TempestTossed

scott asked me to find a site with two or more fossils in the expected evolutionary order. I sent a question to Daniel Moellec, a UK paleontologist, with this question: "I heard that trilobites died out ten million years before dinosaurs existed. Is there a geologic site out there that contains these two sets of layers, one with a dinosaur fossil and another with trilobites?" He never got back to me, so I sent the question to "Arctica." Arctica said: "I'm sorry I can't answer your question, not being a geologist and with no field experience. As you will see from my profile, I am just a reader in the subject of the evolution of life on Earth, and I know very little about rocks and where to go if you want to find particular ones. It is very possible that at some sites you will find Triassic rocks overlying Permian rocks, but they would have to be terrestrial strata for the Triassic period (if you wanted to find dinosaurs in them, and marine strata for the Permian period. So it might be a bit of a tall order. You might want to contact a geologist. There are places in England that might qualify, at the boundary of where Triassic rocks and Permian rocks lie at the surface. But a geologist (or a professional palaeontologist) would be more able to help you here." I should have expected that it would be asking a bit much to find a marine fossil and a terrestrial fossil at the same site. What question should I ask next?

Thanks for clearing up that misunderstanding, Bob. When you preceded your quotes of Dr. Shubin with, "You use Tiktaalik as a transitional form. The peer reviewed articles are saying Tiktaalik do not indicate this.", I thought for sure, wrongly, that you were using the quotes of Dr. Shubin to prove that he doesn't think that the Tiktaalik was a transitional form. But it turns out that your complaint is really about what evolutionists claimed in the past, and now they are rearranging their case to claim that the Tiktaalik is their only smoking gun. Well, maybe they did behave that way, I don't know. For sure, I have a similar complaint against creationists since they claimed that a fish with legs is as ridiculous as horse feathers. But now that we have a fish with bony jointy digity tetrapod-like fins, whatever complaints you had about the shifting goalposts of evolutionists don't seem to be all that relevant. The theory of evolution very elegantly fits the reality of the Tiktaalik, and creationists abandon their ridicule and adapt to the Tiktaalik just like they would adapt to the discovery of a feathered horse or anything else imaginable.

scott, I think that your assessment of Tiktaalik being an amphibian is a good call. That is very close to the chosen taxonomic classification of the Tiktaalik. Perhaps, when leading creationists collectively concluded that the Tiktaalik is just a fish, they dug themselves in a hole. I don't know why they make judgments like those. There was a point brought up earlier in the thread that walruses are a good example of how the transition from land mammals to aquatic mammals can occur. I would like to let you know that there is a difference between the mainline theory of evolution and the Fred Williams theory of evolution. The Fred Williams theory of evolution is where a wolf jumps into the ocean and attempts to live (see this thoroughly-researched biological thesis report). The mainline theory of evolution uses evidence from the fossil record and current biodiversity to reconstruct a sensible theory of gradual transition (land walking, shore dwelling, swimming, amphibious, aquatic). There is quite a bit of detail in this talkorigins.org page here. It is not grounded in speculation. The argument is rooted in the fossil evidence.

Bob, I want to thank you for confronting the evidence. I want to offer you in return a warning against believing creationists who quote scientists. I don't know for sure if it was you or some other creationist writer who first quoted Dr. Shubin like that, but for now I'll assume it is someone else, because I found the same quote in an article written by Casey Luskin, a writer for the Discovery Institute. And you are an honest person, and an honest person would not quote Dr. Shubin as dishonestly as I discovered. Let me explain. You said, Well it turns out that Dr. Shubin actually very much seemed to be talking about what evidence "has been" unavailable BEFORE the discovery of the Tiktaalik, not what remained unavailable afterward. The quote comes from the abstract of the article (not the article itself), and the complete abstract is right here. I'll put in bold the relevant statements just so the original meaning is clear. Using the quote like Luskin did is extremely misleading and is ethically no different from manufacturing quotes outright. People normally call it "quote out of context," because the original context provides the original meaning, but the new context distorts the original meaning, giving a new meaning for the gain of the dishonest quoter. The quote is bad enough. Perhaps a more important point is this one: if we are going to debate this stuff seriously, we should not have to depend on the opinions of scientists. What we have is fish fins with bones, joints and digits. If a particular scientist does not believe that to be a transitional form, then does that really make a difference? I think the evidence here is simple enough that we don't need to rely on intellectual authorities to decide what we believe. The case against you is very compelling. I very much hope you make some sort of concession, big or small.

