Transitional Fossils Show Evolution in Process

I respect the effort the poster has made to use clear definitions. However I would like to challenge the definition by quoting a brief example of talk about transitional fossils from a typical source (a state university).
"The research also suggests that at least three times in the evolution of dinosaurs and their closest relatives, meat-eating animals evolved into animals with diets that included plants. These shifts all occurred in less than 10 million years, a relatively short time by geological standards.
Asilisaurus is part of a sister group to dinosaurs known as silesaurs. Silesaurs are considered dinosaur-like because they share many dinosaur characteristics but still lack key characteristics all dinosaurs share. The relationship between silesaurs and dinosaurs is analogous to the close relationship of humans and chimps. Even though the oldest dinosaurs discovered so far are only 230 million years old, the presence of their closest relatives 10 million years earlier implies that silesaurs and the dinosaur lineage had already diverged from common ancestors by 240 million years ago. Silesaurs continued to live side by side with early dinosaurs throughout much of the Triassic Period (between about 250 and 200 million years ago)."
The link to the full article is at --Page not found - UT News.
Here's what I find troubling, the evidence is what every storyteller at the table has, the 14 fossils. The problem with calling something "transitional" is that in fact we don't know if it is transitional as a fact. Just writing down differences with similar animals does not show an evolution tree link. No one with scientific method observed the transition, for one. And even if it did happen, the transition, once for that particular dinosaur like animal, it would by definition be unrepeatable. Thus no science experimentation would be ever applicable to this fossilized creature. What would be more impressive more than storytelling is a mathematical video tape equivalent of the change, that would be interesting and make the university's claim compelling. As it is though, such alleged transitions are no more convincing than saying once 40,000 years ago an animal drank some water, which changed its life. Well, ok, to give this meaning: how would we break down what the 'transition' period is defined as? After all, the water the animal took in was a one-time event that changed the animal in some way. If that same animal is said to have 'transitioned' on some arbitrary day, say the same day it drank water at that stream and mated, how can we not limit further what a transition is? We should be able to say more than these bones look a lot alike, so we'll assume they are related. It doesn't take a lot of expertise to make causal assumptions that may or may not be true 430 million years ago. To assert that transitions have happened is to assume there ought to be more of it observed to show small, measureable, compelling shifts with at the least thousands of little jumps in this one single species, as opposed to merely telling a story that it has happened with a small pack of fossils in one place. Mathematical theories do not drive transition fossil theories (at least physics can prove such a past event given a causal universe). I see no way that mathematical proof (at least very high probability) of transitioning can ever confirm the transitional fossils actually --being-- transitions. If probability were high due to thousands of small changes in the same line (also an assumption which would have to be proved, that they are moving the same line), then it would be more compelling. But unrelated finds with 14 animals each in the site that lived in a relatively close period of time is not showing a long gradual change for certain. It only shows in that place, or a few small finds, that some animals that looked a lot like a dinosaur existed. But where is the so what coming in? How can the fact that some fossils have been found that have lots in common, prove that they are common. There are animals on the evolutionary tree in textbooks at universities that look similar but are on very different branches. Simply stating similarity doesn't make it so, it is assertion without high probability of correlation over time. Because lots of Firestone and Michelin tires on cars today look similar doesn't mean they came from the same plant (maybe, maybe not; it requires reliable first-hand accounts by company representatives or lots of UPS employees or else scientific repeatable change observation to figure this out).
Perhaps the dinosaur-like Asilisaurus kongwe animals were just created by someone or thing 430 million years ago? Or perhaps they transitioned over a (relatively short, ie unlikely) ten million years? But to say one 'knows' for sure is a claim that is meaningless by any mathematical probability scheme to back it up. It is rather a story that is told about the fossils everyone can see, in order to make evolutionists feel good about themselves for spending time listening to professors assert again and again ages in rock layers through graduate work all those years. And if we are all going to tell stories with low probabilities, then I can think of a 100 stories of how things transitioned, and expect you to believe some of them, since they are conceivably some other possible explanations. Then I can merely say if you don't believe me, you haven't studied enough. This is the problem with claiming evolution is shown in progress with isolated finds on one kind of animal Asilisaurus kongwe, when we really have no line or ability to draw the line of descent accurately. Maybe it’s true, maybe not. But it sounds like speculation based on a popular geology time line in that article I quoted. And I suspect the dating scheme is circular. Respected professor so and so said this layer is such and such years. So this gets repeated, until we are talking about things we can't prove, that over 10 million years these changes happened. Really, where is the repeatable proof in the same animal? The same problem applies to this definition of transitions, which is from the same family of interpretation about the fossil record today over things no one saw hundreds of millions of years ago. And if we say transitions exist today, then who gets to decide what is a transition line? The professor with the most theses done? How many science experiments has he done to show the high probability of the same line, and minor changes in the fossils with a fair test pool of examples?

