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RE: Transitional Forms/Fossils
May 26, 2022 at 9:27 am
My only personal experiences with creationists have involved Jehovah's Witnesses coming to my door or calling me on the phone. They deny evolutionary theory and offer "evidence" against it, always with references to their own literature, containing a wealth of quote mines and outdated science discoveries. The latest JW to contact me decided that, "We are at an impass," after I challenged her to prove her claims without quoting the Bible.
"The world is my country; all of humanity are my brethren; and to do good deeds is my religion." (Thomas Paine)
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RE: Transitional Forms/Fossils
November 12, 2022 at 11:20 am
(November 6, 2022 at 12:41 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote: (November 6, 2022 at 11:32 am)LinuxGal Wrote: All fossils are transitional fossils, unless they are fossils of a species that subsequently went extinct.
Since all species go extinct, that means there are no transition fossils?
Unless they continue to be found by a species not yet extinct or comes into existence.
We were previously something like a vole.
Being told you're delusional does not necessarily mean you're mental.
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RE: Transitional Forms/Fossils
November 12, 2022 at 1:05 pm
(This post was last modified: November 12, 2022 at 1:29 pm by Anomalocaris.)
A better conceptual definition of transitional fossil is the fossil of an organism from some population within which speciation is believed to have subsequently occurred.
In practice, the incompleteness of the fossil record and challenges in correlating of fossil morphology to speciation, which is ultimately a biomelocular and not strictly a morphological thing, makes rigorous application of the conceptual definition I offered above difficult. So in practice, the term transitional fossil is often applied to the fossil of an organism whose morphology seems to be intermediate between those of a known later species, and the group of earlier species from amongst which its more distant evolutionary ancestors are believed to be found.
So strictly speaking, we usually can not be certain that what we think are transitional fossils actually lies on the direct line between beginning and ending points of the transition in question. It could just represent one of several related species that all developed some part of the characteristics which would later define a definitive daughter specie.
A beautiful example is an archaeopteryx, a fossil of a feathered flying creature so dinosaur like in bone morphology that were it not for the bird like feathers it would be instantly be classified as a small dinosaur. Yet it had feathers so bird like in both morphology and layout that they are essentially indistinguishable from those of birds. Archaeopteryx has been held up for over a century as the archetypical transitional fossil, in its case between birds and dinosaurs. But close study of archaeopteryx suggest it is in fact not a direct ancester of later birds. In fact it doesn’t even count amongst its own direct ancesters or descendants the last common ancester between birds and land dwelling dinosaurs. So strictly speaking the actual line of archaeopteryx ended and did not transition from dinosaur to birds.
But it nonetheless has value as transitional fossil. Why? Because it first showed dinosaurs can and did evolve necessary bird like features, even if it itself did not represent the actual instance when birds arose from amongst dinosaurs.
