Darwin Buried Under Chengjiang Fauna!

[Hollie]

5. Now...let me interject here, that what I encourage is spirited debate. Unfortunately, there are only two varieties of debate in these threads, and both involve personal animus.


a. There is one nit-wit who keeps chirping that my viewpoint is dictated by religion. Let me point out that there is nothing about religion in these posts.


b. Another dunce claimed the OP was based on 'hate'....all I can see in the OP is a quote by Charles Darwin, Dr. Stephen Meyer, and a study by paleontologist J.Y.Chen of The Chinese Academy of Sciences.

.....

No hate there...just science.




6. Since neither variety of disputer has the background to defend Darwin....I'll point out one sort of possible defense.

So, on what leg should their disputation stand? How about pointing to the "Artifact Hypothesis"?

There is no disputing the fact that evidence shows highly developed organisms where Darwin said there should be none. Darwin knew:

"To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system I can give no satisfactory answer . . . Nevertheless, the difficulty of assigning any good reason for the absence of vast piles of strata rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian system is very great."
Charles Darwin,The Origin of Species,chapter Ten:On the Imperfection of the Geologic Record: On the Sudden Appearance of Groups of Allied Species in the lowest known Fossiliferous Strata.pp. 164




Let me give my opponents a chance to bring up the Artifact Hypothesis.

Before you bring up the Artifact Hypothesis, why not account first for the edited, parsed and phony "quotes" you're dumping into the thread.

Honestly, I've exposed your lies repeatedly (and identified those lies repeatedly), yet you continue with the lies.

Here again, your phony "quote" (the ones you cut and paste from fundie Christian websites are a fraud. You then become an accomplice to fraud by posting these lies when you know full well they are lies.

Quote Mine Project Darwin Quotes

[paste:font size="4"] The Fossil Record: Proof of Special Creation and The Creation Explanation: The Primeval World -- Fossils, Geology & Earth History: What Do the Fossils Say?

The more complete context is:

To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer. Several eminent geologists, with Sir R. Murchison at their head, were until recently convinced that we beheld in the organic remains of the lowest Silurian stratum the first dawn of life. Other highly competent judges, as Lyell and E. Forbes, have disputed this conclusion. We should not forget that only a small portion of the world is known with accuracy. Not very long ago M. Barrande added another and lower stage, abounding with new and peculiar species, beneath the then known Silurian system; and now, still lower down in the Lower Cambrian formation, Mr. Hicks has found in South Wales beds rich in trilobites, and containing various molluscs and annelids. The presence of phosphatic nodules and bituminous matter, even in some of the lowest azoic rocks, probably indicates life at these periods; and the existence of the Eozoon in the Laurentian formation of Canada is generally admitted. There are three great series of strata beneath the Silurian system in Canada, in the lowest of which the Eozoon is found. Sir W. Logan states that their "united thickness may possibly far surpass that of all the succeeding rocks, from the base of the palæozoic series to the present time. We are thus carried back to a period so remote that the appearance of the so-called primordial fauna (of Barrande) may by some be considered as a comparatively modern event." The Eozoon belongs to the most lowly organised of all classes of animals, but is highly organised for its class; it existed in count less numbers, and, as Dr. Dawson has remarked, certainly preyed on other minute organic beings, which must have lived in great numbers. Thus the words, which I wrote in 1859, about the existence of living beings long before the Cambrian period, and which are almost the same with those since used by Sir W. Logan, have proved true. Nevertheless, the difficulty of assigning any good reason for the absence of vast piles of strata rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian system is very great. It does not seem probable that the most ancient beds have been quite worn away by denudation, or that their fossils have been wholly obliterated by metamorphic action, for if this had been the case we should have found only small remnants of the formations next succeeding them in age, and these would always have existed in a partially metamorphosed condition. But the descriptions which we possess of the Silurian deposits over immense territories in Russia and in North America, do not support the view, that the older a formation is, the more invariably it has suffered extreme denudation and metamorphism.

The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.To show that it may hereafter receive some explanation, I will give the following hypothesis. From the nature of the organic remains which do not appear to have inhabited profound depths, in the several formations of Europe and of the United States; and from the amount of sediment, miles in thickness, of which the formations are composed, we may infer that from first to last large islands or tracts of land, whence the sediment was derived, occurred in the neighbourhood of the now existing continents of Europe and North America. The same view has since been maintained by Agassiz and others. But we do not know what was the state of things in the intervals between the several successive formations; whether Europe and the United States during these intervals existed as dry land, or as a submarine surface near land, on which sediment was not deposited, or as the bed on an open and unfathomable sea. - Origin of Species, 6th Ed. John Murray, 1872, Chapter 10, pp. 286-288.
Darwin is concerned about the lack of fossils before the Cambrian, and seeks to explain it in terms of the wearing away of the earlier strata. He notes here (sixth edition, 1872) that he had said in 1859 (first edition) that fossils would be found in earlier strata, and they eventually were. However, Darwin was probably mislead about the Eozoon formations, as they are not currently considered a real fossil but a metamorphic feature formed from the segregation of minerals in marble through the influence of great heat and pressure.
Tectonic subduction, something that Darwin could not known of, has destroyed some of the relevant material but mostly he was right. The older the sediment, the greater the chance that it has either eroded away or been metamorphosed to an extent that fossils are destroyed. Even so, we have multicellular fossils now back to the Ediacaran (circa 580 million years before the present) and single cell fossils arguably back to 3.75 billion years. The valid argument no longer has any purchase, and Darwin has been vindicated.
Citing it out of the specific context suggests Darwin thought there were a lot of things he could not explain using evolution, and that he knew it was false. This is extraordinarily bad quote mining.
- John Wilkins and John Harshman


Kinda makes you just another dishonest, fundie hack, doesn't it.​

 

[Hollie]

[

"Conservative Dogma"???

The Burgess Shale?

The Chengjiang fauna???

Really?

Nobody is saying "Darwin got it wrong" because we're finding fairly impressive fossils from the Cambrian.

Yes, the Cambrian explosion is interesting. It doesnt' disprove evolution. It certainly doesn't make the Bible true or prove there's an invisible sky pixie.

Actually, real scientists are saying just that: Darwin got it totally wrong.

4. Not only does the evidence of the Burgess Shale, and of the Chengjiang deposits, run counter to Darwin's views, but it is in the Chinese Communist party paper, "The People's Daily," that we find Chinese paleontologists stating that these discoveries challenge a Darwinian view of the history of life.


a." Marine biologist Paul Chien at the University of San Francisco was one scientist who followed the news closely. What drew his attention were a couple of articles that were published in the People's daily, the official newspaper from the Communist Party in China. The article stated the Chinese fossils drew the attention of scientists worldwide and this fossil find actually challenges the theory of Darwin's evolution.


b. ... December 4, 1995, Time Magazine published a cover story entitled Evolution's Big Bang. The story included great detail about the Chinese fossils. Since 1996 Paul Chien has made several trips to conduct his own investigation in China of the fossil site.... the Cambrian explosion absolutely challenges the idea of the traditional view of evolution. The problem is that all of the various fossils and animal species found have clearly appeared in a very brief period of time. This is very difficult to explain from the evolutionary point of view.


c. Paleontologists have determined that the Chinese fossils were older than those excavated in the Burgess Shale in previous years. Yet, anatomically they were often even more complex. "
The Devil Is In the Details January 2013



As you are a novice, let me point out again the significance of "...anatomically they were often even more complex. "

For Darwin to have been correct....the early fossils had to have been simpler.


In "Origin," Darwin provided his famous tree diagram, which illustrated his idea of universal common descent, with higher taxa emerging from lower ones via the accumulation of slight variations. "The diagram illustrates the steps by which small differences distinguishing varieties are increased into larger differences distinguishing species.."
Darwin, "On The Origin of Species," p.120.

In short, diversity would precede disparity ( 'disparity' refers to major differences that separate phyla, classes and orders.)

But the actual pattern in the fossil record contradicts this prediction. In actuality, the fossil record shows representatives of separate phyla appearing first followed by lower-level diversification.

Actually, "real scientists" don't

[

"Conservative Dogma"???

The Burgess Shale?

The Chengjiang fauna???

Really?

Nobody is saying "Darwin got it wrong" because we're finding fairly impressive fossils from the Cambrian.

Yes, the Cambrian explosion is interesting. It doesnt' disprove evolution. It certainly doesn't make the Bible true or prove there's an invisible sky pixie.

Actually, real scientists are saying just that: Darwin got it totally wrong.

4. Not only does the evidence of the Burgess Shale, and of the Chengjiang deposits, run counter to Darwin's views, but it is in the Chinese Communist party paper, "The People's Daily," that we find Chinese paleontologists stating that these discoveries challenge a Darwinian view of the history of life.


a." Marine biologist Paul Chien at the University of San Francisco was one scientist who followed the news closely. What drew his attention were a couple of articles that were published in the People's daily, the official newspaper from the Communist Party in China. The article stated the Chinese fossils drew the attention of scientists worldwide and this fossil find actually challenges the theory of Darwin's evolution.


b. ... December 4, 1995, Time Magazine published a cover story entitled Evolution's Big Bang. The story included great detail about the Chinese fossils. Since 1996 Paul Chien has made several trips to conduct his own investigation in China of the fossil site.... the Cambrian explosion absolutely challenges the idea of the traditional view of evolution. The problem is that all of the various fossils and animal species found have clearly appeared in a very brief period of time. This is very difficult to explain from the evolutionary point of view.


c. Paleontologists have determined that the Chinese fossils were older than those excavated in the Burgess Shale in previous years. Yet, anatomically they were often even more complex. "
The Devil Is In the Details January 2013



As you are a novice, let me point out again the significance of "...anatomically they were often even more complex. "

For Darwin to have been correct....the early fossils had to have been simpler.


