have proven that your arguments are entirely arbitrary. The frog is dead. According to you, studying a dead animal is not biology . . . unless it hasn't been dead for an arbitrary amount of time that you make up on the spot. Fossils still retain biological elements, such as the muscle anchor points, brain features as seen in the cranium, etc. Therefore, dissecting a dead frog is not biology according to your definition. The frog has no life. All we have are some parts left over from when the animal was alive. I am tempted to make this into my signature to let everyone know just how low creationists will stoop.

No it isn't, the genetic scores are not closer for the dolphins and bats, unless you employ some highly selective criteria. They are closer if you look at scores for amino acid identity or only the DNA representing non-synonymous substitutions.What they actually show is that you can have functionally similar proteins from quite divergent DNA sequences, although certain specific residues may be constrained. So quite the opposite of your point in fact. None of that is supported at all by this example.TTFN,WK

So you are claiming, Byers, that the field of comparative anatomy is not in fact a biological science? And that the study of biomechanics can teach us nothing real about extinct or extant animals? Both these assertions are absurd and seem to have been based on a erroneous notion of what constitutes biology. But beyond the fact that we CAN glean valuable information from a skeleton, one sees skeletal characteristics that identify transitional forms everywhere. I honestly haven't read the other 293 posts so this may be redundant, but in the fossil record we see various fish in the fossil record whose pectoral fins have transitioned from the multitude of bones seen in actinopterygians to the one bone-two bones-many bones pattern seen in tetrapods.
And what of whales? Some of the best transitional forms around are whales. Pakicetids, Ambulocetids, REmmingtonocetids, Protocetids, Basilosaurus etc. Ignoring for the moment all the earlier whale ancestors, Basilosaurus is a whale that still has hind legs. Whales evolved from terrestrial ancestors (likely mesonychids), so it is unsurprising that we find these transitional forms that still possess reduced hindlimbs. Basilosaurus is clearly a transitional form. Unless you are going to claim that bones are so uninformative that they can't be used to identify an animal as aquatic and then assert that Basilosaurus was in fact terrestrial.

Morphology lines includes living creatures but fossil creatures are the great emphasis when telling everyone evolution explains biology.
To diminish the need of the fossil record, and so a geological point, to justify evolution is not what most people would understand.
Again Darwin insisted that his idea was worthless unless the presumption of geological time and fossils within in it was not first accepted by a rader of his books.
Anyways all evolution eduction is always about the progression of creatures by way of fossils. From big catergories of divisions of life. Primitive to high. Right across the ages with this order or that.
It is a thing to run from where geology has the importance it has in a unrelated subject like biology.
Biology can not be based on a foreign subject for its claims.

The frog thing is a hopping good point for me.
i'm saying that trivial casts of mere bone structures of creatures is not a study in the living life systems that we call biology.
Frogs being dissected is biology as its tissue substance is what is being dissected. if this was not so then in biology class frog bones from semesters past could be brought in boxes with like biological knowledge gleaned from them as a cold slimy one.evolutionism has had a logical flaw in its claims that it is a biological study. The great claims of progression have not been from biology but geology. Evolution may deal with some attempts at some actual biological points but still its about pickaxes and blowing dirt.

Well this was what i read from those who study the dna of these creatures sonar ability. they said there was a connection in its makeup.
I can't get into it. Yet the press reports allow me to say it follows that sonar ability is a late adaption based on common laws of biology triggering innate abilities to adapt mechanisms.
common program and not unlikelyness of mutations and selection.

When Darwin published his Origin only one hominid fossil was readily available, and it was not well understood having been found only a couple of years earlier. A few other hominid fossils had been found, but their placement was not yet understood. Dating studies were limited as well.So are you saying that what Darwin wrote 150 years ago, with that paucity of fossils, still holds today? Are you unaware that the field of paleontology has made great advances since 1859? And that dating studies have advanced tremendously as well?Darwin was being cautious, as scientists generally are. Nothing wrong with that, is there?But if the reader (for example, you) has not kept up with current findings, Darwin is hardly to blame.And in fact, Darwin has been shown to be substantially correct in his estimation of the "presumption of geological time and fossils within in it," whereas creationists have consistently made incorrect pronunciations on these same issues. YEC is just one example. There are many more.(See tagline.)

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

If you were aware of the studies of such authors as Rightmire, McHenry, and Corruccini (and many others), applying multivariate analyses to human bones and early hominid fossils, you would not make such a statement.Just google these gentlemen and see what they have written.Ignorance is not bliss. Unfortunately, it is the creationists' stock in trade.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Mechanis and anatomy are fine to tel details of creatures. Yet its not biology as biology is understood. Biology is about actual living tissue and great complexity thereof. Bones are just what they are. Harden calcium, I think,.
to have the prestige of biology and so to make claims of biological origins and mechanisms thereto one must be dealing in a living machine.
Evolutionary biology is in fact geological musings that make biological assertions.

Again, this is simply not so. Have you studied evolution at post-secondary level? I have. And I can tell you that a degree level evolution course spends little time on fossils. Fossils support and inform evolutionary theory but they do no from its centrepiece.