What Have Darwinists Said That's True?

[Autodidact]

Hela: I really can't answer your question without knowing what you mean by the word, "Darwinist."

 

[Hela cells/lab pandemic]

Camanintx:

Once again, what does Darwin's religious belief have to do with the validity of his theory?

I wasn't the one who first brought up Darwin's ' ostensibly' agnostic/ non-atheistic status...I merely responded to claims first made by Christine...

However, I've no doubt that the Atheistic aspects of Darwinism are crucial to address/ consider....Since this has been used to promote ' moral relativism/ elite deviance' and I also believe that this has contributed to the death of millions...THERE ARE DANGERS HEREIN...AND THESE DANGERS MUST NOT BE SWEPT UNDER THE ' proverbial' CARPET IMO...

Camanintx:

Would you say that Christianity was wrong because Martin Luther was anti-semitic?

Chrisiianity just like atheistic/secular science has a HELLUVA LOT OF SKELETONS in its closet. THESE MUST ALSO BE ADDRESSED IMO...

It also greatly bothers me that evangelicals and even more reasonable theologians ( who certainly KNOW BETTER ) have for centuries denied Christianity's ( ohhhhh so-ooo obvious ) PAGAN ROOTS...In fact they murdered the gnostics en masse for trying to reveal this...

a Good Book on this subject is Tom Harpur's ' The Pagan Christ '

CHEERS AGAIN ET AL

 

[Hela cells/lab pandemic]

Autodidact:

Hela: I really can't answer your question without knowing what you mean by the word, "Darwinist."

Darwinist : A proponent of Darwin's theory of evolution ( and/or more modern neo-Darwinism) . Contrary to popular opinion around here ( or so it seems ) it IS possible to believe in evolution without being a Darwinist. Evolution is a fact...BUT ...' Darwinian ' Evolution is a myth...

Natural Selection...underpinned by random mutation...simply WON'T SUFFICE/ is woefully insufficient to explain Abiogenesis/ the arrival of Life/ fleshly evolution IMO ...

And all of the ' phylogenetic' family trees supplied by evolutionary biologists are PURE FANTASY/ PSEUDO-SCIENCE

FEATHERED DINOSAURS ? ...Eohippus to Horses? ....Ernst Haeckel's fraudulent embryos/ ' embryonic recapitulation.’? ....H. B. Kettlewell’s ‘ Peppered Moth ’ Malarkey...The Miller Experiment... Nebraska Man’...‘ South-west Colorado Man,’ ...Java Man/Pithecanthropus...Ramapithecus...' Piltdown Man'...Australopithecines/Lucy a human anscestor ?

PLUH-LEEEEEEEZE ... Hell's Bell's... a High School Kid should be able to see through all this pseudo-scientific evolutionary biology B.S. ...BOGUS, BOGUS, BOGUS...ALL BOGUS

Hmmm ...here's a few pertinent quotes...

Paleontologists are traditionally famous (or infamous) for reconstructing whole animals from the debris of death. Mostly they cheat
Stefan Bengtson, ‘The Solution to a Jigsaw Puzzle,’ Nature, vol. 345 (June 28, 1990, p. 765-766 )



Species that were once thought to have turned into others have been found to overlap in time with these alleged descendants. In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.
Steven M. Stanley,‘ The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species’ ( 1981, p. 95)


Not only has paleontology failed to come up with the fossil ‘missing links’ which Darwin anticipated, but hypothetical reconstructions of major evolutionary developments—such as that linking birds to reptiles— are beginning to look more like fantasies than serious conjectures. Paleontologist : George Gaylord Simpson


The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid, that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone. -Tim White , co-discoverer of‘ Lucy ’

Modern Apes...seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans - of upright, naked, tool-making big-brained humans - is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter - Lyall Watson

We do not see constant progressive brain enlargement through time, or a climb to a more completely human posture. We see instead new ‘ideas,’ like upright posture, developed fully from the outset. - Niles Eldredge


If you brought in a smart scientist from another discipline and showed him the meagre evidence ( for man’s evolutionary origins ) ... he'd surely say, forget it; there isn't enough to go on. -Harvard professor David Pilbeam

 

[camanintx]

Hmmm ...here's a few pertinent quotes...

Do you really think that a few quotes is all it takes to disprove a scientific theory? How about some actual science.

