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"Just because a fossil member of a group appears in an earlier geological stratum than any of the other members, we cannot assume that it was the common ancestor...........
Of course you can't assume. You have to study the fossils in detail and establish morphological relationships that are common to the species in question as well as the paleoenvironment in which they are found.
Of course you can't assume. You have to study the fossils in detail and establish morphological relationships that are common to the species in question as well as the paleoenvironment in which they are found.
And yet - assume is just what you do.
. Talkorigions, under the heading "Punctuated Equilibrium" states:
"The fossil record is incomplete.
This incompleteness has many contributing factors.
Geological processes may cause to confusion or error, as sedimentary deposition rates may vary, erosion may erase some strata, compression may turn possible fossils into unrecognizable junk, and various other means by which the local fossil record can be turned into the equivalent of a partially burned book, which is then unbound, pages perhaps shuffled, and from which a few pages are retrieved.
.
(There goes your movie again: remember what I did with it?
Sanspeur wrote:
“Establishing chronologies, both relative and absolute, and geographic change over time are essential for viewing the motion picture that is the history of life on Earth.”
.
My response:
“OK - let’s look at that motion picture:
“An article published in NationalGeographic in 2004 likened the fossil record to “a film of evolution from which 999 of every 1,000 frames have been lost on the cutting-room floor.” Consider the implications of that illustration.
.
Imagine that you found 100 frames of a feature film that originally had 100,000 frames. How would you determine the plot of the movie? You might have a preconceived idea, but what if only 5 of the 100 frames you found could be organized to support your preferred plot, while the other 95 frames tell a very different story? Would it be reasonable to assert that your preconceived idea of the movie was right because of the five frames? Could it be that you placed the five frames in the order you did because it suited your theory? Would it not be more reasonable to allow the other 95 frames to influence your opinion?
.
How does that illustration relate to the way evolutionists view the fossil record? For years, researchers did not acknowledge that the vast majority of fossils—the 95 frames of the movie—showed that species change very little over time.
.
Why the silence about such important evidence? Author Richard Morris says: “Apparently paleontologists had adopted the orthodox idea of gradual evolutionary change and had held onto it, even when they discovered evidence to the contrary. They had been trying to interpret fossil evidence in terms of accepted evolutionary ideas.” (Was Life Created? pp. 25-26)
.
TALKORIGINS:
Beyond geology, there remains taphonomy -- the study of how organisms come to be preserved as fossils. Here, there are further issues to be addressed. Hard parts of organisms fossilize preferentially. The conditions under which even those parts may become fossilized are fairly specialized. All this results in a heavily skewed distribution of even what parts of organisms become fossilized, and that affects which features of morphology are available for use in classification.
The issue of geography enters into all this, as a consequence of the fact that living lineages occupy ecological niches, and those niches are bound to certain features of geography.
Paleospecies, then, have to be recognized as species from morphology alone, where the available morphological characters are drawn from a skewed distribution, the pattern of fossilization is skewed, and the geographic correlates of fossilization are limited in extent."
.
This information builds no confidence in the fossil record because of the massive guesswork involved, SO IT CANNOT BE USED AS EVIDENCE OF EVOLUTION.
And yet - assume is just what you do.
. Talkorigions, under the heading "Punctuated Equilibrium" states:
"The fossil record is incomplete.
This incompleteness has many contributing factors.
Geological processes may cause to confusion or error, as sedimentary deposition rates may vary, erosion may erase some strata, compression may turn possible fossils into unrecognizable junk, and various other means by which the local fossil record can be turned into the equivalent of a partially burned book, which is then unbound, pages perhaps shuffled, and from which a few pages are retrieved.
.
(There goes your movie again: remember what I did with it?
Sanspeur wrote:
“Establishing chronologies, both relative and absolute, and geographic change over time are essential for viewing the motion picture that is the history of life on Earth.”
.
My response:
“OK - let’s look at that motion picture:
“An article published in NationalGeographic in 2004 likened the fossil record to “a film of evolution from which 999 of every 1,000 frames have been lost on the cutting-room floor.” Consider the implications of that illustration.
.
Imagine that you found 100 frames of a feature film that originally had 100,000 frames. How would you determine the plot of the movie? You might have a preconceived idea, but what if only 5 of the 100 frames you found could be organized to support your preferred plot, while the other 95 frames tell a very different story? Would it be reasonable to assert that your preconceived idea of the movie was right because of the five frames? Could it be that you placed the five frames in the order you did because it suited your theory? Would it not be more reasonable to allow the other 95 frames to influence your opinion?
