What would a transitional fossil look like?

Let us see if we can actually have a reasonable conversation.

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None of you will ever see what is really going on because you are glued into your ToE expectations.

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This seems to mean that we disagree with your opinions because we choose to follow the actual evidence.

So, why are your opinions to be preferred to the evidence ?

eg

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What you are talking about is my description of how you get to "speciation" and YOU call that macroevolution. That's a ridiculous claim since the genetic condition of the "new species" is depleted to the point that further evolution is impossible, and that depleted condition is in most cases most likely the reason why breeding with the parent population is no longer possible.

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There are known examples of speciation but none of this “genetic depletion”. The Creationist “kind” concept, which you appear to endorse, accepts speciation. But ven your favourite example, the cheetah has variation as proven by the existence of the king cheetah. Therefore this is obviously your opinion and in conflict with the evidence.

And to add to this

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They are impossible because you have no grasp of the processes involved to bring it about, none.

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Why should we believe that your understanding of the processes involved is better than ours. Especially given that we have had to correct your errors in the past discussion of this issue ?

... The only way macroevolution, or anything that would change its genetic makeup in the direction of a fish, or anything not-cow for that matter, is massive mutations of some very unlikely sort, and they'd have to change the structural genetic stuff for a cow along with the usual variations on superficial traits such as fur color. ...

Thanks for the comic relief, faith. This part in particular. Hysterical.

Enjoy

You're welcome, I'm sure, but if you want humorless stupid me to get your point you need to do a little more explaining. Far as I can see, my point is good. The genome of any given creature has the genetic stuff for making that particular creature, and if you want to get from that creature to some other creature for which the genetic instructions do not exist in the genome in question, something really genetically drastic has to happen to change that genome, so drastic that it is really impossible.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

... The genome of any given creature has the genetic stuff for making that particular creature, and if you want to get from that creature to some other creature for which the genetic instructions do not exist in the genome in question, something really genetically drastic has to happen to change that genome, so drastic that it is really impossible.

Something like mutation and selection occurring in a breeding population over several generations ... ie - your basic evolution.

Enjoy

... something really genetically drastic has to happen to change that genome, so drastic that it is really impossible.

That sounds kind of like a personal judgement to me.

We wouldn't want anything too drastic to happen, would we?

LamarkNewAge writes: I ask that there be less sarcastic commentary.

The sarcasm is a corollary of Poe's law:

"Without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the parodied views." Wikipedia

To wit:

It is impossible to suggest a position so ridiculous that a creationist won't accept it as true.

Faith writes: The cow genome does not have any genetic stuff for making fish....

It would be interesting if you could show us those differences between the cow genome and the fish genome.

Aren't they both made of the same LEGOs? What is there that prevents taking apart a LEGO castle and rebuilding it into a LEGO treehouse?

so drastic that it is really impossible.

You misspelled "due to the mechanisms of evolution".

You obviously know nothing about the magnitude of genetic changes. Almost all of them are teeny and weeny.

I did spell out some time ago the differences that have to be navigated to get from the reptilian ear to the mammalian ear, which is a much more limited project than getting from a cow to a fish but I may try that one two. Remove legs from genome. Add fins and fish tail and fish breathing apparatus. This is silly. Just to make those two changes would require millions of years of mutations and still you wouldn't get them.

If the changes are teeny and weeny which I suppose they would be, getting any one of them in the right place for the new genme would take millions or billions of years of mutations and there is no reason whatever to think any of it would come together in a coherent new creature.

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If the changes are teeny and weeny which I suppose they would be, getting any one of them in the right place for the new genme would take millions or billions of years of mutations and there is no reason whatever to think any of it would come together in a coherent new creature.

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Of course you are wrong because you don’t have the slightest understanding of the processes involved.

Well, the personal judgment makes sense because the genome of every creature has everything it needs for all the characteristics and variations of the creature's physical and behavioral makeup, all right there. Every reprductive event recapitulates all the characteristics to make a new version of it. When you imagine that the genome simply eventually goes on to make something entirely different, even by teeny weeny changes, you have to imagine something new happening in the genome that doesn't already exist. That means there are no guidelines for it of any sort, it just appears for no reason, through a mutation I suppose, an accident of replication that changes something in the genome into something that has nothing whatever to do with the creature that genome constructs. Mutations upon mutations would have to occur, all of them totally accidental, without any guidelines whatever, millions of trials and errors then before any of it amounts to anything coherent at all, and there is in fact no reason at that level of probability why anything coherent would ever emerge. Justg escrescences growing on excrescences, like a cancer though they might be benigh, just utterly useless. Mutations that change a given gene into another version of the gene may do something to the creature that is benign, neutral or even occasionally "beneficial" if you aren't thinking too big, but usually deleterious. Now macroevolution requires a change that changes something in the creature into something that is not related to the creature in order to get an entirely new kind of creature.

Nobody is really thinking about what such changes to a genome would involve along these lines if you continue to think it's feasible.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Gosh you're all so good at tit for tat. Not much else I fear.

Well the simplest answer to this is that when we carry out such a process, it works. Random variation plus selection produces functional objects, indeed objects of a sophistication greater than we could deliberately design.

We can also of course observe it working on a small scale on organisms.

So unless you can think of some theoretical reason why it shouldn't work in the particular case when you don't want it to, then the logical conclusion is that it does.

Also to return to the topic of this thread we have the transitional fossils, which do make it look awfully like it actually happened.

"Due to the mechanisms of evolution" doesn't describe what has to happen to get macroevolution from a given genome. Perhaps you could explain it in some detail?