At 04:56 PM 7/28/98 GMT, David J. Tyler wrote:
>On Mon, 27 Jul 1998 Glenn R. Morton wrote:
>
>> I would argue that 'kind' can not be equivalent with the biological genus,
>> or family either. There are no fossil examples of living genus's prior to
>> the....
>> and there are no fossils members of any modern mammalian family prior to
>> the upper Cretaceous!
>
>The basic creationist approach to this is to work with the fossils we
>do have.
Actually, I would disagree here. Young-earth creationists really don't work
with the fossils. Look at the pages of the Creation Research Society
Quarterly or the ICC volumes. Very few papers are written which have
original research on the fossils. I looked at the 1994 ICC and saw NO
papers on paleontology--either vertebrate or invertebrate. In the 1990
volume II the technical volume, I found only one article on Archaeopteryx.
And it isn't on the paleontology of the fossil, but on whether or not the
fossil is a hoax. There is only one paper in the first ICC which would
qualify as remotely related to paleontology and it really isn't a
discussion of the fossils. It is on the ability of the pre-flood biosphere
to supply the quantities of carbon to coal and oil and thus doesn't really
deal with paleontology. So, in all ICC's not a single paper, by my count,
was on the fossil record. Where exactly do the creationists deal with
fossils?
Various mechanisms are proposed to explain the lack of,
>say, mammals before the Jurassic. The creationist arguments
>generally draw attention to evidences of stasis - implying continuity
>and real possibility of identifying genetically related groups.
Which mechanisms? If you are referring to Whitcomb and Morris'
hydrodynamic sorting, it was disproven in the 17th century long before
Morris tried to revive that old idea. Given a preflood biosphere with all
modern animals living there, and given that the rocks are the result of the
flood, hydrodynamic sorting should sort porpoises with the Devonian fish
or with the mesozoic ichthyosaurs, yet none are found there. Why? Because
modern animals were not on earth at the time those rocks were deposited.
>
>> All animals were different in the lower, older
>> rocks. If you make 'kind' equivalent to the 'order' then you are allowing
>> so much evolution (an ability to evolve the pangolian, the anteater, the
>> cat, the cow etc) from a single pair of organisms. It makes a mockery of
>> 'kind'.
>
>If we are to say anything substantial on this, there must be a
>research programme. The german group have documented 13 Basic Types
>- which are either at the Family or sub-Family level. I see no value
>in talking about 'orders' in the light of this research evidence.
What about the research program of the evolutionists? Doesn't that count?
And if you go to levels below the Families, then the problem becomes worse
because modern forms gradually appear as we climb higher in the geologic
column and with genera and species, the oldest modern animals found in the
fossil record is very late in the game.
>
>> What you will see below is that the modern genera and families are
>> not found in the earliest flood deposited rocks. And you will see that the
>> entirety of living beings has changed from pre-flood to post flood
>> (especially if the end of the flood is where Austin puts it at the end of
>> the Cretaceous.
>
>This is an argument you must put to those who propound this version
>of Flood Geology. I agree they have a problem.
Where do you place the end of the flood? Which rocks?
>
>> This means that young-earth creationists, like Austin,
>> believe that all this change took place in about 6000 years. This further
>> requires that young earthers are really hyper-evolutionists. They believe
>> in morphological change at a more rapid pace than any evolutionist would
>> ever suggest.
>
>This is not the case! The creationist model does allow for rapid
>change - because the biologic information is already present in the
>ancestral animals. The information does not have to be "created" by
>the (natural) selection of mutations. This variation is not
>evolutionary, but creationary! And it will usually result in a loss
>to the gene pool - a testable proposition.
Then if you think that all the information for future animals is already
contained in present day animals, please demonstrate this. What will a
house cat turn into in 1000 or 100,000 years? If the information is
already there, we should be able to find it and decipher it. Or has all
morphological change ceased?
glenn
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
Foundation, Fall and Flood
& lots of creation/evolution information
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm