Scientists Unveil Missing Link In Evolution

This is just an interesting fossil. It proves nothing either or anyway. Relax.

Originally posted by amazing
This is just an interesting fossil. It proves nothing either or anyway. Relax.

Exactly but that’s what’s getting my goat. Why the big fuss by the media?

still nobody willing to explain how they think ID works.

i mean someone , somewhere must have an idea of how this happens? no?

im genuinely interested to know how people think ID works, i've never heard an explanation. Does a designer place the animals whole on the earth? is that how ID folks think it works?

or are they saying the designer designed a cell and the cell evolved into all the species we see?


what does that say when nobody is willing to even propose how ID works? if i asked the same question to an evolutionary biologist i would get a comprehensive answer on mutation, selection, population seperation, they would point to the fossil record, dna, genes on and on.

The least ID folks can do is come up with how they think it works. In the face of this i have no alternative but to go with the only explanation there is. Evolution.



[edit on 21-5-2009 by yeti101]

Darwinism states that life started with simple plant life and evolved from their. Evolved from a single cell.

reply to post by theflashor


but what to ID folks think?

reply to post by yeti101


ID?

reply to post by theflashor


intelligent design

Darwin's theory has been falsified by Darwin himself.

There's 2 theories of evolution. There's Darwin's theory and then there's Intelligent Design. They are both interpretations as to how evolution occured.

What those who support Darwin argue is that Darwin's interpretation is evolution when it's not. Both interpretations state evolution occured. One states it occured through magic (Darwin) and on says it occured through Intelligent Design.

Darwin himself said if we find an abundance of fossil's and fossil's that show a small transition between species are not found then his theory is false.

We have found fossils but NONE in transition according to Darwin's theory.

We find well defined species in transition to more well defined species but no intermediary steps that Darwin's theory needs to be correct. This is because a code in DNA does not need intermediary steps and this is why you see well defined species in the fossil record.

Again, Darwin said:

"As by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed. Why do we not find them embedded in the crust of the earth? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of being, as we see them, well defined species?" — Charles Darwin

I will answer the question, because design is not chaotic. When a code is in place well defined species evolve without intermediary steps.

Darwin said:

The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, (must) be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Darwin falsified his own theory. There are no transitional fossils showing intermediary steps just well defined species in transition and this is what you would expect to find with Design. A code does not need intermediate steps.

Again, this is Darwin's theory and the theory many follow. The theory seeks to explain why we don't see these intermediate steps in the fossil record. It's just wishful thinking.

[edit on 21-5-2009 by platosallegory]

reply to post by platosallegory


so how do ID folks propose intelligent design works?

Abiogenesis comprise two parts: ABIO and GENESIS. "Abio" is made of A,B, I and O that somewhat fused together and formed the word "abio," which doesn't make sense -- unless I have a very thin dictionary. The same goes for "genesis" with an important exceptiont hat the word does exist so you can use it to trace the origin of life:

And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky."
Genesis 1:20

Now the science tells us that life on this planet started in the oceans. In other words, science discovered something that was already known looooong time ago.

(Note: the reference to the birds flying above the earth means that God called the Ci2/b seeders "birds," like we sometimes call that way planes. The other nickname for Ci2/b's was "dumpers.")
1.bp.blogspot.com...

reply to post by stander


wait a sec. That quote implies everything was created at the same time. We know this isnt true.

how do you square that circle within the theory of ID. I'm no expert but birds didnt exist in the cambrian period.

i'm still really confused as to how ID is meant to work

p.s whats a ci2/b, im just a layperson dont know this stuff



[edit on 21-5-2009 by yeti101]

Originally posted by platosallegory
We have found fossils but NONE in transition according to Darwin's theory.

There are lots of transitional fossils. The problem is that people who deny evolution will redefine the term “Transitional” to refer to a fossil that is a direct ancestor of one organism and the direct descendant of another and refuse to accept something as simple as nasal drift in whale ancestors as a transition.

Originally posted by platosallegory
We find well defined species in transition to more well defined species but no intermediary steps that Darwin's theory needs to be correct. This is because a code in DNA does not need intermediary steps and this is why you see well defined species in the fossil record.

Again see above concerning redefining the term of a "Transitional Species"

Originally posted by platosallegory
Again, Darwin said:

"As by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed. Why do we not find them embedded in the crust of the earth? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of being, as we see them, well defined species?" — Charles Darwin"

You quote Darwin alot to prove your point but the ToE is supported by many different sources of evidence, not upon the authority of one man. Alot of new evidence has been found since he was alive.