I am not talking about the TV show. Be careful that you don't facilitate the mistaken impression that you didn't know that CSI is a genuine field of study, because I know that you are more informed than that. I am talking about CSI, the field of study that uses science and technology to gather evidence in criminal investigations. For example, here is an abstract of a case that matched a set of fractured bones with a victim. Check out the sort of relevant detail they can gain from bones alone. From Elsevier.com

The "no new information" thing is a very common objection, and it has a very serious dysfunction: information is not defined. There is no universal definition of "information" within the study of genetics, because it is presumed that the gene code was not written by anyone. Of course creationists DO believe that the gene code was "written" by someone, and so it is their responsibility to offer a definition of genetic "information" so that information can be objectively quantified and their claim can be tested. Without a definition, then the claim is simply word salad. I have asked the skeptics to offer a definition. The intuitive way to quantify information would be very simple: just count the number of nucleotides (U, C, A, G), and more nucleotides means more information. This means that the genetic information contained in a population of two organisms increases by 50% if S@xual reproduction produces one more organism. But creationists don't seem to think this counts. If so, then it is not enough to give ambiguous objections like, "The child genome is just a copy of the parents." No, not really. The child genome is a genetic recombination of both parent genomes, a recombination relying on random elements that will allow differences among siblings, with some random mutations thrown in: some insertions, some replacements, some deletions. What creationists need are the specifics. Find a way to objectively quantify information that makes sense, and then give us an example with the numbers! That is all there is to it! EDIT: Perhaps my argument was geared more toward the common "information never increases" objection, but I think maybe the "no new information" argument is slightly different. And a similar dysfunction is present: "new information" is not defined. Nobody on Earth has the same genome as I do. For that matter, every genome except clones and identical twins are unique. Does my own conception not count as "new information"? If not, then you will need to back up your claim with a definition of "new information" and appropriate evidence. Making the claim without that essential definition is, again, word salad.

Silent spring: Deep in the radioactive bowels of the smashed Chernobyl reactor, a strange new lifeform is blooming. This is a captivating article pertaining to life found in a place that we would not commonly expect. The fungus actually thrives from the energy of the nuclear radiation.

I can't tell simply by looking at photos whether or not the Tiktaalik is fish, amphibian or something else. It could be a weird snake for all I know. I have to depend on the reporting of first-hand observers. If it is something other than a fish, then it is probably something that David Menton would have figured out. He has a Ph.D in biology, and he seems to assert very confidently in an online article that, "Whatever else we might say about Tiktaalik, it is a fish. Like nearly all bony fishes, these fish have small pelvic fins, retain fin rays in their paired appendages and have well-developed gillsâ€â€Âall consistent with an entirely aquatic life style." I wouldn't necessarily take his word on it, but nobody as of yet has denied that particular claim.

I can't help you with #2, but here is what you might be looking for pertaining to #1: http://www.ianjuby.org/sedimentation/index.html Good luck.

The theory is that Tiktaalik used its four bony fins (normal fish do not have bones in their fins) to crawl on land. When the lake, river or swamp they were living in dried up in the summer, they would shuffle to another watery spot. They breathed air through their lungs (lungfish). There are actually such fish living today (only they hibernate in the dry mud), and they are also four-finned with bones (no joints). A mutation that caused a hard shell instead of a fish-like soft shell allowed them to lay eggs on land. Since land was lush with vegetation and free of predators, there would be no reason to go back to water. More natural selection allowed greater mobility, which then led to reptiles and the rest of all of us tetrapods. Some creationists criticize the idea that Tiktaalik was a shuffler, not a walker, because a walking fish is what the popular public had in mind. But, if there is an important difference, a shuffling fish would be a much more sensible evolutionary transition than a fully-walking fish, thus undercutting the objection. The walrus supposedly evolved from land-walkers, much like the ancestors of whales and dolphins, so walruses, while not currently an intermediate species, I think would be a good example of how such evolution can occur (they can live both in water and on land). The idea that there can be a fish that walks on land has long been an idea that was ridiculed by the creationist crowd. The Answers in Genesis cartoon was removed from my post due to hotlinking, but I uploaded a copy to Imageshack, so maybe this one will stay: The cartoon was drawn in 2000. Since the Tiktaalik was discovered in 2006, I doubt that such a cartoon would be drawn again. When creationists make predictions about what will not be found because evolution didn't happen, their predictions seem to fail again and again. But one thing they can do all the time is attribute the glory of God's 6000-year-old creation to absolutely anything you can imagine, including everything that they predicted would not be found. How can we know what the Tiktaalik did? We can't know for absolutely certain, but I think we can make some pretty good estimates based on the skeletal physiology and comparisons to present-day biota. A lot can be ascertained from a skeleton--ask anyone trained in CSI. There is no need to take a postmodernist approach that everything that happened in the past is hopelessly uncertain. Things of the past can be known.

I think I was too harsh on Cameron and Comfort. Kirk is of course wrong, but, in being demonstrably wrong, he is more right than the creationists that nobody can possibly prove wrong for certain, the ones who carefully choose their battles and make unfalsifiable claims such that they are "not even wrong." But Cameron and Comfort are more scientific, even lacking the doctorates. They rightly predicted that, if descent from a common ancestor did not happen, we would not expect to see transitional forms, such as a crocoduck. They then called the Archaeopteryx "fully bird" as if one would discover it is just a bird and nothing else upon closer examination. And this is exactly what would be expected if special creation occurred. This is not unlike the implication of this cartoon from Answers in Genesis: Haha, fish with legs... ridiculous! But, whoops, it actually turns out that there is a fish with legs in the fossil record! It is the famous Tiktaalik rosaea. The theory of evolution fulfills the predictions, and all that creationism can do is once more adapt to the reality by saying that it is just another creation of God. Don't believe me? Here is a headline from Answers in Genesis: "Gone fishin' for a missing link?" Catchy headline as always. Here is an excerpt from the article: "Because evolutionists want to discover transitional forms, when they find a very old fish with leg-bone-like bones in its fins, they want to interpret this as evidence that it is some sort of transitional creature. However, other fish seem to have the same sort of structure as stated above, and these bones are not constructed as one would expect for weight-bearing legs. It may be just another example of the wonderful design of our Creator God." Well, Answers in Genesis, OK, so much for your cartoon. I guess that means pigs can fly, after all.

Hi, scott, I hope you stick around. This forum is very small, but I find that to be a good thing. Debate is polite, which I think is ironic since the heading on every page calls my position a fairytale. I can live with that, because I implicitly return the sentiments! There is a thread I started in the forum that hasn't gotten any attention yet here: http://www.evolutionfairytale.com/forum/in...?showtopic=1784

