You seemed to only answer my post halfway. You even included my last question to you without quotes and you didn't respond to it.
Jazzns previously writes:
NJ, how do you think this find alters the Theory rather than simply our understanding of mammal evolution?
But what if the evidence doen't improve on it, but rather bring parts of it into disrepute?
Neither of the pieces of evience you posted brings the Theory of Evolution into disrepute. You are very obviously confusing an instantiation of the theory with the theory itself. While the mammalian find may cause us to toss out some of what we thought the history of mammals was like, the overarching theory itself is not hampered.
And if those proponents just change times that are supposed to have been based on empirical testing, then what is that saying about the validity of that testing, the validity of the experimentors?
The parts of mammalian history that were theorized before were based on the evidence we had at the time. It was a complete theory given the evidence. Now there is new evidence that adds more information. This does not mean that our previous explanation of mammalian history was faulty. It simply means that it was incomplete.
Newton's theories were not invalid because he didn't include relativity. In fact they are correct for a single frame of reference. Now we know more so we have a better understanding of how the laws of motion and forces work. We don't chide Newton for not being complete because that knowledge was the foundation that eventually became the new best explanation that we have. Even now we think there might be something missing that relativity cannot explain.
Isn't giving an opponent of theirs more ammunition to believe that those who swore, hand to Origins, that they were right all along end up being proven false?
Maybe you can produce for us where anyone has said that the previous understanding of the evolution of mammals was "evo gospel". Scientists fight about paradigms all the time but the evidence always wins.
A century ago it was considered rediculous that the continents might be moving. The evidence won and changed our knowledge.
Recently it was considered rediculous that the Earth might have ever been frozen from the poles to the equator. The evidence won and we changed our knowledge.
Some things even went back and forth like the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs. It was volcanoes, then it was an impact, now we have evidence that the impact caused the volcanoes, then we have even more evidence of other impacts and their effect, then we have computer modeling of what an impact would do, then we have other palentological evidence of a decline in Mezozoic mega-fauna even BEFORE the impact and the volcanoes.
Science is self correcting. No one who can claim to be a scientist SHOULD ever say that what we know now is 100% correct. Everything is open to be falsified and corrected when new evidence comes to light.
Now we know there were bigger mammals in the age of the dinosaur. This REALLY isn't that big of a paradigm shift. All this evidence does is help complete our picture of mammal evolution.
I would like for you to answer the question at the begginging of this post, the one you forgot about. As a hint, answering it properly requires that you are capable of distinguishing between the ToE and a particular instantiation of the theory, in this case early mammalian evolution.
Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)