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buffalo
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The Rise and Fall of Tiktaalik? Darwinists Admit “Quality” of Evolutionary Icon is “Poor” in Retroactive Confession of Ignorance (Updated)
http://www.evolutionnews.org/panvstet.JPG
Pope's astronomer dismisses ID and says Church was "spectacularly wrong" in its treatment of Galileo
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http://www.evolutionnews.org/panvstet.JPG
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edwest2
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The talk origins examples were entirely unconvincing, especially when you include the debate of what constitutes a species. The fruit fly experiment was able to mix up existing genetic material and you had legs pop out where they shouldn’t be. Plants? Come on. Long before modern science, orchard growers grafted branches onto different fruit trees. Grafting of plants is mentioned in the Bible.
Animal breeding? Sure, but is that hybrid dog a new species?
It appears all organisms, including man, have the built-in ability to change within certain parameters. Oriental people have the epicanthic fold in their eyes. Negroid people have a different skull shape compared to Caucasions, but they, and we, are all human.
A sugar beet grown in ideal conditions will yield a lot of sugar. Wine growers know what happens to grapes when grown in different climates, in different soil and with different sunlight exposure times. Scientists are only now beginning to understand the role of horizontal gene transfer, including in humans.
God bless,
Ed
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edwest2
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Thank you buffalo. It’s worth noting that the common smear against the Discovery Institute: That they only issue press releases, implying, of course, that they have nothing of substance to report. That is simply not true. And no - I have no desire to join or support the Discovery Institute.
Peace,
Ed
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StAnastasia
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Buffalo, do you really expect anyone on this forum other than yourself and Ed to accept this dishonest argument from a creationist group like the Discovery Institute, written by someone as scientifically ignorant as Casey Luskin? If anyone other than you two take issue with this, I’ll respond.
StAnastasia
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buffalo
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Two points from the referenced article:
Ancient Fish Had Primitive Fingers, Toes
…Curiously, the radial bones of Panderichthys are more finger-like than those of Tiktaalik, a fish with stubby leg-like limbs that lived about five million years later.
Many scientists regard Tiktaalik as a “missing link”: the crucial transitional animal between fish and the first tetrapods.
**One possibility, Alhberg said, is that finger development took a step backward with Tiktaalik, and that Tiktaalik’s fins represented an evolutionary return to a more primitive form. **
Michael Coates, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, called the new findings “intriguing” but is not convinced that the digit-like structures in Panderichthys’s fin are the equivalent of our fingers.
For one thing, they seem unusually flat for radial bones, Coates said.
“Radials are generally cylindrical. When you look at [a] cross-section [of the digit], they’re dumbbell-shaped.”
The structures are so peculiar, they might just be fragments of damaged bone, he added.
Next, another plug for IDvolution:
…**The finding supports recent studies that suggest primitive fish and sharks had the genes necessary to develop digits, even if the animals didn’t grow those appendages.
Thanks StA - I missed this the first time around.
**
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StAnastasia
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Buffalo, however pretty its pictures, National Geographic is not a reputed science publication. The case for Tiktaalik has not been refuted, and “IDvolution” remains a private fancy with no traction among professional scientists.
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buffalo
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Perhaps you should lecture NG on disseminating incorrect information.
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StAnastasia
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One of our staff geologists has; it takes a long time to hear back from them, and by then they have moved on to some other story.
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buffalo
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Let me know when they retract.
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edwest2
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Are you in contact with everyone on this forum? How do you know with any certainty that “anyone” is entirely in line with your thinking?
God bless,
Ed
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buffalo
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Lobbing a grenade into the Tetrapod Evolution picture
Just when everyone thought that a consensus had emerged, a new fossil find is reported - throwing everything into the melting pot (again!). Trackways of an unknown tetrapod have been recovered from rocks dated 10 million years earlier than Tiktaalik. The authors say that the trackways occur in rocks that: “can be securely assigned to the lower-middle Eifelian, corresponding to an age of approximately 395 million years”. At a stroke, this rules out not only Tiktaalik as a tetrapod ancestor, but also all known representatives of the elpistostegids. The arrival of tetrapods is now considered to be 20 million years earlier than previously thought and these tetrapods must now be regarded as coexisting with the elpistostegids. Once again, the fossil record has thrown up a big surprise, but this one is not “entirely compatible with evolutionary thinking”. It is a find that was not predicted and it does not fit at all into the emerging consensus.“Now, however, Niedzwiedzki et al. lob a grenade into that picture. They report the stunning discovery of tetrapod trackways with distinct digit imprints from Zachemie, Poland, that are unambiguously dated to the lowermost Eifelian (397 Myr ago). This site (an old quarry) has yielded a dozen trackways made by several individuals that ranged from about 0.5 to 2.5 metres in total length, and numerous isolated footprints found on fragments of scree. The tracks predate the oldest tetrapod skeletal remains by 18 Myr and, more surprisingly, the earliest elpistostegalian fishes by about 10 Myr.” (Janvier & Clement, 2010) The Nature Editor’s summary explained: “The finds suggests that the elpistostegids that we know were late-surviving relics rather than direct transitional forms, and they highlight just how little we know of the earliest history of land vertebrates.” Henry Gee, one of the Nature editors, wrote in a blog:
“What does it all mean?
It means that the neatly gift-wrapped correlation between stratigraphy and phylogeny, in which elpistostegids represent a transitional form in the swift evolution of tetrapods in the mid-Frasnian, is a cruel illusion. If - as the Polish footprints show - tetrapods already existed in the Eifelian, then an enormous evolutionary void has opened beneath our feet.”