Evidence for Macroevolution: The Crocoduck and the crocoduck substitute A year ago, Christian evangelists Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron faced off in a national televised debate, against Brian and Kelly of the Rational Response Squad, over the question, "Does God exist?". It was an epic battle royale: embarrassing activist ideologues vs. embarrassing activist ideologues. Comfort and Cameron wanted to make the point that God exists as evidenced by the design of life. Darwinism provides an alternative explanation for the design, so the God team needed to strike it down. Ray Comfort, in the second half, said: "Now there is something called microevoluton. This is very different. Microevoluton is adaptation within a species. Look at dogs. You've got the tiny Chihuahua and the Great Dane. They're very different, but they're both dogs. Or horses; you've got zebras and donkeys, you've got the dwarf pony and the draft horse. They're very different, but they're horses! Horses produce horses, and dogs produce dogs. Adaptation within a species is totally different than man evolving from an entirely different species. Science has never found a genuine transitional form that is one kind of animal crossing over into another kind either living or in the fossil record. And there's supposed to be billions of them. Now what I am about to show you does not exist. These were actually created by a graphic artist. But I want you to keep your eye out for this, because this is what evolutionists have been searching for for hundreds of years. Alright, and, if you find one of these, you could become rich and famous. So here's some transitional forms. This is called the crocoduck." Cameron then showed a picture of the "crocoduck." After some abusive mutterings and laughs from the atheists, Kirk Cameron went on to show a picture of a "bull-frog" (half bull and half frog) and a "sheep-dog" (half sheep and half dog). He didn't know it, but the discovery of any one of those three specimens would be more likely to send the theory of evolution into disarray. Why? The explanation lies in the phylogenetic tree. Presently-living animals--like crocodiles, ducks, cattle, frogs, sheep, and dogs--all exist at the tips of the branches of our family tree, and they did not survive from long into the past. Crocodiles did not evolve from ducks, ducks did not evolve from crocodiles, and nobody is proposing that they did. Crocodiles and ducks both have known evolutionary lineages. To find a "crocoduck" would contradict both theories of lineage, and it would actually be a huge problem for the theory of evolution. Imagine a tree with two branches--at the trunk, these two branches diverge, until they get to the two ends, when they join up again, forming a loop. We don't ever see trees like that. Once the branches split, they stay split. If they join up at both ends in a circle, that would be a dilemma for biologists, much like if we ever found a "crocoduck" or a "sheep-dog" or a "bull-frog." We would be more likely to explain it with genetic engineering than natural evolution, if anything. When asked to think of a cross between a duck and another species, a child may come up with a platypus. After all, a platypus is a lactating mammal that lays eggs, and it’s beak and webbed feet bear at least a superficial resemblance to a duck. So what did Kirk Cameron think of the platypus? "Now there is a mammal with hair and a bill like a duck. Well, yeah! It's a strange one, and that's exactly how God made it! And there's plenty of strange animals like that. Nature is observable proof that every animal brings forth after its own kind. No one has ever seen a horse produce a non-horse, or a bird produce anything but another bird." So, if we ever find a real crocoduck, biologists would be thrown into confusion, but Kirk Cameron would have no trouble explaining it--just another strange animal that God made. And then Ray Comfort would take a victorious huff on his cigar as evolutionists scramble for an answer. Archaeopteryx--the crocoduck substitute. To his credit, Kirk Cameron did mention the Archaeopteryx in the debate. "Even the famous fossil Archaeopteryx--said to be a reptile transitioning into a bird--if you do the research you'll find out it has been shown to be fully bird--a pirching bird, it has feathers." Well, I did do the research. Cameron seems to think that one or two features that identify it as a bird is enough to settle the debate on whether the Archaeopteryx is a reptile, a bird, or something in between. Using a similar argument, I suppose you can also call the Elephant Man fully elephant. Ray Comfort said on his website IntelligentDesignVersusEvolution.com, A transitional form (or missing link) is an example of one species "evolving" into another species. Excited scientists thought they had found one when they discovered "Archaeopteryx." The fossil led to the theory that the dinosaurs did not become extinct, but rather all turned into birds. The Field Museum in Chicago displayed what was believed to be an archaeopteryx fossil on October 4-19, 1997. It was hailed as "Archaeopteryx: The Bird That Rocked the World." However, Dr. Alan Feduccia (evolutionary biologist at the University of North Carolina), said, "Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of ‘paleo-babble’ is going to change that." [science, February 5, 1993]. Whenever a scientist is quoted in order to support a position the scientist probably does not agree with, it helps to look up what that scientist actually thinks in whole on the matter. Discover Magazine interviewed Dr. Alan Feduccia in February, 2003. Q. Creationists have used the bird-dinosaur dispute to cast doubt on evolution entirely. How do you feel about that? A. Creationists are going to distort whatever arguments come up, and they've put me in company with luminaries like Stephen Jay Gould, so it doesn't bother me a bit. Archaeopteryx is half reptile and half bird any way you cut the deck, and so it is a Rosetta stone for evolution, whether it is related to dinosaurs or not. These creationists are confusing an argument about minor details of evolution with the indisputable fact of evolution: Animals and plants have been changing. The corn in Mexico, originally the size of the head of a wheat plant, has no resemblance to modern-day corn. If that's not evolution in action, I do not know what is. Feduccia called the Archaeopteryx, "half reptile and half bird any way you cut the deck" and "a Rosetta Stone for evolution." Allow me to explain why. It is not enough to focus on only the avian features of the bird like Comfort and Cameron do. If it is truly a transition between reptiles and birds, then both sets of features must be considered. I'll tell you about the most obvious features (TalkOrigins.org has a complete list). Reptilian features of the ArchaeopteryxTEETH -- no modern bird has a toothed beak. THREE CLAWS ON EACH WING -- no modern bird has clawed wings with the exception of the hoatzin (two claws on each wing). LONG BONY TAIL -- modern birds have short tailbones. UNFUSED TRUNK VERTEBRA -- all trunk vertebra in modern birds are fused. NECK CONNECTS TO BACK OF SKULL -- modern bird necks connect at bottom of skull. Avian features of the ArchaeopteryxFEATHERS -- a distinction of birds in the modern day, though plenty of feathered dinosaur fossils have been found. OPPOSABLE BIG TOE -- three toes go forward and one goes backward for perching on branches. In reptiles, all toes point forward. If you are not convinced, then examine the fossil images yourself. There is not just one fossil of the Archaeopteryx. There are 8 of them, 7 are complete. Two detailed sketches are seen online here: Berlin Specimen London Specimen Compare the Archaeopteryx fossils to bird and dinosaur skeletons to see where they differ and match: Normal bird skeleton Archosaur skeleton Follow Cameron's suggestion and do your own research. The inescapable conclusion seems to be that Feduccia is right: this bird is indeed a Rosetta Stone of the theory of evolution. Or, if you prefer, what we have here is a crocoduck substitute.