I'm glad to be here to think through some of these processes.By the way, your point on the enter key is useful, I'll take that into account. (But I won't let a monkey in a cage be the source of the enters or we may be here a very long time, eons).At least it makes sure that to read it, one can't easily select only certain paragraphs, but like you, I appreciate greater clarity.Page not found - UT NewsIn this particular article, the thing I find interesting (in a useful way) is the availability of some fairly secure conclusions: like what an animal ate by its teeth shape, size and wear. These inferences are based on what we can observe, which is teeth wear a certain way (speed, angle) when you eat this. Paleontology earns its pay with such fair inferences of reason. The present change in bone/teeth is informative of the past. Physics is useful in this regard with cosmology.I suppose for me at least, a greater problem stands in grey areas of skeletons showing evolutionary change from simple to more advanced. But words like "sister group" show a lot of interpretation is going on that we can't show high probability for. If I walk into the discussion believing that similar skeletons in form or shape show a family resemblance, that is only somewhat justified. Right now, if I see two human skeletons I can fairly use reason to deduce they are the same animal. But suppose I bring in a lemur and a human skeleton and assert they are related, as some recent finds have done to their embarrassment after their colleagues checked their work? So there is a line to be drawn, in saying these are related on a branch of the evolutionary tree, and these are not. Who gets to play the role of God interpreter and decide for us all deductively these two lines are animals that once had these same ancestors on this upper left hand side of the evolutionary tree? Must be a nice job, you assert interpretations which happened hundreds of millions of years ago can explain similar skeletons.
But for all that person deciding knows (professor/researcher) there is no way to get beyond small differences into larger changes without lots of assumptions (art of interpretation, like a scientific hypothesis but without the testability of repetition today) to connect the dots. Assumptions are increasingly involved when making up a 'line' that animals like silesaurs 'followed.' These unrepeatable assumptions are subject to unwarranted interpretation that we are told is 'sure,' after the next form is found in a relatively close layer in a different location. How do we really know that silesaurs shifted in less than 10 million years (a very short time)? There is going to be a serious limit on timing impossed by a system brought to bear from other assumptions. Geology says this time frame is involved in such a layer. We can match these layers. But then what about the assumptions brought in to connect different size and shape bones from the 'same' animal.... That is then a low probability comment from a professor based on interpretation, when we can't tract the line closely enough, with enough of the same animal in the same pack (which we can't). These lines are drawn beyond the packs we find them in (like one or several close digs) are subject to low probability for inferences of reason.If a person were to say, well we can see changes in bones today in size, that is very much true. I could then reply, we find humans in the USA with bones far larger than some in other places (say Peru or China). Are the Western bones more evolved? Are they further along? No. These are the issues of interpretation which are notoriously risky games of connect the dots. When we weren't there in the dig zone with radio animal tracking tags 430 to 420 million years ago, we cannot know for 'sure' that increased size in skeleton is a move in the right "hegelian" (if I may use that) direction. Perhaps the larger ones are devolving (which would certainly be possible with the way most Americans live eating grossly large amounts of food and killing themselves with diseases as a result).

