John Harshman wrote:
Fletis Humplebacker
"John Harshman
Fletis Humplebacker


That isn't in dispute, his reference is the geological record, not a
stop watch. The point is that it was, by all accounts I've seen so far,
sudden. Hense the term "explosion", which was contrary to the traditional
view of evolution.

Clearly there was something sudden going on, if your definition of
"sudden" includes periods of 5 million years.

It does geologically speaking. It would not be sudden if we were
talking about tax rebates.


Right. I'm asking you to keep this in mind. That definition of "sudden"
is not a big problem for standard Darwinian theory.


Sure it is. According to many or most of those who do this
professionally the suddeness is a big problem, hense the theories
that go beyond Darwinian thinking to accomodate it. I've posted
quotes that demonstrate it, your cognitive dissonance doesn't
make them disappear.


You have confused PE with the Cambrian explosion.


No, but the mother of all suddenness of life forms doesn't
make the case for slow gradual change. Or small incremental
ones for that matter.


I can understand something like the environment favoring birds with
bigger beaks to dominate the breed. I don't think we need to see
such a transition in the fossil record to know it happens. The kinds of
macro-transformations of limbs changing from flippers to legs wouldn't
be so quick that it would leave no trace. I've seen nothing that suggests
a natural transformation like that would happen in 100,000 years.

Indeed it wouldn't. It would probably happen in many steps over millions
of years. And in fact we have transitional fossils for those
intermediate steps in whales, for example. We have good evidence from
both the fossil record and the genetics of living species for the
transformation. Whether it was natural is not something we can test.


Let us know when you come up with some evidence for the transitions.

Gingerich, P. D., M. ul Haq, I. S. Zalmout, I. H. Khan, and M. S.
Malkani. 2001. Origin of whales from early artiodactyls: Hands and feet
of Eocene Protocetidae from Pakistan. Science 293:2239-2242.

Good example of the type of circular reasoning I see so often for
those who make the evidence fit the theories.


http://www.trueorigin.org/ng_ap01.asp

It was half of a pulley-shaped anklebone, known as an astragalus, belonging
to another new species of whale. A Pakistani colleague found the other half.
When Gingerich fitted the two pieces together, he had a moment of humbling
recognition…. Here was an anklebone, from a four-legged whale dating back
to 47 million years, that closely resembled the homologous anklebone in an
artiodactyls. Suddenly he realized how closely whales are related to antelopes
(p. 31, emp. added).

“Well-preserved ankles of the earliest ancient whales are now needed to confirm
that the traits seen in the new skeletons are indeed inherited from early artiodactyls
and not a result of convergent evolution,” Rose said.

The Nature article is deceitful. The headline gives, and the conclusion takes
away. It starts out with “Almost like a whale: Fossils bridge gap between land
mammals and whales . . . . Fifty million years ago, two mammals roamed the
desert landscapes of what is now Pakistan. They looked a bit like dogs. They
were, in fact, land-living, four-legged whales. Their new-found fossils join other
famous missing links, such as the primitive bird Archaeopteryx, that show how
one group of animals evolved into another.” Then it proceeds to undermine
everything it just said. The fossils are not anything like whales except for alleged
similarities in ear bones and heel bones (of which neither has anything to do with
whale function), and there are other scientists who disagree strongly that this fossil
has anything to do with whales. The article glosses over tremendous anatomical
differences between the fossil and whales and yet assumes that these formidable
evolutionary changes must have occurred rapidly without leaving a trace in the
fossil record of hundreds of transitional forms that must have been required. The
opening paragraph lies about Archaeopteryx, which is not ancestral to birds (earlier
birds are found in the fossil record), and it presents, in confident terms, a flimsy
observation that is highly disputed or irrelevant to this serious problem in the
evolutionists’ story. For shame, Nature!

The pictures on the Science page also stretch the truth, portraying Rodhocetus
as whale-like as possible. What they don’t tell you is that most of the bones are
inferred. Just a few fragments were found, and the rest is artistic license (See
Creation magazine, Sept-Nov 2001, pp. 10-14.)