Bob, thank you for starting this topic! At first blush, it would seem as though paraconformities are explained simply by there being a lack of geological activity in that certain place and interval of time. Without deposits, you don't have layers. But I anticipate that you already know about this explanation, and you want more detail, such as how it is that geological activity did not occur in some places but did occur in others. On this point, you will just have to do your own homework. Maybe you can read a specialized publication, or you can interview by email or phone an experienced geologist (pretend you are working on a college assignment, because they don't have much tolerance for creationists), find out what the answers are, and then give your thoughts on the matter. I imagine, taking an untrained stab in the dark, that the correct answer is somewhat mundane. In the middle of continents (away from tumultuous oceans, rivers, tectonic edges and weather patterns), there is simply no good reason to expect geological activity in the absence of a global phenomenon. Alternatively, perhaps you believe that the standard history of the planet does not fit with the existence of paraconformities. If so, then you will need to explain why you think this. And then we will have a point of disagreement. As it stands, I just don't know exactly what the problem is.

I think it helps to separate the scientific or philosophical strength of a theory from the popular or political strength. And, also, the popular strength is separate from the political strength. Intelligent design seems to have the upper hand popularly, but evolution seems to have the upper hand politically. Courts have always ruled against intelligent design and in favor of evolution, and evolutionists are much more impassioned about their cause. In a political debate, evolutionists will get much more fired up than creationists if a candidate contradicts their position. And evolutionists have the positions of power in academia and science. The evolutionists generally win the debates, from the high-class debates between leaders to the low-level debates between friends and Internet rivals, probably because the evidence appears on the side of evolution, right or wrong. These elements of power mean that intelligent design is on the losing side. The young generation of today (my generation) is strongly against creationism and for evolution, and we are the future. Scientifically and philosophically, I think both positions have generally stayed the same. I can't put my finger on any major fundamental change in either position since the 1990s. Intelligent design was not born in 1990s, but it has been around since before Darwin, at the latest, beginning with William Paley and his watchmaker argument. And the roots can be traced back to antiquity, when people first explained life and the universe with the gods. Only in the 1990s did it become a political/social strategy, a rebranding of creationism. A good strategy, in my opinion, but ultimately a failed one, because it never had much of a chance.