Can you see what you’ve done here? You’ve taken a fact - speciation - then applied a wild extrapolation to it, ending up with a theory of macroevolution, thinking they are one and the same thing. Fascinating.
My car’s owners manual makes no mention of God anywhere in it either. Nor, I suspect, do any other auto manuals out there. So are car manufacturers atheistic by default then?
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Then why did you reject the example I gave because it did not evolve an evolutionary lineage that starts with microbes and ends with humans?
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A separate and distinct nested hierarchy of species with a mixture of mammal and bird features would be pretty easy to see. It would also falsify the theory of evolution. I don’t think you understand what nested hierarchies are nor the evidence that supports evolution.
Then how can you say the fossil record best fits progressive creation if you don’t know what progressive creation would produce?
Such a statement is dishonest because you refuse to accept the fossils that do fill those gaps.
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That information was already given to you:
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You seem to think the participants in this study were just fooling around … making up stuff.
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Genome tests show that three marsupial lineages are unusually closely related.
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That despite being unusually closely related, these three lineages are about as far apart in behavior and ecological niche as unrelated species could ever be:
Carnivorous Hunter Predators
Vegetarian Underground Moles
Omnivorous Bandycoot type marsupials
And to tie it all together, the only eligible marsupial fossils all come from a single species of generalized marsupial that traveled to Australia while it was still connected to neighboring land masses. Then no other mammals could join the marsupial group in Australia because it had detached from the other continents and was thereafter isolated in the middle of the ocean.
In fact, it is this unique aspect of Australia that causes no end of trouble for those who consider the biblical discussion of a global flood to be inerrantly true. There is virtually no way to sync up the fossil record of Australia with any global flood.
As for charges of “wild extrapolations” and rejection of anything that would be Macro-evolution, if you would prefer to call the three different types of marsupials all “One Kind” (based on the close similarities in their genomes), let me know!
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Common ancestry isn’t assumed. The conclusion is based on mountains of evidence.
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All it means is that T. roseae is not a direct ancestor. It doesn’t change the transitional nature of T. roseae. You seemed to have confused your terms:
" A transitional fossil is any fossilized remains of a life form that exhibits traits common to both an ancestral group and its derived descendant group.[1] This is especially important where the descendant group is sharply differentiated by gross anatomy and mode of living from the ancestral group. These fossils serve as a reminder that taxonomic divisions are humanconstructs that have been imposed in hindsight on a continuum of variation. Because of the incompleteness of the fossil record, there is usually no way to know exactly how close a transitional fossil is to the point of divergence. Therefore, it cannot be assumed that transitional fossils are direct ancestors of more recent groups, though they are frequently used as models for such ancestors.[2]"
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The lack of curiosity needed to be a creationist is quite stunning.
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You’re flailing.
You may disagree because you won’t look at evidence, but your claim that the uses haven’t been OFFERED is objectively false:
I’ve cited multiple examples. If you cannot engage in gracious discussion, instead of simply denying and making false claims, why are you devoting your time here?
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There’s nothing wild about it.
We’ve taken a fact, speciation, and then applied it to the sequence and fossil evidence, showing that there are no bright white lines as you claim there are (apparently based entirely on creationist quote mining and zero actual evidence).
What’s wild is that you falsely claimed that you’d need an advanced degree before you could even look at any of that sequence evidence. Convenient!
You also haven’t offered a single mechanistic difference between micro and macro. You need to explain why the same mechanisms that you accept and cause speciation are somehow prohibited from causing genusization, familyization, orderization, classization, etc., all the way up to kingdomization.
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What’s the point of giving you evidence if you don’t know how to read the evidence? Did you go to the article? Did you notice footnotes? Did you look at the footnotes?
This seems like a much more clear explanation about Transitional fossils… going out of their way to point out that ancestry is not to be automatically assumed!
Darwin described it clearly as well:
"In looking for the gradations by which an organ in any species has been perfected, we ought to look exclusively to its lineal ancestors; but this is scarcely ever possible, and we are forced in each case to look to species of the same group, that is to the collateral descendants from the same original parent-form, in order to see what gradations are possible, and for the chance of some gradations having been transmitted from the earlier stages of descent, in an unaltered or little altered condition. "–Charles Darwin, “Origin of Species”
T. roseae is a collateral descendant of the direct lineage that led to modern tetrapods, what we now call a sister taxa. The features found in T. roseae give us evidence of what the ancestors in the direct lineage looked like.
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The refutation of Chris’s false claim is not in the footnotes. It’s right there in the text, where they give p values for the trees. The p value is the probability of getting these results from no relationships or common ancestry.
Hi @gbrooks9! Not sure what you’re after here.
Google up “transition” and it is defined as: the process or a period of changing from one state or condition to another.
“Transitional fossil” in contrast does not show a “transition” “from one state or condition to another”, but shows features of something former and features of something after. It’s hardly an intuitive use of the word. And by this definition every fossil is a transitional fossil. So why have a special term?
Returning to the thread topic, I don’t think one can tell from the fossils if mutation and natural selection (M&NS) are adequate to produce all the complexity in the history of life. I agree with the OP that it fits better with occasional divine intervention (probably further up the taxonomic tree, not so much at the species level), and M&NS have obviously done some stuff too.
That’s pretty silly, Marty, as drift plays a huge role in evolution. Why are you ignoring it?
Even worse, I think that one can tell from the fossils. Have you looked? Edgar hasn’t.
How does the sequence data fit with occasional divine intervention further up the taxonomic tree?
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Hi Marty,
It’s good to have you back here.
Worth noting: scientists have used the theory of evolution to make predictions about fossils. For example, Neil Shubin predicted that a shallow-dwelling fish with the beginnings of tetrapod limbs should be found in layers dated c. 480 MYA, given the existence of lobed fin fish at 525 MYA and true amphibians at 440 MYA. He went fossil digging in a correctly aged deposit, and lo and behold: Tiktaalik!
I don’t see how progressive creation could make such a prediction. There is no clear indication of what the boundaries between stages should be. Can we make any predictions about the various contributions of divine intervention and micro-evolution? God is sovereign, after all.
Also, as others have noted, the fossil record is not even the best evidence for common ancestry. That honor belongs, in my opinion, to DNA sequence evidence. Pseudo-genes and ERVs are especially powerful evidence.
But the topic of the thread is the fossil record, so I will stop there.
Have a great day!
Chris
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Perhaps that is why some might call the ‘god hypothesis’ for unknowns in the natural world a science stopper.
The awkward part about all of this is that at the same time, other research was going on that demonstrated how ERV (endogenous retrovirus) insertion helped lead to the development of the placenta:
The insertion of new genetic material from a retrovirus certainly can ‘speed up’ evolution as much as it can grind it to a halt, this one happened to speed it up.
I really have no idea how you can claim this somehow impacts the scientific explanation of how species got here. Can you elaborate why you think this somehow confounds the scientific community?
Which is what happens literally everytime there is a mass extinction event- so many new niches to explore! The speed of ‘speciation’ increases when populations can split from each other. While a population remains isolated- it will stay a single ‘species.’ Notice the slope of this graph after extinction events.