Paleontologists are traditionally famous (or infamous) for reconstructing whole animals from the debris of death. Mostly they cheat
Stefan Bengtson, ‘The Solution to a Jigsaw Puzzle,’ Nature, vol. 345 (June 28, 1990, p. 765-766 )

I would suggest that contrary to Mr. Bengtson's assumption, most paleontologists are honest about where they are guessing and where they are not. Does Mr. Bengtson suggest a better way of recreating animals that no longer live?

Species that were once thought to have turned into others have been found to overlap in time with these alleged descendants. In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.
Steven M. Stanley,‘ The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species’ ( 1981, p. 95)

If some members of a species evolve into a new species, why wouldn't they overlap with the remaining descendants of the original species? I don't see a problem here.

Not only has paleontology failed to come up with the fossil ‘missing links’ which Darwin anticipated, but hypothetical reconstructions of major evolutionary developments—such as that linking birds to reptiles— are beginning to look more like fantasies than serious conjectures. Paleontologist : George Gaylord Simpson

You haven't shown how Tiktaalik is not a "missing link" between fish and mammals.

The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid, that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone. -Tim White , co-discoverer of‘ Lucy ’

How does that discredit the bones that have been proven to be hominid?

Modern Apes...seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans - of upright, naked, tool-making big-brained humans - is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter - Lyall Watson

Any simple Google search proves this statement to be wrong.

Researchers find prehistoric ape fossils | Science & Health | Reuters

We do not see constant progressive brain enlargement through time, or a climb to a more completely human posture. We see instead new ‘ideas,’ like upright posture, developed fully from the outset. - Niles Eldredge

Looks like there is ample evidence of progressive brain enlargement to me.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/images/hominids2.jpg

If you brought in a smart scientist from another discipline and showed him the meagre evidence ( for man’s evolutionary origins ) ... he'd surely say, forget it; there isn't enough to go on. -Harvard professor David Pilbeam

I'm not even a scientist and I can understand the "meager evidence" for evolution. Mr. Pilbeam is either mistaken or the quote was taken out of context.

 

[Hela cells/lab pandemic]

Camanintx:

You haven't shown how Tiktaalik is not a "missing link" between fish and mammals.

You want me to prove a negative ? YOU have not proven that it is a ' missing link' between fish and ' four footed' Vertebrates ...

Indeed not a single claim ever made by Darwinists is demonstrably true...although many MANY are demonstrably false !

 

[yossarian22]

I DON’T NEED UR ‘ FRUGGEN ‘ PERMISSION vis a vis subject MATTER/ MATERIALISM.

Get over yourself
You posted some idiotic paper with an idiotic purpose under idiotic pretenses which I will pay no attention to.
I don't give a **** what your opinions about Materialism is, because, in the end, it is opinion. I won't waste my time dredging through philosophical questions in something clearly in a forum not meant to it.
I don't give a **** whether you use latin or not. My objections are not around your latin, and you have blown my point out of proportion simply because you either cannot or will not address the points I bring up.
Pathetic.

That’s such wild conjecture ( bordering on SuperNaturalism ) that you might as well be arguing about the number of angels that might dance on the head of a pin

Ah, the bitter stench of hypocrisy.
I could easily say the same thing of creationist arguments, but I have more tact than that

Spurious / ludicrous or not....I’ll respond to some of your other points in due course

Like the last thread? I won't hold my breath.

 

[Autodidact]

Autodidact:

Darwinist : A proponent of Darwin's theory of evolution ( and/or more modern neo-Darwinism) . Contrary to popular opinion around here ( or so it seems ) it IS possible to believe in evolution without being a Darwinist. Evolution is a fact...BUT ...' Darwinian ' Evolution is a myth...

O.K., so that would include the entire field of modern biology, basically.

Natural Selection...underpinned by random mutation...simply WON'T SUFFICE/ is woefully insufficient to explain Abiogenesis/ the arrival of Life/ fleshly evolution IMO

Well of course it is, nor has it ever tried to. It's not about that; it's about diversity of species, not abiogenesis.

And all of the ' phylogenetic' family trees supplied by evolutionary biologists are PURE FANTASY/ PSEUDO-SCIENCE

Yes, I'm sure you know much better than all of the experts.

FEATHERED DINOSAURS ? ...Eohippus to Horses? ....Ernst Haeckel's fraudulent embryos/ ' embryonic recapitulation.’? ....H. B. Kettlewell’s ‘ Peppered Moth ’ Malarkey...The Miller Experiment... Nebraska Man’...‘ South-west Colorado Man,’ ...Java Man/Pithecanthropus...Ramapithecus...' Piltdown Man'...Australopithecines/Lucy a human anscestor ?

