Helios
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- Jan 27, 2008
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- #141
Evolution has NOT been proven to exist to the extent that 2 or more totally different distinct species of ANIMALS have evolved from one species. The Horse proves that WITHIN a species evolution occurs. BUT there is no record like that shows 2 or more different species linked to a single species.
Your late to the game, been round this briar patch a couple times with the resident scientific faithful. None of them can provide any proof so I doubt you have any, unless your secretly waiting to disclose it and win that Nobel Science prize.
All science has it a theory that if this and if that were true then this occurred. No bone records to connect to, like with the Horse. Ohh and don't bother with try to compare single cell life and or plant life, they do not function like animals. Sorry but until you can show me where I can slice off a chinese guys arm, graft it to a white womans body and she has half chinese and half white babies as a virgin you aren't gonna sell that magic bean.
Ok, RGS. I know this is pointless since you probably wont read it anyways, but there is evidence of a species turning into 2.
The Evidence of Evolution
Natural Selection:
Some facts about reproduction on Earth.
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoEvidence.html1. All organisms produce far more offspring than can survive to adulthood and reproduce. This means that many of those offspring will die without reproduction.
2. Organisms vary in many ways, and much of that variation is heritable - that is, variations that exist in the parents are passed on to the offspring.
3. Some of those heritable, variable traits affect an organism's fitness - its ability to survive to reproductive maturity.
4.(This is the kicker.) Those traits that increase an organism's fitness will tend to be passed on to the organism's offspring and to subsequent generations.
Even if you reject evolution, do you see the logic of how populations will become different from each other over time if there is variability in fitness characteristics?
The Fossil Record:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part1a.html#tranWhat is a transitional fossil?
The term "transitional fossil" is used at least two different ways on talk.origins, often leading to muddled and stalemated arguments. I call these two meanings the "general lineage" and the "species-to-species transition":
"General lineage":
This is a sequence of similar genera or families, linking an older group to a very different younger group. Each step in the sequence consists of some fossils that represent a certain genus or family, and the whole sequence often covers a span of tens of millions of years. A lineage like this shows obvious morphological intermediates for every major structural change, and the fossils occur roughly (but often not exactly) in the expected order. Usually there are still gaps between each of the groups -- few or none of the speciation events are preserved. Sometimes the individual specimens are not thought to be directly ancestral to the next-youngest fossils (i.e., they may be "cousins" or "uncles" rather than "parents"). However, they are assumed to be closely related to the actual ancestor, since they have intermediate morphology compared to the next-oldest and next-youngest "links". The major point of these general lineages is that animals with intermediate morphology existed at the appropriate times, and thus that the transitions from the proposed ancestors are fully plausible. General lineages are known for almost all modern groups of vertebrates, and make up the bulk of this FAQ.
"Species-to-species transition":
This is a set of numerous individual fossils that show a change between one species and another. It's a very fine-grained sequence documenting the actual speciation event, usually covering less than a million years. These species-to-species transitions are unmistakable when they are found. Throughout successive strata you see the population averages of teeth, feet, vertebrae, etc., changing from what is typical of the first species to what is typical of the next species. Sometimes, these sequences occur only in a limited geographic area (the place where the speciation actually occurred), with analyses from any other area showing an apparently "sudden" change. Other times, though, the transition can be seen over a very wide geological area. Many "species-to-species transitions" are known, mostly for marine invertebrates and recent mammals (both those groups tend to have good fossil records), though they are not as abundant as the general lineages (see below for why this is so). Part 2 lists numerous species-to-species transitions from the mammals.
Transitions to New Higher Taxa
As you'll see throughout this FAQ, both types of transitions often result in a new "higher taxon" (a new genus, family, order, etc.) from a species belonging to a different, older taxon. There is nothing magical about this. The first members of the new group are not bizarre, chimeric animals; they are simply a new, slightly different species, barely different from the parent species. Eventually they give rise to a more different species, which in turn gives rise to a still more different species, and so on, until the descendents are radically different from the original parent stock. For example, the Order Perissodactyla (horses, etc.) and the Order Cetacea (whales) can both be traced back to early Eocene animals that looked only marginally different from each other, and didn't look at all like horses or whales. (They looked rather like small, dumb foxes with raccoon-like feet and simple teeth.) But over the following tens of millions of years, the descendents of those animals became more and more different, and now we call them two different orders.
There are now several known cases of species-to-species transitions that resulted in the first members of new higher taxa. See part 2 for details.
About Creationism:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part1a.html#predPredictions of creationism and of evolution
Before launching into the transitional fossils, I'd like to run through the two of the major models of life's origins, biblical creationism and modern evolutionary theory, and see what they predict about the fossil record.
