The difference with God is we are asked to believe, not to prove. This is vital in the case of someone who maybe on their deathbed, as they need to only accept and believe instead of having to prove. Could be the difference for where one ends up for eternity.
John 3:16 He who believes…
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I didn’t ask that question.
… which explains nothing.
I don’t think you or anyone else knows - and will never know - what the percentage is. I suggest that knowledge is impossible to obtain.
Thats a point im interested in. I am on my phone so i havent gone through all the subsequent responses, do we have on these forums evidence that resolves that question from the persepctive of darwinian theory?
Despite the uproar this point seems to cause, yep i agree with you tuere
If, as you claim, it’s a “very small percentage”, would that not amount to a statisically-insignifcant sample size, thus renderng the fossil record unreliable?
Building a scientific theory on the evidence provided by a statistically-insignificant sample doesn’t sound very scientific to me.
Science can only theorise about what process was responsible for producing the history of life on earth.
As for knowing what that process was, that’s impossible. However, that doesn’t stop some people claiming to know what the process was, even though they can’t prove that their claim is true.
Amos 4:13
“He who forms the mountains, who creates the wind, and who reveals his thoughts to mankind, who turns dawn to darkness, and treads on the heights of the earth— the LORD God Almighty is his name.”
Psalm 104:6-8
"You covered it with the deep as with a garment;
the waters stood above the mountains.
At your rebuke they fled;
at the sound of your thunder they took to flight.
The mountains rose, the valleys sank down
to the place that you appointed for them"
No. In the same way that a study of 0.01% of the global human population could give highly statistically significant answers and describe at least many human characteristics very thoroughly, so long as it was not so biased as to make inferences impossible (e.g., all of them from one ethnic group). Samples of a few hundred (if they don’t have a bunch of subcategories of relevance) are nearly always big enough to be indistinguishable from infinitely large samples in terms of statistical test results. If, as with studying a species or many species, there are relevant subcategories, then trying for dozens to hundreds for as many subcategories as possible is best. For example, the statistical significance of the difference in extinction rate between two layers can be gotten well better than 4 sigma for high-diversity layers given reasonably extensive sampling of each layer. Support values on a phylogenetic tree are also a measure of statistical significance, so there’s also that.
It can only theorize about anything.
We have a best-fit model for the process, just like gravity, just like plate tectonics, just like sea level, just like paleoclimate, just like …
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What is foundational to Christian thought is interpreting the Scriptures intelligently and rationally.
Please explain again how evolution managed connect the poison gland of a venomous snake to its hollow fangs. Btw, no one can sensibly explain how the hollow fangs evolved, either.
Ditto for many other biolgical features found in nature.
I take your point. It’s reasonable to argue that species-level transitions and speciation evident in the fossil record are the result of evolutionary processes such as the aforementioned natural selection, random mutation, neutral drift, etc … although, to be fair, no one was there millions of years ago to actually observe such things.
Certainly, no one has ever observed the aforementioned evolutionary processes producing transitions above the level of genus.
Fair enough. Nevertheless, the possibility remains that only a tiny fraction of the organisms that have ever existed are recorded in the fossil record. Does that not make any theory of evolution based on the fossil record rather dubious?
How do you know the fossil record represents a statistically-significant sample of all the organisms that have ever existed?
For all we know, the fossil record could contain only one-millionth (or even less) of all the organisms that have ever existed, which I imagine would represent a statisically-insignifcant sample size.
Well, this was shared higher in the thread, so this statement is wrong.
Yes and no. The species-level transitions are the only ones where it’s comparatively easy to tell which process was at play, but it’s not very difficult to find intermediates among and evidence for speciation events between genera, e.g., Busyconidae (no, I don’t recommend taking any of the systematics at face value, but Petuch et al., 2015 does have good figures of a lot of them). For multiple families, cetaceans are a reasonable example; as are early pteriomorphs or heterobranchs.
Not any more than not having a very high proportion of human graves makes descriptions of historical burial practices dubious.
Statistically significant for what type of study? If it’s “Are these two taxa more similar morphologically to each other than to something else?”, then for a lot of taxa, yes. If it’s “What proportion of cells at any given time were bacterial?”, then we have nowhere close to a good enough sample size.
Given that most of them were prokaryotes, it’s probably more like 1 in a trillion, plus or minus a factor of 1000 or so.
Again, it depends a lot on what the study is trying to do and how on many individuals that works out to; for most statistics, proportion of the total population matters a lot less than numerical sample size. As I said above, a few dozen to hundred of each important subcategory is generally enough for most analyses.
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On the contrary, that paper didn’t explain either. It attempted to explain how a snake’s hollow fangs evolved, but failed miserably. For example, it didnt explain how natural selection acted to produce hollow fangs.
The paper more or less claims that what began as a “groove” in a snake’s tooth (somehow) evolved into a hollow fang, but didnt explain how.
Not that an explanation would really matter, as it would only add up to yet another evolution hypothesis that can’t be tested, which is all a lot of so-called evolution science seems to amounts to.
Neither did it explain how evolution connected the poison gland of a poison snake to its fangs.
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An atheist who preaches evolution with religious fervour, but doesn’t believe it’s true. Really?? 
I agree.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t know that the percentage, whatever it is, is very small.
We don’t know how many planets there are in the universe. We may never know. It may be that that knowledge is impossible to obtain. But that doesn’t we can’t know there are more than three.
Knowing that only a very small percentage of living organisms get fossilised is a similar situation.
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You asked “What percentage of all the organisms that have ever existed are represented in the fossil record?” in response to a comment about whether the fossil record consists mostly of individual organisms or of groups of organisms.
If you don’t know why your question is relevant to that topic, then why did you ask?
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No.
Having only a small amount of data doesn’t make that data unreliable. It might make it useless for statistical purposes, but that’s not what we use the fossil record for.
The theory of evolution wasn’t built on the fossil record.
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