In "Origin," Darwin provided his famous tree diagram, which illustrated his idea of universal common descent, with higher taxa emerging from lower ones via the accumulation of slight variations. "The diagram illustrates the steps by which small differences distinguishing varieties are increased into larger differences distinguishing species.."
Darwin, "On The Origin of Species," p.120.

In short, diversity would precede disparity ( 'disparity' refers to major differences that separate phyla, classes and orders.)

But the actual pattern in the fossil record contradicts this prediction. In actuality, the fossil record shows representatives of separate phyla appearing first followed by lower-level diversification.

Sorry dear, but real scientists don't work at Answers in Genesis or the Disco ' Tute.

Hey....aren't you proud of your mention in 5 a above?

Hey....aren't you proud of your exposure (for the 8th time now in these threads of phony "quotes"), as a liar and a fraud?

 

[PoliticalChic]

5. Now...let me interject here, that what I encourage is spirited debate. Unfortunately, there are only two varieties of debate in these threads, and both involve personal animus.


a. There is one nit-wit who keeps chirping that my viewpoint is dictated by religion. Let me point out that there is nothing about religion in these posts.


b. Another dunce claimed the OP was based on 'hate'....all I can see in the OP is a quote by Charles Darwin, Dr. Stephen Meyer, and a study by paleontologist J.Y.Chen of The Chinese Academy of Sciences.

.....

No hate there...just science.




6. Since neither variety of disputer has the background to defend Darwin....I'll point out one sort of possible defense.

So, on what leg should their disputation stand? How about pointing to the "Artifact Hypothesis"?

There is no disputing the fact that evidence shows highly developed organisms where Darwin said there should be none. Darwin knew:

"To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system I can give no satisfactory answer . . . Nevertheless, the difficulty of assigning any good reason for the absence of vast piles of strata rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian system is very great."
Charles Darwin,The Origin of Species,chapter Ten:On the Imperfection of the Geologic Record: On the Sudden Appearance of Groups of Allied Species in the lowest known Fossiliferous Strata.pp. 164




Let me give my opponents a chance to bring up the Artifact Hypothesis.

Before you bring up the Artifact Hypothesis, why not account first for the edited, parsed and phony "quotes" you're dumping into the thread.

Honestly, I've exposed your lies repeatedly (and identified those lies repeatedly), yet you continue with the lies.

Here again, your phony "quote" (the ones you cut and paste from fundie Christian websites are a fraud. You then become an accomplice to fraud by posting these lies when you know full well they are lies.

Quote Mine Project Darwin Quotes

[paste:font size="4"] The Fossil Record: Proof of Special Creation and The Creation Explanation: The Primeval World -- Fossils, Geology & Earth History: What Do the Fossils Say?

The more complete context is:

To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer. Several eminent geologists, with Sir R. Murchison at their head, were until recently convinced that we beheld in the organic remains of the lowest Silurian stratum the first dawn of life. Other highly competent judges, as Lyell and E. Forbes, have disputed this conclusion. We should not forget that only a small portion of the world is known with accuracy. Not very long ago M. Barrande added another and lower stage, abounding with new and peculiar species, beneath the then known Silurian system; and now, still lower down in the Lower Cambrian formation, Mr. Hicks has found in South Wales beds rich in trilobites, and containing various molluscs and annelids. The presence of phosphatic nodules and bituminous matter, even in some of the lowest azoic rocks, probably indicates life at these periods; and the existence of the Eozoon in the Laurentian formation of Canada is generally admitted. There are three great series of strata beneath the Silurian system in Canada, in the lowest of which the Eozoon is found. Sir W. Logan states that their "united thickness may possibly far surpass that of all the succeeding rocks, from the base of the palæozoic series to the present time. We are thus carried back to a period so remote that the appearance of the so-called primordial fauna (of Barrande) may by some be considered as a comparatively modern event." The Eozoon belongs to the most lowly organised of all classes of animals, but is highly organised for its class; it existed in count less numbers, and, as Dr. Dawson has remarked, certainly preyed on other minute organic beings, which must have lived in great numbers. Thus the words, which I wrote in 1859, about the existence of living beings long before the Cambrian period, and which are almost the same with those since used by Sir W. Logan, have proved true. Nevertheless, the difficulty of assigning any good reason for the absence of vast piles of strata rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian system is very great. It does not seem probable that the most ancient beds have been quite worn away by denudation, or that their fossils have been wholly obliterated by metamorphic action, for if this had been the case we should have found only small remnants of the formations next succeeding them in age, and these would always have existed in a partially metamorphosed condition. But the descriptions which we possess of the Silurian deposits over immense territories in Russia and in North America, do not support the view, that the older a formation is, the more invariably it has suffered extreme denudation and metamorphism.

The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.To show that it may hereafter receive some explanation, I will give the following hypothesis. From the nature of the organic remains which do not appear to have inhabited profound depths, in the several formations of Europe and of the United States; and from the amount of sediment, miles in thickness, of which the formations are composed, we may infer that from first to last large islands or tracts of land, whence the sediment was derived, occurred in the neighbourhood of the now existing continents of Europe and North America. The same view has since been maintained by Agassiz and others. But we do not know what was the state of things in the intervals between the several successive formations; whether Europe and the United States during these intervals existed as dry land, or as a submarine surface near land, on which sediment was not deposited, or as the bed on an open and unfathomable sea. - Origin of Species, 6th Ed. John Murray, 1872, Chapter 10, pp. 286-288.
Darwin is concerned about the lack of fossils before the Cambrian, and seeks to explain it in terms of the wearing away of the earlier strata. He notes here (sixth edition, 1872) that he had said in 1859 (first edition) that fossils would be found in earlier strata, and they eventually were. However, Darwin was probably mislead about the Eozoon formations, as they are not currently considered a real fossil but a metamorphic feature formed from the segregation of minerals in marble through the influence of great heat and pressure.
Tectonic subduction, something that Darwin could not known of, has destroyed some of the relevant material but mostly he was right. The older the sediment, the greater the chance that it has either eroded away or been metamorphosed to an extent that fossils are destroyed. Even so, we have multicellular fossils now back to the Ediacaran (circa 580 million years before the present) and single cell fossils arguably back to 3.75 billion years. The valid argument no longer has any purchase, and Darwin has been vindicated.
Citing it out of the specific context suggests Darwin thought there were a lot of things he could not explain using evolution, and that he knew it was false. This is extraordinarily bad quote mining.
- John Wilkins and John Harshman


Kinda makes you just another dishonest, fundie hack, doesn't it.​

Wow!


You actually verified my post by providing this in yours:

"The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained."


So....Darwin couldn't explain the missing fossils he predicted.....

...and stated that this fact is pretty good evidence against his thesis.



Good work!

 

[Hollie]

More evidence that Charles Darwn cannot possibly have been correct in explaining the diversity of life on the planet!


1. The most straightforward course of action for Darwinists would be an admission that there is far more evidence that discourages acceptance of Darwin's thesis, than supports same.



That would lead to two potentially rewarding avenues of investigations.....

a. New attempts to explain the amazing diversity of life on the planet.

and

b. An inquiry into the reason why so may in academia pretend to accept Darwin as the starting point toward enlightenment.




2.For purposes of clarity, this is Darwin's perspective, the pillars on which his thesis rests:
a. The universal common ancestry of all living things: all had a single common ancestor way back in the distant past..."all the organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one [ONE SINGLE] primordial form" (Darwin, "On The Origin of Species," p.484.)

and this-
b. natural selection, the process that acted on random variations of the traits or features of organism and their offspring, retaining favorable adaptations.




If Darwin was correct, the geological stockpile should provide examples of organisms with a partial accumulation of said new traits and features, but not complete enough to have quite made it into the menagerie of life. Although they didn't produce new lines of living things, these 'attempts' would be, should be, preserved as fossils.


To save time and effort, although input from every perspective is desired, this discussion requires an understanding of terms such as Cambrian Explosion, fauna, and perhaps taxonomy. Here, see what I mean.....
3. "The Chengjiang fauna makes the Cambrian explosion more difficult to reconcile with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearances in which individual representatives of the higher taxonomic categories (phyla, subphyla, and classes) appear and only later diversify into the lower taxonomic categories (families, genera, and species).
Meyer, "Darwin's Doubt," p.74

The sudden appearance of complex organism.....followed by simpler.




So...you see, if Darwin were correct, the opposite would be true...and we'd find in Chengjiang, and in sites such as the Burgess Shale in Britain, simpler categories early and the more developed, later.

This is not the case.


a. " The Lower Cambrian sediments near Chengjiang have preserved fossils of such
excellent quality that soft tissues and organs, such as eyes, intestines, stomachs, digestive
glands, sensory organs, epidermis, bristles, mouths and nerves can be observed in detail.
Even fossilized embryos of sponges are present in the Precambrian strata near Chengjiang."
J.Y. Chen, C.W. Li, Paul Chien, G.Q. Zhou and Feng Gao, “Weng’an Biota—A Light Casting on the Precambrian World,” presented to: The Origin of Animal Body Plans and Their Fossil Records conference (Kunming, China, June 20-26, 1999). Sponsored by the Early Life Research Center and The Chinese Academy of Sciences.




So.....do we agree? Darwin is buried by Chengjiang!

3. "The Chengjiang fauna makes the Cambrian explosion more difficult to reconcile with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearances in which individual representatives of the higher taxonomic categories (phyla, subphyla, and classes) appear and only later diversify into the lower taxonomic categories (families, genera, and species).
Meyer, "Darwin's Doubt," p.74

You're "quoting" Meyer?

