Come on down. We will throw a neck-tie party for ya! :-)
The reason I mentioned that footprint bit, is that it is the absolutely
weakest evidence since we don't know where it came from and aren't certain of
its age and aren't certain of what made it.
>
>Of course, your "evidence" is subject to massive interpretation. We all know
>this. That you choose to view it as "proving" true transitionals is your
>privilege. But it's sort of funny--when a paleontologist like Eldredge speaks
>about evolution he never talks about trilobites (his specialty) or fish to
>amphibian. He tells stories about hominids! That's how strong this
> "evidence" is!
>
Changing the topic?
>Here is just one example. You continue to rely on Ahlberg and Milner re:
>panderichthyids. Is there interpretation going on there? Most decidely. They
>didn't even refer to the Lower Devonian trackway you won't let anyone
>mention. That's telling in and of itself, since it has been around since
1986. Convenient to leave that datum out.
See the above. This trackway is useless as scientific evidence. They leave it
out because few accept the importance of this. K.S. Thomson with whom you
agree down below writes:
"But the Australian trackway is inconclusive both as a record of tetrapods
(however 'good' the track, a definitive set of skeletal remains is still
needed) and with respect to age. It is listed as 'possible Early Devonian'."
K.S. Thomson, The Origin of Tetrapods" American Journal of Science 295a p.48
and
"As long as the geological age of the reported 'Early Devonian' trackway
from Australia is tentative and no skeletal remains are known, to conclude
that tetrapods arose in, and radiated from, East Gondwana is premature.". Ibid
p. 52.
I bet you will disagree with this since you only agree with an expert when he
agrees with you.
>I remember back to the days when Ashby Camp stomped you on this issue (this
>is MY interpretation of that debate).
Yeah. It was funny that Ashby wanted to spend most of the time talking about
the whale transition, which I admitted was a weaker argument than the
amphibian transition. He got off the amphibian argument relatively quickly.
> He pointed out how you held the trackway evidence to a much higher standard
>than you did the Ahlberg and Milner evidence, which has you doing what you
>accuse so many others of doing: conveniently ignoring the problems to your
>view. He put it well when he wrote:
>
Wo fan doi zhe ge (Mandarin -I disagree with this).
We KNOW where the Ahlberg and Milner fossils came from. They came from Upper
Devonian rocks at Scat Craig, Scotland (P. E. Ahlberg, "Tetrapod or
Near-tetrapod fossils from the Upper Devonian of Scotland,"
Nature, 354, Nov. 28, 1991, p. 300-301), the Upper Devonian Old Red Sandstone
of East Greenland, (Joseph T. Gregory, "Vertebrates in Geologic Time Scale",in
Arie Poldervaart, editor, The Crust of the Earth,(Washington: Geological
Society of America, 1955), p. 603). We have the bones and know that this is a
tetrapod.
We know none of this with your Devonian trackway. We don't know where it came
from since it was found in the courtyard stones of a house built in 1873. They
write:
"We have located several quarries in the Mt. Bepcha region, but
at the time of writing have not been successful in determining
the source of the courtyard flagstones.
"On the basis of the Carter document and lithological
similarities, we are convinced that the courtyard material was
quarried locally from units of the Grampians Group."
~Anne Warren, robert Jupp and Barrie Bolton, "Earliest Tetrapod
Trackway," Alcheringa 10, 1986, p. 183
Being convinced is not the same as knowing. They also are not sure it is a
tetrapod.
"No digit impressions are preserved and there is no tail or body
trace. Because of this there is no certainty that the marks form
a tetrapod track, but their highly regular nature indicates that
they do."~Anne Warren, Robert Jupp and Barrie Bolton, "Earliest
Tetrapod Trackway," Alcheringa 10, 1986, p. 184
>"At the risk of stating the obvious, the matter boils down to whether one
>believes that the morphological gap between any of the sarcopterygians and
>the earliest tetrapod was crossed by Darwinian processes without leaving a
> trace of the forms that must have existed between them. As the evolutionist
>sees it,the gap is too small and the vagaries of fossilization are too great
>to expect, let alone demand, fossil evidence of the transition. As the
>creationist sees it, the gap is so large that the number of transtional forms
>needed to cross it would be too great to completely escape fossilization and
>discovery. These differences in how one weighs the evidence have much to do
>with on'es philosophical or theological commitments.