Actually, I accept some of the conclusions (these are interpretive, but I think inductively impressive), as I mentioned in my reply to another forum member.I am going to be the good skeptic and ask the questions about interpretation that too many are allowed to get away with. We all have 'evidence,' which is fairly boring. As we are playing the game of transitions though, which is an interpretive enterprise with the evidence we all have, interpretation is going to be involved trying to show trends, no trends, limited trends, & catastrophe trends. I do not believe there are brute facts out there, but that we bring a grid to the game from the start. Sometimes somebody's got to ask a few good questions to point this bias (whether it is a good interpretive bias or not) to a few.It is the story about transitions that is told by neo-Darwinian influenced paleontology that I am questioning in the distant past (say 10 million years ago and more). Since Dr. Adequate was probably (by inductive reason) born sometime in the 20th century, he wasn't able to confirm through repeatable processes (nor any of his fellow human species) things that happened so long ago in the range of 430 million to 420 million years ago, as the article link mentions. Nor were any of Dr. Adequate's species with reason (present human reason in the brain) available to check things out inductively. I have no reason to buy into an interpretation just because someone says I want to deny 'all' the evidence. I can just assert that Dr. Adequate wants to deny 'all' the evidence, which is a fairly hard to believe statement for anyone (sounds very deductive). Evidence is not impressive left to itself. The story about how those things progressed (or maybe de-evolved) is far more interesting.I should point out that if the human brain mass is evolving even now in the broad culture or at least in the best thinkers of culture and their transitions today, that the postmodern culture is the one which is at present on the ascendancy. The modernistic idea that the evidence is all there is, no interpretation, is thus retrograde. Surely then, in the interpretive scheme of neo-Darwinian paleontology, someone of its best thinkers with a human brain mass would 'catch up.'Objective statements of natural selection leading to separate animals like asilisiraus from a previous form (which also diverged to dinosaurs) require adding in the subjective belief that a fossil we have fits into a line connecting the ‘similar’ into a descending family.Edited by davids-evolution, : Grammatical/clarity of argument.

Handprint.com (I don't know enough about the site really) has an interesting comment that is relevant to this discussion forum, I just found it in my own reading. This isn't a reply so much as a statement I came across:"The human fossil record from about 2.5 to 1.0 million years ago is especially sparse only about 50 individuals are known, many of them represented by only a single tooth or jaw fragment and the evolutionary connections from australopithecus to homo erectus, including the evolutionary relationships between habilis, ergaster and erectus, are in dire need of clarification. "This link can be found by: http://www.handprint.com/LS/ANC/evol.html.I would on this seperate issue from dinosaurs that with humans, I would not want to build a transitional structure on a jaw fragment or ten. Or some unrelated part like a knee cap by itself in a few. That is maybe enough to guess, but starts to make the historical science side of paleontology look a lot more like interpretation than science. That' my point basically.

