The Ediacaran fossils were a “precursor“ to the Cambrian, but they can hardly be described as a “link” - there are no fossil links between E and C.
Okay, what came before the Ediacaran fauna?
Or are you just assuming that the record is complete and we 'know' that there is nothing in between E and C. The Ediacara forms are more primitive and difficult to put into the Cambrian phyla framework, which is exactly what we would expect of transitional species.
For example, where are the links between the Ediacaran organisms (worms, sponges, barnacles, jelly fish)...
What happened to your barnacles?
... and the fish that appeared in the Cambrian? Ditto for Ediacaran life-forms and insects. My scientific explanation is that aliens took the Ediacaran creatures, seriously fiddled with their DNA and voila!...
First of all, some of these questions have been answered previously.
Second, that's a great idea. Now, how have you tested it? Where is your evidence for the aliens?
welcome to new and improved creatures of the Cambrian!
Again, a great idea, but "voila" will not cut it as a mechanism.
"BSTs (Burgess Shale Types) from the latest Ediacaran Period (eg, Miaohe biota, 550 Ma) are abundantly fossiliferous with algae but completely lack animals, which are also missing from other Ediacaran windows, such as phosphate deposits (eg, Doushantuo, 560 Ma)" - Daley AC, Antcliffe JB, Drage HB, Pates S 2018. Early fossil record of Euarthropoda and the Cambrian Explosion. PNAS, 9 pp.
And the problem is?
It’s interesting how you’ve conflated “testing a theory” and “finding evidence for a theory”. I think of a “test” as confirming or proving something.
Yes it is. But more specifically, when one predicts the location of a particular transitional fossil in a certain age of rocks and the they go out and actually confirm the prediction.
And besides, what better way to test a theory than use it? If it didn't work, we would be forced to accept a paradigm shift at some point, just as phlogiston had to be abandoned as an explanation.
Hence, there is no way to test what happened between Fossil A and Fossil B. All you’ve got is a gap between two different fossils, which you fill in with blind faith in evolution.
And when you did connect the dots pictures as a kid, did you have a problem going from 'dot 1' to 'dot 2'? Maybe there was something in between like a tiny horsey.
My “aliens did it” explanation can’t be tested either (although it remains the best scientific explanation).
When you have some kind of supporting evidence, please let me know. I have no problem going with the known evidence. How about you?
"To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion" Henry Gee, Nature (magazine), 1999.
Correct. As we have been saying all along, transitional fossils do not define lineage. I thought we'd cleared that up a long time ago.
“It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test” - Colin Patterson, from a letter to Luther Sunderland, 1979.
Ah, good. Another out-of-context opinion.
Want any to the contrary?
"To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bed-time story - amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific." Henry Gee, Nature (magazine), 1999.
I think you already posted this.
I know, those big words are confusing...
Edited by edge, : No reason given.
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