stopped reading at "fully explains the origins of biological diversity". Let me guess the rest, creationist ramblings? Don't we have a religion/spirituality section?
If the fossil record doesn’t support macroevolution, exactly what does it evidence? If one looks at the fossil record objectively, there can be no denying that instead of witnessing the evolution of living creatures—rather than finding innumerable examples of life gradually transforming from one biological group into another exhibiting radically different properties through a series of successive intermediate forms—one instead sees the sudden appearance of new life forms, with new biological groups showing up explosively in the fossil record, almost as if out of nowhere. And not only is there a near absence of transitional intermediates, the fossil record is characterized by stasis, which is to say, instead of seeing gradual change over time, once new forms appear, they remain unchanged over vast periods of time. One of the most remarkable examples of sudden appearances of new forms in the fossil record is something known as the "Cambrian explosion." This happened approximately 540 million years ago when, judging by the fossil record, a veritable explosion of complex multicellular animal life appeared. For the first time in earth’s history one sees anywhere from 50% to 80% of the animal phyla that have ever existed. Moreover, these organisms show up in a window of time that is arguably close to 2 to 3 million years in duration, though some would argue the Cambrian explosion lasted for about 13 to 25 million years. Virtually out of nowhere comes this incredible diversification of complex animal forms. And when we look at the fossil record, we see that prior to the Cambrian explosion, we find nothing that looks like complex animal life whatsoever. It is new life showing up virtually out of nowhere. Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionary biologist and one of the leading scientists who study the Cambrian explosion stated the following: "William Buckland knew about it, Charles Darwin characteristically agonized over it, and we still do not fully understand it. 'It,' of course, is the seemingly abrupt appearance of animals in the Cambrian 'explosion.'" [PNSA 97 (2000)] The Cambrian explosion just simply makes no sense from an evolutionary perspective. In fact, Charles Darwin's book titled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life actually has a couple of chapters where he deals with problems for his theory, and one of the problems was the Cambrian explosion, about which he wrote: "There is another and allied difficulty, which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks… To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer…” In other words, in Darwin’s day, the Cambrian explosion—the idea that new animal life appears explosively in the fossil record without any evolutionary history preceding it—was already well known. Darwin hoped that future studies would uncover these missing transitional forms, but they have not. So, here we are 150 years later, and though we now know of many, many more fossils than Darwin knew in his day, the nature of the Cambrian explosion is still exactly the same. In fact, even the atheist Richard Dawkins, on page 299 in his book The Blind Watchmaker, laments about the Cambrian explosion. He writes… ..the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years, are the oldest ones in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. This is indeed a significant challenge to the evolutionary paradigm, but it is not just limited to the Cambrian explosion. Every time there is biological innovation that happens in the history of life on earth, it happens explosively. This includes the origin of life about 3.8 billion years ago, the eukaryotic big bang about 2 billion years ago (when single-celled eukaryotic organisms appear for the first time), as well as each time there is biological innovation with regard to animal life after the Cambrian Explosion (i.e., it happens as what paleontologists call "radiation" where there is an explosive diversification of new forms, with there being radiations for fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals). Again, these radiation events challenge the notion of biological evolution (i.e., the gradual unfolding of life on earth and the gradual emergence of new biological groups). It’s also interesting that when scientists look at the fossil record, they see extinctions. There are many mass extinction events that scientists can document in life’s history such as the Permian extinction and the K-T extinction (Cretaceous-Tertiary) where the dinosaurs disappeared and where one shortly thereafter sees the mammalian radiation. What is interesting is that in looking at each of these major mass extinction events, one finds they are closely followed by mass origination events where entirely new lifeforms and ecosystems appear. Again, they appear explosively and virtually out of nowhere—a pattern that does not fit what one would expect to see if biological evolution (or macroevolution more specifically) were a fact.
Of course fossil fuels form over hundreds of millions of years, everyone knows that really. Maybe creationists, especially young earth creationists, shouldn't be using things like fossil fuel if it hasn't had time to "evolve".
