Barbarian on disruptive selection:
Yes. It is quite common when a population enters a new environment with many open niches.
Such series exist. Would you like to see some of them?
Let’s test your beliefs. If I can show you a series of fossils, each less different from the adjacent one, than the variation within many species, but the first and last are entirely different animals, will you agree that this would invalidate your belief?
If not, why not? If so, you have the courage to see if you are wrong. Ready?
You’ve been misled. There are millions of them.
" I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic licence, would that not mislead the reader?"(Patterson, Colin [late Senior Palaeontologist, British Museum of Natural History, London], letter 10 April 1979, in Sunderland L.D., “Darwin’s Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems,” [1984], Master Book Publishers: El Cajon CA, Fourth Edition, 1988, p.89).
"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution. (Gould, Stephen Jay [Professor of Zoology and Geology, Harvard University, USA], “Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?,” Paleobiology, Vol. 6, No. 1, January 1980, p.127).
“Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of
seeing' evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists the most notorious of which is the presence of gaps’ in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them.” (Kitts, David B. [Professor of Geology, University of Oklahoma], “Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory,” Evolution, Vol. 28, September 1974, p.467).
“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.” (Gould, Stephen Jay [Professor of Zoology and Geology, Harvard University, USA], “Evolution’s erratic pace,” Natural History, Vol. 86, No. 5, pp.12-16, May 1977, p. 14).
If you have the courage to test that assumption, we can begin. Fair enough?
Barbarian observes:
Fossilization is rather rare for most organisms. But fortunately, we do have examples of this. Horses, for example.
Quite a jump from Hyracotherium to Equus. You would never know the two were related, if you didn’t have the intermediates. But we do. Want to see?
Condylarths. There are condylarths that are very much like Hyracotherium.
http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Hall/1697/meniscotherium.JPG
“Many people suppose that phylogeny can be discovered directly from the fossil record by studying a graded series of old to young fossils and by discovering ancestors, but this is not true. The fossil record supplies evidence of the geological ages of the forms of life, but not of their direct ancestor-descendant relationships. There is no way of knowing whether a fossil is a direct ancestor of a more recent species or represents a related line of descent (lineage) that simply became extinct.” (Knox B., Ladiges P. & Evans B., eds., “Biology,” [1994], McGraw-Hill: Sydney, Australia, 1995, reprint, p.663) .
Would you like to know from where condylarths originated?
There are.
Museums and universities, mostly.
Barbarian observes:
How many fossilized humans have there been in the last few thousand years? How many fossilized raccoons, or pelicans?
You can show me a fossilized racoon of the species that now exist? Great. Show us.
Fossil Raccoon Skull
Physicists. Physics says the world is about 4.5 billion years old.
You have, but you do the usual creationist/IDer thing; both hands in your ears, eyes tightly closed. Those guys look on evidence the way a vampire regards a crucifix.
I’m willing to give you a chance. Do you have enough faith in your assumptions to test them?