>
To paraphrase Alice, Conclusions first; reasons later? What was wrong with the
transitional sequence I laid out? You give no reasons for rejecting it except
that you conclude that evolution can't be true. The valid way of rejecting
something is to explain what is wrong with the sequence before you give the
conclusions.
>It is in this context that statements from internationally known
>evolutionists, such as Robert L. Carroll and Keith Steward Thomson,that there
>are no transitional forms between fishes and tetrapods take on such
>importance. Their philosophical lenses are finely ground for seeing
>transitional forms. If with full knowledge of -Acanthostega- and the
>panderichthyids,Dr. Thomson can declare that 'we still do not have any really
>intermediate fossil forms between fishes and tetrapods,' how can creationists
>who hold that same opinion be viewed as zealots who care nothing about the
>data?"
>
You may be misunderstanding what Thomson is saying. Six pages after your
quote, he writes of Panderichthys and Elpistostege:
These two genera are particularly important because, of all lobe-finned
fishes, they are most closely similar to the early amphibians. Key features
include: the skull roof pattern with frontals, parietals and postparietals,
low position of the external naris at the mouth margin, absence of
extratemporal." (The origin of Tetrapods, American Journal of Science 295a p.
45.)
>Ashby's question to you, Glenn, is still good today.
>
>These stratomorphic forms are not true"intermediates" in the Darwinian sense.
>There is no gradual sequence which should show the morphing of new species,
>as Darwin predicted there should be. You have even admitted such in the past.
I don't know of a single evolutionist who believes that there should be a
gradual morphing of one species into another. Darwin may have believed that,
but Darwin was wrong. Let me give a rather delicate example.
Almost all mammals have, ahem, penile bones, which aid in rapid copulation.
Mankind lacks such paraphenalia. There is no gradual series in which such a
feature is lost and no evolutionist would expect one either. It is either
there or not there.
>Thus, you face the same dilemma as Dr. Eldredge:
>
>"Either you stick to conventional theory despite the rather poor fit of the
>fossils, or you focus on the empirics and say that saltation looks like a
>reasonable model of the evolutionary process--in which case you must
> embrace a set of rather dubious biological propositions."
>
>I guess in your case you choose dubious. In fact, back in the whale debate
>days, you wrote that gradual transitionalism was "an unreasonable expectation
>and requires that one ignore the environmental and adaptational needs of
> the transitional animal to survive."
You misquote me. I in my original response to your challenge to show a
transitional form I clearly defined that view as consisting of morphing.
>
>This ipse dixit still amazes me. It's in the same league as "imagined
>selective advantage" in that it is easy to say without any proof
> whatsoever.
>It is there to bridge the unbridgable. It is a convenient rhetorical ploy
> to
>ignore the major problems.
>
>In this case, the major problem is the lack of true transitions. Why aren't
>they there? Glenn says it's unreasonable to expect them! (Gee, that Chuck
>Darwin. What an unreasonable lout he was.)
>
I wasn't going to quote from my original post about what a transition is but
now I must. I wrote:
<<<< If by transitional series one means that there should be an
infinite gradation of morphology from one form to another, like
the morphing done to pictures of politicians in political TV ads,
then he is using a bad concept of the nature of genealogical
traits. This is the view that Wise and most non-evolutionary
creationists suggest. That view of heredity is almost that of
Pythagoras who believed that life began with a blending of male
and female fluids. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1982, 7, 994.) In
this note, when I use the term morphing, I am meaning a smooth
gradation between one form and another like the face of Clinton
turning into the face of Jimmy Carter or Hillary in a political
ad. Those types of sequences consist of hundreds of
intermediates. But this is NOT how transitions occur in the
fossil record.