Funny stuff but then again, he shills for the Disco 'tute, a haven for fundie cranks who can't find employment elsewhere.

Amazon.com Donald Prothero s review of Darwin s Doubt The Explosive Origin of An...

Another common tactic of creationists is credential mongering. They love to flaunt their Ph.D.'s on their book covers, giving the uninitiated the impression that they are all-purpose experts in every topic. As anyone who has earned a Ph.D. knows, the opposite is true: the doctoral degree forces you to focus on one narrow research problem for a long time, so you tend to lose your breadth of training in other sciences. Nevertheless, they flaunt their doctorates in hydrology or biochemistry, then talk about paleontology or geochronology, subjects they have zero qualification to discuss. Their Ph.D. is only relevant in the field where they have specialized training. It's comparable to asking a Ph.D. to fix your car or write a symphony--they may be smart, but they don't have the appropriate specialized training to do a competent job based on their Ph.D. alone.

Stephen Meyer's first demonstration of these biases was his atrociously incompetent book Signature in the Cell (2009, HarperOne), which was universally lambasted by molecular biologists as an amateurish effort by someone with no firsthand training or research experience in molecular biology. (Meyer's Ph.D. is in history of science, and his undergrad degree is in geophysics, which give him absolutely no background to talk about molecular evolution). Undaunted by this debacle, Meyer now blunders into another field in which he has no research experience or advanced training: my own profession, paleontology. I can now report that he's just as incompetent in my field as he was in molecular biology. Almost every page of this book is riddled by errors of fact or interpretation that could only result from someone writing in a subject way over his head, abetted by the creationist tendency to pluck facts out of context and get their meaning completely backwards. But as one of the few people in the entire creationist movement who has actually taken a few geology classes (but apparently no paleontology classes), he is their "expert" in this area, and is happy to mislead the creationist audience that knows no science at all with his slick but completely false understanding of the subject.

 

[Hollie]

5. Now...let me interject here, that what I encourage is spirited debate. Unfortunately, there are only two varieties of debate in these threads, and both involve personal animus.


a. There is one nit-wit who keeps chirping that my viewpoint is dictated by religion. Let me point out that there is nothing about religion in these posts.


b. Another dunce claimed the OP was based on 'hate'....all I can see in the OP is a quote by Charles Darwin, Dr. Stephen Meyer, and a study by paleontologist J.Y.Chen of The Chinese Academy of Sciences.

.....

No hate there...just science.




6. Since neither variety of disputer has the background to defend Darwin....I'll point out one sort of possible defense.

So, on what leg should their disputation stand? How about pointing to the "Artifact Hypothesis"?

There is no disputing the fact that evidence shows highly developed organisms where Darwin said there should be none. Darwin knew:

"To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system I can give no satisfactory answer . . . Nevertheless, the difficulty of assigning any good reason for the absence of vast piles of strata rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian system is very great."
Charles Darwin,The Origin of Species,chapter Ten:On the Imperfection of the Geologic Record: On the Sudden Appearance of Groups of Allied Species in the lowest known Fossiliferous Strata.pp. 164




Let me give my opponents a chance to bring up the Artifact Hypothesis.

Before you bring up the Artifact Hypothesis, why not account first for the edited, parsed and phony "quotes" you're dumping into the thread.

Honestly, I've exposed your lies repeatedly (and identified those lies repeatedly), yet you continue with the lies.

Here again, your phony "quote" (the ones you cut and paste from fundie Christian websites are a fraud. You then become an accomplice to fraud by posting these lies when you know full well they are lies.

Quote Mine Project Darwin Quotes

[paste:font size="4"] The Fossil Record: Proof of Special Creation and The Creation Explanation: The Primeval World -- Fossils, Geology & Earth History: What Do the Fossils Say?

The more complete context is:

To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer. Several eminent geologists, with Sir R. Murchison at their head, were until recently convinced that we beheld in the organic remains of the lowest Silurian stratum the first dawn of life. Other highly competent judges, as Lyell and E. Forbes, have disputed this conclusion. We should not forget that only a small portion of the world is known with accuracy. Not very long ago M. Barrande added another and lower stage, abounding with new and peculiar species, beneath the then known Silurian system; and now, still lower down in the Lower Cambrian formation, Mr. Hicks has found in South Wales beds rich in trilobites, and containing various molluscs and annelids. The presence of phosphatic nodules and bituminous matter, even in some of the lowest azoic rocks, probably indicates life at these periods; and the existence of the Eozoon in the Laurentian formation of Canada is generally admitted. There are three great series of strata beneath the Silurian system in Canada, in the lowest of which the Eozoon is found. Sir W. Logan states that their "united thickness may possibly far surpass that of all the succeeding rocks, from the base of the palæozoic series to the present time. We are thus carried back to a period so remote that the appearance of the so-called primordial fauna (of Barrande) may by some be considered as a comparatively modern event." The Eozoon belongs to the most lowly organised of all classes of animals, but is highly organised for its class; it existed in count less numbers, and, as Dr. Dawson has remarked, certainly preyed on other minute organic beings, which must have lived in great numbers. Thus the words, which I wrote in 1859, about the existence of living beings long before the Cambrian period, and which are almost the same with those since used by Sir W. Logan, have proved true. Nevertheless, the difficulty of assigning any good reason for the absence of vast piles of strata rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian system is very great. It does not seem probable that the most ancient beds have been quite worn away by denudation, or that their fossils have been wholly obliterated by metamorphic action, for if this had been the case we should have found only small remnants of the formations next succeeding them in age, and these would always have existed in a partially metamorphosed condition. But the descriptions which we possess of the Silurian deposits over immense territories in Russia and in North America, do not support the view, that the older a formation is, the more invariably it has suffered extreme denudation and metamorphism.

The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.To show that it may hereafter receive some explanation, I will give the following hypothesis. From the nature of the organic remains which do not appear to have inhabited profound depths, in the several formations of Europe and of the United States; and from the amount of sediment, miles in thickness, of which the formations are composed, we may infer that from first to last large islands or tracts of land, whence the sediment was derived, occurred in the neighbourhood of the now existing continents of Europe and North America. The same view has since been maintained by Agassiz and others. But we do not know what was the state of things in the intervals between the several successive formations; whether Europe and the United States during these intervals existed as dry land, or as a submarine surface near land, on which sediment was not deposited, or as the bed on an open and unfathomable sea. - Origin of Species, 6th Ed. John Murray, 1872, Chapter 10, pp. 286-288.
Darwin is concerned about the lack of fossils before the Cambrian, and seeks to explain it in terms of the wearing away of the earlier strata. He notes here (sixth edition, 1872) that he had said in 1859 (first edition) that fossils would be found in earlier strata, and they eventually were. However, Darwin was probably mislead about the Eozoon formations, as they are not currently considered a real fossil but a metamorphic feature formed from the segregation of minerals in marble through the influence of great heat and pressure.
Tectonic subduction, something that Darwin could not known of, has destroyed some of the relevant material but mostly he was right. The older the sediment, the greater the chance that it has either eroded away or been metamorphosed to an extent that fossils are destroyed. Even so, we have multicellular fossils now back to the Ediacaran (circa 580 million years before the present) and single cell fossils arguably back to 3.75 billion years. The valid argument no longer has any purchase, and Darwin has been vindicated.
Citing it out of the specific context suggests Darwin thought there were a lot of things he could not explain using evolution, and that he knew it was false. This is extraordinarily bad quote mining.
- John Wilkins and John Harshman


Kinda makes you just another dishonest, fundie hack, doesn't it.​

Wow!


You actually verified my post by providing this in yours:

"The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained."


So....Darwin couldn't explain the missing fossils he predicted.....

...and stated that this fact is pretty good evidence against his thesis.



Good work!

It was good work to identify your fraud and lies.

However, you make it easy because you fundie hacks just mindlessly cut and paste from fundie Christian websites knowing full well the "quotes" are lies.

But you don't care.

 

[Hollie]

More evidence that Charles Darwn cannot possibly have been correct in explaining the diversity of life on the planet!


1. The most straightforward course of action for Darwinists would be an admission that there is far more evidence that discourages acceptance of Darwin's thesis, than supports same.



That would lead to two potentially rewarding avenues of investigations.....

a. New attempts to explain the amazing diversity of life on the planet.

and

b. An inquiry into the reason why so may in academia pretend to accept Darwin as the starting point toward enlightenment.




2.For purposes of clarity, this is Darwin's perspective, the pillars on which his thesis rests:
a. The universal common ancestry of all living things: all had a single common ancestor way back in the distant past..."all the organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one [ONE SINGLE] primordial form" (Darwin, "On The Origin of Species," p.484.)

and this-
b. natural selection, the process that acted on random variations of the traits or features of organism and their offspring, retaining favorable adaptations.




If Darwin was correct, the geological stockpile should provide examples of organisms with a partial accumulation of said new traits and features, but not complete enough to have quite made it into the menagerie of life. Although they didn't produce new lines of living things, these 'attempts' would be, should be, preserved as fossils.


To save time and effort, although input from every perspective is desired, this discussion requires an understanding of terms such as Cambrian Explosion, fauna, and perhaps taxonomy. Here, see what I mean.....
3. "The Chengjiang fauna makes the Cambrian explosion more difficult to reconcile with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearances in which individual representatives of the higher taxonomic categories (phyla, subphyla, and classes) appear and only later diversify into the lower taxonomic categories (families, genera, and species).
Meyer, "Darwin's Doubt," p.74

The sudden appearance of complex organism.....followed by simpler.




