How did you determine that nearly all species in the past have a representative fossil in modern collections?
There are thousands of flatworm species today, and yet no fossils of flatworms exist.
Flatworm eyes don’t have a lens, so are they not fully formed? We see hominid fossils changing over time, so are they not fully formed?
Also the marsupials have changed in all kinds of ways. Birds and dinosaurs are very different. There were bipedal crocs. “Whales” with legs. Lots of differences.
How can you say that? Evolution has no goal and no end. The next version of insects may be lurking somewhere, plotting our destruction right now.
This is why I specified the same animal, as closely as possible. There are no fossil branches to connect ‘lower’ from ‘higher’ forms of life, and unless there is DNA, no way to tell if similar looking fossils are related.
I watched that picture for a minute and guess what? Not one of the skulls changed. I’ll bet that’s true from the time they became bare bones or fossils. As for one to the next, good luck proving they are related to each other. Some of those are human and some are apes.
East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet.
I’m assuming that you don’t have a degree in paleontology, or are very familiar with minute variations and changes that takes a long time to occur. Basal traits verses divergent traits in primates including our extinct ancestors. But most are not. I’m not even very familiar with them. But the experts are, and they talk about the various differences.
As someone very actively engaged with botany and mycology I see it often there. “ Plant and Mushroom Blindness” . I can go hiking with someone and show them 10 species of oaks and five species of magnolias and they can’t tell the difference between them. They don’t recognize the slightly different leaf shapes, hair on the inside or outside of acorns, or how the buds looks. They often confuse sweetbay magnolias for spicebushes because they are very similar but have completely different buds. Then likewise, they don’t see the similarities between species in the same family. Like with ferns and peas. One fern grows 4 feet and fits the traditional perception and the next is only 2 inches tall and has three different leaf shapes including one that looks like a traditional tree leaf. They are blind to the differences.
I think most likely that’s the case for you and whatever images you were looking at. The fossils probably are very distinct to a trained eye in that field but to you just looks exactly the same. Because they look the same you probably are not seeing the divergent traits and only see the basal traits.
That issue also turns up for mollusks. The first picture illustrates semi-superficially similar species. The second shows a variety of marginelliform gastropods (three closely related families) scaled to 4X life size. Each picture on the slide is a different species (21 of them undescribed) The third shows a variety of fossil members of the incredibly diverse (probably ~5,000 species globally, but no one really knows for sure) ectoparasitic family Pyramidellidae (most of these species are undescribed).
So a fossil is fully formed if it doesn’t change while we look at it? That’s quite strange.
What criteria do you use to determine if these hominid fossils are fully formed?
Exactly. That’s why you listen to experts about morphological differences, genetic relationships, and so on. The average joe, and even a amateur hobbyist that’s a few years into something working towards becoming self study experts, will still miss a lot of things. Even experts often overlook something for decades before someone teases out a error like with infant, juvenile, adult, and older adult forms in dinosaur fossils where they’ve confused two stages of the same species for separate species. With plants often hybrids are mistaken for different species. Especially when you have a hybrid of a subspecies that mixes back in with the original straight species of one parent lol.
When you say same species do you literally mean same species, or do you mean same genus, family, order? Most species we have now are not the same species from millions of years ago though they may belong to the same families and orders and carry the basal traits.
However, even within the same families and genera now the species that at a glance look very similar often have overlooked distinct differences such as an extra “third eye”, or a slightly different shape with different pigments and so on. As you trade the morphology backwards, losing more snd more divergent traits you’ll see just how different they actually are.
I think there is a misunderstanding here. Likely this is my own fault; I did not mean ‘end’ in a teleological sense; wasps are not the pinnacle or goal of insect evolution. From a purely scientific perspective, evolution has no more a teleos that it is striving towards than gravity or photosynthesis. On that front we agree.
I was using end, in sequential sense. The Hymenopterans were the last to evolve chronologically speaking, and so represent the end of the known sequence. There may be more to be added in the future, there may not. Perhaps, I should have simply said, ‘Hymenopterans evolved most recently’. Isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing 
True the fossil record is incomplete and soft-bodied insects do not fossilise all that well, and that is before one takes into account the very specific set of variables needed for fossilisation anyway. However, I do think that the emergence of insects from simple to complex through the fossil record adequately demonstrates a nested hierarchy.
They lived. They seem to have lived through babyhood, childhood and into adulthood. As far as we know, nothing missing from them, so they are fully formed as the creatures they were, not half-human or proto-ape.
Which species specifically are you referring to?
Therefore, if a fossil is a transitional you would label it as fully formed.
Hominid transitional species would have individuals who lived to adulthood, so you would classify them as fully formed.
Transitional is a label that nobody can prove. Yes, they are fully formed. It lived. It died. That is all the proof they can be.
I gave the wasp for an example, but this is generic to any creature. Are there apes with a novel type of eye? Dogs? Catfish? Loss of information does not count because that loss is one directional. Down.
I understand. None of that changes my question on what species means to you. There is not a extinct , and living species, that’s the same species.
Yes, we can. A transitional is a fossil with a mixture of features from two divergent taxa. Hominid transitionals have a mixture of features from humans and other apes. They are transitional.
The reason these transitional fossils evidence evolution is because we only see the transitional fossils that are predicted by the theory of evolution. The theory predicts a nested hierarchy which means we should only see specific transitional fossils and not see others. For example, there should have been species with a mixture of basal reptile features and derived mammal features, but there shouldn’t have been any species with a mixture of derived bird and derived mammal features. It is the pattern of transitional species that evidences evolution.
Finding the exact pattern of transitional species that evolution predicts is the evidence that supports evolution.
Who needs to prove labels?
According to evolution, they are all transitional. In actuality, none are, because no relationship between kinds can be proven to even have happened.
Saying it doesn’t make it so. I sent my DNA in to 23andMe, and find I am related to a lot of people I never knew based on shared DNA, and several I do know who also sent their DNA in. The known relationships (cousins, second cousins, third cousins) of those I know are correct compare very well to what was predicted by the company based on how much DNA I shared with the.
That is a more crude comparison than scientists use to compare species by means of sequencing and things like ERV sites, but they too compare very well to what was thought to be true, as well as giving insight into those relationships that were previously unknown.
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