Traits are not analog in nature; they are quantized. I have
blue eyes; my three sons have brown eyes. They do not have
bluish-brown or brownish blue eyes. In the fossil record, horses
have one toe or three toes. Even today, about 1 in 10,000 horses
are born with three toes; Julius Caesar was said to have ridden
on such a horse. (Gold, 1983, p. 177) They don't have 2.75 toes,
or 1.82345 toes. Thus for creationists to insist upon an
infinitude of forms is using the hereditary knowledge of 500 B.
C. Surely we can do better than that.
So what is a transitional form? I would define it as an
animal which has some features of each group; not an infinite
morphing sequence. Remember the Goldschmidt toad from Nature, Feb
2, 1995, p. 398? This toad had eyes on the inside of his mouth
on the roof of the mouth. He was found living in the wilds of a
Canadian garden. Regardless of the cause of his deformity, it
was not a gradual thing which produced this feature. His parents
did not have the eyes on the lips, and his grandparents did not
have the eyes where the nostrils are and this great grandparents
did not have eyes just below where normal toads have their eyes.
There was no GRADUAL transition to the eyes-in-the-mouth state.
I believe that this is how most mutational change occurs. Mutate
the control genes and you get a major change in the morphology of
one or a set of traits. (see the fish to amphibian transition
below).
Phillip Johnson advocates this morphing view of genetics as
evidenced by his statement in the fall/winder 1994 Origins
Research, p. 6. He says,
"There is no evidence from the fossils of a pattern of
common ancestors and intermediates connecting them. If neo-
Darwinism were true, somewhere there should be a universe of
transitional intermediates, as Darwin said there had to be.
Where is it?"
Darwin, it is true believed that gradualism in the morphing
sense was the way evolution worked. But Darwin did not have
modern genetic and developmental knowledge. To always quote
Darwin as the authority on how change must occur is to hold
evolution to its most primitive form. It does not even attack
the view held by most scientists today. Secondly, just because
Darwin believed it does not make it standard dogma today. So the
constant demand for a series of morphing forms is trying to
attack a view held more than 100 years ago and is not what our
children are taught in college. Our use of these views makes us
look outdated and risks our children's trust.>>>>
>But when you read texts on fish-amphibian transition, and see the
>reconstructions they make, it is exactly this sort of morphing transition
> they are arguing for (e.g., Volpe, -Understanding Evolution 2d.-, pg. 123).
Good grief, if I am not mistaken, Volpe was written prior to the first article
on Punctuated equilibrium. Can't you find anything newer than that?
>In Thewissen et al., "Fossil Evidence for the Origin of Aquatic Locomotion
> in
>Archaeocete Whales," Science, Jan. 14 1994 at 210 ff. and Berta, "What is a
>Whale?" Ibid., at 180 f., we have a most interesting conundrum. Mesonychids
>had small feet and leg structures in keeping with land locomotion.Ambulocetus
>natans, however, had HUGE feet in front and back--aquatic leg design. But on
>land the semipronated elbow of Ambulocetus natans (according to Thewissen)
>"left the hands sprawling when the shoulder was abducted."IOW, they stuck out
>from the head where their size would have INTERFERED with land locomotion.
>
>But I when I asked Glenn several times what "selective advantage" there was
>in this, I got silence.
>
I don't remember this but that's ok. The advantage was in the water, not on
land, just like the advantage of seal flippers lies in the water, not on land.
Seals can not move rapidly on land but move fantastically in the water where
their food is. Using your reasoning, what DESIGN advantage is there in these
legs which stick out at the neck for land locomotion? Afterall if this
creature was instantaneously created by the Designer rather than being evolved
by the desinger, why did God give him such awkward feet?
>If you'd like to answer the question now, Glenn, please do! But if you don't,
>please don't expect us to be compelled by both your "unreasonable to expect"
>and "imagined selective advantage" propositions.
I answered your question but I bet you won't answer my question about the
Design advantage to those feet. You seem never to answer direct questions.
>In the world Darwinians want us to believe in, it is reasonable to expect
>true fossil transitions. And good science requires more than the chimeras of
>the mind.
And Christian apologetics needs more than the statement, "It can't be so,
please tell me it can't be so."
Merry Christmas, Jim. We can share in the rejoicing that God sent his son for
both of us. Scary thought, huh? :-)
glenn
Foundation,Fall and Flood
http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm