RE: Argument #1: Transitional Fossils
April 24, 2014 at 12:11 pm
(This post was last modified: April 24, 2014 at 12:54 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(April 24, 2014 at 7:59 am)Revelation777 Wrote:(April 22, 2014 at 6:50 pm)Chuck Wrote: Lots. Absent soft tissue and/or DNA, it is often hard to tell whether two somewhat different fossil specimens really represent two species, or different sexes within the same species, or normal range of morphological variation within the same sex of the same species. Sometimes it is even hard to tell if two different specimens really represent two individual of same species, but died at different ages, or even different part of the year, resulting in differences in annual growths such as deer antlers.
Also, many species are recognized based on partial remains. If two sets of non-overlapping partial fossil remains are discovered, it is often impossible to tell whether they represent two different species, or are different parts of animals of the same species.
Sometimes mistakes happen in reverse, such as assigning two non-overlapping sets of partial remains to the same species, when in fact they came from different species, resulting in fanciful fossil reconstructions of a single species that really consist of parts of two different species.
That is why it is unrealistic and deceptive to draw a rendering of an "transitional" organism when all you have is a tooth and a part of a jawbone.
Very good, you are capable of simulating a modicum of evidence evaluation, which means small as your powers of objective evaluation might be, it should still becapable of penetrating the howls of the parasites like your priests and pastors, and elaborate con of the frauds who wrote the bible, and the ramblings of cheap shabby low class hucksters at AIG (both the creationist website, and the so called investment bank, but that it a different story).
But mere simulation is not enough in any case, it is especially not enough when it is liberally debased and adulterated with your own personal dishonesty.
Your personal dishonesty is menifested by the fact that what you assert to be all that we have is NOT all that we have, and you surely know this because you surely have seen essentially complete recovered and mounted fossils that fits in known evolutionary lineage sometime in your life, and yet lied for your jesus without skipping a beat.
There are numerous cases where we have complete or essential complete skeletons that are still articulated in their original pre-mortum position. What is more, there are cases where we have even extracted DNA from the bone fragments to unambigiously identify the relationship of the original owner of the bones, with species that are related to it.
Now let us say, just to humor you, a jaw bone or some other fragmentary species ambigious remains is was really all that we have, it would only make particular species identification problematic, it would not hamper the observation of progressive changes through time of which the ambigiously identified species forms an unabigious part.
You see, it doesn't matter if there is doubt whether jawbone B belongs with the same species as Jawbone C. For there to be confusion species B and species C would already have to be pretty similar to the eyes of a trained paleontologist, in other words eyes infinitely better informed and better trained than yours, much less those of the blind idiots at AIG.
Therefore, it is overwhelmingly likely that, regardless whether jawbone B and jawbone C belong to the same species, or two closely related species, either jaw bone has enough characteristics to place them as transition between species A and species D.
It would be like if we discovered your bones, the bones of your mother, the bones of your mother's sister, and the bones of your grand mother.
It doesn't matter if we confused the bones of your mother with the bones of your mother's sister. It doesn't matter if we grafted your mother's skull onto the body of her sister. It doesn't matter if we might have though your mother's feet belonged to a different individual than your mother's hands.
We can tell, analytically, and quantitatively, the collection of bones containes both your mother's bones, and your mother's sister's bones, however grouped, contains a transitional form between you and your grand mother.