What the bones show are extinct animals who were perfectly adapted to their own
environment, without any desire or pressure to evolve into something else. The
crucial features the evolutionists are basing their stories on are just skeletal features
– teeth, ear cavities, and foot bones. What about all the other specialized features
of whales – sonar, spouts on the top of their heads, the ability to dive deep, and
much more, for which there is not a shred of evidence of transitional forms? The
only way you can arrange extinct animals into a family tree is with a prior commitment
to evolution. This is circular reasoning. Beaver have webbed feet, too; are they
evolving into dolphins? The fossil evidence shows a wide assortment of adapted
animals that appear abruptly then went extinct. The rest is storytelling. These articles
also highlight a reappearing difficulty for evolution, that the genetic/molecular family
trees do not match the morphological family trees.



Thewissen, J. G. M., E. M. Williams, L. J. Roe, and S. T. Hussain. 2001.
Skeletons of terrestrial cetaceans and the relationship of whales to
artiodactyls. Nature 413: 277-281.

....from the same page just prior to the above rebuttal.


Whale Ancestor Alleged 09/19/2001
“Everyone will agree that these animals are whales,” says an Ohio paleontologist
about a wolf-sized creature that probably only got wet walking across streams,
according to a report in Nature. But that may be wishful thinking. Molecular
analyses put very different creatures in the ancestral line of whales, and rival teams
see the hippopotamus as a more likely candidate.

Because cetaceans are so unlike any land mammal, with their legs as paddles
and their nostrils atop their heads, it has been immensely difficult to place them in
the evolutionary scheme of things . . . . “Rapid evolutionary change, be it molecular,
ecological or anatomical, is extremely difficult to reconstruct, and the speed with
which cetaceans took to the water may make their bones an unreliable guide to their
ancestry,” he says [evolutionary biologist Ulfur Arnason of the University of Lund in
Sweden]. Arnason believes the two camps will remain divided, at least for now.
“There’s no point trying to reach some sort of consensus based on compromise.
It has often been very difficult to reconcile morphological and molecular opinions,”
he says.

Science Magazine also has a report with pictures of reconstructions of two of the
specimens. National Geographic, as expected, joined in the celebration of the
new fossil, but admits “Despite this evidence that cetaceans (whales, dolphins,
and porpoises) evolved from artiodactyls, substantial discrepancies remain,
Rose said. "If cetacaeans belong to artiodactyls," he said, "then similarities in the
cranial and dental morphologies of mesonychians and cetaceans must be the result
of convergent evolution or must have been lost in artiodactyls.



Shedlock, A. M., M. C. Milinkovitch, and N. Okada. 2000. SINE evolution,
missing data, and the origin of whales. Syst. Biol. 49:808-817.


Is the missing data still missing or did they fill it in with their beliefs ?
The problem I have with this sort of thinking is that the mammal is supposed
to not only survive but thrive in a competitive environment as it's leg's
slowly morph to flippers ( slowly even by PE standards ).


That should do for a start. New fossils and new molecular analyses make
this conclusion stronger every year.


I'd rather base my conclusions on unbiased evidence.


And yes, you are right, we can't test the cause although we can draw
conclusions based on what we know. You believe miracles are natural,
I believe they are supernatural.


Odd way to put it.


That's what it amounts to isn't it? Even if things happened as a natural
outcome of matter interacting with matter, life got amazingly complex,
fine tuned for it's environment and diverse rather quickly. I don't
have enough faith to believe that it is all a quirk of electro-magnetic
forces.


All you ever do is back up assertions with more assertions.


You can live in your little insulated world if you like. But don't you
ever feel like a mushroom?

No, I feel freed from the burdens of the fundamentalism that has
enslaved your thinking. I can look at both sides of the issues.


But if all you ever do is look at creationist web sites, how can you
consider that to be more than one side?


Good example of what I mean since I have posted from secular
sources as well and the ones from the creationist sites were primarily
from secular sources. Quoting Gould's 20 year old beef isn't evidence
that their words were misrepresented.