Originally posted by platosallegory
I will answer the question, because design is not chaotic. When a code is in place well defined species evolve without intermediary steps.

You are correct, design is not chaotic. But neither is evolution. At the heart of evolution is "Natural Selection" and this is anything but chaotic.

Originally posted by stander
Abiogenesis comprise two parts: ABIO and GENESIS. "Abio" is made of A,B, I and O that somewhat fused together and formed the word "abio," which doesn't make sense -- unless I have a very thin dictionary.

Hello, I am not judging or taking sides here, I just wanted to point out that the abio part has a very well defined and non-ambiguous meaning.

A - BIO means without life. A is "a" negative in ancient greek. Bios (Βίος) = life (ζωή).
Abiogenesis (Αβιογένεσις) = Birth without life. So the term is used to define the moment life emerged out of lifeless organic matter.

O Stokos.

Originally posted by stander
Abiogenesis comprise two parts: ABIO and GENESIS. "Abio" is made of A,B, I and O that somewhat fused together and formed the word "abio," which doesn't make sense -- unless I have a very thin dictionary. The same goes for "genesis" ...

Latin translation of Abiogenisis:

A = No, Bio = Life, Genisis = Origins


Edit: ah poster above me beat me to it


[edit on 21-5-2009 by ExistenceUnknown]

Originally posted by ExistenceUnknown

There are lots of transitional fossils. The problem is that people who deny evolution will redefine the term "Transitional" to refer to a fossil that is a direct ancestor of one organism and the direct descendant of another and refuse to accept something as simple as nasal drift in whale ancestors as a transition.

this tendency to seek confirming evidence over contrary evidence is known as confirmation bias. One consequence of confirmation bias can be that confirming evidence is viewed as correct and typical whereas disconfirming evidence is viewed as anomalous and rare.

When a scientific theory makes a prediction that is discovered to be false, the theory is simply modified a bit to accommodate the new finding. Broad, umbrella theories, such as evolution, are particularly amenable to adjustments.

Evolution states that naturalistic mechanisms are sufficient to explain the origin of species. This is a very broad statement capable of generating a wide variety of specific explanations about how evolution is supposed to have actually occurred

A central issue in making a new theory of evolution is how large a role natural selection , which has come to mean the weeding out of traits that don't favor survival, gets to play.

Natural selection was only part of Darwin's Origin of Species thinking. Yet through the years most biologists outside of evolutionary biology have mistakenly believed that evolution is natural selection.

A wave of scientists now questions natural selection's relevance, though few will publicly admit it. And with such a fundamental struggle underway, the hurling of slurs such as "looney Marxist hangover", "philosopher" (a scientist who can't get grants anymore), "crackpot", is hardly surprising.

When I asked esteemed Harvard evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin in a phone conversation what role natural selection plays in evolution, he said, "Natural selection occurs."

But Stanley Salthe goes further

"Oh sure natural selection's been demonstrated. . . the interesting point, however, is that it has rarely if ever been demonstrated to have anything to do with evolution in the sense of long-term changes in populations. . . . Summing up we can see that the import of the Darwinian theory of evolution is just unexplainable caprice from top to bottom. What evolves is just what happened to happen."

Stuart Pivar, has been investigating self-organization in living forms but thinks natural selection is irrelevant - and has paid the price for this on the blogosphere. Pivar's an extremely engaging man, trained as a chemist and engineer - a bit of a wizard who loves old art. He was a long-time friend of Andy Warhol and a buddy of the late paleontologist Steve Gould, who continues to serve as an inspiration for Pivar's work. Stuart Pivar Steve Gould's Natural History magazine editor Richard Milner, by the way, describes Gould as "a popular articulator of Darwinian evolution to a new generation, while privately, his creative and rebellious mind sought to move beyond it."

There is a new mechanism a new insistance to get those wannabe kitchen cosmetology scientists in the atheist blogs all caught up so they won't trip over the latest data and new discoveries in the properties DNA has that shatter the myth and relavence of natural selection. The entire theory is being reshaped and new words to add a flair of intelligence are being created. What was an elegant sinewy bridge pitiless and indifferent is now encroaching on the tenets if intelligent design. Like Darwin who had a sort of spin off from lamarkian theory, adding to it his natural selection. Like the idea that beneficial advantageuous random mutation might act as the necessary accelerator this broken theory needed to get even a hope of ever being plausibly believable.

As luck and unscientific speculation would have it, DNA foiled the Darwinists again in that mutations not only cause some deleterious results but after a time where two beneficial mutations even could take place given the unlikely probability for that, it turns out the DNA will "reboot" itself and get back to the default blue printed and templated gene the Original creatures DNA had as "factory" fresh again.