I appreciate your mentioning the starting point for paleontology is another field. It is, as you know, based on more than its own study. That's fine if that's the Ace, let's call it an Ace (in most circumstances with a perceived stronger warrant coming alongside to prop up neo-Darwinian paleontology itself).The genetic link to chimps from humans is something I would question. Obviously they share similar segmets of DNA (Francis Collins argues for 100% gene sequence that codes for protein similarity with chimpanzees, and 98% for random DNA segments between genes). We are talking about transitional fossils, but since you mentioned this starting point in DNA, I'll offer an understanding. Similarity does not equate common ancestry. That is an assumption brought to the table beforehand. Whether in fossils (this thread) or in genetics (presumably there is another thread on this). To circularly use the same assumption smuggled in with genetics, to prove the transitional fossils between all species idea is interesting. I think circular argument is ok, as long as you're honest about it. Genetics is also using the same logic on populations, one from similarity. The switch between one animal and another is a real question. Some small level changes seem to occur in birds with their beaks. It is another thing to say a bird family became something far less like a bird. The "how you get there" is where the story telling pops into the picture. Humans also have large segments of their DNA in common with the dog and a significant minority of it with a mouse. Does this prove genetically that we are from a common ancestor? Saying it does only begs the question, a logical fallacy if it is used as an explanation. We still have no repeatable evidence to match a hypothesis of a bird changing into another animal, for example, even if we look at it genetically. While this kind of evidence may be hard to come by, it is still needed. The danger of the evolution as common ancestor explanation for all things (or most) is it assumes a lot we can't prove. Stories of a fish becoming another kind of fish are not going to be impressive to me. I would like to see something more than longer fins, longer or shorter beaks on a bird, or a curly haired dog versus a straight haired and faster dog. Breeding is something we can observe and repeat as an experiment to verify a local hypothesis. To extrapolate that out over a change from one genus or species of animal to another is completely different. It requires more assumptions being brought in (whether in the form of fossils transitioning or genetics transitioning). What I'm asking for essentially is humility of interpretation. Claiming that evolution as a mechanism in genetics or paleontology results is the true answer smacks of claiming to know more than one can seriously offer as a 'scientist.' Though if we are to tell nice stories based in circularity, then I grant perhaps there is some plausibity to the idea you have offered. Scientists come up with hypothesis to test them, rather than to just describe similarity between animals. A good science experiment would be to show fundamental change in genetics occuring that doesn't kill off the animal it is happening in, as it becomes a significantly different animal. Genetic information should be expected to be largely similar if organs and methods of mating are similar. This doesn't show that they were the same animal back in time.But the similarity is often overstated, as the DNA is (admittedly by genetic researchers) rearranged to fit alongside a segment in another different animal. That way the segments that would not be side by side now look more similar than they truly are at a genetic level naturally. This rearrangement as well has to be taken into effect in the complexity of the differences.I'll give an example of a counter to the statement that in transitional fossils or genetics, similarity is proof of having been a common ancestor at a previous time. If I use the same computer language and similar segments of code to write two seperate programs, that doesn't mean that the second program was naturally selected out of the first. They weren't the same program at some time. It only shows that the designer of these programs used a similar language to do two seperate 'projects,' if you will. The only way to say they were once the same program is to start with the materialist assumption that they had to be to fit with an assumption grid brought to the table (ie that the best explanation must be common ancestory whenever we see similarity).Edited by davids-evolution, : spelling

Dr. Colin Patterson, author of the book Evolution, said this about the lack of transitional fossils (which should give some of the pride "Dr Adequate" has a check, one always knows that an opponent has lost when all he can do is call me a 'whack job.' -- an ad hominem fallacy in argument):" I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic licence, would that not mislead the reader?"He also goes on to say that his belief in gradualism is due to genetics. So there is a close tie between transitional fossil 'interpretation' and the evidence, which says nothing, but awaits a theory from some source of intelligence to say 'what' happened.Sounds like Dr. Adequate is inAdequate in logical argumentation.Edited by davids-evolution, : grammar

Sounds good Razd, so long as people can't use the genetics card on their part, and then when I bring it up dismiss me as not able to bring it up (while they can bring it up). As long as it's even handed, I'll avoid doing anything more than just mentioning it. I'll stick more to the transitional fossil thread. Thank you for the clarification.

