Yes, one of the more predictable denouements to the WC threads. When you can’t argue on substance, issue dire warnings that everyone’s going to hell.
The formation of new species as a result of geographic, physiological, anatomical, or behavioral factors that prevent previously interbreeding populations from breeding with each other?
Species - 1. a class of individuals having some common characteristics or qualities; distinct sort or kind. 2. the major subdivision of a genus or subgenus, regarded as the basic category of biological classification, composed of related individuals that resemble one another, are able to breed among themselves, but are not able to breed with members of another species. ???
Some “scientists” must be slimy, like the ones who keep putting the myth of gill slits in human fetuses in the text books. See link - Revolution Against Evolution – A Revolution of the Love of God
No.
Just those who love a lie to the lake of fire prepared for the devil and his angels. Rev. 21 & 22
Thump!
Sorry, I couldn’t resist the temptation to thump it just one more time.
You keep ignoring the substance or imagining your own brand. See Revolution Against Evolution – A Revolution of the Love of God
Tossing people into a lake of fire ? If that’s the sort of thing God does, perhaps we should join with the devil.
A link from a from a creationist website ? Ignorance and insanity, free on the Web ! Come up with a real cite. You might even be correct, but I certainly won’t take claims by a creationist seriously; by definition, they are either a liar, deluded or ignorant, and therefore not good sources of information.
Again, you can repeat catchphrases like this as much as you want: it isn’t an argument. Common descent is something that can be demonstrated from first principles using evidence, which is simply not the same process as faith.
Care to define what a “true” transitional species is? I have to warn you that in general, when I ask creationists this, they end up defining something that evolution never suggests would exist: like a half-pig, half-frog. There are countless transitional fossils: as true as any other. You just have to first be willing to understand what common descent implies and how they fit in and what they would then be like.
Again, Tiktaalik is a textbook example of a transitional species.
So is Achaeopteryx, by the way, though some creationists have taken to trying to confuse debates over whether it is in the direct lineage of birds with a debate over whether or not it is transitional. Again: that’s a demonstration of the lack of understanding of what a transitional fossil is and what it is useful for demonstrating.
Are you saying that acceptance of evolution is incompatable with salvation?
As Diogenes the Cynic has pointed out, we have now come to the numbingly boring part of the thread that seems to be repeated every time a Wandering Creationist stumbles through, complete with dire warnings about how God is going to get us for actually follwing the evidence to conclusions. This is also the point where I generally have to note the irony of a person who claims to espouse the “Truth” based upon the bible having to resort to a violation of the Commandment to refrain from bearing false witness in order to buttress their rant.
One discovery of a swine tooth suggested the possibility of a human ancestor in North America. (Several teeth in humans and swine are similar.) However, the discovery was challenged by the paleontological community as soon as it was submitted for examination and in fewer than 11 months, even the person who had proposed the connection between that tooth and human descent had withdrawn the claim, yet here we are 80 years later with Creationists making their same false claim that someone “made” a human ancestor out of a single tooth from the wrong species.
The Lucy bones were not complete, but they were all found together and it required no great imagination to “put them together” as they form a nearly complete proto-human skeleton.
Haeckel’s gilled humans was put aside by biologists a very long time ago. It is not a part of the scientific discourse. Unfortunately, textbooks are often not written by practicing scientists, and Haeckel’s illustrations continue to show up in such works, despite protests by many scientists.
So, in order to point out the “errors” of science, you have felt a need to post two lies and a criticism of textbooks (pretending that scientists support the error in those texts). It is hard to take seriously the claims of someone who wants to call down God’s wrath by breaking one of God’s commandments.
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.
Ummm you didn’r make much of an examination. I’ll hightlight a small section of the list:
[quote]
Transition from primitive bony fish to amphibians:
o Paleoniscoids again (e.g. Cheirolepis)
o Osteolepis – one of the earliest crossopterygian lobe-finned fishes, still sharing some characters with the lungfish (the other group of lobe-finned fish). Had paired fins with a leg-like arrangement of bones, and had an early-amphibian-like skull and teeth.
o Eusthenopteron (and other rhipidistian crossopterygian fish) – intermediate between early crossopterygian fish and the earliest amphibians. Skull very amphibian-like. Strong amphibian-like backbone. Fins very like early amphibian feet.
o Icthyostegids (such as Icthyostega and Icthyostegopsis) – Terrestrial amphibians with many of Eusthenopteron’s fish features (e.g., the fin rays of the tail were retained). Some debate about whether Icthyostega should be considered a fish or an amphibian; it is an excellent transitional fossil.
o Labyrinthodonts (e.g., Pholidogaster, Pteroplax) – still have some icthyostegid features, but have lost many of the fish features (e.g., the fin rays are gone, vertebrae are stronger and interlocking, the nasal passage for air intake is well defined.)