So...you see, if Darwin were correct, the opposite would be true...and we'd find in Chengjiang, and in sites such as the Burgess Shale in Britain, simpler categories early and the more developed, later.

This is not the case.


a. " The Lower Cambrian sediments near Chengjiang have preserved fossils of such
excellent quality that soft tissues and organs, such as eyes, intestines, stomachs, digestive
glands, sensory organs, epidermis, bristles, mouths and nerves can be observed in detail.
Even fossilized embryos of sponges are present in the Precambrian strata near Chengjiang."
J.Y. Chen, C.W. Li, Paul Chien, G.Q. Zhou and Feng Gao, “Weng’an Biota—A Light Casting on the Precambrian World,” presented to: The Origin of Animal Body Plans and Their Fossil Records conference (Kunming, China, June 20-26, 1999). Sponsored by the Early Life Research Center and The Chinese Academy of Sciences.




So.....do we agree? Darwin is buried by Chengjiang!

I'll agree this is just another thread of your edited, parsed and phony "quotes" intended only to promote your fundamentalist religious beliefs.

You science/knowledge loathing zealots are a joke.

Well....let's see how simple it is to prove that the OP is well beyond your comprehension.



1. There are no "edited, parsed and phony "quotes" ...as you show by failing to show any.
All are correct and there is no way for you to deny the import of the OP.



2. "...only to promote your fundamentalist religious beliefs."
There is nothing that relates to anything but science....clearly nothing of a religious nature.
So....why would you say that?



3. In fact, you post suggests that you felt insulted by this:
"To save time and effort, although input from every perspective is desired, this discussion requires an understanding of terms such as Cambrian Explosion, fauna, and perhaps taxonomy."

I tried to save you the embarrassment of trying to respond to a subject clearly beyond your ken....but you insisted on making an ass of yourself.

Have a good day.

In connection with your item 1., I just posted an example of your phony "quote-mining".

What a shame you didn't contact me prior to posting your phony "quotes" so I could have advised you of your impending embarrassment at being exposed, again, as a liar and a fraud.

 

[guno]

5. Now...let me interject here, that what I encourage is spirited debate. Unfortunately, there are only two varieties of debate in these threads, and both involve personal animus.


a. There is one nit-wit who keeps chirping that my viewpoint is dictated by religion. Let me point out that there is nothing about religion in these posts.


b. Another dunce claimed the OP was based on 'hate'....all I can see in the OP is a quote by Charles Darwin, Dr. Stephen Meyer, and a study by paleontologist J.Y.Chen of The Chinese Academy of Sciences.

.....

No hate there...just science.




6. Since neither variety of disputer has the background to defend Darwin....I'll point out one sort of possible defense.

So, on what leg should their disputation stand? How about pointing to the "Artifact Hypothesis"?

There is no disputing the fact that evidence shows highly developed organisms where Darwin said there should be none. Darwin knew:

"To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system I can give no satisfactory answer . . . Nevertheless, the difficulty of assigning any good reason for the absence of vast piles of strata rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian system is very great."
Charles Darwin,The Origin of Species,chapter Ten:On the Imperfection of the Geologic Record: On the Sudden Appearance of Groups of Allied Species in the lowest known Fossiliferous Strata.pp. 164




Let me give my opponents a chance to bring up the Artifact Hypothesis.

Before you bring up the Artifact Hypothesis, why not account first for the edited, parsed and phony "quotes" you're dumping into the thread.

Honestly, I've exposed your lies repeatedly (and identified those lies repeatedly), yet you continue with the lies.

Here again, your phony "quote" (the ones you cut and paste from fundie Christian websites are a fraud. You then become an accomplice to fraud by posting these lies when you know full well they are lies.

Quote Mine Project Darwin Quotes

[paste:font size="4"] The Fossil Record: Proof of Special Creation and The Creation Explanation: The Primeval World -- Fossils, Geology & Earth History: What Do the Fossils Say?

The more complete context is:

To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer. Several eminent geologists, with Sir R. Murchison at their head, were until recently convinced that we beheld in the organic remains of the lowest Silurian stratum the first dawn of life. Other highly competent judges, as Lyell and E. Forbes, have disputed this conclusion. We should not forget that only a small portion of the world is known with accuracy. Not very long ago M. Barrande added another and lower stage, abounding with new and peculiar species, beneath the then known Silurian system; and now, still lower down in the Lower Cambrian formation, Mr. Hicks has found in South Wales beds rich in trilobites, and containing various molluscs and annelids. The presence of phosphatic nodules and bituminous matter, even in some of the lowest azoic rocks, probably indicates life at these periods; and the existence of the Eozoon in the Laurentian formation of Canada is generally admitted. There are three great series of strata beneath the Silurian system in Canada, in the lowest of which the Eozoon is found. Sir W. Logan states that their "united thickness may possibly far surpass that of all the succeeding rocks, from the base of the palæozoic series to the present time. We are thus carried back to a period so remote that the appearance of the so-called primordial fauna (of Barrande) may by some be considered as a comparatively modern event." The Eozoon belongs to the most lowly organised of all classes of animals, but is highly organised for its class; it existed in count less numbers, and, as Dr. Dawson has remarked, certainly preyed on other minute organic beings, which must have lived in great numbers. Thus the words, which I wrote in 1859, about the existence of living beings long before the Cambrian period, and which are almost the same with those since used by Sir W. Logan, have proved true. Nevertheless, the difficulty of assigning any good reason for the absence of vast piles of strata rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian system is very great. It does not seem probable that the most ancient beds have been quite worn away by denudation, or that their fossils have been wholly obliterated by metamorphic action, for if this had been the case we should have found only small remnants of the formations next succeeding them in age, and these would always have existed in a partially metamorphosed condition. But the descriptions which we possess of the Silurian deposits over immense territories in Russia and in North America, do not support the view, that the older a formation is, the more invariably it has suffered extreme denudation and metamorphism.

The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.To show that it may hereafter receive some explanation, I will give the following hypothesis. From the nature of the organic remains which do not appear to have inhabited profound depths, in the several formations of Europe and of the United States; and from the amount of sediment, miles in thickness, of which the formations are composed, we may infer that from first to last large islands or tracts of land, whence the sediment was derived, occurred in the neighbourhood of the now existing continents of Europe and North America. The same view has since been maintained by Agassiz and others. But we do not know what was the state of things in the intervals between the several successive formations; whether Europe and the United States during these intervals existed as dry land, or as a submarine surface near land, on which sediment was not deposited, or as the bed on an open and unfathomable sea. - Origin of Species, 6th Ed. John Murray, 1872, Chapter 10, pp. 286-288.
Darwin is concerned about the lack of fossils before the Cambrian, and seeks to explain it in terms of the wearing away of the earlier strata. He notes here (sixth edition, 1872) that he had said in 1859 (first edition) that fossils would be found in earlier strata, and they eventually were. However, Darwin was probably mislead about the Eozoon formations, as they are not currently considered a real fossil but a metamorphic feature formed from the segregation of minerals in marble through the influence of great heat and pressure.
Tectonic subduction, something that Darwin could not known of, has destroyed some of the relevant material but mostly he was right. The older the sediment, the greater the chance that it has either eroded away or been metamorphosed to an extent that fossils are destroyed. Even so, we have multicellular fossils now back to the Ediacaran (circa 580 million years before the present) and single cell fossils arguably back to 3.75 billion years. The valid argument no longer has any purchase, and Darwin has been vindicated.
Citing it out of the specific context suggests Darwin thought there were a lot of things he could not explain using evolution, and that he knew it was false. This is extraordinarily bad quote mining.
- John Wilkins and John Harshman


Kinda makes you just another dishonest, fundie hack, doesn't it.​

Little miss Saigon is one mentally ill religious nutter

 

[Hollie]

[

"Conservative Dogma"???

The Burgess Shale?

The Chengjiang fauna???

Really?

Nobody is saying "Darwin got it wrong" because we're finding fairly impressive fossils from the Cambrian.

Yes, the Cambrian explosion is interesting. It doesnt' disprove evolution. It certainly doesn't make the Bible true or prove there's an invisible sky pixie.

Actually, real scientists are saying just that: Darwin got it totally wrong.

4. Not only does the evidence of the Burgess Shale, and of the Chengjiang deposits, run counter to Darwin's views, but it is in the Chinese Communist party paper, "The People's Daily," that we find Chinese paleontologists stating that these discoveries challenge a Darwinian view of the history of life.


a." Marine biologist Paul Chien at the University of San Francisco was one scientist who followed the news closely. What drew his attention were a couple of articles that were published in the People's daily, the official newspaper from the Communist Party in China. The article stated the Chinese fossils drew the attention of scientists worldwide and this fossil find actually challenges the theory of Darwin's evolution.


b. ... December 4, 1995, Time Magazine published a cover story entitled Evolution's Big Bang. The story included great detail about the Chinese fossils. Since 1996 Paul Chien has made several trips to conduct his own investigation in China of the fossil site.... the Cambrian explosion absolutely challenges the idea of the traditional view of evolution. The problem is that all of the various fossils and animal species found have clearly appeared in a very brief period of time. This is very difficult to explain from the evolutionary point of view.


c. Paleontologists have determined that the Chinese fossils were older than those excavated in the Burgess Shale in previous years. Yet, anatomically they were often even more complex. "
The Devil Is In the Details January 2013



As you are a novice, let me point out again the significance of "...anatomically they were often even more complex. "

For Darwin to have been correct....the early fossils had to have been simpler.


In "Origin," Darwin provided his famous tree diagram, which illustrated his idea of universal common descent, with higher taxa emerging from lower ones via the accumulation of slight variations. "The diagram illustrates the steps by which small differences distinguishing varieties are increased into larger differences distinguishing species.."
Darwin, "On The Origin of Species," p.120.

