Universal Common Designer theory [UPDATED and REVISED]

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@Meerkat_SK5

@John_Harshman

First, you will have to show that the studies you have cited say anything relevant to your claims.

“However, if scaled to the stratigraphic level of the stage and the taxonomic level of the family, the past 540 million years of the fossil record provide uniformly good documentation of the life of the past.”

So there is “good” representation at the family level. Which does not imply the conclusion that the fossil record is complete.

@Meerkat_SK5

Furthermore, “the astonishing agreement between evolutionary trees based on molecular (DNA) data and the fossil record, and the fact that the detailed pattern of the evolution of life has not changed much over 200 years of study, suggests that the fossil record is adequate for the purpose we have put it to. It provides incontrovertible evidence of Darwinian evolution.”

I completely agree with that quote. The fossil record provides incontrovertible evidence of Darwinian evolution, in part because of the astonishing agreement between evolutionary trees based on molecular data and hte fossil record.

@Meerkat_SK5

Yes, I do acknowledge that all those points prove how the fossil record must continue to be considered incomplete.

Then we are done. Case closed, game over. You are over reaching.

@Meerkat_SK5

However, the problem with all those points is that it does not go far enough to explain the sudden appearances between major groups of animals that Gunter Beuchely laid out in his video.

Sure it does. That’s exactly and literally what it does.

@Meerkat_SK5

. There are simply too many of those type of gaps, especially if 99.9 of species are extinct already

That seems to suggest the diametrically opposite conclusion than what you are suggesting.

Given the astonishing match between fossil and molecular phylogenies, and given that “The fossil record provides incontrovertible evidence of Darwinian evolution” - then it seems to me that the very existence of gaps is overwhelming evidence of the incompleteness of the fossil record, and the fossil record’s incompleteness is in fact readily explained by obvious geological effects. The process of fossilization is rare, the long-term preservation of any organisms that still manages to fossilize is rarer still, some organisms intrinsically don’t seem to fossilize at all but under the rarest of circumstances leaving only rough outliness and imprints with way to infer or elucidate their internal structures, that enormous amounts of fossil-containing sediments have already eroded away, and that another large fraction is hidden away in inaccessible locations on the Earth, either deep below glaciers, or in the crust.

Then there’s the fact that new “gap”-filling species are still routinely discovered. They are still finding new transitional whales, or early Devonian tetrapods.