Great choice. I look at a Mandarin duck and think, “Isn’t God wonderful to create such a beautiful bird.”
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My ‘like’ quota just ran out. 
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Let’s see, there’s Tiktaalik and other stem-amniotes, then we have a decent number of basal reptiles, and a bunch of stem-synapsids, getting more mammal-like over time, generally. So yes, we have a decent record of what is intermediate. I known far less about current research on gravity.
Except for the history they have. What appear are very basal members of the phyla, many with traits that make them look more like each other in some ways than like their modern relatives. Also, most of the expected ancestral forms would be generic worms unless they had really exceptional preservationn even within preserving soft tissue.
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Your response seems a tad irrelevant to my post. Lining up some fossils to form a perceived evolutionary lineage tells us nothing about HOW mammals allegedly evolved from fish … or how any other organism in the fossil record evolved.
Incidentally, you can’t prove that any fossil in any perceived evolutionary lineage is the biological ancestor or descendant of any other fossil in the lineage. The fact that said fossils are usually separated by millions of years makes such lineages seem even more speculative.
That’s fine, but it’s only part of the story. You can’t explain what natural forces rearranged the DNA to allow mammals to evolve from fish … that is something that cannot ever be known.
Probably because it never happened. At least in the form of a “hopeful monster” hypothesis which is a caricature of evolution coming from those who don’t understand evolution. No fish ever gave birth to a mammal. That’s just not how evolution works. So if anybody ever explained how that could work to you, then I guess you could say they would have “broken evolution!” Over many eons, and multitudes of generations, the little changes accumulate. Nowhere in there, even if you could see every last organism, could you identify something that would be “clearly the first mammal”, any more than you can identify the exact day that you learned to read. And yet … here you are. Reading!
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If the only possible evolutionary ancestor of the fish (for example) that appeared in the Early Cambrian is a worm, that hardly represents an evolutionary lineage.
Such a massive gap does nothing for the theory of evolution.
Yes, it did (allegedly) happen. Mammals are the (alleged) evolutionary descendants of fish, so it’s fair to say mammals (allegedly) evolved from fish … or humans (allegedly) evolved from a prokaryote.
I know.
I know.
Actually that’s backwards: if those fossils were close together, separated by just millennia, then the links would become speculative because there is no known mechanism capable of such rapid change. Millions of years make the links believable.
That depends on the mutation(s) in question – there are types for which the mechanisms are known, and as I understand it there are types where the ‘forces’ involved leave a trace. For many, perhaps most, though, you’re correct: I suspect that there’s no way to tell the difference between a base change caused by a cosmic ray, by a neutron from background radiation, or by a mutagenic chemical.
That’s something that makes studying biology fun: there are many things we know happened but haven’t tracked down the responsible mechanism (or ruled out the ability to track one down, as above).
No idea why but what came to mind was human chest hair: what kind of mutation led to some guys having none at all? Or for that matter, the same with chin hair?
[That latter led to an interesting conundrum for the Orthodox, one I read about but which hadn’t been resolved: Orthodox priests are supposed to have evident facial hair, but some Asians just don’t have any.]
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Are there actually any gaps that large still around?
Nor does it particularly do anything contrary for said theory – it might if all we had were massive gaps, but the story of the last thirty years and more is that the gaps keep getting smaller (with many of the newly found forms having been predicted).
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What are the (alleged) evolutionary ancestors of the fish that appeared in the Early Cambrian?
… not if the evolutionary changes between fossils were small.
Darwin’s biggest disappointment was that fossil lineages showing the very small changes his theory predicted were non-existent.
Deep-time makes anything seem possible … for some folks, at least.
You believe in the antiquity of the universe, right? And its evolution? (At least that’s a step better than the YECs.) It’s all about the mechanics. As I’ve noted before, evolution is about the mechanics of biology. Just think of yourself as an indigenous native somewhere who has just been a handed a cellphone, having never seen one before. You’re having similar difficulty with ‘the mechanics’ of evolution.
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I remember a cartoon from when the first computer word processing software came out. It showed a guy looking under the keyboard, behind the computer tower, under the table, wondering where the letters went onto the paper. It was actually quite a leap for some people that you could type on a keyboard and the words would appear on the screen and you could go back and correct mistakes (without white-out) before sending the completed bit of writing to the printer.
Though just BTW, to make your phone analogy complete you need to toss in one of these:
§
and of course before that –
Three steps in sending messages…
§ we used to have two of those; my brother rigged one upstairs and one in the basement as an intercom
Two drums?
I fear you missed the point here.
As have most of the other responders.
I have never tried this one.
I usually go further up the alleged tree.
But it doesn’t really matter where you look, the so-called missing links are still missing. And no pathetic attempt at anaogising with telephones is gointg to change that.
But they are still arguing pure science. Because that is all they know. They see God in nauture but deny Him the skill to create these wonders Himself. Instead he created a wonderful ungodly mechanism to randomly do it for him and congratulated Himself by pronouncing it good.
Hmm
I just do not understand how anyone can look at a Mandarine Duck and think it was not “designed”. Must be something to do with the word and connotations that have been attached to it.
I wonder whyr the beauty of the Mandarine does not give it the same prevalence as a common Mallard? Is that how Evolution works so perfectly? Making sure the beauty is not so prevalent that it gets taken for granted? I wonder why ducks that all live in similar environments do not look the same? So that they know who to mate with?
I wonder how a system so finely tuned as to be able to create humans managed to create some that think they are superior to others be it due to colour of skin or intellect?
Oh, wait a minute, evolution stopped at Adam. Didn’t it?
Must have done, two genomes could not produce such a diversity of races and by that time God had got back involved.
Yes, you cannot mix theology and science.
Richard
My understanding is there is nothing even remotely like a fish - or any vertebrate - in the fossil record before the first fish appeared in the Early Cambrian.
Most of the Ediacaran (pre-Cambrian) biota didn’t even move and there is no evidence at all of many of the body-plans that appeared in the Cambrian. The so-called Small Shelly Fauna (late-Ediacaran to Early Cambrian) don’t help the evolutionist cause.
Missing links between the Cambrian and pre-Cambrian biota are the norm, not the exception.
Extensive BST (Burgess Shale-Type) deposits that allow the fossilisation of soft-bodied, Ediacaran biota have been discovered, but they are almost totally devoid of fossils that can be linked to the complex animals that appeared in the Cambrian.
No, but what should we expect to find if mammals are descended from fish via reptiles (in the grade sense)? Exactly this:
Given that most of the extant phyla consist of worms, something that just looks like a worm without preservation even beyond many Lagerstatten would be the predicted common ancestor to most bilaterian phyla. There’s also the problem that we just don’t have very many deposits that have survived for more than 550 million years in which we could find such organisms, thus a paucity of transitional forms is mostly just reflective of a paucity of fossils of anything from the date range.
Myllokungmingiids or something similar to them.
Again, we have very few fossils of the relevant vintage, so the paucity is not a surprise.
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You’ve probably collected some fossils in your time. If so, do you have a favourite?
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What a name!
What are the evolutionary ancestors of Myllokungmingiids?