Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
That's where we start to drift away from facts and into debatable speculation
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Transitional Fossils
- Thread starter Rational Agnostic
- Start date
That's where we start to drift away from facts and into debatable speculation
Not any more than drifting from observations of our sky to the conclusion that the Earth orbits the Sun.
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
You may want to take your assertion up with the author of this study from the Journal of Ornithology, among others, and tell them where they went wrong..
Scientists: Bird's Ancestors Likely Not Dinosaurs
Also PBS
Evolution: Frequently Asked Questions - PBS
www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/faq/cat02.html
Humans did not evolve from monkeys. Humans are more closely related to modern apes than to monkeys, but we didn't evolve from apes, either.
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
The missing link, once again, retreats into the shadows. Evolution of the gaps
gnostic
The Lost One
Man being made from "dust" is more believable?
That's even more utterly stupid.
Dust are dead waste byproducts. Can living matters come from dead dust?
You assume there is only *one* such link. But any species in the chain can reasonably be describes as such a link.
Perhaps the best example of a link to humans is Homo erectus. But Homo habilus is also quite good as an example. The austalopitheciness clearly are both ape-like and proto-human.
Also, for example, the most recent common ancestor to chimps will be different than the most recent common ancestor to gorillas.
OK, so feathered dinosaurs and birds have a common ancestor? We shall see.
HUMANS ARE GREAT APES.
No, we did not evolve from monkeys. Monkeys (both old world and new wolrd) are on a different line of primates.
We also didn't evolve from any of the *modern* apes. We didn't, for example, evolve from chimpanzees or gorillas.
But we do share common ancestors with the other great apes. And these ancestors were apes.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
Except the "missing link" may have already been found (not likely though) or something at least close to it in a 6 million year old individual found several years ago in Chad that has so many shared ape-human characteristics that the anthropologists have not been able to classify him, the last I read. This is what we expect to see as we get closer to the individuals around the time of the split.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
Stop and think this through as I use a type of homemade graph (I'm low-tech):
X-----------------------Z
X----------Y-----------Z
Notice what happened here. By finding Y, we go from having one gap to having two gaps. Any additional finds will just add more gaps. But, in the process of finding more, we learn more.
Overly simplistic, I know, but this process has been going on for over a century now, so we have an increasingly accumulation of knowledge about what's happening, and the genome testing that is being conducted confirms most, but not all, of what we expected to see.
SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
There is no "the missing link." That's kind of an outdated notion.
Myth Of The ‘Missing Link’ In Evolution Does Science No Favors
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Not only genome evidence, but fossil evidence to. Remember this thread?
The Science of Human Evolution
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
but birds coming from Dinos was an utterly indisputable fact just a couple of posts ago- as obvious as the earth orbiting the sun was it not?
nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact, as Sherlock Holmes said!
Sure, maybe... but it's largely a matter of semantics, whether we call the ancestor an ape, and entirely academic since like the half necked Giraffe ancestor, it's never been found-
why not?
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
Well most of us have known that for some time
evolution has come a long way towards what intelligent design has been saying for a long time, the gaps are real, not artifacts of an incomplete record as originally predicted by Darwinism. There are no smooth steady transitions between different body plans, but parallel lines with limited adaptation among them- that's what the record, the models, and direct experimentation shows us.
SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
It was hard to tell from your posts.Well most of us have known that for some time
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
Yes, indeed Darwin was wrong on that, but ya gotta cut him at least some slack because he had really no fossil evidence to work from.Well most of us have known that for some time
With my anthropology students, I used the terminology "mosaic evolution" to demonstrate your point, namely that one needs to picture a species as being a large group with a significant of sub-groups within it that are all changing in their own way, only some of which may evolve into new species. This is the pattern we see with both the fossil record and the genome testing.
Evolution is not uniform, prone also to variations in the rate of change. IOW, it's sloppy, not pretty.