In short, diversity would precede disparity ( 'disparity' refers to major differences that separate phyla, classes and orders.)

But the actual pattern in the fossil record contradicts this prediction. In actuality, the fossil record shows representatives of separate phyla appearing first followed by lower-level diversification.

Here again, with reference to the Darwin "quote" we see that PC (parses a single sentence out of an entire paragraph in a dishonest and failed attempt to present her fundamentalist Christian agenda of lies and deceit.

The complete paragraph is shown as:

The Origin of Species Chapter 4

After ten thousand generations, species (A) is supposed to have produced three forms, a10, f10, and m10, which, from having diverged in character during the successive generations, will have come to differ largely, but perhaps unequally, from each other and from their common parent. If we suppose the amount of change between each horizontal line in our diagram to be excessively small, these three forms may still be only well-marked varieties; or they may have arrived at the doubtful category of sub-species; but we have only to suppose the steps in the process of modification to be more numerous or greater in amount, to convert these three forms into well-defined species: thus the diagram illustrates the steps by which the small differences distinguishing varieties are increased into the larger differences distinguishing species. By continuing the same process for a greater number of generations (as shown in the diagram in a condensed and simplified manner), we get eight species, marked by the letters between a14 and m14, all descended from (A). Thus, as I believe, species are multiplied and genera are formed.

Just more of the lies that have come to define the religious extremist agenda.

 

[Hollie]

[

"Conservative Dogma"???

The Burgess Shale?

The Chengjiang fauna???

Really?

Nobody is saying "Darwin got it wrong" because we're finding fairly impressive fossils from the Cambrian.

Yes, the Cambrian explosion is interesting. It doesnt' disprove evolution. It certainly doesn't make the Bible true or prove there's an invisible sky pixie.

Actually, real scientists are saying just that: Darwin got it totally wrong.

4. Not only does the evidence of the Burgess Shale, and of the Chengjiang deposits, run counter to Darwin's views, but it is in the Chinese Communist party paper, "The People's Daily," that we find Chinese paleontologists stating that these discoveries challenge a Darwinian view of the history of life.


a." Marine biologist Paul Chien at the University of San Francisco was one scientist who followed the news closely. What drew his attention were a couple of articles that were published in the People's daily, the official newspaper from the Communist Party in China. The article stated the Chinese fossils drew the attention of scientists worldwide and this fossil find actually challenges the theory of Darwin's evolution.


b. ... December 4, 1995, Time Magazine published a cover story entitled Evolution's Big Bang. The story included great detail about the Chinese fossils. Since 1996 Paul Chien has made several trips to conduct his own investigation in China of the fossil site.... the Cambrian explosion absolutely challenges the idea of the traditional view of evolution. The problem is that all of the various fossils and animal species found have clearly appeared in a very brief period of time. This is very difficult to explain from the evolutionary point of view.


c. Paleontologists have determined that the Chinese fossils were older than those excavated in the Burgess Shale in previous years. Yet, anatomically they were often even more complex. "
The Devil Is In the Details January 2013



As you are a novice, let me point out again the significance of "...anatomically they were often even more complex. "

For Darwin to have been correct....the early fossils had to have been simpler.


In "Origin," Darwin provided his famous tree diagram, which illustrated his idea of universal common descent, with higher taxa emerging from lower ones via the accumulation of slight variations. "The diagram illustrates the steps by which small differences distinguishing varieties are increased into larger differences distinguishing species.."
Darwin, "On The Origin of Species," p.120.

In short, diversity would precede disparity ( 'disparity' refers to major differences that separate phyla, classes and orders.)

But the actual pattern in the fossil record contradicts this prediction. In actuality, the fossil record shows representatives of separate phyla appearing first followed by lower-level diversification.

Actually, "real scientists" don't

[

"Conservative Dogma"???

The Burgess Shale?

The Chengjiang fauna???

Really?

Nobody is saying "Darwin got it wrong" because we're finding fairly impressive fossils from the Cambrian.

Yes, the Cambrian explosion is interesting. It doesnt' disprove evolution. It certainly doesn't make the Bible true or prove there's an invisible sky pixie.

Actually, real scientists are saying just that: Darwin got it totally wrong.

4. Not only does the evidence of the Burgess Shale, and of the Chengjiang deposits, run counter to Darwin's views, but it is in the Chinese Communist party paper, "The People's Daily," that we find Chinese paleontologists stating that these discoveries challenge a Darwinian view of the history of life.


a." Marine biologist Paul Chien at the University of San Francisco was one scientist who followed the news closely. What drew his attention were a couple of articles that were published in the People's daily, the official newspaper from the Communist Party in China. The article stated the Chinese fossils drew the attention of scientists worldwide and this fossil find actually challenges the theory of Darwin's evolution.


b. ... December 4, 1995, Time Magazine published a cover story entitled Evolution's Big Bang. The story included great detail about the Chinese fossils. Since 1996 Paul Chien has made several trips to conduct his own investigation in China of the fossil site.... the Cambrian explosion absolutely challenges the idea of the traditional view of evolution. The problem is that all of the various fossils and animal species found have clearly appeared in a very brief period of time. This is very difficult to explain from the evolutionary point of view.


c. Paleontologists have determined that the Chinese fossils were older than those excavated in the Burgess Shale in previous years. Yet, anatomically they were often even more complex. "
The Devil Is In the Details January 2013



As you are a novice, let me point out again the significance of "...anatomically they were often even more complex. "

For Darwin to have been correct....the early fossils had to have been simpler.


In "Origin," Darwin provided his famous tree diagram, which illustrated his idea of universal common descent, with higher taxa emerging from lower ones via the accumulation of slight variations. "The diagram illustrates the steps by which small differences distinguishing varieties are increased into larger differences distinguishing species.."
Darwin, "On The Origin of Species," p.120.

In short, diversity would precede disparity ( 'disparity' refers to major differences that separate phyla, classes and orders.)

But the actual pattern in the fossil record contradicts this prediction. In actuality, the fossil record shows representatives of separate phyla appearing first followed by lower-level diversification.

Sorry dear, but real scientists don't work at Answers in Genesis or the Disco ' Tute.

More real scientists here:
" The Lower Cambrian sediments near Chengjiang have preserved fossils of such
excellent quality that soft tissues and organs, such as eyes, intestines, stomachs, digestive glands, sensory organs, epidermis, bristles, mouths and nerves can be observed in detail.
Even fossilized embryos of sponges are present in the Precambrian strata near Chengjiang."
J.Y. Chen, C.W. Li, Paul Chien, G.Q. Zhou and Feng Gao, “Weng’an Biota—A Light Casting on the Precambrian World,” presented to: The Origin of Animal Body Plans and Their Fossil Records conference (Kunming, China, June 20-26, 1999). Sponsored by the Early Life Research Center and The Chinese Academy of Sciences.



Kinda blows you out of the water, huh?

Actually, it presents insurmountable obstacles to your YEC proclivities.

 

[PoliticalChic]

More evidence that Charles Darwn cannot possibly have been correct in explaining the diversity of life on the planet!


1. The most straightforward course of action for Darwinists would be an admission that there is far more evidence that discourages acceptance of Darwin's thesis, than supports same.



That would lead to two potentially rewarding avenues of investigations.....

a. New attempts to explain the amazing diversity of life on the planet.

and

b. An inquiry into the reason why so may in academia pretend to accept Darwin as the starting point toward enlightenment.




2.For purposes of clarity, this is Darwin's perspective, the pillars on which his thesis rests:
a. The universal common ancestry of all living things: all had a single common ancestor way back in the distant past..."all the organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one [ONE SINGLE] primordial form" (Darwin, "On The Origin of Species," p.484.)

and this-
b. natural selection, the process that acted on random variations of the traits or features of organism and their offspring, retaining favorable adaptations.




If Darwin was correct, the geological stockpile should provide examples of organisms with a partial accumulation of said new traits and features, but not complete enough to have quite made it into the menagerie of life. Although they didn't produce new lines of living things, these 'attempts' would be, should be, preserved as fossils.


To save time and effort, although input from every perspective is desired, this discussion requires an understanding of terms such as Cambrian Explosion, fauna, and perhaps taxonomy. Here, see what I mean.....
3. "The Chengjiang fauna makes the Cambrian explosion more difficult to reconcile with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearances in which individual representatives of the higher taxonomic categories (phyla, subphyla, and classes) appear and only later diversify into the lower taxonomic categories (families, genera, and species).
Meyer, "Darwin's Doubt," p.74

The sudden appearance of complex organism.....followed by simpler.




So...you see, if Darwin were correct, the opposite would be true...and we'd find in Chengjiang, and in sites such as the Burgess Shale in Britain, simpler categories early and the more developed, later.

This is not the case.


a. " The Lower Cambrian sediments near Chengjiang have preserved fossils of such
excellent quality that soft tissues and organs, such as eyes, intestines, stomachs, digestive
glands, sensory organs, epidermis, bristles, mouths and nerves can be observed in detail.
Even fossilized embryos of sponges are present in the Precambrian strata near Chengjiang."
J.Y. Chen, C.W. Li, Paul Chien, G.Q. Zhou and Feng Gao, “Weng’an Biota—A Light Casting on the Precambrian World,” presented to: The Origin of Animal Body Plans and Their Fossil Records conference (Kunming, China, June 20-26, 1999). Sponsored by the Early Life Research Center and The Chinese Academy of Sciences.




So.....do we agree? Darwin is buried by Chengjiang!

