[QUOTE=srmclauren]
Looks like they all look like their ancestors.
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Really? You can’t have looked that hard or thought that deeply about many of them then. Because all of them have features that are NOT like their ancestors: that’s what makes them transitional.
Look again. They all have key morphological differences. To a layperson who might only know things in terms of “fish” or “pigs” these elements may not be immediately apparent, but I assure you they are they, quite intelligible, and quite compelling.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. All of these examples demonstrate the directions of ancestral lineages, and they do it by showing features that characteristic of one older branch of life with the addition of a cluster of features that are characteristic of a later branch. I don’t know how things could get more direct or compelling than that.
I don’t think anyone can actually look at the whole of the fossil record, then compare it with the genetic record, and then compare those things with virtually every other piece of evidence we have to check to see if the story makes sense, see that every little piece lines up exactly, and then claim that its just all faith and guesswork. The only explanation is either denial or simply refusing to spend the time to realize exactly what all the evidence is and what it looks like as a whole.
At one point, someone claimed to have discovered another hominid based on a tooth. That might sound really crazy to you, but that’s because you don’t understand taxonomy and the uniqueness of traits. In this case, however, the evidence was weak, and most scientists were skeptical throughout. And, of course, it was scientists that definitively showed that the tooth was not hominid at all. So I’m not sure what your point is.
The original Lucy was certainly in pieces, but she wasn’t pieced together by imagination: she was pieced together by a lot of painstaking methodology on bone structure and muscle attachments (which are preserved to some extent on bones) and exact site locations and so on. Furthermore, there have been any number of other Lucies found to confirm that we got things right.
No. Haekel’s drawings were inaccurate, but they were not hoaxes, and what you’ll find in modern biology textbooks are lithographs and other photographic representations of embryos. Haekel’s own theory of recapitulation was another that was always controversial and eventually tossed out, BY SCIENTISTS, but the basic idea of what embryos show: i.e. a wealth of information demonstrating common origins in a branching pattern, is perfectly solid without Haekel’s flawed drawings. If anything, the real ones are even more compelling given what we know of genetics and evo-devo.
Humans don’t lose gills (though there’s more to it as I discuss below) but did you know that dolphin embryos form leg buds and then lose them? That’s sort of hard to explain without common descent, but obvious with it. And dolphins /whales have even been found with rare atavisms in which those leg buds aren’t re-absorbed, but instead develop into legs… which just so happen to be physiologically matched up in the basic tetrapod way to the hip. Quite a stunning coincidence. Humn beings have atavisms as well, but in their case they are tails: real tails that fail to reabsorb in the same sort of way. Why do dolphins have atavisms reflecting a past ancestry with legs, and humans have atavisms reflecting a past ancestry with tails, and not the other way around or some other totally random elements? Common descent makes the reason pretty darn clear.
As usual, you have a creationist claim that involves mixing a whole lot of nonsense up together, pretending that information 80 years out of date is current, and so on. Yes, human embryos do not have “gill slits.” But what they DO have, is pharyngeal arches. In fish these structures become the basis gills, in humans they don’t, but the fact remains that these are basic embryonic structures that are characteristic of vertebrate embryos and both fish embryos and human embryos have them. And, wouldn’t you know it, the same basic path of development that these arches go through just HAPPENS to be exactly what the supposedly non-existence transitional fossils demonstrate: the modification of simpler parts from what used to be gill and jaw structures to the more complex ear bones and other structures of reptiles and then mammals. What a coincidence! You might even say that it takes a great deal of faith to deny the very very obvious implication.