.
How does that illustration relate to the way evolutionists view the fossil record? For years, researchers did not acknowledge that the vast majority of fossils—the 95 frames of the movie—showed that species change very little over time.
.
Why the silence about such important evidence? Author Richard Morris says: “Apparently paleontologists had adopted the orthodox idea of gradual evolutionary change and had held onto it, even when they discovered evidence to the contrary. They had been trying to interpret fossil evidence in terms of accepted evolutionary ideas.” (Was Life Created? pp. 25-26)
.
TALKORIGINS:
Beyond geology, there remains taphonomy -- the study of how organisms come to be preserved as fossils. Here, there are further issues to be addressed. Hard parts of organisms fossilize preferentially. The conditions under which even those parts may become fossilized are fairly specialized. All this results in a heavily skewed distribution of even what parts of organisms become fossilized, and that affects which features of morphology are available for use in classification.
The issue of geography enters into all this, as a consequence of the fact that living lineages occupy ecological niches, and those niches are bound to certain features of geography.
Paleospecies, then, have to be recognized as species from morphology alone, where the available morphological characters are drawn from a skewed distribution, the pattern of fossilization is skewed, and the geographic correlates of fossilization are limited in extent."
.
This information builds no confidence in the fossil record because of the massive guesswork involved, SO IT CANNOT BE USED AS EVIDENCE OF EVOLUTION.
(\__/)
( ‘ .‘ )
>(^)<
Wilson
So once again you are quote mining...Please take the time to read the entire article, I doubt that you will, or that you will understand it if you do. Punctuated Equilibria
There are many transitional fossils. The only way that the claim of their absence may be remotely justified, aside from ignoring the evidence completely, is to redefine "transitional" as referring to a fossil that is a direct ancestor of one organism and a direct descendant of another. However, direct lineages are not required; they could not be verified even if found. What a transitional fossil is, in keeping with what the theory of evolution predicts, is a fossil that shows a mosaic of features from an older and more recent organism.
Transitional fossils may coexist with gaps. We do not expect to find finely detailed sequences of fossils lasting for millions of years. Nevertheless, we do find several fine gradations of fossils between species and genera, and we find many other sequences between higher taxa that are still very well filled out. http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC200.html
I agree. It is easy to overdraw the handily - mined quotes, or perhaps nit -pick in the hope of discrediting the evidence for evolution.
Let's compare it with archaeology where on any dig 99% of the material has of course gone missing. That does not in any way invalidate the conclusions drawn from what does remain.
We may have an occupation layer with a lot of broken pottery, meat bones, a few coins and above a floor level showing no occupation, burned wood and weathering. There may not be a note there explaining that the family have moved out, but the conclusion is valid that this is what happened.
The fossil record shows that there were changes within species as time went on (the triceratopids is a good example) and also many long periods when stable conditions meant that a species could flourish with little or no change. The idea that evolution is obliged to change species continually and at a regular rate is a common and false idea.
The fact that the information about Jesus can only cover a few hours of his ministry would be regarded as irrelevant since the odd bits of information supposedly add up to a coherent narrative (in fact they don't and if the fossil evidence was so contradictory I would wouldn't believe that either)
Amusingly this missing information is used to try to help theist apologetics. If any contradictions or discrepancies are pointed up then it it is pointed out that 'There were many other things that Jesus did' and the absent evidence is held to explain everything if only we knew it.
But a quite different line is taken with evolution evidence. Though there are no serious problems or discrepancies, the sheer fact that there are many other things that evolution did which I suppose would fill hundreds of books, is held up by our anti - evolutionists as somehow discrediting the evidence.
It is special pleading and a false argument in itself. While ignorance of the subject is some excuse, it is not when it is explained and the explanation is rejected. That becomes intellectual dishonesty.
I'm quoting what Gee allegedly wrote.
Are you calling him "apologist" and his work "pseudo-science?"
I think he knows more about it than you do.
(\__/)
( ‘ .‘ )
>(^)<
Wilson
You are quotemining what he wrote ('allegedly' implies that you are just cutting and pasting from elsewhere, so I will give it you that you are not misrepresenting what he was saying on your own account). He is no apologist or pseudo - scientist, but it seems that you are lifting your material from someone who is.
Gee knows more about it than you or your source and I suspect that we do, too. I suggest that you read what he actually says rather than swallow whole the misrepresentations of Creationist apologists and pseudo scientists.
