>At 03:28 PM 1/16/98 -0600, Ron wrote:
>RC:===
>>As far as I am concerned, there are no 'facts' that are illumined by
>>fossils. There are interpretations but no facts. None has ever been
>>observed in a Lab. That life cannot come from non-life is a fact that
>>Pasteur, through experiments, proved and those experiments can be
>>replicated. Most interpretations of the fossil record assume
>>macroevolution took place to begin with and a seeming pattern of
>>evolutionary change from the fossil record only comes from less than 1% of
>>the world-wide fossil strata that has been uncovered. Most of the time
>>major phyla do not appear in the sequence necessary to interpret
>>evolution-wise.
>>
>
>I'm not an expert in the fossil record. I wonder if you could document
>these claims?
I earn my living off the geologic column so I want to make a few comments
here.Technically there is only a small part of the sedimentary column
exposed at the earth's surface. But we have lots of oil well cores that
show us that the rocks below the surface are like those expose, including
holding the same fossils.Thus the sampling that wells provide show that what
we see at the surface is about what we will find if we were to dig out the
entire geologic column and examine it. Does this mean that there are not
fossils found at depth which still awaits discovery? No. We will find new
fossils but probably not all that many compared with what we already have
found. There are 130,000 fossil species which have been described so we have
quite a database of fossil animals. This is no small amount of information
upon which to base hypotheses.
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm