1 piece of evidence to disprove evolution..

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Imagine this. Super Species reigns over all, kills many species.

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Hmmmm, what species does this remind me of?As to cycles in the fossil record, well they are there, there are cycles of extinction and proliferation, these super-species aren't the cause but the cycles are there, you don't get the same thing every cycle though which is what you seem to be suggesting.

Why? What's so special about a carrion eater?

Well, from what I have gathered the fossil table is basically arranged from most simple to most complex organism ?from CrashFrog Well, in my naivity I assumed it had no natural predators [This message has been edited by Zealot, 08-18-2003]

Well, that may very well be, but predation isn't the only limit on population growth. After all if the only time you get to eat is when you find something (mostly) freshly dead - and you have only moderate ability to hasten that process yourself - then the size of your population becomes very dependant on food.Luckily (for T. Rex at the time) dead animals are a renewable resource.

crash there is no Evidence to say tyrannosaurus was a SCavenger or a Hunter.(could have been either) Most Agree it was a Hunter. I tend to believe it was alittle of both like Lions are today.

That may very well be... I'm of the (largely uninformed) opinion that T. Rex was mostly a scavenger with a limited ability to catch the occasional sick, weak sauropod. I think she was just too big to be a good hunter. But what do I know?

crashfrog,But then we have to ask ourselves how fast a Triceratops (etc) could run? I suspect slower than a T.Rex. The late Cretaceous arms race wasn't an escalation of speed, we can be relatively confident of that at least.Mark------------------
"I can't prove creationism, but they can't prove evolution. It is [also] a religion, so it should not be taught....Christians took over the school board and voted in creationism. That can be done in any school district anywhere, and it ought to be done." Says Kent "consistent" Hovind in "Unmasking the False Religion of Evolution Chapter 6."

The T-rex-was-a-scavenger debate concerns more than speed. One issue is its bipedal perch and tiny arms. It can't catch itself it falls, and an animal that heavy would crush its ribs if it came crashing to the ground. The tiny arms were pretty useless, but this would have been less of a disadvatage if t-rex made its living eating corpses rather than creating them.------------------
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This is rapidly devolving into a debate along the lines of "Star Destroyer vs. Starship Enterprise, who wins?" Nonetheless... Sure. But if the T. Rex is taller than most of its prey, it's attacking the backs of it's potential meals. With as dense ribs as those dinosaurs typically had, nothing the T Rex has in it's arsenal is going to make much of a dent.It's that disembowling claw of the dromaeosaurs, in my uninformed opinion, that really marks them as predators. T Rex just doesn't have the hardware to bring down Triceratops, it seems to me.

O dear.This isn't at all what I meant. I merely wanted to sketch a rather ridiculous scenario, based on the erroneous idea that evolution always replaces species with 'better' ones. I'm afraid you didn't catch my drift when I tried to point out that evolution would soon come to a grinding halt if it were true that it always optimizes all the features of a species. For that to be true, there would have to be such things as 'the perfect claw' and 'the perfect wing' et cetera. There aren't. A wing just needs to be good enough to enable a creature to survive long enough to produce offspring and hand down its traits. 'The perfect wing' might be the best thing there is to fly with, but if its properties are such that it hampers the creature's other functions, its propagation is compromised, to say the least. You realise of course that cancer is not a separate organism, don't you? It's just an abnormal growth of the body's own tissue.Cheers.

Well, wouldn't this be a creationist argument then ? Well, how can you say that a dove's wing is not the perfect wing for the dove ? I mean surely if 1 dove develops a mutation to produce a better wing (faster/longer flight), this would assume that the 'fitter' dove would have a greater chance of surviving to reproduce ? Thus after x years of mutation, the dove would have a perfect wing (for its body) ?Lets take a hypothetical example of a lion. Should 1 lion develop an ability to secrete poison from its bite, this would mean that that specific lion would only have to scratch or get a small bite out of its prey before the prey collapses and dies. This would surely be a substantial advantage over all the other lions. Thus this lion would in a very quick span replace lions without poisonous fangs. Also a lion today (after 100 000 years of evolution) would surely by default have the 'perfect' claw (for a lion) ? Any Lion that develops a stronger claw would mean his genes would most likely be passed on to the next generation (well most likely that is) ?Any spider forinstance that develops poisonous fangs will be at an advantage to any spider that doesn't have poisonous fangs, the species, will change and eventually a perfect species will be the end result ? Sorry , bad comparison. Just take a virus forinstance or some parasite that kills its host and thus itself in the process. Sorry cant remember the name or term of that. Either way, surely this would be a feasible analogy when comparing man and a nuclear holocaust to the Environment ?Cheers.

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Also a lion today (after 100 000 years of evolution) would surely by default have the 'perfect' claw (for a lion) ? Any Lion that develops a stronger claw would mean his genes would most likely be passed on to the next generation (well most likely that is) ?