I'll give you this - the last thread on Gee went over 80 pages without the fellow involved even listening. I get the impression that you are listening while admittedly trying to maintain your case, and that may be encouraging.
You see, your religious beliefs wouldn't suffer from actually giving credit to evolution evidence. Like many Christians, you could simply take it that was the method by which God got it done.
It would pretty much unseat the literalist view of the Genesis account, but then you wouldn't have the burden of trying to believe what is so in conflict with the hard evidence.
How about giving reason a try?
Mined quote supp0sedly saying that the fossil record doesn't support common descent of humans from ape-like creatures.
"New fossil discoveries are fitted into this preexisting story. We call these new discoveries 'missing links', as if the chain of ancestry and descent were a real object for our contemplation, and not what it really is: a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices. In reality, the physical record of human evolution is more modest. Each fossil represents an isolated point, with no knowable connection to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps. - Henry Gee, 1999. In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life. (New York: The Free Press), page 32 "
Ignores the context. Earlier on the same page, Gee notes that:
The conventional portrait of . . . the history of life . . . tends to be one of lines of ancestors and descendants. We concentrate on the events leading to modern humanity, ignoring or playing down the evolution of other animals; we prune away all branches in the tree of life except the one leading to ourselves. ...
Because we see evolution in terms of a linear chain of ancestry and descent, we tend to ignore the possibility that some of these ancestors might instead have been side-branches; collateral cousins rather than direct ancestors. The conventional linear view easily becomes a story in which features of humanity are acquired in a sequence that can be discerned retrospectively; first an upright stance, then a bigger brain, then the invention of toolmaking and so on, with ourselves as the inevitable consequence."
The quoted text follows immediate from this. Clearly Gee is not saying that evolution is a pre-existing story, but the popular and non-paleontological views of human evolution is. (Talk origins)
Quote supposedly saying that fossil discoveries contradict claims about the evolution of man.
".. Whatever the outcome, the skull shows, once and for all, that the old idea of a "missing link" is bunk... It should now be quite plain that the very idea of the missing link, always shaky, is now completely untenable." - Henry Gee, The Guardian, 11 July 2002
Gee is discussing Sahelanthropus tchadensis, commonly known as "Toumaï", a mostly complete cranium [1] found in Chad in 2001 that is, at the very least, a specimen from at or around the time of the split between humans and our closest relative, the chimpanzees. Why does Gee find it so interesting? As he says:
".. It is a mixture of primitive and disconcertingly advanced traits. The braincase has the same size and shape as a chimpanzee. The face, though, is where the interest lies. Rather than having a projecting snout with large canine teeth, the face is flat and the teeth are very small and human-like. Strangest of all are the enormous brow-ridges. These are usually associated with our own genus Homo, and are not otherwise seen in anything older than about 2m years."
This leads Gee to ask:
".. Does this mean we have, at last, a sign that the roots of humanity go directly back to the divergence with chimps, and that the legions of ape-men and near-humans discovered over the past 70 years are a side-issue, irrelevant to the main course of human evolution?"
Gee's answer is "no". He maintains that Toumaï is a "very small tip of a very deep iceberg, just a sample of what might have been a huge diversity of creatures living between four and 10m years ago." As was the case with the quote mine of Gee previously addressed in Quote #4.14, he is pointing out and arguing against the tendency, even among scientists, to "see evolution in terms of a linear chain of ancestry and descent" instead of as a "bush" with many collateral cousins. Thus, there are no "missing links", not because evolution is false, but because simple chains are poor metaphors for the prolific nature of life. Or, as Gee explains:
".. People and advertising copywriters tend to see human evolution as a line stretching from apes to man, into which one can fit new-found fossils as easily as links in a chain. Even modern anthropologists fall into this trap...
[W]e tend to look at those few tips of the bush we know about, connect them with lines, and make them into a linear sequence of ancestors and descendants that never was. But it should now be quite plain that the very idea of the missing link, always shaky, is now completely untenable." Talk Origins
The misrepresentation is that Gee is made to look as though he is rubbishing all the evidence for Human evolution, if not evolution as a whole, whereas he is actually saying: 'there are no "missing links", not because evolution is false, but because simple chains are poor metaphors for the prolific nature of life.' (underlining mine)
While you accept that Gee accepts evolution, of course, your quote made it seem as though he was admitting that the evidence really did not stack up. Clearly that is NOT what he was saying.
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 01-10-2012 at 02:20 PM..
Reason: 'representing' should of course be 'misrepresenting'
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