Oh god, what a load of crap. Where to start? Are you saying that horses did not descend from a common horse-progenitor? The ToE is not based on any of the things you mention, so why are you dragging them into it? Are you not familiar with the actual evidence, or are you being deliberately dishonest? Peppered moths are an excellent example--note, not evidence, example--of evolution in action. What's your gripe with the Miller-Urey experiments, and what on earth do they have to do with Darwinian evolution

PLUH-LEEEEEEEZE ... Hell's Bell's... a High School Kid should be able to see through all this pseudo-scientific evolutionary biology B.S. ...BOGUS, BOGUS, BOGUS...ALL BOGUS

Hmmm, and yet the world's leading scientists have not--why do you suppose that is?

 

[camanintx]

Camanintx:

You want me to prove a negative ? YOU have not proven that it is a ' missing link' between fish and ' four footed' Vertebrates ...

Indeed not a single claim ever made by Darwinists is demonstrably true...although many MANY are demonstrably false !

No one ever said you had to prove a negative. Every paleontologist that has studied Tiktaalik agrees that it is a transitional species exhibiting the characteristics of fish and tetrapods. It was found in rock formed from late Devonian river sediments, exactly where Darwin's theory said that such a transitional species should exist.

A Devonian tetrapod-like fish and the evolution of the tetrapod body plan : Nature

All you have to do is produce one scientific paper by someone who has actually studied Tiktaalik that says otherwise. Your personal opinions on the matter are meaningless unless you can how you know more than the people who actually study these things.

 

[Mister_T]

***MOD POST***​

Please debate in a civil manner from this point on. Any further personal attacks will not be tolerated and will result in further moderator action.​

Thank You.​

 

[Hela cells/lab pandemic]

Autodidact :

Oh god, what a load of crap. Where to start? Are you saying that horses did not descend from a common horse-progenitor?

I am saying that all of the ‘ phylogenetic’ family trees drawn by evolutionary biologists
purporting to trace the ' transition' from ‘ eohippus to horses’ ( and this is a common complaint about ALL phylogenetic family trees ) are pure fantasy !



' A HORSE IS A HORSE, OF COURSE ' !


For decades, evolutionists asserted that a four toed, fox-sized creature, called eohippus, morphed, over millions of years, into that much larger , one toed beast, known as the horse.

Beginning with eohippus, researchers claimed to have found ‘ incontrovertible evidence’ linking still more extinct creatures ( such as orohippus , mesohippus, merychippus, and pliohippus ) to today’s steeds. Trouble was , scientists kept adding , subtracting, or otherwise shuffling species, in this supposedly well ordered lineage.

As formerly missing skeletal parts were unearthed ( in such diverse places as India, Africa, Europe, and the Americas ) tracking these pseudo-ponies became problematic. Mulishly, many fossils turned up in the wrong geological strata; others revealed glaring physiological discrepancies, which raised ‘ nag-ging ’ doubts.

In detailing a smooth transition, from eohippus to equines, evolutionists needed to show a sequential decrease in the number of these creatures’ toes . Yet artfully arranging this, produced anomalies in the number of their vertebrae and ribs. So how could a beast which started out with 16 ribs, turn into one with 19, which then arbitrarily got reduced back to 17 ? What sort of step by step, species progression was that ?

Things got murkier still , when fossils of eohippus and horses were found in close proximity to each other. According to carbon dating, millions of years ago, these were contemporary species, living side by side. But this unsettling revelation made the equine family tree suddenly seem like a non-starter. If today’s thoroughbreds evolved from eohippus, their ancestors couldn’t have coexisted . Natural selection decreed that the more primitive eohippus would have been out competed and replaced by better adapted ( i.e. more horse-like ) creatures , eons earlier.

Conceding defeat , scientists reluctantly acknowledged that the extinct eohippus
( which bears a stunning resemblance to the modern hyrax ! ) was no more an ancestor of equines , than is the unicorn . In the words of biologist Boyce Rensberger:

The popularly told example of horse evolution, suggesting a gradual sequence of changes from four-toed fox-sized creatures living nearly 50 million years ago to today's much larger one-toed horse, has long been known to be wrong. Instead of gradual change, fossils of each intermediate species appear fully distinct, persist unchanged, and then become extinct. Transitional forms are unknown.[Boyce Rensberger, as cited in the ‘ Houston Chronicle’, November 5, 1980, p. 15]

 

[Hela cells/lab pandemic]

Autodidact:

Are you ( Hela ) not familiar with the actual evidence, or are you being deliberately dishonest?