Just when everyone thought that a consensus had emerged, a new fossil find is reported - throwing everything into the melting pot (again!). Trackways of an unknown tetrapod have been recovered from rocks dated 10 million years earlier than Tiktaalik. The authors say that the trackways occur in rocks that: “can be securely assigned to the lower-middle Eifelian, corresponding to an age of approximately 395 million years”. At a stroke, this rules out not only Tiktaalik as a tetrapod ancestor, but also all known representatives of the elpistostegids. The arrival of tetrapods is now considered to be 20 million years earlier than previously thought and these tetrapods must now be regarded as coexisting with the elpistostegids. Once again, the fossil record has thrown up a big surprise, but this one is not “entirely compatible with evolutionary thinking”. It is a find that was not predicted and it does not fit at all into the emerging consensus.“Now, however, Niedzwiedzki et al. lob a grenade into that picture. They report the stunning discovery of tetrapod trackways with distinct digit imprints from Zachemie, Poland, that are unambiguously dated to the lowermost Eifelian (397 Myr ago). This site (an old quarry) has yielded a dozen trackways made by several individuals that ranged from about 0.5 to 2.5 metres in total length, and numerous isolated footprints found on fragments of scree. The tracks predate the oldest tetrapod skeletal remains by 18 Myr and, more surprisingly, the earliest elpistostegalian fishes by about 10 Myr.” (Janvier & Clement, 2010) The Nature Editor’s summary explained: “The finds suggests that the elpistostegids that we know were late-surviving relics rather than direct transitional forms, and they highlight just how little we know of the earliest history of land vertebrates.” Henry Gee, one of the Nature editors, wrote in a blog:
“What does it all mean?
It means that the neatly gift-wrapped correlation between stratigraphy and phylogeny, in which elpistostegids represent a transitional form in the swift evolution of tetrapods in the mid-Frasnian, is a cruel illusion. If - as the Polish footprints show - tetrapods already existed in the Eifelian, then an enormous evolutionary void has opened beneath our feet.”
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wanstronian
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There’s no such thing. It’s just a phrase you made up, for a process that you are unable to describe.
The fact is that only dim-witted buffoons like the DI and their followers could possibly interpret the iterative improvement of a scientific theory as a sign of weakness. They just don’t understand what science is all about; to them, stubbornly defending their initial mistaken dogma is more important than methodical pursuit of the truth.
It seems that in this case, Luskin will only accept a transitional fossil with the body of a fish and four perfectly-formed tetrapod limbs. Which of course, would actually be a serious problem for Evolution.
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edwest2
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To buffalo -
“coexisting with elpistostegids”? Sob… Tell me it isn’t true…
This changes everything, again.
Peace,
Ed
“coexisting with elpistostegids”? Sob… Tell me it isn’t true…
This changes everything, again.
Peace,
Ed
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StAnastasia
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No – it was a question.
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StAnastasia
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Speaking of dim-witted buffons, I wonder if Casey would agree with Glenn Beck’s objection to evolution that he has never seen something that is half chimp and half man:
mediamatters.org/mmtv/201010200013
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reggieM
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Name-calling & personal insult = good display of Christian virtue in a public forum?
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Touchstone
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As someone who thinks that a charitable description of Luskin (truly!), I can say I’m impressed with the Christian virtue of that description much more than a defense of a guy like that as you’ve got here. Here is a Christian who isn’t suffering BS, and will call a spade a spade. That’s as strong an apologetic as is to be had around here, I’d say. A Catholicism that defends (and rallies around) a Casey Luskin, or a Ken Ham or a Bill Dembski has dug a deep hole for itself as a starting point. That there are Catholics who can identify guys like that for what they are – and this is virtually unheard of in my long travels through Protestant circles – is at least a stance that isn’t reasonably and trivially discounted as “politics and dogma pretending at science”. A Catholic view that identifies Luskin for the con man he is at least holds out the consideration that reason and faith can be harmonized in Catholicism.
I’m always surprised here how many and loud are the “Protestant fundamentalists” who are listed as “Catholic”. It may be that Catholic breeds a very similar form of incorrigible fundamentalism to the Protestant kind, or maybe that there are just a lot of ex-Protestant fundamentalists here who changed out the “Protestant” part and kept the fundamentalism mojo, but it’s odd that of all the Catholics I know, and who were persuasive in convincing me to consider becoming a Catholic and leaving Protestantism, not one of them was a fundamentalist-type. And there were many.
The picture is very different, here, though.
-TS
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StAnastasia
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Merely quoting Wanstronian in post # 690, and it’s a description, not an insult: “A buffoon was a person employed to tell jokes and provide general entertainment, typically by a European monarch.” What Glenn has to say about someone who is “half monkey and half human” is very funny (he made my sons laugh in a jolly manner at supper last night), so I’m crediting him with wit and entertainment skill.
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StAnastasia
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Con men are not foreign to our faith, but should be exposed for what they are and opposed when possible.
TS, I suspect that a lot of converts kept their biblical literalist hermeneutic wrapped in a waterproof bundle on their backs as they “swam the Tiber.” They are coming into the Church without realizing that we Catholics have been here for ages, and that we don’t carry that same literalist hermeneutic on our backs.
StAnastasia
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larkin31
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Turn Fox off during dinner!!!
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