Reflectorites
Check out the latest NATURE which has a letter from Benton, et. al.,
arguing that the fossil record at the level of family for the past 540
million years, provides "uniformly good documentation of the life of
the past".
This looks like another nail in Darwinism's coffin as it has always
had to argue that the fossil record was *very* incomplete in order to
hide the myriads of transitional forms that the `blind watchmaker'
would leave in his wake:
"But just in proportion as this process of extermination has
acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of
intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the
earth, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological
formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?
Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely
graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most
obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against
my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme
imperfection of the geological record."
(http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/origin/chapter9.html).
If the fossil record is substantially complete at the level of families,
then this a very low level of taxonomic classification (one up from
genus) in the basic seven part hierarchy of: kingdom, phylum,
class, order, *family*, genus, species.
Of course Darwinists will no doubt argue that evolution must always
have happened so rapidly in the past and/or in such small groups,
that the fossil record didn't preserve the evidence of it.
That's OK, but then that would be an unfalsifiable position. Also,
that scenario would be a *prediction* of creationist theory but an
*unexpected explaining away* by Darwinian evolution theory!
Steve
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http://www.nature.com/server-java/Propub/nature/403534A0.abs_frameset
3 February 2000
Nature 403, 534 - 537 (2000) (c) Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
Quality of the fossil record through time
M. J. BENTON, M. A. WILLS & R. HITCHIN
Does the fossil record present a true picture of the history of life, or
should it be viewed with caution? Raup argued that plots of the
diversification of life were an illustration of bias: the older the rocks,
the less we know. The debate was partially resolved by the
observation that different data sets gave similar patterns of rising
diversity through time. Here we show that new assessment
methods, in which the order of fossils in the rocks (stratigraphy) is
compared with the order inherent in evolutionary trees (phylogeny),
provide a more convincing analytical tool: stratigraphy and
phylogeny offer independent data on history. Assessments of
congruence between stratigraphy and phylogeny for a sample of
1,000 published phylogenies show no evidence of diminution of
quality backwards in time. Ancient rocks clearly preserve less
information, on average, than more recent rocks. However, if
scaled to the stratigraphic level of the stage and the taxonomic
level of the family, the past 540 million years of the fossil record
provide uniformly good documentation of the life of the past.
[..]
Nature (c) Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2000 Registered No. 785998
England.
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Stephen E. (Steve) Jones ,--_|\ Email: sejones@iinet.net.au
3 Hawker Avenue / Oz \ Web: http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
Warwick 6024 -> *_,--\_/ Phone: +61 8 9448 7439
Perth, Western Australia v "Test everything." (1 Thess. 5:21)
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