Am I quite familiar with the total dearth of evidence to support ' Darwinian ' evolution. Completely spurious phylogenetic family trees ( masquerading as evidence ) only amounts to an academic ‘ sleight of hand’

Autodidact:

Peppered moths are an excellent example--note, not evidence, example--of evolution in action.

No they are not . H. B. Kettlewell’s much cited ‘ Peppered Moth’ Study, was merely another illustration of Evolutionary biologist’s academic dishonesty/ fraud masquerading as science


H. B. KETTLEWELL’S ‘ PEPPERED MOTH’ MALARKEY

H. B. Kettlewell’s much cited ‘Peppered moth study’ provided more malarkey, masquerading as fact. Kettlewell claimed to have found evidence of both ' Darwinian' evolution and natural selection in contemporary moth populations, affected by coal pollution, which had darkened the bark on Great Britain’s trees.

Reportedly, darker bark meant that darker moths , in heavily industrialized regions, would be better camouflaged, and therefore more likely to escape predation by birds. Conversely, lighter coloured moths, of the same species, were said to have a comparative advantage in relatively unpolluted areas. Kettlewell failed to mention that Peppered moths don’t normally light on tree trunks, but instead hide under tree branches by day, venturing forth at night.

All of Kettlewell’s statistics were carefully doctored, and photographed insects - misrepresented as living specimens - were actually dead ones , pinned or glued to trees ! Even Kettlewell’s original premise was flawed. Both dark and light versions of Peppered moths predate coal pollution, so this was not an example of an adaptive mutation at all.

 

[camanintx]

No they are not . H. B. Kettlewell’s much cited ‘ Peppered Moth’ Study, was merely another illustration of Evolutionary biologist’s academic dishonesty/ fraud masquerading as science

If you are going to use Jonathan Wells as a source to refute Evolution, you should know that his arguments have been completely refuted. Kettlewell's Peppered Moth experiments, while not perfect, are still considered an example of adaptive mutation and natural selection.

H[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]owever, in 1998, Michael E. N. Majerus of the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge carefully re-examined Kettlewell's studies, as well as many others that have since appeared. What he reported, first of all, was that Kettlewell's experiments, indicating that moth survival depends upon color-related camouflage, were generally correct:[/FONT]

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]" Differential bird predation of the typica and carbonaria forms, in habitats affected by industrial pollution to different degrees, is the primary influence on the evolution of melanism in the peppered moth."[/FONT]​

 

[Hela cells/lab pandemic]

Autodidact :

What's your gripe with the Miller-Urey experiments

Well first and foremost , most experts now concede ( and even Miller agrees ) that the conditions set up in the Miller experiment, in all probability, did NOT come close to representing atmospheric conditions in the pre-biotic earth. Secondly, Miller cheated by employing a ‘ Cold Trap’

THE FLAWED ‘ MILLER EXPERIMENT’

Darwinists/ neo-Darwinists have long insisted that life was simply a fortuitous accident ? Is this possible ?

Investigations into the enigmatic/ pre-biotic ‘ origins of life’ were first conducted in 1953, at the university of Chicago, by a 22 year old undergraduate student named STANLEY L. MILLER . To stimulate the heat from the sun, along with lightning strikes, Miller had heated, or alternatively passed electrical currents, through glass tubes filled with a mixture of gases, inclusive of water vapor, hydrogen, methane and ammonia, which ostensibly served to recreate/represent conditions in the primordial earth atmosphere.

After seven days Miller determined that a dark tar deposited in the bottom of his containers, included the amino acids alanine and glycine . Since both alanine and glycine are precursors, as well as crucial components of all organic proteins, evolutionists hailed this as a successful experiment which went a long way toward corroborating Darwinian notions that prebiotic chemistry could have spontaneously engendered life ( a hypothetical process known as Abiogenesis ). There were even a few newspaper headlines which ludicrously declared that Miller’s lab had successfully recreated life in a test-tube !

Despite all the hoopla, in recent years, Miller’s experiment has faced growing criticism. In hindsight, his 1950's simulation seems totally unrealistic to many. Most contemporary experts believe that the ammonia and methane - which Miller had originally used as precursors for his organic compounds - didn’t exist in abundance in the primordial atmosphere. These same experts insist that the only readily available substitutes would, most probably, have been nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Alas, recreations of the Miller experiment, employing these as precursors, yielded no amino acids !

BUT Even assuming useful amino acids could have been generated, spontaneously, from the primordial soup ( and this is in severe doubt ) this still doesn’t solve the riddle of how simple AMINO ACIDS might spontaneously give rise to proteins.

There are twenty amino acids utilize by nature, so the odds of any one being correctly aligned ( purely by chance ) are one in twenty, BUT these odds magnify quickly when one considers organic chains hundreds of AA's long ( representative of a typical protein ) quickly becoming astronomical !

Proteins are long chains of amino acids whose shape / chemical composition is crucial to its function. In the case of the protein hemoglobin ( for example ) a single Amino Acid mistep/ mistake ( only one in 287 ) results not only in an improperly functioning hemoglobin molecule, it also results in death twenty-five percent of the time !


Imagining how proteins, in turn, could have given rise by blind chance, to living cells, becomes an exercise in unadulterated absurdity ! Renown Mathematicians have insisted that even millions of billions of trillions of years ,of optimal prebiotic conditions, still wouldn’t be sufficient for Abiogenesis to occur, purely by chance. Indeed , according to many, the spontaneous generation of life would remain essentially impossible , given a literally limitless amount of time.

Renown scientist Fred Hoyle ( a well known proponent of supernatural explanations for genesis ) famously quipped that :

the likelihood for the spontaneous emergence of a single cell, is roughly akin to the odds of a whirlwind passing through a junkyard and spontaneously creating a fully functioning Boeing 747 !

***
Doubtless the carefully contrived conditions provided by S. L. Miller - which required considerable foresight and intelligence on his part - have nothing in common with the chaotic environment which presumably prevailed on our primitive planet.So too, the ‘ reducing atmosphere’ needed to remove oxygen atoms from complex molecules - which Miller had presumed existed on the pre-biotic earth, is now almost universally disputed by most experts.

THE PRIMORDIAL ATMOSPHERE THAT MILLER ATTEMPTED TO SIMULATE IN HIS EXPERIMENT WAS NOT REALISTIC. IN THE 1980S, SCIENTISTS AGREED THAT NITROGEN AND CARBON DIOXIDE SHOULD HAVE BEEN USED IN THIS ARTIFICIAL ENVIRONMENT INSTEAD OF METHANE AND AMMONIA. ( sorry I can’t find the source for this quote )

Miller's detractors have asserted that the very same unbridled energy ( inclusive of such things as potentially lethal ultraviolet light, violent lightning strikes , radioactive decay, dramatic volcanism and more ) which Stanley M originally hypothesized as providing the energy needed to engender organic complexity, would in fact have destroyed large organic molecules , at a much faster rate than they could possibly have been spontaneously created.

This critical problem of organic molecules breaking down at much faster rates than they can be spontaneously created, was also addressed by Miller. To overcome this conundrum, Stanley L. employed something, which in the parlance of the laboratory, is known as a ‘ cold trap.’ Miller’s cold trap carefully shepherded organic molecules away from those unbridled electrical discharges and unruly heat energies which would otherwise have swiftly destroyed them all.

Critics labeled this ‘ cheating’ since the supposed organic chemistry of the primitive earth would have had no protective traps. How then could myriads of complex molecules have survived long enough to interact and engender even more complex molecules - which would themselves have been even more inclined to quickly break down ? How in hindsight, could this ostensibly rich prebiotic soup, have endured for the hundreds of millions of years , theoretically needed to spontaneously give rise to biology ?

Suffice to say that the Miller experiment proved nothing, other than the fact that an intelligent scientist can synthesize amino acids in a laboratory setting. Any more outlandish claims ( related to the supposedly spontaneous emergence of corporeality from pre-biotic chemistry ) remains hogwash pure and simple !

***
Only life begets life, it cannot ( nor in all likelihood will it ever ) be recreated from scratch, in a laboratory setting, even if ameliorated by considerable human intelligence. All naturalistic explanations for the origin of life , from inanimate matter ( again see abiogenesis ) as well as the ' hypothetic' shaping of species by random mutations ( even if honed by natural selection ) seem equally preposterous according to all probability papers produced by mathematicians which have considered the ‘ Darwinian’ evolutionary problem.

