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Old 12-10-2005, 01:34 AM
BluffTHIS! BluffTHIS! is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2004
Posts: 375
Default Re: The Fossil Question

Actually joel is helping. This was his key statement:

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The reason why the above question is a trick one becomes clear when we examine it closely. Let us say we are looking for a fossil that shows a transition from Species A and Species B, by definition said fossil cannot belong to either species. This means that it would have to be a different species that shows characteristics of both. Many such intermediate species have previously and currently exist. There are also many places in the fossil record where new species that are similar to existing species pop up (like [censored] Sapiens 200k years ago) But how does one prove that any one specific species led to another? Especially when there are several candidate species? Outside of DNA there is no way of doing this, and since fossils are made of stone they contain no DNA.

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This is indeed the trick of creationists in trying to frame the question with a scientifically wrong premise, namely that for evolution of species to be true then there must shown an unbroken line of fossil evidence, which of course is not necessarily all extant. And the real trick is their trying to poke holes in evolution by saying it is not continuous when they are the ones making it a chain of discrete instances of antecedant and descendant species when in fact their is no precise point of differentiation, although one can point to a time when a new one existed and a time when it did not.

The solution is that each individual biological specimen in the chain from one species to another is the "missing link". And one only has to look at evidence of early hom.o sapiens to see that Cro Magnon man was different in many ways than we who are the same species, though with a smaller brain capacity than Cro Magnon.

There are also two other points wrong with the OP's arguments in this thread. Firstly, he falsely has tried to limit the discussion to macro evolution, with the implication that micro evolution is not a sufficient proof of a common biological process, which if continued for a long enough time would eventually produce a macro result if there were not occasional cross-breeding within variations of a species to prevent the divergence of the gene pool into first subspecies and then differing species.

And secondly, he rejected David Steele's entire quotation of instances of speciation as only due to hybrydization and not natural selection. This is not true if one will look closely at all the studies on house flies.
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