Sure there are many reasons why evolutionists have no evidence for their position. That type of theory is called unfalsifiable. Some of those reasons sound intelligent, but a thinking man would observe significant fossils since the early Cambrian, even soft bodied, and expect something more than what we do see at the late Ediacaran and early Cambrian. At least a few transitions among thousands. Possibly showing half soft bodied, half vertebrates for 2 or 3 of those species, traceable through the transitions? Easily recognizeable after phylogenetic analysis as part of the same genus.
In the meantime the evidence is just what creationists would expect, thousands of species, appearing without fossil precursor. I’m not completely disregarding evolution as an explanation of origins, but the fossil evidence surely favors a creation event.
Where is your evidence that these Cambrian fossils have no ancestors?
A thinking man already figured it out:
We don’t have a complete fossil record in our collections. Therefore, we would expect to have fossil species that have no fossilized ancestors in our collections.
Again, how can you know if they lack fossil precursors after searching such a tiny percentage of the fossil record?
I enjoyed this question, yes I would have regarded it as having no precursor, and then as the precursors were discovered, I would have been curious of the extent of the transitions and how early in the Cambrian they are represented. If the gradual transitions extended across into another genus, technically outside the arthropod classification and started to show transitional forms representing a partial exoskeleton and partial soft bodied organism, then that would have been significant for me.
After 150 years, the same flaw in the theory of evolution exists, that Darwin identified.
Sure is possible that some more concrete evidence is found one day, but in the meantime creationism explains the fossil record with more convincing clarity than the theory of evolution.
The excuses for not having evidence in the meantime, although reasonably valid, render the theory of evolution unfalsifiable.
This means your methodology doesn’t work. Furthermore, you are using an argument from ignorance which is an informal logical fallacy. Reality isn’t limited to what humans know.
Linnaean taxonomy is a poor system to use for modeling evolution. This is why biology has largely moved over to cladistics. A genus doesn’t exist in nature, and for that matter, neither do kingdoms, phyla, orders, families, or genera. The only thing that exists in nature is species. The rest are just arbitrary categories invented by humans. Cladistics does away with taxonomic categories and uses phylogenies which fits better with evolutionary relationships.
I think you would also agree that there is no way we could state that such a transition did not exist in the past. Basing arguments or conclusions on purely negative evidence is not the way to go. This is is why scientific conclusion are based on positive evidence, such as fossils from Precambrian animals:
Just because there is some evidence of adaptation in some species, coupled with evidence that natural selection for fitness is observed, doesn’t automatically make evolution the preferred theory to explain the origin of species. You need more than that, not just hopes and possibilities that these transitions exist.
The unfalsifiability of the theory is a problem. And the sheer number of fossil species without precursor is a problem too. I’m not saying I will convince you, but hopefully some fence sitters will see the common sense of the fossil record and how creationism explains the fossil record and origins of species more fully than evolution.
Sure but you need evidence for a theory to be convincing. Not just excuses for the lack of evidence. Unfalsifiability is a pretty damning concept in its own right. The satisfaction that without evidence the theory is still preferable, on what grounds?
The theory of evolution makes no predictions that a single fossil should exist. Fossilization is a function of geology, not biology. The prediction the theory of evolution does make is about the pattern of morphological features in the fossils we do find, and that pattern is a nested hierarchy. The nested hierarchy is the one huge piece of evidence that points to evolution, and it is found all over biology.
You haven’t shown that they lack precursors. No matter how many times you try to pretend you have this knowledge, you don’t. No one does.
As someone else pointed out, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Given the rate at which new fossil species are discovered, there is every reason to reject the notion that our current lack of knowledge is any indication of what did or didn’t exist in the Cambrian or Pre-Cambrian.
As T said above, an argument from ignorance is an informal logical fallacy. He also gave us a valuable quote from Darwin’s Origin of Species which addresses this issue quite well, I think.
For 150 years and more, there have been fossil discoveries throughout the periods, and the number of identified species in the Cambrian Explosion keeps growing, yet the evidence for their appearance via evolution is still lacking.
Knowing the unfalsifiability of the lack of evidence for evolution at that stage in history, why would you prefer evolution as an explanation for the origins of the species reflected in the Cambrian Explosion?
I think you’re getting caught on putting too much focus on the Cambrian Explosion. This is just one of many, many, many pieces of geologic and evolutionary history. Even if the Cambrian Explosion could be established as an anomaly, it would not undo everything else. And, in fact, we should interpret the Cambrian Explosion based on facts gleaned elsewhere. This is similar to Scripture–when a place in Scripture is unclear, we can use other places in Scripture that are clearer to help us understand that which is unclear.