3. "The Chengjiang fauna makes the Cambrian explosion more difficult to reconcile with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearances in which individual representatives of the higher taxonomic categories (phyla, subphyla, and classes) appear and only later diversify into the lower taxonomic categories (families, genera, and species).
Meyer, "Darwin's Doubt," p.74

You're "quoting" Meyer?

Funny stuff but then again, he shills for the Disco 'tute, a haven for fundie cranks who can't find employment elsewhere.

Amazon.com Donald Prothero s review of Darwin s Doubt The Explosive Origin of An...

Another common tactic of creationists is credential mongering. They love to flaunt their Ph.D.'s on their book covers, giving the uninitiated the impression that they are all-purpose experts in every topic. As anyone who has earned a Ph.D. knows, the opposite is true: the doctoral degree forces you to focus on one narrow research problem for a long time, so you tend to lose your breadth of training in other sciences. Nevertheless, they flaunt their doctorates in hydrology or biochemistry, then talk about paleontology or geochronology, subjects they have zero qualification to discuss. Their Ph.D. is only relevant in the field where they have specialized training. It's comparable to asking a Ph.D. to fix your car or write a symphony--they may be smart, but they don't have the appropriate specialized training to do a competent job based on their Ph.D. alone.

Stephen Meyer's first demonstration of these biases was his atrociously incompetent book Signature in the Cell (2009, HarperOne), which was universally lambasted by molecular biologists as an amateurish effort by someone with no firsthand training or research experience in molecular biology. (Meyer's Ph.D. is in history of science, and his undergrad degree is in geophysics, which give him absolutely no background to talk about molecular evolution). Undaunted by this debacle, Meyer now blunders into another field in which he has no research experience or advanced training: my own profession, paleontology. I can now report that he's just as incompetent in my field as he was in molecular biology. Almost every page of this book is riddled by errors of fact or interpretation that could only result from someone writing in a subject way over his head, abetted by the creationist tendency to pluck facts out of context and get their meaning completely backwards. But as one of the few people in the entire creationist movement who has actually taken a few geology classes (but apparently no paleontology classes), he is their "expert" in this area, and is happy to mislead the creationist audience that knows no science at all with his slick but completely false understanding of the subject.

He's correct, isn't he.

 

[PoliticalChic]

7. How to defend Charles Darwin from the blistering attack employed in the OP?

So far, none has been able to....
The whiners simply attack the messenger....they seem unable to deal with the message.

Can you imagine?? It's left to me to provide a defense....
....but, a good offense is the best defense!


So....let's try the 'Artifact Hypothesis.'


a. OK...so the transitional forms that should be there in the geological record, i.e., showing that life began as simple and became complex, are missing. "Perhaps they were microscopic, similar to modern marine larvae....too small to have been reliably fossilized." This from developmental biologist Eric Davidson, California Institute of Technology.

Davidson has even posited that the intermediate forms only existed in the larval stage.




b. Maybe the ancestors of Cambrian animals were not preserved because they lacked hard parts such as shells and exoskeletons.
"Molecular evidencefor deep Precambrian divergences among metazoan phyla,"
GAWray,JSLevinton, LHShapiro- Science, 1996 - sciencemag.org

Get it: why expect to find remains of soft-bodied ancestors?




OK?
So....perhaps Darwin's missing fossils were either too small to be seen.....or lacked hard parts, so as to be preservable.


Did you notice that neither of these scientists claimed that the fossils proving Darwin's theory were present.

So....how about it....the 'Artifact Hypothesis'.....Is that a plausible defense of Darwin?

 

[Hollie]

7. How to defend Charles Darwin from the blistering attack employed in the OP?

So far, none has been able to....
The whiners simply attack the messenger....they seem unable to deal with the message.

Can you imagine?? It's left to me to provide a defense....
....but, a good offense is the best defense!


So....let's try the 'Artifact Hypothesis.'


a. OK...so the transitional forms that should be there in the geological record, i.e., showing that life began as simple and became complex, are missing. "Perhaps they were microscopic, similar to modern marine larvae....too small to have been reliably fossilized." This from developmental biologist Eric Davidson, California Institute of Technology.

Davidson has even posited that the intermediate forms only existed in the larval stage.




b. Maybe the ancestors of Cambrian animals were not preserved because they lacked hard parts such as shells and exoskeletons.
"Molecular evidencefor deep Precambrian divergences among metazoan phyla,"
GAWray,JSLevinton, LHShapiro- Science, 1996 - sciencemag.org

Get it: why expect to find remains of soft-bodied ancestors?




OK?
So....perhaps Darwin's missing fossils were either too small to be seen.....or lacked hard parts, so as to be preservable.


Did you notice that neither of these scientists claimed that the fossils proving Darwin's theory were present.

So....how about it....the 'Artifact Hypothesis'.....Is that a plausible defense of Darwin?

Do you think "quote-mining" lies and falsehoods is a plausible defense for christian fundamentalists?

 

[Hollie]

More evidence that Charles Darwn cannot possibly have been correct in explaining the diversity of life on the planet!


1. The most straightforward course of action for Darwinists would be an admission that there is far more evidence that discourages acceptance of Darwin's thesis, than supports same.



That would lead to two potentially rewarding avenues of investigations.....

a. New attempts to explain the amazing diversity of life on the planet.

and

b. An inquiry into the reason why so may in academia pretend to accept Darwin as the starting point toward enlightenment.




2.For purposes of clarity, this is Darwin's perspective, the pillars on which his thesis rests:
a. The universal common ancestry of all living things: all had a single common ancestor way back in the distant past..."all the organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one [ONE SINGLE] primordial form" (Darwin, "On The Origin of Species," p.484.)

and this-
b. natural selection, the process that acted on random variations of the traits or features of organism and their offspring, retaining favorable adaptations.




If Darwin was correct, the geological stockpile should provide examples of organisms with a partial accumulation of said new traits and features, but not complete enough to have quite made it into the menagerie of life. Although they didn't produce new lines of living things, these 'attempts' would be, should be, preserved as fossils.


To save time and effort, although input from every perspective is desired, this discussion requires an understanding of terms such as Cambrian Explosion, fauna, and perhaps taxonomy. Here, see what I mean.....
3. "The Chengjiang fauna makes the Cambrian explosion more difficult to reconcile with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearances in which individual representatives of the higher taxonomic categories (phyla, subphyla, and classes) appear and only later diversify into the lower taxonomic categories (families, genera, and species).
Meyer, "Darwin's Doubt," p.74

The sudden appearance of complex organism.....followed by simpler.




So...you see, if Darwin were correct, the opposite would be true...and we'd find in Chengjiang, and in sites such as the Burgess Shale in Britain, simpler categories early and the more developed, later.

This is not the case.


a. " The Lower Cambrian sediments near Chengjiang have preserved fossils of such
excellent quality that soft tissues and organs, such as eyes, intestines, stomachs, digestive
glands, sensory organs, epidermis, bristles, mouths and nerves can be observed in detail.
Even fossilized embryos of sponges are present in the Precambrian strata near Chengjiang."
J.Y. Chen, C.W. Li, Paul Chien, G.Q. Zhou and Feng Gao, “Weng’an Biota—A Light Casting on the Precambrian World,” presented to: The Origin of Animal Body Plans and Their Fossil Records conference (Kunming, China, June 20-26, 1999). Sponsored by the Early Life Research Center and The Chinese Academy of Sciences.




So.....do we agree? Darwin is buried by Chengjiang!

3. "The Chengjiang fauna makes the Cambrian explosion more difficult to reconcile with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearances in which individual representatives of the higher taxonomic categories (phyla, subphyla, and classes) appear and only later diversify into the lower taxonomic categories (families, genera, and species).
Meyer, "Darwin's Doubt," p.74

You're "quoting" Meyer?

Funny stuff but then again, he shills for the Disco 'tute, a haven for fundie cranks who can't find employment elsewhere.

Amazon.com Donald Prothero s review of Darwin s Doubt The Explosive Origin of An...

Another common tactic of creationists is credential mongering. They love to flaunt their Ph.D.'s on their book covers, giving the uninitiated the impression that they are all-purpose experts in every topic. As anyone who has earned a Ph.D. knows, the opposite is true: the doctoral degree forces you to focus on one narrow research problem for a long time, so you tend to lose your breadth of training in other sciences. Nevertheless, they flaunt their doctorates in hydrology or biochemistry, then talk about paleontology or geochronology, subjects they have zero qualification to discuss. Their Ph.D. is only relevant in the field where they have specialized training. It's comparable to asking a Ph.D. to fix your car or write a symphony--they may be smart, but they don't have the appropriate specialized training to do a competent job based on their Ph.D. alone.

Stephen Meyer's first demonstration of these biases was his atrociously incompetent book Signature in the Cell (2009, HarperOne), which was universally lambasted by molecular biologists as an amateurish effort by someone with no firsthand training or research experience in molecular biology. (Meyer's Ph.D. is in history of science, and his undergrad degree is in geophysics, which give him absolutely no background to talk about molecular evolution). Undaunted by this debacle, Meyer now blunders into another field in which he has no research experience or advanced training: my own profession, paleontology. I can now report that he's just as incompetent in my field as he was in molecular biology. Almost every page of this book is riddled by errors of fact or interpretation that could only result from someone writing in a subject way over his head, abetted by the creationist tendency to pluck facts out of context and get their meaning completely backwards. But as one of the few people in the entire creationist movement who has actually taken a few geology classes (but apparently no paleontology classes), he is their "expert" in this area, and is happy to mislead the creationist audience that knows no science at all with his slick but completely false understanding of the subject.

He's correct, isn't he.