[\quote]
This is series not only shows very clear examples of these supposidly mythical transitional fossils (that is the transition from one species to another), buts show the transition from fish to something that is not only not a fish but not an aquatic mammal at all, to an air breathing amphibian.
Gill slits, human ears, hey wait a minute… didn’t Kevin Costner already do that in “WATERWORLD”?
Y’all still arguing evolution? I recall an experiment where scientists took a species of minnow, one with a fast reproductive generation, and introduced a sample of these fish into a different environment. Several years later these fish had evolved various changes in their anatomy to survive in their new location.
Physical proof of Jesus’ existence? hmm, other than a few letters, there’s just not any. But then, that’s the case with most people noted throughout history. We don’t have the actual physical remains of many of our known leaders and/or famous personalities but we accept their existence.
I don’t think too many people even deny Jesus actually lived. But proof? sorry, it’s just not there
kinda got away from the OP huh?
It’s been a while since we had a creationist that ran the full gamut of predictable arguments, including the ‘God’s gonna burn you’ one.
Almost am I persuaded to sponsor this one to join. Almost.
I just felt like pointing out to srmclauren that actually the board probably has a majority of christian posters. Even some of the posters to this thread are christian (i’m not, but there are some). We’re arguing evolution with you, not the existence of God, and the two are not incompatible.
Anyway, my main question was; what about my forest scenario do you think couldn’t happen? What’s impossible about it?
Very good. Now tell us how that relates to two different animals breeding together.
By the way, you forgot Piltdown Man. Science is done by fallible people, the reason that science works is that everything is up for re-examination, and things change - especially ideas put forth at the beginning of a field. Now, if you followed the same practice, you’d admit that the Flood never happened and evolution did. The Catholic Church does.
I don’t think you’ve responded to even one of the points made in this thread so far. Just because you are unwilling to look at or unable to understand the evidence does not mean that it isn’t there.
BTW, you showed your lack of understanding of evolution by your comment that nothing you saw couldn’t be accomplished by breeders in a finite number of steps. You think that this is something against evolution, but it actually is in support of it. If you actually read Darwin (which will not put your soul at risk) you’d know that he used animal husbandry as evidence. Breeders have aways worked using evolutionary principles, selecting (unnaturally) the traits they wanted to encourage. In nature traits that encourage descendants get selected for. Do you think that evolution waves a magic want and turns a fish into a pig or something?
No one has mentioned this to you, but Tom is a Christian - by all the evidence I see, a much better one than you are. I’m an atheist, and I say keep going, guy. A debating strategy of responding to all points with “but, but, but … YOU’LL GO TO HELL” is a lot easier to refute than an intelligent one.
Heathen scientists must be very lucky by the way, since genetic evidence found after the tree (or bush) representing common descent supported it very well. Explain that, if you can.
Interesting, the ‘You’ll go to hell’ argument, isn’t it? Because up until that one rolls out, you might almost allow yourself to believe that the creationist is arguing his case because he’s concerned for your spiritual welfare and wants you to be right with God. But as soon as the hell card is played, it becomes apparent that no such concern actually exists; it’s smug superiority all the way, and in fact he doesn’t want you to be right with God; he wants God to let him watch you being toasted.
I’m waiting to see if he’s one of those people who “answers” that question by claiming the Catholic Church isn’t Christian.
Since we have a real life creationist here, I’d like to ask a question:
Given that, by the above statement, you accept “changes within a species”, how do you know, when presented with two distinct types of animal, whether or not that mysterious barrier to evolution exists between them?
Do these distinct types correspond to any of the classical (if somewhat outmoded) Linnaean taxonomic ranks (such as species, genus, family, etc.)? I ask because you appear to promote intra-“type” variation as accounting for the various canids (dogs, wolves, foxes, coyotes) even though these are typically considered multiple species (arguable in the dog-wolf case).
So how does a creationist tell between species that fall within a single variable “type” and species that don’t?
I don’t wish to presume to answer on behalf of srmclauren (who is, of course, still completely free to answer), but speaking as a former YECreationist, the way that creationism deals with this issue is to try to stifle inquiry long before the question arises.
All species are transitional species.
To imply otherwise assumes that evolutionary processes have a specific morphologic conclusion as a goal, which is not the case.
From my experience, this is true too. 
However, I have heard of some creationists coming up with classifications like “baramin” to sidestep this issue, and I was curious to hear more about it.