* Most forms of creationism hold that all "kinds" were created separately, as described in Genesis. Unfortunately there is no biological definition of "kind"; it appears to be a vague term referring to our psychological perception of types of organisms such as "dog", "tree", or "ant". In previous centuries, creationists equated "kind" to species. With the discovery of more and more evidence for derivation of one species from another, creationists bumped "kind" further up to mean higher taxonomic levels, such as "genus", or "family", though this lumps a large variety of animals in the same "kind". Some creationists say that "kind" cannot be defined in biological terms.
Predictions of creationism: Creationists usually don't state the predictions of creationism, but I'll take a stab at it here. First, though there are several different sorts of creationism, all of them agree that there should be no transitional fossils at all between "kinds". For example, if "kind" means "species", creationism apparently predicts that there should be no species-to-species transitions whatsoever in the fossil record. If "kind" means "genus" or "family" or "order", there should be no species-to-species transitions that cross genus, family, or order lines. Furthermore, creationism apparently predicts that since life did not originate by descent from a common ancestor, fossils should not appear in a temporal progression, and it should not be possible to link modern taxa to much older, very different taxa through a "general lineage" of similar and progressively older fossils.
Other predictions vary with the model of creationism. For instance, an older model of creationism states that fossils were created during six metaphorical "days" that may each have taken millenia to pass. This form of creationism predicts that fossils should be found in the same order outlined in Genesis: seed-bearing trees first, then all aquatic animals and flying animals, then all terrestrial animals, then humans.
In contrast, many modern U.S. creationists believe the "Flood Theory" of the origin of fossils. The "Flood Theory" is derived from a strictly literal reading of the Bible, and states that all geological strata, and the fossils imbedded in them, were formed during the forty-day flood of Noah's time. Predictions of the Flood Theory apparently include the following:
o most rock should be sedimentary and indicative of cataclysmic flooding. There should be no rock formations that indicate the passing of millenia of gradual accumulation of undisturbed sediment, such as multi-layered riverbed formations. There should be no large lava flows layered on top of each other, and definitely not with successively older radiometric dates in the lower levels.
o terrestrial animal fossils should either not be sorted at all, or should be sorted by some "hydrodynamic" aspect such as body size, with, for instance, extinct elephants and large dinosaurs in the lowest layers, and small primitive dinosaurs in the upper layers. Terrestrial animal fossils should not be sorted by subtle anatomical details (such as, say, the number of cusps on the fourth premolar).
o marine animals are a puzzle, since it is unclear that a Flood would cause any extinctions of aquatic animals. If such extinctions did occur, aquatic fossils would perhaps be "sorted" by body size or ecological niche (bottom-feeder vs. surface swimmer). For instance, plesiosaurs, primitive whales, and placoderm fishes (relatively slow-swimming and quite large) should end up in the same layers. Ichthyosaurs and porpoises (smaller, faster swimmers with almost identical body shapes and similar diets) should also occur in the same layers.
o there should be no sorting of large rooted structures such as coral reefs and trees. There should likewise not be differential sorting of microscopic structures of the same size and shape, such as pollen grains.
o sorting, if it occurs at all, should be quite imperfect. With only 40 days for sorting, there should be occasional examples of individual fossils that ended up in the "wrong" layer -- the occasional mammal and human fossil in Paleozoic rocks, for instance, and the occasional trilobite and plesiosaur in Cenozoic rocks.
o sorting should not correlate with date of the surrounding rocks. If all fossils were created by Noah's flood, there is no conceivable reason that, for instance, lower layers of fossils should always end up sandwiched between lava rocks with old radiometric dates.
Finally, some creationists believe that fossils were created by miraculous processes not operating today. (Many of these creationists combine this idea with the Flood Theory, as follows: fossils were created during the Flood, but were "sorted" by a miraculous process not observable or understandable today.) Obviously, such a theory makes no testable predictions...except perhaps for the prediction that geological formations should not bear any obvious resemblance to processes occurring today.
* Modern evolutionary theory holds that the living vertebrates arose from a common ancestor that lived hundreds of millions of years ago (via "descent with modification"; variety is introduced by mutation, genetic drift, and recombination, and is acted on by natural selection). Various proposed mechanisms of evolution differ in the expected rate and tempo of evolutionary change.
Predictions of evolutionary theory: Evolutionary theory predicts that fossils should appear in a temporal progression, in a nested hierarchy of lineages, and that it should be possible to link modern animals to older, very different animals. In addition, the "punctuated equilibrium" model also predicts that new species should often appear "suddenly" (within 500,000 years or less) and then experience long periods of stasis. Where the record is exceptionally good, we should find a few local, rapid transitions between species. The "phyletic gradualism" model predicts that most species should change gradually throughout time, and that where the record is good, there should be many slow, smooth species-to-species transitions. These two models are not mutually exclusive -- in fact they are often viewed as two extremes of a continuum -- and both agree that at least some species-to-species transitions should be found.
Tell me how you interpret this information. Or (this should be fun) give me some evidence to support your theory.