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You point out the error in your own argument with your second sentence. If it has a "perfect" claw..then how could a stronger claw develop? There is no such thing as perfection. Even when a population is highly adaptive, mutation still occurs and allele frequencies change and the new variants can be acted on by selection. In any event, a lion with say less robust claws but a sperm count 1000 times higher than other lions could end up producing way more young and driving a relatively poor claw trait to high frequency in the population...evolution is not a goal directed process in terms of forming body plans....given the gross inefficiencies at the molecular and morphological level in most organisms this should be pretty clear.

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Well, how can you say that a dove's wing is not the perfect wing for the dove ? I mean surely if 1 dove develops a mutation to produce a better wing (faster/longer flight), this would assume that the 'fitter' dove would have a greater chance of surviving to reproduce ? Thus after x years of mutation, the dove would have a perfect wing (for its body) ?

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Yes, and no. The dove will develop a wing that best balances the many trade-offs involved in a doves life. The wing must produce enough thrust, lift, manouverability (sp?) to meet both it's food gathering, and predator escape needs (note that to escape a predator it doesn't need to be faster than the predator, only faster than the slowest dove). But it must also have as low as possible a food cost, both in terms of construction, maintanence and energy to use. It must be durable, but light. And so on, across a whole range of factors.So the dove will evolve a wing that balances the required factors to best increase it's reproductive chances. Note that it (probably) can't actually reach the best possible wing design to match these criteria because it has to move by small 'step-wise' change, each of which must be viable.Evolution rarely produces the 'best possible' anything, because the extra ability granted by 'best possible' is rarely worth it's biological cost.

I'd say it's an evolutionist argument against some creationist misunderstandings of evolution. Evolution doesn't necessarily zero in on the optimum of development. Usually, it settles for what is minimally required for survival until reproduction has taken place. Occasionally, it may do better than that, but if there is no selective pressure, better-than-necessary features will gradually disappear again. On the other hand, if there is a lot of selective pressure, things may tend to go toward some sort of optimum. But it would not necessarily be 'THE' optimum, i.e. the best possible solution. In most cases, it would be a local optimum, with very unlikely paths from there to a real optimum, if any. These paths are unlikely because they necessarily lead past less than (locally) optimal solutions, which are unlikely to survive the selective pressure. For a more indepth discussion of this subject I would refer you to Daniel Dennett's excellent book "Darwin's Dangeous Idea". Apparently, you didn't read the last sentence of what you quoted. Anyway, I'll rephrase what I said before: the dove's wing is a local optimum. It serves the bird quite well, but there's likely a design that would serve it even better. But it's unlikely that the dove will ever reach that better design because the development towards it would necessarily take it along a path that selective pressure would cut short. Only when circumstances change in such a way that the current wing design becomes a liability, then it will change substantially.Let me give you another example: the blind spot in our eyes. It's a peculiarity of the particular path that was followed in the evolutionary development that lead to the human eye. Our eyes are great, I won't deny it. But they would be even better without that darned blind spot. There are examples of eyes in nature that don't have a blind spot. So it is possible to have eyes without a blind spot. But, now that we have a blind spot, the developmental path that would take us from here to eyes without a blind spot is virtually impossible.Your examples of lions with poisonous fangs, lions with stronger claws, spiders with and without poisonous fangs, are all very cute, but you keep forgetting that there needs to be selective pressure for a trait to be propagated. Without it, mutations are just noise.I hope that by now you realise that a perfect species, as an end result of evolutionary development, is a misconception. Species can be at most well adapted. And species that are well adapted now, may be the losers of tomorrow.Cheers.

Ok, perhaps I can put this in a better way. There realy shouldn't exists a lion today with an 'inferior' claw correct ? Considering all other things equal, lions with superior claws (genetically) should not be found with lions with 'inferior' claws. Thus, as far as the lion is concerned its claw should be perfect. Now however, a new mutation occurs which provides one of the lions with poinsonous claws. All things else being equal, or more or less equal, IE: same sperm count as they all are pretty much from the same genetic line, this lion with its mutation should reign supreme ?In the same if you have tarantula that develops a poison equivalent to that of a black widdow's poinson , all other things being equal, this spider should have such a distinct advantage that its offspring will have a significant advantage. I realise an organism might not have a 'perfect' organ ect, as it would still be evolving, and there is no 'goal' for the ultimate creature, however surely by default that would be achieved ? Taking all other things into account and assuming that something which has evolved for billions of years should be fertile and no other similar species near it will be 1 000 times more fertile. Yes I see your argument that a more fertile organism would produce more offspring etc, however those would be less suited to achieve reproductive age and also reproducing, especially in the case when they compete for reproduction rights as in male lions.Something as drastic as poisonous fangs vs non-poisonous fangs would surely also easily overcome the offspring of another more fertile organism ?thanks.In any event, a lion with say less robust claws but a sperm count 1000 times higher than other lions could end up producing way more young and driving a relatively poor claw trait to high frequency in the population...evolution is not a goal directed process in terms of forming body plans....given the gross inefficiencies at the molecular and morphological level in most organisms this should be pretty clear.