“As I said, Bren, the theory predicts everything and nothing at the same time. Everything in generalities, but nothing in specifics. Stasis as well as change, conserving as well as directional selection, large or small populations, etc. as you say. After seeing the evidence, it predicts the evidence. Your sentence itself is something you take for granted, without realizing the implications. “The theory predicts the absence of fossils prior to emergence”… why? because they are absent prior to when we see them. Of course they are. If they are seen, then they are no longer absent, and the emergence is earlier… Well. But what you don’t realize is you cannot prove their absence (of the species) prior to its assumed emergence. You only see the absence of fossils. But you know that in other cases, absence of fossils after “emergence” does not prove the absence of the species. You know this by many species, and the coelacanth is only one obvious example. As a result, it would not be illogical for me to say that all species existed prior to their emergence in the fossil record. Nor can we tell how long they existed before their appearance in the fossil record. Not without inserting and forcing our paradigm into the evidence.” (JohnZ)
I’ll let the first paragraph go, since you are merely reiterating without addressing my point as to the completely different types of evidence that need to be considered when testing evolution itself. You’re continuing interest is in the wrong sets of evidence for the purposes being considered, so the outcome is hardly surprising; what is surprising is the conclusion this apparently allows you to come to.
For your second paragraph, you are right that it is difficult in practice to determine when a species “should” come into the fossil record. I was dealing with the theoretical point (it is in theory reasonable to say that fossils can’t show up in the record before the species could have arisen, but this terminus a quo would quite obviously need to be inferred from other grounds), and it was only in contrast to the inexplicable idea that evolution predicts when a species should go extinct. You seem to have missed that this logical contrast was the only point of the statement, but perhaps I shouldn’t have assumed that you would understand my sentence in this way, and anyway, you still have a legitimate question, worthy of a response. You are inventing a circular argument (based on surprisingly little evidence) because you suspected one, so I should clarify that there isn’t one. Evolution would not have a serious problem if bird-like dinosaurs showed up a few million years earlier in the fossil record (this would be further information, not a contradiction, since the only thing it could be thought to contradict is the absence of evidence for the same), but if, for example, a giraffe showed up in the Jurassic, this would be a direct contradiction to the known evidence (in combination with the theory), of when the mammals underwent serious adaptive radiation to produce the known families (of which the giraffe is the tip of a branch). The giraffe would be multiple steps out of the established sequence, apparently arising well before its own ancestors. So although the fossil record does not produce such contradictions (though it should a thousand times over if special creation was on point), it is only a useful test over greatly extended timeframes, and where there is clear and positive evidence to the contrary.
“Selection pressures are a very sound reason for evolution, and design is a very sound reason for special creation. Special creation has an answer for one observation (the similarities), but does not have anything that explains the particular pattern of differences and why they all happen to align with the same groups. That is a huge gap in explanatory power.(bren) Selection pressures are indeed a very sound reason for why certain species exist in certain environments. Obviously a whale is not going to do well on land, and an iguana will not do well beside the polar bears. However, the selection pressures do not provide a good reason for why a polar bear should become a lizard or vice versa.” (JohnZ)
I would welcome your arguments, less your assertions. You are not addressing the far more relevant point in my argument, which was clearly the only point worth discussing.
“A group is a group based on its similarities. But differences within the group are what allows a group to be a group that consists of similar but yet different entities by definition. The similarities define the group; the differences are what identify the group members. The fewer the similarities, the larger the grouping. The more varied the environment, the more likely that there will be more diverse groups and individuals.” (JohnZ)
Did not address the argument in any way.
“Design implies that animals can survive in their environment. Design implies that animals will continue to survive in their environments. Design implies that there will be diverse groups and individuals to occupy the various environments, but it does not imply that only one type is possible, or that what exists there is the only option. We know that when rabbits were introduced to Australia, they did very well. Their absence did not imply that they could not exist there. We know that weeds introduced to North America do well once they get there, even though they were absent. Thus a niche is not determined by what does not exist there.” (JohnZ)
So to sum up; design implies design. And the absence of evidence does not imply that something can’t happen or can’t work. I’ll agree to this without being sure of what it is meant to clarify.
“Soft tissues (after rehydration by the way) in dinosaur bones is again somewhat obviously not a prediction of evolutionary theory; it was an expectation based on previous findings or lack of findings. Depending on the conditions, the expected stability of organic materials can vary by many orders of magnitude. Obviously the extensive cross-linking caused by free radicals (from the released iron molecules that were associated with the heme compounds) is one such condition, as was the context that lead the bone preservation in the first place and the protective matrix of the bone itself. But this is beside the point; the point is that it is clearly not a prediction of the theory. (bren). Right. As I said, it did not have a prediction for finding red blood cells or dna in bones. Why? because the red blood cells and dna should have deteriorated, by all normal expectations of deterioration. To say that it can survive by “many” orders of magnitude, is generally not true, but could be true only under certain known conditions such as extremely low temperature, but even then, it cannot survive the periods suggested, not for 60 million years. Under the assumed conditions, it certainly would not survive that long. So it didn’t. Not that long. That is what the evidence shows. (JohnZ)”
Some errors in the paragraph about soft tissues, so just a suggestion that you might want to refresh the memory on what was actually found and what the current scientific view on the question happens to be. That said, it completely misses the point of my argument, so I will just refer back to my original comments.