OK, I wasn’t around on here when this discussion happened, but reading over this is painful. Christian was asking a fair question - can you show me a hypothetical chain consistent with the fossil record. Within a few posts, Christian makes this clear again, saying that it only has to be plausible - not that we have to know for sure exactly that this is the actual descendant.
With such a question, we should have provided a ton of very useful and clear pictures. Instead, we went around for post after post talking about how we can’t know exact ancestry (which isn’t needed in this case anyway), and about how evolution produces trees or bushes (which is fine, but chains still exist along any lineage, and plausible ones are all that’s needed anyway).
Now, in all fairness, several people did give good information, and the homind sequence early on was good and was not defended - which it certainly could have been since it is plausible (or at least major sections of it). The later horse and whale discussions were good too. There is a series of cartoons that show what I think is desired here, on the Cosmos series. We need to make more of those, and in image form. I have several good pictures here, and don't know how to attach them, but you know the kinds of pictures I mean.
Christian may well have been too nitpicky later, and indeed did quibble over good chains, but am I the only one who feels her initial questions were fair, and that we failed miserably in answering them, even though we have tons of excellent examples of exactly what she wanted?
I think this is an area where the educated community really has some work to do - to make these clear and easy chains available - even if they have footnotes that we avoid in scientific papers, with phrases like “plausible”, “consistent with the fossil record”, and “exact lineages cannot be known for certain”.
-Equinox
_ _ _ ___ _ _ _
You know, it's probably already answered at
An Index to Creationist Claims...
(Equinox is a Naturalistic Pagan -
Naturalistic Paganism Home)