Here’s a few more pertient quotes :

It ( Darwinian Evolution ) seems to require many thousands, perhaps millions, of successive mutations to produce even the easiest complexity we see in life now. It appears, naively at least, that no matter how large the probability of a single mutation is, should it be even as great as one-half, you would get this probability raised to a millionth power, which is so very close to zero that the chances of such a chain seem to be practically non-existent." ( See : Stanislaw M. Ulam, "How to Formulate Mathematically Problems of Rate of Evolution," in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), pg. 21 .....see also Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5)

[Darwinian Evolution] is undergoing its broadest and deepest revolution in nearly 50 years . . Exactly how evolution happened is now a matter of great controversy among biologists . . No clear resolution of the controversies was in sight [at the meeting]."—*Boyce Rensberger, "Macroevolution Theory Stirs Hottest Debate Since Darwin," in The Riverside (California) Enterprise, p. E9; *Roger Lewin, "Evolutionary Theory under Fire," Science, November 21, 1980, pp. 883-887.

An increasing number of scientists, most particularly a growing number of evolutionists . . argue that Darwinian evolutionary theory is no genuine scientific theory at all . . Many of the critics have the highest intellectual credentials."—*Michael Ruse, "Darwin's Theory: An Exercise in Science," as cited in New Scientist, June 25, 1981, p. 828.

 

[Hela cells/lab pandemic]

Hela :

Evolutionary biology ( i.e. " Darwinian' Evolution ) is a myth

Autodidact :

O.K., so that would include the entire field of modern biology, basically.

What Nonsense !

....Contemplating a purposeful/ intelligent evolution, does NOTHING to negate any other aspects of biology, other than ' Darwinism/ neo-Darwinism' itself. In fact, the more we learn about the incredible complexities of organic chemistry/ ' irreducibly complex' fleshly design features etc....the stronger the arguments for ID become...

In other words, the arguments for a ' Creator' only get stronger...the more the biological sciences, and indeed all bonafide sciences ( as opposed to atheistic dogma masquerading as science ) advances...

Pseudo sceince/atheistic dogma... and that's all Neo-Darwinism/ conventional ' evolutionary biology ' IS...DON'T COUNT ...Since they are NOT true science !

 

[Hela cells/lab pandemic]

Camanintx :

If some members of a species evolve into a new species, why wouldn't they overlap with the remaining descendants of the original species? I don't see a problem here.

Because that wouldn’t allow Natural Selection to be the driving force for evolution, since this is supposed to represent ‘ survival of the fittest’ ....Darwinian evolution demands a slow gradualistic chain of minor alterations, which gets selected for when they are deemed advantageous ( taking the others/ less adapted out of the evolutionary ' horse' race, so to speak ) ...Darwinian evolution does NOT allow for a sudden evolutionary ‘ quantum leap’ from one species to another.

So this ‘ overlapping’ presents quite an intractable problem when it comes to a creature like Eohippus, in particular ...still existing in the same evolutionary/ fossil strata as horses ( their ostensibly distant descendents ) ...Since Eohippus is said to represent only the FIRST link in an ‘ ostensibly’ long evolutionary chain ... which supposedly went on to include orohippus , mesohippus, merychippus, and pliohippus etc etc...

Now lets not forget that most of the ' transitional creatures' which Darwinists claim gave rise/ lead up to horses ( or what have you ) went extinct...Furthermore, there must be a huge huge number of other transitional forms ( according to Darwinists ) which not only went extinct...BUT which left no fossil trace/ evidence.

Why then would the very first link in the Horse ‘ phylogenetic’ chain, which presumably would be the least well adapted , not only leave lots of fossils ? but also lots of fossils on the same strata as horses ? This makes NO ' Darwinian' sense...NOT When all of the other ‘ better adapted’ transitional/ pseudo horse forms...left no trace in the same strata...

Natural Selection isn’t supposed to ( neigh it cannot ) work this way...If transitional forms never died out ( in the region where a novel transition form appears ) they would still be free to interbreed / mix their ' inferiror' genes with this better adapted form, which had yet to become a truly novel species...In that kind of scenario ‘ Darwinian ‘ evolution would NEVER happen !

 

[Hela cells/lab pandemic]

Camanintx :

How does that ( ' Lucy' etcetera ) discredit the bones that have been proven to be hominid?

If by Hominid you mean a ‘ transitional species’ somewhere between apes and humans , there are no such creatures / fossil evidence / bones ....there are only ‘ pretenders’ which do NOT withstand close scrutiny .

 

[Hela cells/lab pandemic]

Camanintx :

If you are going to use Jonathan Wells as a source to refute Evolution...

