The Origin of Novelty

Its easy to fantasize a path of evolution for any feature seen. Its been done many times so I don't see a difficulty even with bats with avian wings. We had reptiles with vaguely bat-like wings, fish with wings, mammals that swim, mammals that lay eggs. There's an endless variety out there and evolutionists will continue to make up imaginary transitions for anything that they see. Its not very difficult to imagine what a transition would look like if evolution was true, unfortunately a vivid imagination is not evidence. Maybe one day I will start a thread on that. I normally deal with one thread at a time, and I will be going back to dates thread soon.

Yes. that's a standard ape skull. Very similar to a chimpanzee. Even Lucy, our supposed missing link, was from bones lying scattered kilometers away from eachother. The supposed human "uprightness" is no more than an orangutan. The skull shape, brain size are 100% ape.You cant throw together a bunch of old monkey and human skulls, place them in an imaginary order, and then conclude "scientific proof" of evolution. I think you misunderstood me, I am wanting to see these skulls arranged according to dates, with empirical geological backing for those dates. They have been arranged according to skull shape, which is not logical at all. Its easy to place a set of similar skulls into an order of features, what feature should we choose? Tooth size? Brain size? Uprightness? Choose a feature, then arrange them, that's not rocket science and it proves nothing. Anyone can arrange a set of old skulls into any order they like. I could take a set of ant breeds, arrange them into a size order, a brain order, a jaw size order, just arranging organisms does not prove they are a dated sequence of evolved organisms. That's fantasy, not scientific method.

No claimed transitional fossils have been found for the bat...... along with many other species. Ok place your fossils of various extinct creatures in an undated order and according to an ascending visibility of a feature. Then use the very order of your fossils which could be in the wrong date order, but are in an assumed order of features as proof of evolution! SWEET!Lovely circular reasoning. I'm not avoiding the evidence, I'm laughing at it. Let me tell you what can truly be stated fact about your pile of skulls tadaaaaaaaaa here's the true scientific conclusion .............Features vary slightly between individuals and similar species.WOW Just the fact that they vary , ALWAYS makes it possible to place them in an order of ascending features. How the placing them in an order somehow proves evolution ... is completely beyond me. Edited by mindspawn, : No reason given.

You are making a much grander claim. You are claiming that they don't exist, not that they haven't been discovered. Can you back this up or not? They are in chronological order. Through time we see the emergence of modern human features.If these are not transitional fossils, then please tell us what features a real transitional hominid fossil would have. No, you are avoiding it by laughing it off and never engaging the actual evidence. Nowhere do you discuss why those are not transitional fossils. Nowhere. You just laugh and pretend the evidence does not exist. The very fact that they can be put in an ascending order, and only one ascending order, is the very evidence of evolution. Cars can not be put in such an ascending order. This ascending order is a nested hierarchy, and designed things do not fall into nested hierarchies.For example, if we followed the Ford Mustang through the years we would see the sudden appearance of the air bag from other branches of the car tree. This is a gross violation of the nested hierarchy.

That is a lie, mindspawn. Another lie. The australopithecine pelvis is much more like ours than the orangutan pelvis. The australopithecine pelvis has adapatations for bipedalism that are not found in other living ape species. Why not? Isn't that exactly what we should see if they are transitional fossils? You seem to be complaining that they are transitional.

Spin? Deny? I just say it as it is. I'm not saying the lack of one transitional form puts doubt on evolution, its the lack of MOST transitional forms, and the doubtful nature of many more so-called transitions that puts doubt on evolution.

What I meant, is that mutations are only observed to be favorable when genes are damaged, or when in laboratory conditions they mimic areas of the genome that are widely known to have multiple copies.This thread demonstrates the rarity of beneficial mutations.

We need to see a reference for this. It appears that you are just making it up as you go.How many of the mutations that separate humans and chimps cause damage in genes?

Could you be more specific?How about you answer my other questions? But you won't, will you? But this is just a standard creationist lie. It isn't even slightly true. It's just one of those dumb lies that creationists have learned to recite. You haven't even misinterpreted something, which might be excusable. You have learned to recite a stupid lie without taking the least bit of interest as to whether it is true or false. I understood you perfectly well. You have made a stupid mistake.Once more, I suspect that you are merely reciting your stupidity rather than thinking about it.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Lie is a dramatic word. I was referring to the leg bones, I see that you are referring to the pelvis. The pelvis and feet of the gibbon are very similar to humans, does this really prove evolution? Let's find a monkey skull, a chimp skull, a gibbon skull and a human skull. Let's lay them next to eachother. This proves evolution. (not) They are not proven transitionals. Skeletons vary. By laying them in an order , all you are proving is that life-forms vary. I don't see what else a line of skulls can prove.

It is a fitting description of what you are doing. They are? Again, you are making statements that are not supported by the facts. Check them out yourself. The gibbon pelvis is on the bottom. All of the other ape pelvises have iliac blades that are flared along the back while australopithecines have a pelvis like humans where the iliac blades are at the sides. The gibbon pelvis is least like the human pelvis out of the apes. However, the australopithecine pelvis is much more like the modern human pelvis than any other living ape. So you are saying that transitionals should not vary through time? This is getting stranger by the minute. Again, you are complaining that they look transitional. Why not take the next step and admit that they are transitional.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

And an accurate one. All you are doing here is reciting dumb lies that creationists have made up. You have a moral duty to try to tell the truth, and you're not even trying.

I will also add

Please keep discussion impersonal and dispassionate. In the opinion of this moderator, the clumsiness of the claims pretty conclusively indicates ignorance rather than deceit at work.

Hi, Mindspawn. This is rather unfair of you. You asked if I would reject evolution if I observed a certain type of evidence that another model explains better than evolution does. I said, "Yes, I would." Your response here appears to be, "No, you wouldn't." Well, the evidence is against you on this one too.Upthread, I made a big deal about how I was unsatisfied with RM/NS as an explanation for certain steps in the evolution of vertebrate and mollusc eyes. I would be most happy to accept an alternative explanation, if one could be found, because it seems a bit too fortuitous to be a random mutation, in my mind. Maybe I just don't understand all the relevant variables yet, but, as it currently sits, I am eager to find some other mechanism that can explain how a "dimple" appeared on top of an eyespot. But, I don't have that, so I fall back on the best hypothesis I have (which I don't like).I would also like to point out that evolutionary biologists have a history of assimilating non-"orthodox" ideas into our worldviews when they prove to be better than our orthodox ideas. For example, some novel features in the diversity of life are better explained by horizontal gene transfer than by random mutations. Nowadays, most evolutionists agree that "random mutation" is a poor explanation for many features, such as carotenoid pigments in spider mites and in aphids.In addition, the biology community has reached consensus on the idea that mitochondria and chloroplasts emerged through endosymbiosis, rather than by random mutation. This is particularly telling, because this idea is usually credited to Lynn Margulis, who is widely regarded as something of a kook and "fringe scientist" with a history of controversial ideas (e.g., the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, and the idea that all novelty in evolution is due to symbiosis and "gene sharing").So, the record seems to show that the evolutionary biology community is more than willing to accept and incorporate ideas from outside of our strict RM/NS framework, even if they come from people we regard as nutjobs. But, like everybody else whose ideas evolutionists eventually accepted, it's incumbent on you, the creationist, the demonstrate that we should accept yours.