What is it that you fail to understand? I do not accept that evolution, as you believe it, ever took place.
You are welcome to believe whatever you want. But you started a thread here trying to convince others of the rational validity of your irrational beliefs. You should expect people to rebut your fact-free claims.
You see these things presented as "evidence" for evolution, but it is a premise that is completely unproven. No one was there to document any of it, so what you find in the fossil record does not really paint the picture you want it to.
Science completely rejects the idea that the past cannot be known unless some person was there to document it. The past has left behind ample evidence of itself in the present which can be scientifically analyzed to gain and accurate and reliable picture of ancient times (either in earth or in the universe in general).
Science does that with their diagrams and graphics.
A well informed and quantitative graph or a scientific diagram is worth a 1000 data sheets. While the artists impressions are for family friendly vibe in museums, actual diagrams of bones and relationships encapsulate immense amounts of extensively analyzed data in a useful format. Just so you know, its done in all sciences. Here is one where the burning of gasoline spray insider your car engine is simulated by a model. Such models are routinely used to design and analyze the performance of engines
It is "assumed" that there is an evolutionary chain of descent, all linked by intermediate species....but the facts are, that there are no intermediate species (and there should be thousands of them for every living thing on this planet if the theory is correct) Finding something that resembles another species is automatically assumed to be an ancestor.....yet there is nothing "linking" the two except a similarity.
If your first premise (that evolution is a fact and "must" have taken place) is flawed, then everything you present to uphold that premise will also be flawed. It will seem to fit the description of a transitional species because you want it to. I don't see that any species, just because it resembles another in a past era, is linked in any way to anything before it.....except by suggestion.
The theory of evolution
predicts that descent with modification with natural selection will create species that will show biological similarities with their ancestral lineage while slowly diverging as time progresses into newer types of body structure. The theory of evolution
predicts that when we look at two very different seeming types (land animals and fish), there will be ancient animals who lived in the past who would share characteristics of both fish and land animals and we would see a
chronological sequence where we would see certain types of fossil fish appear that are more and more land animal like until the
first fossils of land amphibians crop up.
Thus the theory of evolution predicts a pattern, a pattern that has no reason to exist otherwise. Here is the pattern\
1) The ancient earth will have no land animals but only fish in the sea. This is indeed what we see before 400 million years.
2) There will eventually be groups of fish that will have some similarities with land animals. This is observed in the fossil record with lungfish (fish with lungs) and other lobe-finned fish (fish with four fleshy limb like fin lobes) cropping up from 400 million years. No land animals are found yet.
3) Some groups of lobe finned fish are seen to adapt to shallow waters and begin to sport primitive limb bones in their fins
Example Eusthenopteron. 385 million years ago, after generic lungfish are seen and before any animals are seen.
http://palaeos.com/vertebrates/sarcopterygii/eusthenopteron.html
With the typical bone structure in the limbs that will become characteristic of all later land animals
4) By 375 million years, fish-amphibian transition animals like Tiktaalik are being found showing further development of limbs, heads and other features that make them more and more similar to land vertebrates.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/13/tiktaalik-fossil-fish-four-legged-land-animal
"Its extraordinary blend of gills, scales, fins and lungs, combined with a movable neck, sturdy ribcage and crocodile-like head, placed Tiktaalik half way between fish and the earliest four-legged land animals.In work published on Monday, researchers describe fossils of the back half of Tiktaalik for the first time. The report shows that the animal had a large, robust pelvic girdle, a prominent hip joint, and long hind fins. The powerful fins could have propelled the beast in the water, but also helped it walk on riverbeds, or scramble around on mudflats."
5) Finally we have Acanthostega and Icthyostega that are discovered after 370 million years that, as I discussed, have many of the features that show them to be clearly amphibious.
6)Its only after this, from 360 million years, that land vertebrate fossils begin to enter the fossil record. An example is an ancient land walking amphibious animal Perderpes from 350 million years who show striking similarity with earlier Acanthostega and yet has more well developed legs and shoulders that are now capable of supporting its full weight on land.
