The Origin of Novelty

Your requirement that a creator has to follow a nested hierarchy is unsupported and contradicted by everything we know about designers. Since when does a designer HAVE to make his designs fall into an objective nested hierarchy? So you searched the entire fossil record and determined that there were no transitional fossils? When did this occur? And now you are avoiding the evidence. No living human has features like those found in transitional hominids. None. Those fossils are transitional.When you avoid the evidence like this it only invalidates your argument.

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.

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?

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.

What criteria are you using to determine if a fossil is transitional or not? And then I would demonstrate that they do not fall into a nested hierarchy as one would expect from intelligent design.On the other hand, life does fall into a nested hierarchy which is consistent with evolution.

I already showed that a gibbon pelvis is nothing like a human or australopithecine pelvis. Do we really need to go over this again? Seriously?Take a look for yourself:Australopithecine pelvis:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/...PPFiY/s1600/australohipecine.jpgModern human pelvis:
Access deniedGibbon pelvis:
http://yogainthesky.com/...eton-anterior-torso-and-skull.jpgAs you can clearly see, the australopithecine pelvis is much more like a modern human pelvis than the gibbon pelvis. Yes, until there are too many human qualities, and then it is no longer an ape. We already know how this game is played.

You are making the same mistake that most creationists make. Transitional does not mean ancestral. Transitional means that the fossil has a mixture of characteristics from two divergent taxa. You don't need DNA to determine this. The theory of evolution makes predictions of which transitionals you should see, and which you should not see. As you have shown, ID/creationism is incapable for making predictions in this manner because any combination of features would be consistent with ID/creationism.That is what separates evolution from ID/creationism. Evolution can predict which combinations of features you should see and not see.

Yes, latent reservoirs that are turned on by novel mutations. That is evolution. A duplication is a mutation. It is a change in DNA sequence of the genome. These mutations result in novel phenotypes. This is the origin of novelty. A mutation put a new promoter region onto the gene, and natural selection selected for this mutant which was responsible for a novel phenotype.

Baloney. It is a fact that fossils have a mixture of features from two divergent taxa. Transitional fossils are a fact. Every single transitional fossil we have is consistent with evolution. That is some serious evidence in favor of evolution.

Yes, really. H. erectus has a mixture of features from modern humans and basal apes. The platypus has a mixture of features from reptiles and placental mammals. Archaeopteryx has a mixture of features from modern birds and non-avian dinosaurs. Tiktaalik roseae has a mixture of features between lobed finned fish and terrestrial vertebrates. Transitional fossils and species are a fact. That doesn't change the fact that they are transitional. The transitional nature of fossils is based on their morphology, not their DNA. We can determine if they are transitional by their morphology alone since that is all that is needed. Again, transitional means that the fossil has a mixture of features from two divergent taxa. THAT'S IT!!! Transitional and ancestral are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS. Ignoring the evidence does not help your case.Name a single fossil that does not fit into the nested hierarchy.

Convergence times for both the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA are well beyond the 6,000 year mark. Human variation in these two parts of the genome already falsify a 6,000 year old Earth.

"We report the discovery of an African American Y chromosome that carries the ancestral state of all SNPs that defined the basal portion of
the Y chromosome phylogenetic tree.We sequenced ~240 kb of this chromosome to identify private, derived mutations on this lineage,
which we named A00.We then estimated the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) for the Y tree as 338 thousand years
ago (kya) (95% confidence interval 237—581 kya)."
http://haplogroup-a.com/Ancient-Root-AJHG2013.pdf"A number of sequences (13%) were highly divergent and coalesced on the "mitochondrial Eve" in Africans. The remaining sequences also ultimately coalesced on this sequence but fell into four major clusters whose starlike phylogenies testify to demographic expansions. The oldest of these African expansions dates to approximately 60,000-80,000 years ago."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/2010/08/100817122405.htm

Transitional does not mean ancestral. The platypus is transitional between reptiles and placental mammals even though the platypus is not ancestral to modern placental mammals. Theories don't dig up fossils. Humans do.

No, it doesn't. The transitional nature of fossils is determined solely by their morphology. It has nothing to do with DNA. Actually, the anatomy of the tasmanian wolf is much more like other marsupials than it is placental wolves. Anatomists use much more than the size of horns to determine if a fossil is intermediate. A monitor lizard, a platypus, and a human are all contemporary species. A platypus is transitional between the monitor lizard and modern humans. Transitional does not mean ancestral.Let me say this very clearly. If you found a mammal-bird transitional it would falsify evolution. Think about that for a second. We already have those. The hominid transitional fossil record shows exactly that. The transitional nature of a fossil is a fact. A platypus is transitional. That is a fact. Again, you keep confusing ancestral with transitional. They are two different things.