Existence-unknown would have us believe that their were no birds in the fossil record during the cambrian era, Ironically this is where others have found alleged dino to bird fossil's moreover the many hopes for transition fossil finds were not found NOT because any of the evolution skeptics have re-defined transitionals but simply because they DO NOT EXIST. This isn't just MY belief this is the belief of prominant biologists of evolutionary pseudo science.

Required Transitional Forms Missing
DARWIN'S BIGGEST PROBLEM, "...innumerable transitional forms must have existed but why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? ...why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain, and this perhaps is the greatest objection which can be urged against my theory". Origin of the Species.

MORE EMBARRASSING, David M. Raup, U. Chicago; Ch. F. Mus. of N. H., "The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be. Darwin was completely aware of this. He was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn't look the way he predicted it would.... Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. ....ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as the result of more detailed information." F.M.O.N.H.B., Vol.50, p.35

PREDICTION FAILED, Niles Eldridge, Amer. Mus. N. H., "He [Darwin] prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search.... One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction was wrong." The Myths of Human Evolution, p.45-46

Then we have all those Proposed Links "Debunked"

TEXTBOOK DECEIT, GEORGE G. SIMPSON, "The uniform, continuous transformation of Hyracotherium into Equus, so dear to the hearts of generations of textbook writers never happened in nature." LIFE OF THE PAST, p.119

THE HORSE "STORY", Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist British Museum of Natural History, "There have been an awful lot of stories, some more imaginative than others, about what the nature of that history [of life] really is. The most famous example, still on exhibit downstairs, is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps fifty years ago. That has been presented as the literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I think that that is lamentable, particularly when the people who propose those kinds of stories may themselves be aware of the speculative nature of some of that stuff." Harper's, p. 60, 1984.

TEXTBOOK HORSES, Bruce MacFadden, FL Museum of Natural History & U. of FL "...over the years fossil horses have been cited as a prime example of orthogenesis ["straight-line evolution"] ...it can no longer be considered a valid theory...we find that once a notion becomes part of accepted scientific knowledge, it is very difficult to modify or reject it" FOSSIL HORSES, 1994, p.27

STORY TIME OVER, Derek Ager, U.at Swansea, Wales, "It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student....have now been 'debunked.' Similarly, my own experience of more than twenty years looking for evolutionary lineages among the Mesozoic Brachiopoda has proved them equally elusive.", PROC. GEOL. ASSO., Vol.87, p.132

"FOSSIL BIRD SHAKES EVOLUTIONARY HYPOTHESES, "Fossil remains claimed to be of two crow-sized birds 75 million years older than Archaeopteryx have been found....a paleontologist at Texas Tech University, who found the fossils, says they have advanced avian features. ...tends to confirm what many paleontologists have long suspected, that Archaeopteryx is not on the direct line to modern birds." Nature, Vol.322, 1986 p.677

REPTILE TO BIRD W.E. SWINTON, "The origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved." BIOLOGY & COMPARATIVE PHYSIOLOGY OF BIRDS, Vol.1, p.1.

S. M. Stanley, Johns Hopkins "The record now reveals that species typically survive for a hundred thousand generations, or even a million or more, without evolving very much. We seem forced to conclude that most evolution takes place rapidly...a punctuational model of evolution...operated by a natural mechanism whose major effects are wrought exactly where we are least able to study them - in small, localized, transitory populations...The point here is that if the transition was typically rapid and the population small and localized, fossil evidence of the event would never be found." p.77, 110, New Evolutionary Timetable, 1981

Colin Patterson, B.M.N.H. "Well, it seems to me that they have accepted that the fossil record doesn't give them the support they would value so they searched around to find another model and found one. ...When you haven't got the evidence, you make up a story that will fit the lack of evidence." Darwin's EnigmA, p.100

In conclusion, it isn't the skeptics of evolution that have made it so difficult to understand. It is the cults followers who deny they have been on a endless road to nowhere and know nothing about true science and how science is supposed to be done. Rather than kick this impossible theory to the curb letting it die in its rigormortis state of value and interest, they frantically work, doing the same thing they have always done getting the same results they have always got.

SQUAT

reply to post by Con Science


hi, i looked at the wiki page on ID becuase nobody would tell me how ID works.

Even on that page theres no explantion on how its supposed to work.

It seems there is no competeing theory to evolution. Am i wrong?

I had seen some requests for "crazy creationist" to come out of the woodwork and defend against IDA.