7) Thus from 400-350 million years, the fossil record show a chronological sequence where -at one end we have only primitive fishes and no vertebrate animals whatsoever on land, and the other end we have the first land walking amphibians. And in between we have a whole sequence of fish-amphibian animals whose bodies begin by looking like the ancient fishes but take on characteristics of the primitive amphibians over time, until at the end we have the first land walking amphibians!
This is exactly as predicted by the theory of evolution, where descent through modification and natural selection is expected to generate just this kind of a pattern as the animals slowly evolve from fully marine fishes to land-walking amphibians through 50 million years of evolution over successive generations.
8) Your "Jehova created everything directly when he wanted to" can neither predict such a pattern or explain why its rational to expect such a pattern. He could have created land animals with fully developed features along with all the fishes directly 450 million years ago. All the fishes, all the reptiles, all the amphibians, all the birds could have been created at the same time, fully modern . He could have created them billions of years ago instead of waiting around for 4 billion years since the formation of earth and populating the earth with nothing but bacteria, amoeba and plankton for the first 3.5 billion years of life.
In your theory there is no reason to expect
i) Simple unicellular prokaryotic life to predate complex multicellular life by a billion years (in evolution this is expected)
ii) Eukaryotic cells to arise after prokaryotic cells by a billion years (in evolution this is expected)
iii) Simplest types of animals like jellyfish and sponge to predate complex animals by 100 million years (in evolution you expect this)
iv) Early forms of invertebrate and vertebrate life look very primitive and less well developed than later types in the Cambrian era (in evolution you expect this)
v) Fish fossils to show distinct stages of sequential development of modern features over a 100 million year period like from jawless varieties to jaws, from bony plates to scales, from no internal skeleton to internal skeleton (the flexible vertebra), from early lobe like fins to more aerodynamic ray like fins. (evolution predicts this)
vi) For vertebrate animals to appear on land much much after the emergence of fish and the earliest of them showing a clear sequence of intermediate forms between certain fish and the first amphibians.(evolution predicts this)
vii) For amphibians to arise first, then reptiles, then mammals, then dinosaurs and then birds with clear sequence of forms intermediate between each of these group just at the time point of emergence.(evolution predicts this)
Why can't that Ictheyostega be just another created species who appeared like all the others, suddenly and with nothing connecting it to any later creature except some similarity in its anatomical structure? How many creatures exist today who are similar in many ways to others......yet this isn't proof for evolution. It is only proof of diversity. We are all made of the same stuff after all.
I believe that the Creator probably had a wonderful time experimenting with various models before he settled on the keepers.
It appears Jehovah went into an enormous amount of trouble trying to time and finetune his designed animals so that it looks like they arose by evolution. It seems his only goals were to make evolution appear to be correct rather than good design of perfected animals! Thousands and thousands of very different animals filled the same ecological niche over the eons again and again before becoming extinct and replaced by new forms living almost the exact same way. What is this? A perfect omnipotent, omniscient designer can't decide what he wants and changing each and every animal type every 2-3 million years or so for the last 600 million years? Building and rebuilding species, moving the continents and oceans around again and again, building and eroding mountains again and again and again eon after eon of pointless mindless transformations and re-transformations. This is design?? Wow!! He is psychotic or something?
You belittle God by hanging onto such a regressive view of creation.
I am not expecting you to accept my views, but you somehow seem to think I have to accept yours.
Mine is more believable IMV. You are welcome to believe whatever you like.
I do not expect you to change your views either. I will simply show how unjustfied and irrational your rejection of evolution is. Rest is upto you and others who read this thread. Your problem is not only your faith but your inability to understand anything beyond surface appearance. All you have done so far is to post pretty pictures. That is the level of your engagement with the natural world. You have not looked beyond the fur and feathers into the flesh, bone, blood and eventually into the cells and the genes over all of which this cm thick skin is nothing but a protective covering. Similarly you have not looked behind the wafer thin skin of the present now and down into the thick layers of 4 billion years of the past of this earth and this life in earth. No wonder your understanding is riddled with false beliefs. You are like a person who believes that the gift wrap is the gift itself and the book cover is the book itself. Probably you understand your Bible and God in the same way as well and thus make your religion and God presented in it much less than He needs to be.
