It’s true no matter how we define “out of place”. One data point doesn’t overrule all the others.
For a conceivable example, the Precambrian Torridonian Sandstone of Scotland is a relatively unmodified sedimentary rock. You could imagine a crevase being eroded in it, and subsequently infilled with material eroded from the surrounding sandstone, a rabbit digging a burrow in the infill and dieing there, and the material subsequently becoming recemented. Technically the rock in which the rabbit fossil was found would be Neogene, but how would it be recognised that the rock wasn’t Precambrian. That’s why a single Precambrian rabbit doesn’t outweigh the evidence of the rest of the fossil record (and everything else).
For an actual example, I recall reading of creationists finding modern pollen in Precambrian rocks near the Grand Canyon. Not only modern pollen, but fresh pollen - being so small it had infiltrated cracks in the rock.
By noting that the crevasse infill isn’t stratified and cross-bedded like the surrounding rock (and possibly contains rounded pebbles too) and so shows signs of having been reworked by erosion.
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Yes, if you look carefully enough you can recognise infill deposits - dating them is harder - but does everyone always look carefully enough. The Torridonian Sandstone already contains rounded pebbles. As I recall - it’s 20 or more years since I saw any - it’s not well cemented, so it can break down to sand grains, which can then be lain down in new strata. Infill deposits are commonly formed not all that long after their host deposits, so a similar age might be assumed.
I can’t offer a citation but I think I’ve read of instances where infill deposits misled people - possibly in fissures in limestone.
This is a point which has taken me a long time to really understand. It’s not helped by the fact that many famous scientists and science popularizers dumb things down and commonly speak about scientific theories in terms that make it appear like theories are subject to a sort of black and white, popperian falsification. There is no shortage of quotes from “famous authority” scientists who say that if you observe something that disagrees with your theory, the theory is false. People like Richard Dawkins, Feynman, Haldane, and so on.
A model of the Earth as a spinning sphere with sunlight coming in from a fixed position, only illuminating an ever moving side of the spinning sphere, may provide a decent account for fact that we see day-night fluctuations in temperature. But it will fail to capture the input from cloud cover, the seasons, local bodies of water and terrain that affects wind and provides local shadow etc. etc. Is that model strictly falsified by the fact that there will be many measurements that lie outside it’s naive sinusoidal temperature predictions? Well if your models says that there are no other forces acting to influence the temperature of the Earth, then sure. But the model doesn’t actually say that.
This idea that scientists build models to explain data, and that no model explains all the data points equally well, that some data has higher or lower probabilities on those models, yet is still strictly compatible with the model, is hard to wrap one’s head around when you come from that viewpoint where things are absolutely falsified given some simple observation. What does it mean to say that theories are statistically testable? What is model selection? That is no easy task to undertand without spending a lot of time on study, much less explain well to someone else.
On a related note, I’ve had trouble wrapping my head around phylogenetic classification, as opposed to what is incorrectly depicted on so many purportedly educational websites, where biological clades are strictly defined by simple, single characters presence/absense, that accumulate along some branch. I’ve lost count of how many websites say the clade vertebrates is organisms with a spine or something along those lines. The alternative is considerably more difficult to understand. Invariably someone will read those websites, discover where some scientsts have discovered something that doesn’t fit with this naive picture of classification, and will then come running and declare evolution has been absolutely falsified because strictly speaking there’s some other organism with a related derived character outside the clade. So now you have the task of explaining their views on systematic classification are wrong, and also, that’s not how falsification works. And you’re just random internet nobody number 238 they’ve spoken to, and they have tons of quotes from famous authorities like Feynman and who knows what else.
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Probably not. Or even definitely not. But anomalous results (e.g Precambrian rabbits) get a lot more scrutiny than run-of-the-mill fossils and other features, simply because they demand explanation, so I’d expect either the infill deposit to be recognised or some admission that it wasn’t possible to tell whether the deposit had been reworked.
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In Britain, in winter, on shorter timescales, heat transfer by air movements, dominates over radiative transfers, so it can be warmer overnight than during the day, if the frontal systems pass over at the right time. I’m not sure whether Britain is exceptional in this way, or the US Midwest, for example, gets a similar result from polar outbreaks.
Naive falsification doesn’t work because facts are not always unimpeachable, and because theories can be modified, rather than overthrown.
Excellent. “Naive falsification” is on my bingo card.
Reality is complicated, and models have to be simple to be useful. Good luck getting that point across to someone like SCD.
Good to hear that naive Popperian falsification is not the way to go. Philosophers of science drew that conclusion some years ago, but too many biologists don’t realize that. I have a Rants and Diatribes webpage at my own website, one of whose points is that inferring phylogenies is not just a matter of recognizing derived states of characters, in spite of what many museum displays, textbooks, and web pages say. So I’m with you on this.
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who said they are?
Yes, a non fish fin will not have The same number and placement of bone, cartilage, muscle, etc because the fin was adapted from a different structure, like a leg or a wing
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Do you have any reference that states no such species exists, complete with evidence supporting that conclusion?
Again, absence of evidence is not evidence for absence. 30 years ago we didn’t have Tiktaalik, in case you forgot. Would it have been fair to say that the most primitive tetrapods we had at that time were the first transitional species?
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7 posts were split to a new topic: The Shroud of Turin, Part III
A nice video about a new quadruped whale, the first found in the Americas. New Species of Ancient Whale Offers Clues on How Whales Evolved to Swim
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if so convergent evolution\loss should be impossible too.
no. but we need to go by the evidence we have. and by the evidence we do have there are no such fossils. otherwise we can also claim that human existed in the dinos age too. we just dont have evidence for this yet.
indeed. but we did had close species like the lungfish and others. and they are date for a similar date like the tiktaalik.
If you are saying that are certain examples of fossils that are “out of place” in relation to the other fossils, that can only be true if there is a pattern that exists among the other fossils that means they are all in place.
For instance, you can identify which number is “out of place” in this pattern:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 367, 7, 8, 9, 10…
But can you say which number is out of place here?
575, 76, 3, 4510, 94, 2, 56789345, 37
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Convergence of the sort you are describing involves too many different genes to have any realistic likelihood of recurring. There is convergence at the anatomical level where traits with similar morphology arise thru different genetic mechanisms (e.g. similar body shape of dolphins and sharks).
Convergence does occur at the molecular level, but not on a large enough scale to account for such similarities.
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That we do not have such fossils does not demonstrate that the organism did not exist. The likelihood of a member of a particular species being fossilized and that fossil being found by humans is sufficiently low that such gaps would be predicted.
What would also be predicted by common descent is the pattern of change over time along the lines of a nested hierarchy that is demonstrated by the fossils we have found. I would still like to hear how creatioinism can account for that. Why DON"T we ever find a single fossil of a land vertebrate prior to the Devonian era? If we are talking about gaps in the fossil record, it is creationism, in its usual form (excluding, say, “progressive creation”) that suffers a massive problem.
The usual approach to this problem by creationists is to deny that the fossil record has a temporal aspect at all, that it simply shows the way that organisms were all jumbled together and laid down by a massive, worldwide “flood.” However, that still does not account for the specific pattern that is observed.
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That makes no sense. The evolution of the dolphin and penguin lineages converged on the same basic propulsion strategy using what was available (leg, wing). The whales/dolphins went through a stage when they were more otter like. So what of otters? Do you also disbelieve they, like the whale and dolphin, descended from a terrestrial mammal?
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