Transitional fossils not proof of evolution?

"Lowly"? We have the best job on the planet. All those molecular biologists, geneticists, physicists, and others of that ilk are simply envious. I mean, what other job can you have where you get to camp and hike, and generally play in the woods and have someone pay you for it?

Except it didn't. The Phylum Bryozoa for example didn't appear until the Ordovician (about 470 mya) - after the Cambrian. Other phyla, whose ancestors may have derived from generalized body plans in the Cambrian but are today recognized as distinct phyla, aren't observed in the fossil record until much later. Most of 'em are types that are very rarely fossilized, of course. However, the Bryozoa simply couldn't have evolved in the Cambrian, since they represent the first land plants. There's a period right at the Cambrian-Ord. boundary where on one side there are no land organisms, and on the other we see spores quite clearly representative of land plants. Sorry to burst your bubble. Not all phyla appeared in the Cambrian.

And I should correct myself - Phylum Bryophyta, not Bryozoa. Quick fingers doth oft make stupid mistakes.

The doppler effect you hear is the train leaving the station without you. Sorry DB, but the wild mustard relatives are all the same species: Brassica oleracea. Every one of them is a distinct, formally recognized variety, but they don't even rate the term sub-species I'm afraid. IOW, broccoli, cabbage, etc, are not evidence of macroevolution, which at a minimum requires speciation.Don't feel bad, I get my head slapped on a regular basis on this forum for much the same kind of mistake.

Heh. Who you talkin' to? I'm the guy that sees the fingerprints of macroevolution on a regular basis. Say, with two closely related species of Eleutherodactylus living on opposite sides of the same ridge with a transitional hybrid population between them. I don' need no steenkin' fossils! On the other hand, in spite of the striking morphological differences between the different varieties of Brassica olercea, for better or worse taxonomists have placed them in the same species - and hence by definition can't be considered evidence of macroevolution.Nice try on the save, though.

True enough. I never pretended to understand them anyway. I guess it would boil down to whether the creationists think broccoli, cabbage and brussel sprouts were different "kinds".