Whales did (NOT) evolve

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

I wanted to treat your last 2 sections separately, @Ashwin_s:

@Ashwin_s

If you look at an evolutionary tree, all extant and extinct organisms are dead-ends. The only places where we see a linear/direct link is in the nodes which denote unknown common ancestors. This tells us clearly that scientists cannot really determine whether there is a direct linear descent between organisms…
either that, or its worse…

The first is a problem for falsifiability (you cant falsify linkage to an imaginary CA).
The second is itself a falsification or atleast strong evience against CA.
In your opinion. Which is it?

In my opinion, the problem is in your analysis. Instead of trying to answer all your questions about common descent from a schematic diagram … try READING the articles… and learn why the schematics are the way they are.

Here is an article on the LOGIC of “intermediate forms” - - which has nothing to do with proving a particular fossil is directly descended from another fossil… because by most anyone’s admission, there is no way of knowing which fossils are part of an offshoot or not. The point is to show that natural processes generated forms that demonstrate plausible transitions from one time frame to another.

Here - - - read this …

[[ Really, I’m not kidding. The thread discusses the very questions you have raised about the point
of these schematic diagrams, and the use of intermediate fossils. Read it, and it will be less
chaotic to you. ]]

That's not a Missing Link! - the vocabulary of "Intermediate Forms"

Have you ever wondered about the phrase "missing link"? This is the first article I've read that does a good job of explaining the misunderstanding regarding "missing link" fossils ... versus, say, "transitional forms". But even that phrase causes problems - - because it implies that one population of extinct animal "transitioned" into this other fossil form! Sometimes that slightly different fossil comes from a different lineage, but shows perfectly what the common ancestor or event…

.
.
.

Thank you … you do attempt to answer my earlier question about your own personal scenario. What surprised me was to find out how we only differ on one point: Can God use Evolutionary principles or not!

You write:
“I think there is some amount of room for modification in Organisms. i think this is mainly driven by programmed adaptability (Phenotypic plasticity, Epignetics, genetic drift etc) and not by chance events/natural selection.”

So all this disputation of yours is because you think God guided evolution? Well, no kidding! Lots of us supporters of BioLogos say the same thing! So where do we differ?

You write:
“As to when God intervened.I believe he intervened at various stages of life emerging… There are several instances in the development of life where we see sudden bursts of change usually accompanied by the emergence of many de-novo genes… . . . In short, phenotypes are determined by genotypes which are determined by regulatory mechanisms designed by God.”

So, @Ashwin_s, how often do you think god made “special creation” templates? Every 10 or 20 million years? Or every 100 million years? Why do you suppose God spent so much time making brand new “special creations” of species - - and doing it in such a way as to convince the modern scientist that it was by Evolutionary processes? That’s pretty odd, right?

You conclude:
“The changes are sudden and programmed.(Because of how i interpret Genesis, i view this programming to have happened in stages) Such a scenario would create the diversity we see. Common descent with inherited modifications driven by chance will not.It will just lead to a confused ridiculous picture that we see today.”

But isn’t that denying God the power to trigger the necessary mutations? If he didn’t trigger the mutations, then he wouldn’t have had to make each Special Creation of Earth’s life forms so genetically gradated from one group to another, right?

What may be the hardest thing for you to explain is why you accept modern physics and geology enough to reject Young Earth scenarios… but then reject the very same physics and geology that also says creatures evolved. And since you and I agree that God is behind all of these life forms… your insistence that God couldn’t do it through Evolutionary science sounds, well, practically superstitious !