I just want to let you know what I think about a few comments, without replying to this whole post (that would be too much replying).
On the one hand, I would question what you mean by saying I'm a transitional animal. Sure I'm an animal, and I have traits that are a bit different gradually (in a small time frame) from my parents or other members of the population. However changes in a population start with individuals mating. Everyone admits that, and this isn't a large population (with humans, it takes two baby, it takes two.... (sorry for the song)). I doubt that as a transitional animal (which I admit) that I prove a change in species will ever occur in the human population. I will admit I'm skeptical that differences in the population lead us to be more evolved. I would suggest that lots of defects such as cancer are increasingly common in transitional animals.I think there is a far, far stronger interpretation than yours (which sounds like the Hegelian up up and away of fossils), which is transition fossils show devolving characteristics that take down species. Certainly the obesity problem in the US, European (especially UK), and some Asian countries that are advanced in testing scores (or chose some standard for the population) shows an example of downgrade in the transitional fossils living in the population today. There are all kinds of health problems observable in current transitional fossils that show a devolution. There is a great amount of disease and animal weakness in the fossil record (generally acknowledged). The conclusion I draw from this is evolution is like Joel Osteem optimism, but on a more scientific level. Whereas a more likely explanation would be a scientific negative view of where species are going.Edited by davids-evolution, : spell check

Well, Razd I have been honest with you, but you have misunderstood why I quoted that (instead of reading in my motives, I will read them out). What's dishonest is putting words in your opponents mouth, Razd. I have found that a quote can be useful so as to give pause or reflect on the need to not be dogmatic about a position (such as yours). However, in this case you have --wrongly-- pigeon holed me as saying that because someone has been quoted once, that disproves evolution in transitional fossils in every case. I don't feel that any total case like that is being made. I offered this quote for thought, not as some total dismissal. Who is saying one or two or ten quotes can disprove something totally, that is a stronger claim than I'm making. I am simply saying there ought to be pause, rather than dogmatism about adopting a totalizing theory of neo-Darwinian evolution seen in transitional fossils.I am not arguing anything that strong as a total case. I am arguing that your totalizing faith in evolution as optimism that things are becoming more advanced needs some caution, as it is based on philosophy not strictly science. This is something you have missed, and thereby misrepresented your opponents intent.And you also mentioned I have argued a creationist line. I don't know that I have argued a creationist line with you either, though I have mentioned several options as alternative interpretations of the evidence (as any good scientist should be open to if they are truly 'neutral'). Just don't misrepresent what I've offered by way of critique of popular ideas of evolution.It is far to easy too see what you want though in an opponent. I also offered a de-evolution line which is essentially unrebutted. You may offer reasons for doubt of it, but there is no way to show that devolving trends are winning the day deductively. In fact, I came across today a major writer who outlined de-evolution as a position some have taken while reading some major naturalistic works put out by a mainline publisher.I suppose discussion can only happen if there are different viewpoints, and this site advertises itself for a place of discussion. This should mean that EVC wants to avoid ad hominem attacks on the opponent. Let's stick with the issues of how to see the evidence rather than merely saying an opponent is a whack job (as another poster did) or is dishonest (how do you know I meant to disprove all transitional fossils ever with a quote, I'm not sure that is what I was trying to do?). If I believe I am being honest in giving pause to my opponents, why would that be dishonest? If you are appealing to an objective standard of morality, where did that enter in? And if you appeal to community standards, why not follow Nietzsche instead and say the strongest wins?In passing, it is an interest I have in being on the forum in challenging interpretations, even deeply held ones, particularly in how fossils are viewed as transitioning. There is no de facto idea here. The reality is we all have the evidence, and your interpretation (opinion) Razd differs from mine at present at least. It is the story you (and others often) tell about what we're looking at that I disagree with on fossils being transitional in a way that shows evolution as advancing populations is true. It is not that there is evidence someone doesn't have. The evidence is boring until the story is told, and I reject the 'evolution as total or deductive' explanation storyline. I think a more likely one (opinion) is that things are devolving, which fits with death, cancer, disease, horrible pain, etc. This is reality, not optimistic advancing of the best species which seems to not match evidence in reality. And I might add, that by quoting another author which you have done, hopefully you as well, (not using a double standard) don't believe that -totally- disproves my case either for a devolving world of transitional fossil evidence.