Argument #1: Transitional Fossils

[Revelation777]

I'm tired of this moron spouting AIG so I'll shove Richard Dawkins up his ass.

'SHOW ME YOUR CROCODUCK!'
'Why doesn't the fossil record contain a fronkey?' Well, of course, monkeys are not descended from frogs. No sane evolutionist ever said they were, or that ducks are descended from crocodiles or vice versa. Monkeys and frogs share an ancestor, which certainly looked nothing like a frog and nothing like a monkey. Maybe it looked a bit like a salamander, and we do indeed have salamander-like fossils dating from the right time. But that is not the point. Every one of the millions of species of animals shares an ancestor with every other one. If your understanding of evolution is so warped that you think we should expect to see a fronkey and a crocoduck, you should also wax sarcastic about the absence of a doggypotamus and an elephanzee. Indeed, why
limit yourself to mammals? Why not a kangaroach (intermediate between kangaroo and cockroach), or an octopard (intermediate between octopus and leopard)? There's an infinite number of animal
names you can string together in that way. * Of course hippopotamuses are not descended from dogs, or vice versa. Chimpanzees are not descended from elephants or vice versa, just as monkeys are not descended from frogs. No modern species is descended from any other modern species (if we leave out very recent splits). Just as you can find fossils that approximate to the common
ancestor of a frog and a monkey, so you can find fossils that approximate to the common ancestor of elephants and chimpanzees. Here is one called Eomaia, which lived in the early Cretaceous period, a little more than 100 million years ago.

As you can see, Eomaia was nothing like a chimpanzee and nothing like an elephant. Vaguely like a shrew, it probably was pretty similar to their common ancestor, with which it was roughly contemporary, and you can see that a lot of evolutionary change has taken place along both pathways from an Eomaia- like ancestor to an elephant descendant, and from the same Eomaia- like ancestor to a chimpanzee descendant. But it is not in any sense an elephanzee. If it were, it would
also have to be a dogatee, for whatever is the common ancestor of a chimpanzee and an elephant is also the common ancestor of a dog and a manatee. And it would also have to be an aardvapotamus, for the same ancestor is also the common ancestor of an aardvark and a hippopotamus. The very idea of a dogatee (or an elephanzee, or an aardvapotamus or a kangaroceros or a buffalion) is deeply unevolutionary and ridiculous. So is a fronkey, and it is a disgrace that the perpetrator of that little witlessism, the Australian itinerant preacher John Mackay, has been touring British schools in 2008
and 2009, masquerading as a 'geologist', teaching innocent children that if evolution were true the fossil record should contain 'fronkeys'.

An equally ludicrous example is to be found in the Muslim apologist Harun Yahya's enormous, lavishly produced, glossily illustrated and fatuously ignorant book Atlas of Creation. This book obviously cost a fortune to produce, which makes it all the more astounding that it was
distributed free to tens of thousands of science teachers, including me. Notwithstanding the prodigious sums of money spent on this book, the errors in it have become legendary. In the service of illustrating the falsehood that most ancient fossils are indistinguishable from their modern counterparts, Yahya shows a sea snake as an 'eel' (two animals so different that they are placed in different classes of vertebrates), a starfish as a 'brittlestar' (actually different classes of
echinoderms), a sabellid (annelid) worm as a crinoid 'sea lily' (an echinoderm: this pair come not just from different phyla but from different sub-kingdoms, so that they could hardly be more distant
from each other if they tried, while still both being animals) and - best of all - a fishing lure as a 'caddis fly' (see colour page 8). But in addition to these gems of partisan risibility, the book has a section on missing links. One picture is seriously offered to illustrate the fact that there is no intermediate form between a fish and a starfish. I find it impossible to believe that the author seriously thinks evolutionists would
expect to find a transition between two such differing animals as a starfish and a fish. I therefore cannot help suspecting that he knows his audience all too well, and is deliberately and cynically exploiting their ignorance.

'I'LL BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION WHEN A MONKEY GIVES BIRTH TO A HUMAN BABY' Once again, humans are not descended from monkeys. We share a common ancestor with monkeys. As it happens, the common ancestor would have looked a lot more like a monkey than a
man, and we would indeed probably have called it a monkey if we had met it, some 25 million years ago. But even though humans evolved from an ancestor that we could sensibly call a monkey, no animal gives birth to an instant new species, or at least not one as different from itself as a man is from a monkey, or even from a chimpanzee. That isn't what evolution is about. Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact; it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work. Huge leaps in a single generation - which is what a monkey giving birth to a human would be - are almost as unlikely as divine creation, and are ruled out for the same reason: too statistically improbable. It
would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing.

Put down your fucking bible. Delete the link to AIG and get a copy of "The Greatest Show on Earth." Maybe you'll learn something...although that seems even far more unlikely than a crocoduck.

I don't mean to be critical but this guy doesn't across to me as a genius at all. When explaining what we should not expect from species common ancestor, he doesn't tell us what to expect. Even if this process of change was for millions of years we should be able to map a slow transition through the fossil record for a variety of different species, we don't. Dawkins tells us what not to do but doesn't answer the obvious questions science can't answer.