In fact I first read about the objections to Kettlewell's ‘ Peppered Moth study ' in noted biologist Richard Lewontin's book ' It aint necessarily so' . I don’t recall ever reading anything written by Jonathan Wells. I may have, BUT the name doesn’t ring a bell.

BTW I'm NOT refuting ' evolution' I'M REFUTING DARWINISM/ ' DARWINIAN' EVOLUTION only ....let's NOT forget that...

Camanintx :

Kettlewell's Peppered Moth experiments, while not perfect, are still considered an example of ADAPTIVE MUTATION and natural selection.

NOT perfect eh ? Talk about your GROS UNDERSTATEMENTS... According to Richard Lewontin... Kettlewell admitted ( after the fact ) to purposely doctoring his data and ‘ staging’ his photos ( He tried to claim that this academic dishonesty didn't matter/ didn't adversely effect his conclusions...)

Add to this the fact that this was NOT ( I repeat NOT ) an example of an ' ADAPTIVE MUTATION' ....Since the two colorations of Peppered Moths pre-existed / pre-dated coal pollution...

Kettlewell’s ‘ fraudulent’ study has PROVEN NOTHING ! At least nothing in support of ‘ Darwinian’ evolution ...Natural selection is not exclusive to Darwinism, it remains a puissant force in theories of ' Intelligent/purposeful ' Evolution too

What sets Darwinism apart is that it maintains that simple ' Natural Selection ' alone' ( when underpinned by purely random mutations ) would be sufficient to give rise to completely novel species/ fleshly design features...

There is still NO EVIDENCE that this is true...and That fraud Kettlewell certainly does nothing to lend credence to the theory of ' Darwinian' evolution ( by Natural Selection ) either

 

[Smoke]

I'm not even a scientist and I can understand the "meager evidence" for evolution. Mr. Pilbeam is either mistaken or the quote was taken out of context.

No, it's not just taken out of context; it's deliberately misrepresented.

If you brought in a smart scientist from another discipline and showed him the meagre evidence ( for man’s evolutionary origins ) ... he'd surely say, forget it; there isn't enough to go on. -Harvard professor David Pilbeam

The deliberate lie here is the parenthetical comment "(for man's evolutionary origins)." That's not what Pilbeam was talking about at all. Pilbeam not only acknowledges the fact of evolution, but has written several books on the subject. When he was speaking, in 1981, about "meager evidence," he was talking about the meager evidence available for reconstructing the precise evolutionary tree of hominids and the other great apes. Of course, we have considerably more evidence now than we had in 1981, but Pilbeam wasn't saying anything even remotely resembling what Creationists claim.

The first thing you notice about Creationists is that in their defense of "truth" they are not at all ashamed to lie.

 

[camanintx]

So this ‘ overlapping’ presents quite an intractable problem when it comes to a creature like Eohippus, in particular ...still existing in the same evolutionary/ fossil strata as horses ( their ostensibly distant descendents ) ...Since Eohippus is said to represent only the FIRST link in an ‘ ostensibly’ long evolutionary chain ... which supposedly went on to include orohippus , mesohippus, merychippus, and pliohippus etc etc...

If the oldest example of modern horses (Equus stenonis) dates back only 3 million years and the youngest fossil of Eohippus is 20 million years old, where exactly do you see any overlap?

Now lets not forget that most of the ' transitional creatures' which Darwinists claim gave rise/ lead up to horses ( or what have you ) went extinct...Furthermore, there must be a huge huge number of other transitional forms ( according to Darwinists ) which not only went extinct...BUT which left no fossil tace.

Why then would the very first link in the Horse ‘ phylogenetic’ chain, which presumably would be the least well adapted , not only leave lots of fossils ? but also lots of fossils on the same strata as horses ? This makes NO ' Darwinian' sense...NOT When all of the other ‘ better adapted’ transitional/ pseudo horse forms...left no trace in the same strata...

I suggest you bone up on your knowledge of fossilization and why we don't find the remains of every creature which ever lived.

Natural Selection isn’t supposed to ( neigh it cannot ) work this way...If transitional forms never died out ( in the region where a novel transition form appears ) they would still be free to interbreed / mix their ' inferiror' genes with this better adapted form, which had yet to become a truly novel species...In that kind of scenario ‘ Darwinian ‘ evolution would NEVER happen !

Darwinian evolution works perfectly fine under these conditions. For a better understanding, I suggest you read up on the evolution of lactose tolerance.