It is unbelievably frustrating to here them claim this is the missing link. Funny, evolutionist never admitted to "missing link" until now, I thought evolution was "fact" just last week. Besides isn't a missing link supposed to show true transitional forms Anyway, there is much hype but little science. After reading 75 times that this proves evolution at various outlets, the only science I have found is that it thumbs, grooming claw, and nails make the case. Huh?? The following was taken from
www.answersingenesis.org...

Ida has opposable thumbs, which the ABC News article states are “similar to humans’ and unlike those found on other modern mammals” (i.e., implying that opposable thumbs are evidence of evolution). Yet lemurs today have opposable thumbs (like all primates). Likewise, Ida has nails, as do other primates. And the talus bone is described as “the same shape as in humans,” despite the fact that there are other differences in the ankle structure.3
Unlike today’s lemurs (as far as scientists know), Ida lacks the “grooming claw” and a “toothcomb” (a fused row of teeth) In fact, its teeth are more similar to a monkey’s. These are minor differences easily explained by variation within a kind.



In order to make a case evolution you need to show that new information was created in the DNA. Yet there is not one example of clear, empirically supported examples of information-gaining, beneficial mutations. Mutations that are expressed virtually always result in loss of information or corruption of the gene. People can mutate to be immune to malaria but that is because they have sickle cell anemia. Bacteria can mutate to be resistant to antibiotics but that is because the pouch that holds the antibiotic is gone, kind of like saying a human is immune to handcuffs because his hands are gone. While it may be beneficial "in that environment" the organism is actually weaker. This is evidence of de-evolution.

www.trueorigin.org...

I can also debunk their claim that the fossil is millions of years old but my post is long. I will end this post by saying that even the evolutionist members of the scientific community are saying that breaks need to be applied to these claims and that this needs to be peer reviewed. Below is a link to a peer reviewed study. Careful open minded review of this information will confirm what you already know believing in the "primordial ooze" takes faith. It may be hard to overcome your evolutionary trained bias. But further review will show you that it takes MORE faith to believe in evolution than creation. This is media hype in an obnoxious form.

www.plosone.org...:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0005723

[edit on 21-5-2009 by stuff1]

Originally posted by yeti101
reply to post by Con Science

 

hi, i looked at the wiki page on ID becuase nobody would tell me how ID works.

Even on that page theres no explantion on how its supposed to work.

It seems there is no competeing theory to evolution. Am i wrong?

Yeah you're wrong and again, why are you jerking people around talking like you have no idea how ID " is supposed to work" nice trap by the way, what comes next, who the designer is?

You know what seti is correct? Of course you do, you wrote a stunning post on reasons justify for the project. You know what they are looking for and you know identifying an intelligent message from noise is key.

You have also written another great post on what makes man intelligent what the differences are between us and our fellow creatures sharing this planet. You spoke quite eloquently of our ability for abstract thought and the ability to communicate in 2 and 3 evenn 5th person using shakespere as an analogy you said :" ( one of the reasons shakespeare is so revered his work demonstrates thinking like this). "

Many ID'ers are into seti and their is quite a difference but the way we look at science seems very similar indeed.

So if you are serious Ill ask you, do you agree with the following Working Definition of Intelligent Design below:

Because there are various incarnations of ID floating around, I felt I should make clear the working version I am using here.



Intelligent Design (ID) is based on the observation that the only fully observed source of complex devices or machines is from intelligent designers: our fellow humans who engineered and built them. Thus, it is reasonable to suspect or at least inquire that complex life forms were perhaps also made by intelligent being(s).



The intelligent being(s) could be aliens, humans who came back in time, smart robots, being(s) with god-like powers, etc. ID does not actually attempt to identify a specific intelligence at this stage. Further, the intelligence does not have to be supernatural or omnipotent to qualify as a potential designer. In fact, the designer(s) may be sloppy, lazy, have limited skills, use trial-and-error, etc. (Some half-jokingly suggest I call this definition "Halfwit Design".) Further, it may not be mutually-exclusive with evolution. Beings may have adjusted DNA along the way for as-of-now unknown reasons.



If this version differs too much from those put forth by Bible proponents, then so be it. This version is based almost entirely on the observation of sources of complexity, not religion.



"Fully observed" means there is a clear human-observed record of the process creating complexity from basic building materials such as raw elements and commonly-occurring minerals and chemicals. Issues regarding measuring complexity are addressed in the question and answer section above.

[edit on 21-5-2009 by Con Science]

reply to post by Eteric Rice


On "Wired:"


It is interesting that the spark that has been created in Labs was done by a being with consciousness. How would the test work with no lab and no human consciousness?

This is the perpetual issue that I confront and never receive an answer: Where did consciousness come from and how could it randomly and with time develop without the template of a conscious mind in the first place?