Stumper Questions for Creationists

Stumper Questions for Creationists

Introduction

This is a collection of questions which many people who support conventional science wonder about when confronted with those who oppose conventional science in the name of creationism. The questions are grouped in these categories: what is creationism; what is conventional science; how does creationism explain the evidence for conventional science; theological questions. Within each category there are numbered specific questions, surrounded by introductory or other explanatory material. These questions are repeated at the end of each category (sometimes paraphrased) for emphasis.

We begin with the more important questions, and answers to them are greatly desired in order to promote communication. Later questions may be considered to be about details.



A few comments about some terminology

The expression "conventional science" is used here as it is a neutral expression, and many people object to misunderstandings surrounding such expressions as "evolutionism" or "theory of evolution".

The other side is referred to as "creationist" as that appears to be the self-description of those opposed to conventional science in the ways of interest here. It is not intended to include all people who believe in creation.



What is creationism?

Many people find that the most important part of a theory is a clear description of what the theory says and does not say.

(1) Give a comprehensive statement of creationism. (There are questions below about conventional science, so please restrict your discussion here to the positive aspects of creationism.) This is the one question of over-reaching importance, so much so that you might consider many of the following questions merely asking for certain details of what makes up a comprehensive statement of creationism. It should be noted that many people prefer quantitative details where appropriate.

 

[PoliticalChic]

More evidence that Charles Darwn cannot possibly have been correct in explaining the diversity of life on the planet!


1. The most straightforward course of action for Darwinists would be an admission that there is far more evidence that discourages acceptance of Darwin's thesis, than supports same.



That would lead to two potentially rewarding avenues of investigations.....

a. New attempts to explain the amazing diversity of life on the planet.

and

b. An inquiry into the reason why so may in academia pretend to accept Darwin as the starting point toward enlightenment.




2.For purposes of clarity, this is Darwin's perspective, the pillars on which his thesis rests:
a. The universal common ancestry of all living things: all had a single common ancestor way back in the distant past..."all the organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one [ONE SINGLE] primordial form" (Darwin, "On The Origin of Species," p.484.)

and this-
b. natural selection, the process that acted on random variations of the traits or features of organism and their offspring, retaining favorable adaptations.




If Darwin was correct, the geological stockpile should provide examples of organisms with a partial accumulation of said new traits and features, but not complete enough to have quite made it into the menagerie of life. Although they didn't produce new lines of living things, these 'attempts' would be, should be, preserved as fossils.


To save time and effort, although input from every perspective is desired, this discussion requires an understanding of terms such as Cambrian Explosion, fauna, and perhaps taxonomy. Here, see what I mean.....
3. "The Chengjiang fauna makes the Cambrian explosion more difficult to reconcile with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearances in which individual representatives of the higher taxonomic categories (phyla, subphyla, and classes) appear and only later diversify into the lower taxonomic categories (families, genera, and species).
Meyer, "Darwin's Doubt," p.74

The sudden appearance of complex organism.....followed by simpler.




So...you see, if Darwin were correct, the opposite would be true...and we'd find in Chengjiang, and in sites such as the Burgess Shale in Britain, simpler categories early and the more developed, later.

This is not the case.


a. " The Lower Cambrian sediments near Chengjiang have preserved fossils of such
excellent quality that soft tissues and organs, such as eyes, intestines, stomachs, digestive
glands, sensory organs, epidermis, bristles, mouths and nerves can be observed in detail.
Even fossilized embryos of sponges are present in the Precambrian strata near Chengjiang."
J.Y. Chen, C.W. Li, Paul Chien, G.Q. Zhou and Feng Gao, “Weng’an Biota—A Light Casting on the Precambrian World,” presented to: The Origin of Animal Body Plans and Their Fossil Records conference (Kunming, China, June 20-26, 1999). Sponsored by the Early Life Research Center and The Chinese Academy of Sciences.




So.....do we agree? Darwin is buried by Chengjiang!

3. "The Chengjiang fauna makes the Cambrian explosion more difficult to reconcile with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearances in which individual representatives of the higher taxonomic categories (phyla, subphyla, and classes) appear and only later diversify into the lower taxonomic categories (families, genera, and species).
Meyer, "Darwin's Doubt," p.74

You're "quoting" Meyer?

Funny stuff but then again, he shills for the Disco 'tute, a haven for fundie cranks who can't find employment elsewhere.

Amazon.com Donald Prothero s review of Darwin s Doubt The Explosive Origin of An...

Another common tactic of creationists is credential mongering. They love to flaunt their Ph.D.'s on their book covers, giving the uninitiated the impression that they are all-purpose experts in every topic. As anyone who has earned a Ph.D. knows, the opposite is true: the doctoral degree forces you to focus on one narrow research problem for a long time, so you tend to lose your breadth of training in other sciences. Nevertheless, they flaunt their doctorates in hydrology or biochemistry, then talk about paleontology or geochronology, subjects they have zero qualification to discuss. Their Ph.D. is only relevant in the field where they have specialized training. It's comparable to asking a Ph.D. to fix your car or write a symphony--they may be smart, but they don't have the appropriate specialized training to do a competent job based on their Ph.D. alone.

Stephen Meyer's first demonstration of these biases was his atrociously incompetent book Signature in the Cell (2009, HarperOne), which was universally lambasted by molecular biologists as an amateurish effort by someone with no firsthand training or research experience in molecular biology. (Meyer's Ph.D. is in history of science, and his undergrad degree is in geophysics, which give him absolutely no background to talk about molecular evolution). Undaunted by this debacle, Meyer now blunders into another field in which he has no research experience or advanced training: my own profession, paleontology. I can now report that he's just as incompetent in my field as he was in molecular biology. Almost every page of this book is riddled by errors of fact or interpretation that could only result from someone writing in a subject way over his head, abetted by the creationist tendency to pluck facts out of context and get their meaning completely backwards. But as one of the few people in the entire creationist movement who has actually taken a few geology classes (but apparently no paleontology classes), he is their "expert" in this area, and is happy to mislead the creationist audience that knows no science at all with his slick but completely false understanding of the subject.

He's correct, isn't he.

Stumper Questions for Creationists

Stumper Questions for Creationists

Introduction

This is a collection of questions which many people who support conventional science wonder about when confronted with those who oppose conventional science in the name of creationism. The questions are grouped in these categories: what is creationism; what is conventional science; how does creationism explain the evidence for conventional science; theological questions. Within each category there are numbered specific questions, surrounded by introductory or other explanatory material. These questions are repeated at the end of each category (sometimes paraphrased) for emphasis.

We begin with the more important questions, and answers to them are greatly desired in order to promote communication. Later questions may be considered to be about details.



A few comments about some terminology

The expression "conventional science" is used here as it is a neutral expression, and many people object to misunderstandings surrounding such expressions as "evolutionism" or "theory of evolution".

The other side is referred to as "creationist" as that appears to be the self-description of those opposed to conventional science in the ways of interest here. It is not intended to include all people who believe in creation.



What is creationism?

Many people find that the most important part of a theory is a clear description of what the theory says and does not say.

(1) Give a comprehensive statement of creationism. (There are questions below about conventional science, so please restrict your discussion here to the positive aspects of creationism.) This is the one question of over-reaching importance, so much so that you might consider many of the following questions merely asking for certain details of what makes up a comprehensive statement of creationism. It should be noted that many people prefer quantitative details where appropriate.

Why did you insert this, as it has nothing to do with the thread?

Gave up trying to defend Darwin's flawed thesis, huh?

Good.

 

[PoliticalChic]

7. How to defend Charles Darwin from the blistering attack employed in the OP?

So far, none has been able to....
The whiners simply attack the messenger....they seem unable to deal with the message.

Can you imagine?? It's left to me to provide a defense....
....but, a good offense is the best defense!


So....let's try the 'Artifact Hypothesis.'


a. OK...so the transitional forms that should be there in the geological record, i.e., showing that life began as simple and became complex, are missing. "Perhaps they were microscopic, similar to modern marine larvae....too small to have been reliably fossilized." This from developmental biologist Eric Davidson, California Institute of Technology.

Davidson has even posited that the intermediate forms only existed in the larval stage.




b. Maybe the ancestors of Cambrian animals were not preserved because they lacked hard parts such as shells and exoskeletons.
"Molecular evidencefor deep Precambrian divergences among metazoan phyla,"
GAWray,JSLevinton, LHShapiro- Science, 1996 - sciencemag.org

Get it: why expect to find remains of soft-bodied ancestors?




OK?
So....perhaps Darwin's missing fossils were either too small to be seen.....or lacked hard parts, so as to be preservable.


Did you notice that neither of these scientists claimed that the fossils proving Darwin's theory were present.

So....how about it....the 'Artifact Hypothesis'.....Is that a plausible defense of Darwin?

Do you think "quote-mining" lies and falsehoods is a plausible defense for christian fundamentalists?

Could you find any examples of "lies and falsehoods" in my posts?

So far, the only "lies and falsehoods" are yours.

 

[Hollie]

7. How to defend Charles Darwin from the blistering attack employed in the OP?

So far, none has been able to....
The whiners simply attack the messenger....they seem unable to deal with the message.

Can you imagine?? It's left to me to provide a defense....
....but, a good offense is the best defense!


So....let's try the 'Artifact Hypothesis.'


a. OK...so the transitional forms that should be there in the geological record, i.e., showing that life began as simple and became complex, are missing. "Perhaps they were microscopic, similar to modern marine larvae....too small to have been reliably fossilized." This from developmental biologist Eric Davidson, California Institute of Technology.

Davidson has even posited that the intermediate forms only existed in the larval stage.




b. Maybe the ancestors of Cambrian animals were not preserved because they lacked hard parts such as shells and exoskeletons.
"Molecular evidencefor deep Precambrian divergences among metazoan phyla,"
GAWray,JSLevinton, LHShapiro- Science, 1996 - sciencemag.org

Get it: why expect to find remains of soft-bodied ancestors?




