Just for the record. Are you saying that you believe there is absolutely no evidence in the fossil record for evolution?
Why do you believe that? How, for example, do you account for faunal succession?
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Nymphs?
How do you account for the nested hierarchy? Why do we see fossils with a mixture of mammal and reptile features, but no fossils with a mixture of mammal and bird features? Why do we see the exact pattern of shared characteristics that the theory of evolution predicts we should see?
That is definitely what I believe. But not interested in a long drawn out argument where your interpretation of the evidence wins for you, and my interpretation wins for me. There is no point.
I was merely enthused and humored at @John_Harshman 's paragraph which is nothing but a string of excuses. No long arguments today.
I agree that there is no point when you refuse even to make an argument. What is your interpretation? Why is it better than the standard one? You refuse to answer any questions about either.
I suspect the major difference is that you interpret the evidence through your dogmatic beliefs. Any geologic formation, no matter what it looks like, will be forced to fit your beliefs. Thatâs quite different from scientific interpretations that start with observations and end with a conclusion.
I agree that it is pointless. An argument that claims there is no evidence for evolution in the fossil record shows an unfamiliarity with the fossil record, a commitment to ignore the fossil record, or both.
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You donât have to rely in on fossils for evidence of evolution. One famous recent example involves the cichlids of Lake Victoria:
While the precise course of events in ancestral Lake Victoria has yet to be reconstructed, it is clear that, after a dry period, it filled up again about 15,000 years ago. Descendants of the genetically diverse hybrid population colonized the lake and, within the evolutionarily short period of several thousand years, diverged to form at least 500 new cichlid species, with a wide variety of ecological specializations. The particular genetic diversity and adaptive capacity of Lake Victoriaâs cichlids is demonstrated by the fact that more than 40 other fish speciesâwhich colonized the lake at the same timeâhave barely changed since then.
The study involved sequencing over 3 million sites in the genome of 100 cichlid speciesâa task which, until recently, would not have been feasible.
Oh absolutely not - there are multiple area of science with strong evidence supporting evolution. The fossil evidence just happens to be the topic of discussion in this thread. Thanks for the interesting read!
But ignoring most of the evidence isnât science at all.
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Quotemine.
Heres Bechly:
âMRD has a mix of primitive and derived facial and cranial features that I didnât expect to see on a single individual,â according to its discoverer, Haile-Selassie (Max Planck Society 2019). This means we have here another fossil that doesnât satisfy Darwinian expectations and does not fit with any phylogenetic tree without major incongruences in the character distribution. But even this is not the really important thing about this discovery. So, what is the real surprise? The great surprise is that A. afarensis can no longer be derived by gradual anagenetic species transition from A. anamensis , as most specialists still believed until a few days ago.â
From the article he quotes:
âAustralopithecus anamensis* is the oldest known member of the genus Australopithecus . Due to the craniumâs rare near-complete state, the researchers identified never-before-seen facial features in the species. "MRD has a mix of primitive and derived facial and cranial features that I didnât expect to see on a single individual,"Haile-Selassie said. Some characteristics were shared with later species, while others had more in common with those of even older and more primitive early human ancestor groups such as Ardipithecus and Sahelanthropus . âUntil now, we had a big gap between the earliest-known human ancestors, which are about 6 million years old, and species like âLucy,â which are two to three million years old. One of the most exciting aspects of this discovery is how it bridges the morphological space between these two groups,â said [co-author of the study, Stephanie] Melillo.â
Doh!
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Archaeopteryx too has an interesting mix of primitive and derived features. Hey, isnât that exactly what weâre supposed to expect from a transitional fossil? Perhaps invertebrate paleontologists have different expectations.
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