BWT - any luck finding a competent rebuttal to Tiktaalik?

 

[Autodidact]

Autodidact :

I am saying that all of the ‘ phylogenetic’ family trees drawn by evolutionary biologists
purporting to trace the ' transition' from ‘ eohippus to horses’ ( and this is a common complaint about ALL phylogenetic family trees ) are pure fantasy !



' A HORSE IS A HORSE, OF COURSE ' !


For decades, evolutionists asserted that a four toed, fox-sized creature, called eohippus, morphed, over millions of years, into that much larger , one toed beast, known as the horse.

Beginning with eohippus, researchers claimed to have found ‘ incontrovertible evidence’ linking still more extinct creatures ( such as orohippus , mesohippus, merychippus, and pliohippus ) to today’s steeds. Trouble was , scientists kept adding , subtracting, or otherwise shuffling species, in this supposedly well ordered lineage.

As formerly missing skeletal parts were unearthed ( in such diverse places as India, Africa, Europe, and the Americas ) tracking these pseudo-ponies became problematic. Mulishly, many fossils turned up in the wrong geological strata; others revealed glaring physiological discrepancies, which raised ‘ nag-ging ’ doubts.

In detailing a smooth transition, from eohippus to equines, evolutionists needed to show a sequential decrease in the number of these creatures’ toes . Yet artfully arranging this, produced anomalies in the number of their vertebrae and ribs. So how could a beast which started out with 16 ribs, turn into one with 19, which then arbitrarily got reduced back to 17 ? What sort of step by step, species progression was that ?

Things got murkier still , when fossils of eohippus and horses were found in close proximity to each other. According to carbon dating, millions of years ago, these were contemporary species, living side by side. But this unsettling revelation made the equine family tree suddenly seem like a non-starter. If today’s thoroughbreds evolved from eohippus, their ancestors couldn’t have coexisted . Natural selection decreed that the more primitive eohippus would have been out competed and replaced by better adapted ( i.e. more horse-like ) creatures , eons earlier.

Conceding defeat , scientists reluctantly acknowledged that the extinct eohippus
( which bears a stunning resemblance to the modern hyrax ! ) was no more an ancestor of equines , than is the unicorn . In the words of biologist Boyce Rensberger:

O.K., this is a good example of the kind of disinformation, quote mining and downright lies that creationists tell, and that continue to circulate on the internet forever. Boyce Rensberger is not a biologist; he's a reporter. He reported on a conference in Chicago in 1980, and reported about what some of the speakers there said. The year alone should raise questions for you as it is--what? That's right, a long time ago. The point that the speakers, well-known evolutionary biologists Stephen Gould and Niles Eldredge, were making is that the evolution of the horse, for example, is more complicated and intermittent than was once thought, not that the horse did not evolve from Eohippus, which is accepted among virtually all paleontologists and evolutionary biologists studying the matter. In any case, it is a remark at a conference 25 years ago, not one of the many articles, books and textbooks that covers this interesting subject in detail.

The variation in evolutionary theory that Eldredge and Gould pioneered, and which is now pretty well accepted, is called punctuated equilibrium. It was an interesting and significant advance in evolutionary theory--not a rejection of it. Creationists love to mine quotes from advocates of punc. eq.("punk eek") and try to twist them to sound like a rejection of evolutionary theory. They aren't, and trying to misportray them as being so is called "quote-mining" which is, of course, a form of lying that creationists are famous for. That is one of the many reasons that we say that creationists lie, and Hela has demonstrated it nicely for you here. Thank you, Hela.

Of course scientists add, subtract and shuffle species as new discoveries are made. That is what science is and does, how it works, and what makes it science. It is continually revised, refined and updated with each new discovery. What matters is that there has never been a single discovery ever that called into question the common ancestry of the horse or of all creatures on earth. It's not where each individual creature fits, which we're constantly learning more and more about, it's the overall question of whether they are all related by common descent, as Darwin first discovered.

No, there doesn't need to be a sequential reduction in the number of toes, as long as we start with 4 and end up with 1. It could have gone 4,2,4,6,3,1 (it didn't, but just as an example.) No, it doesn't matter whether some of the species in question co-existed--of course they did. That's how species evolve. One species doesn't just morph into another, rather two species branch of from an ancestor, which may continue to exist for some time before any one or more of them goes extinct.

What devastates the creationist position, and the reason why they are trying to exploit any areas of confusion, is that the fact that we have extinct fossils of horse ancestors at all completely destroys their argument.