OK?
So....perhaps Darwin's missing fossils were either too small to be seen.....or lacked hard parts, so as to be preservable.


Did you notice that neither of these scientists claimed that the fossils proving Darwin's theory were present.

So....how about it....the 'Artifact Hypothesis'.....Is that a plausible defense of Darwin?

Do you think "quote-mining" lies and falsehoods is a plausible defense for christian fundamentalists?

Could you find any examples of "lies and falsehoods" in my posts?

So far, the only "lies and falsehoods" are yours.

Except for lies and falsehoods in your"quote-mining".

I suppose christian fundies such as yourself can't make a distinction between lies and falsehoods. You should convert to Islam. They have a built-in allowance for lies and falsehoods.

 

[PoliticalChic]

8.So, we find actual scientists making efforts to support Darwin, as in the 'Artifact Hypothesis' above.
I may not have done the best job in presenting it. but as the Darwin-groupies couldn't come up with anything....well, anything is better than nothing.
So...what is my answer to the Artifact Hypothesis?


Sorry....there is just too much evidence that opposed it.


a. Here's a study that shows that even the tiniest organisms have been found:

"It should be noted that cells of filamentous microorganisms (interpreted as cyanobacteria) have been discovered and documented in the Warrawoona Group strata of Western Australia. These microfossils, found in bedded carbonaceous cherts, are estimated to be between 3.3 billion to 3.5 billion-years-old. "
William J. Schopf and Bonnie M. Packer, “Early Archean (3.3-Billion to 3.5-Billion-Year-Old) Microfossils from Warrawoona Group, Australia,” Science 237 (July 3, 1987): 70. 62 Jochen J. Brocks, Graham A. Logan, Roger Buick, and Roger E. Summons, “Archean Molecular Fossils and the Early Rise of Eukaryotes,” Science 285 (1999): 1033-36


b. I mean tiny!

"Species of single-celled algae and the appearance of cells with a nucleus about 2.7 billion-years-ago have been well documented in the fossil record."
Jochen J. Brocks, Graham A. Logan, Roger Buick, and Roger E. Summons, “Archean Molecular Fossils and the Early Rise of Eukaryotes,” Science 285 (1999): 1033-36



c. And, from the OP we learned that even soft parts are preserved:

. " The Lower Cambrian sediments near Chengjiang have preserved fossils of such
excellent quality that soft tissues and organs, such as eyes, intestines, stomachs, digestiveglands, sensory organs, epidermis, bristles, mouths and nerves can be observed in detail.
Even fossilized embryos of sponges are present in the Precambrian strata near Chengjiang."
J.Y. Chen, C.W. Li, Paul Chien, G.Q. Zhou and Feng Gao, “Weng’an Biota—A Light Casting on the Precambrian World,” presented to: The Origin of Animal Body Plans and Their Fossil Records conference (Kunming, China, June 20-26, 1999). Sponsored by the Early Life Research Center and The Chinese Academy of Sciences.


d. Maybe the Earth's gyrations destroyed them?

And, of course, paleontologists can find minuscule single cells in formations which are far older (and therefore far rarer due to the greater likelihood of tectonic destruction), it would seem that the allegedly tiny fossil precursors of the Cambrian animals should have been found somewhere in the over 500 million years of sedimentary strata below the Cambrian. Moreover, as already noted, the Precambrian rocks in China beneath the Chengjiang biota clearly reveal the presence of tiny sponge embryos.
http://www.discovery.org/articleFiles/PDFs/Cambrian.pdf



There is simply no scientific support for Darwin's theory in the geological record.


Sorry, kids.....back to the drawing board.

 

[Toronado3800]

More evidence that Charles Darwn cannot possibly have been correct in explaining the diversity of life on the planet!


1. The most straightforward course of action for Darwinists would be an admission that there is far more evidence that discourages acceptance of Darwin's thesis, than supports same.



That would lead to two potentially rewarding avenues of investigations.....

a. New attempts to explain the amazing diversity of life on the planet.

and

b. An inquiry into the reason why so may in academia pretend to accept Darwin as the starting point toward enlightenment.




2.For purposes of clarity, this is Darwin's perspective, the pillars on which his thesis rests:
a. The universal common ancestry of all living things: all had a single common ancestor way back in the distant past..."all the organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one [ONE SINGLE] primordial form" (Darwin, "On The Origin of Species," p.484.)

and this-
b. natural selection, the process that acted on random variations of the traits or features of organism and their offspring, retaining favorable adaptations.




If Darwin was correct, the geological stockpile should provide examples of organisms with a partial accumulation of said new traits and features, but not complete enough to have quite made it into the menagerie of life. Although they didn't produce new lines of living things, these 'attempts' would be, should be, preserved as fossils.


To save time and effort, although input from every perspective is desired, this discussion requires an understanding of terms such as Cambrian Explosion, fauna, and perhaps taxonomy. Here, see what I mean.....
3. "The Chengjiang fauna makes the Cambrian explosion more difficult to reconcile with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearances in which individual representatives of the higher taxonomic categories (phyla, subphyla, and classes) appear and only later diversify into the lower taxonomic categories (families, genera, and species).
Meyer, "Darwin's Doubt," p.74

The sudden appearance of complex organism.....followed by simpler.




So...you see, if Darwin were correct, the opposite would be true...and we'd find in Chengjiang, and in sites such as the Burgess Shale in Britain, simpler categories early and the more developed, later.

This is not the case.


a. " The Lower Cambrian sediments near Chengjiang have preserved fossils of such
excellent quality that soft tissues and organs, such as eyes, intestines, stomachs, digestive
glands, sensory organs, epidermis, bristles, mouths and nerves can be observed in detail.
Even fossilized embryos of sponges are present in the Precambrian strata near Chengjiang."
J.Y. Chen, C.W. Li, Paul Chien, G.Q. Zhou and Feng Gao, “Weng’an Biota—A Light Casting on the Precambrian World,” presented to: The Origin of Animal Body Plans and Their Fossil Records conference (Kunming, China, June 20-26, 1999). Sponsored by the Early Life Research Center and The Chinese Academy of Sciences.




So.....do we agree? Darwin is buried by Chengjiang!

I dunno. Theories on evolution have changed a bit in 100 plus years.

When I look at what we have done to dogs and corn with selective breeding over 10,000 years the idea of what, 400,000,000 years of random and selective evolution can do does not amaze me.

God might have set it all in motion. Perhaps. I think he/she/it used biological processes not magic. Goes along with all that faith stuff they preached to me.

 

[Hollie]

8.So, we find actual scientists making efforts to support Darwin, as in the 'Artifact Hypothesis' above.
I may not have done the best job in presenting it. but as the Darwin-groupies couldn't come up with anything....well, anything is better than nothing.
So...what is my answer to the Artifact Hypothesis?


Sorry....there is just too much evidence that opposed it.


a. Here's a study that shows that even the tiniest organisms have been found:

"It should be noted that cells of filamentous microorganisms (interpreted as cyanobacteria) have been discovered and documented in the Warrawoona Group strata of Western Australia. These microfossils, found in bedded carbonaceous cherts, are estimated to be between 3.3 billion to 3.5 billion-years-old. "
William J. Schopf and Bonnie M. Packer, “Early Archean (3.3-Billion to 3.5-Billion-Year-Old) Microfossils from Warrawoona Group, Australia,” Science 237 (July 3, 1987): 70. 62 Jochen J. Brocks, Graham A. Logan, Roger Buick, and Roger E. Summons, “Archean Molecular Fossils and the Early Rise of Eukaryotes,” Science 285 (1999): 1033-36


b. I mean tiny!

"Species of single-celled algae and the appearance of cells with a nucleus about 2.7 billion-years-ago have been well documented in the fossil record."
Jochen J. Brocks, Graham A. Logan, Roger Buick, and Roger E. Summons, “Archean Molecular Fossils and the Early Rise of Eukaryotes,” Science 285 (1999): 1033-36



c. And, from the OP we learned that even soft parts are preserved:

. " The Lower Cambrian sediments near Chengjiang have preserved fossils of such
excellent quality that soft tissues and organs, such as eyes, intestines, stomachs, digestiveglands, sensory organs, epidermis, bristles, mouths and nerves can be observed in detail.
Even fossilized embryos of sponges are present in the Precambrian strata near Chengjiang."
J.Y. Chen, C.W. Li, Paul Chien, G.Q. Zhou and Feng Gao, “Weng’an Biota—A Light Casting on the Precambrian World,” presented to: The Origin of Animal Body Plans and Their Fossil Records conference (Kunming, China, June 20-26, 1999). Sponsored by the Early Life Research Center and The Chinese Academy of Sciences.


d. Maybe the Earth's gyrations destroyed them?

And, of course, paleontologists can find minuscule single cells in formations which are far older (and therefore far rarer due to the greater likelihood of tectonic destruction), it would seem that the allegedly tiny fossil precursors of the Cambrian animals should have been found somewhere in the over 500 million years of sedimentary strata below the Cambrian. Moreover, as already noted, the Precambrian rocks in China beneath the Chengjiang biota clearly reveal the presence of tiny sponge embryos.
http://www.discovery.org/articleFiles/PDFs/Cambrian.pdf



There is simply no scientific support for Darwin's theory in the geological record.


Sorry, kids.....back to the drawing board.

The mantra of the Christian extremist.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Darwin collapses under the math. The odds of inorganic, mindless proteins and molecules forming even a single cell are beyond astronomical.

Once more the odds of 2,000 items aligning themselves to form a functioning cell are 10 E 5745 - 1. that's a number with 5,735 0's after it