Evolution as summarized by Jordan Peterson... The cosmos is fifteen billion years old, and the world is four and a half billion years old. And there’s been life for three and a half billion years, and there were creatures that had pretty developed nervous systems three hundred to six hundred million years ago. And we were living in trees as small mammals sixty million years ago. We were down on the plains between sixty million and seven million years ago and that’s when we split from chimpanzees. And modern human beings seem to emerge about a hundred and fifty thousand years ago. And civilization pretty much after the last Ice Age, something after fifteen thousand years ago. The cosmos is 15,000,000,000 years old. The world is 4,500,000,000 years old. There’s been life for 3,500,000,000 years. There were creatures that had pretty developed nervous systems 300,000,000 to 600,000,000 years ago. We were living in trees as small mammals 60,000,000 years ago. We were down on the plains between 60,000,000 and 7,000,000 million years ago, and that’s when we split from chimpanzees. Modern human beings seem to emerge about a 150,000 years ago. Civilization pretty much after the last Ice Age, something after 15,000 years ago.
-1 energy -2 particles -3 atoms -4 compounds -6 replicating molecules -7 microbes -8 humans -9 x -10 god(s) -11 God -12 y What is the % likelyhood that -9 in the above spectrum is real? (>-9, see religion thread) - Human accelerated regions From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Human accelerated regions (HARs), first described in August 2006,[1][2] are a set of 49 segments of the human genome that are conserved throughout vertebrate evolution but are strikingly different in humans. They are named according to their degree of difference between humans and chimpanzees (HAR1 showing the largest degree of human-chimpanzee differences). Found by scanning through genomic databases of multiple species, some of these highly mutated areas may contribute to human-specific traits. Others may represent loss of functional mutations, possibly due to the action of biased gene conversion [2][3] rather than adaptive evolution.[4][5][6] Characterisation of HAR1-HAR5 regions, from a paper on Forces shaping the fastest evolving regions in the human genome by Katherine Pollard et al.[2] Several of the HARs encompass genes known to produce proteins important in neurodevelopment. HAR1 is a 106-base pair stretch found on the long arm of chromosome 20 overlapping with part of the RNA genes HAR1F and HAR1R. HAR1F is active in the developing human brain. The HAR1 sequence is found (and conserved) in chickens and chimpanzees but is not present in fish or frogs that have been studied. There are 18 base pair mutations different between humans and chimpanzees, far more than expected by its history of conservation.[1] HAR2 includes HACNS1 a gene enhancer "that may have contributed to the evolution of the uniquely opposable human thumb, and possibly also modifications in the ankle or foot that allow humans to walk on two legs". Evidence to date shows that of the 110,000 gene enhancer sequences identified in the human genome, HACNS1 has undergone the most change during the evolution of humans following the split with the ancestors of chimpanzees.[7] The substitutions in HAR2 may have resulted in loss of binding sites for a repressor, possibly due to biased gene conversion.[8][9]
Archaeopteryx Why haven’t you mentioned archaeopteryx, which appears about 155 million years ago? It’s probably because it is a classic example of how the fossil record does indeed display gradual evolutionary transformations where one major group transitions into another major group—part of a series of numerous transitional intermediate forms, thus supporting the theory of evolution and validating the evolutionary paradigm. Archaeopteryx is a perfect midpoint between reptiles and birds! Well actually, archaeopteryx is a true bird. It’s an ancient bird that belongs to a group known as Archaeornithines. Also, it appears quite suddenly in the fossil record without any true transitional form leading up to it. Though evolutionary biologists are convinced that birds evolved from ancient reptiles known as thecodonts (which gave rise to birds) the problem is that there is a 100 million year gap between the appearance of thecodonts in the fossil record and when archaeopteryx appears—and there are no transitional forms connecting these ancient reptiles to the very first birds. Moreover, thecodonts and birds lack similar characteristics to each other, which undermines the idea that there is an evolutionary connection between reptiles and birds. But hold on! In more recent years, scientists have argued that the transitional form that produced birds would be feathered dinosaurs belonging to the group known as theropods. Yes, this is true, but the problem here is the presence of temporal paradox, where the transitional form appears in the fossil record after the forms that it is supposed to have evolved into (around 125 million years ago). And finally, following the sudden appearance of archaeopteryx, we don’t observe the gradual evolutionary transformation and diversification of ancient birds into more modern birds. Instead, we see stasis followed by explosive radiation events in three separate instances, the last one being 60 million years ago with the introduction of modern birds on the surface of the earth. None of this looks like what one would expect if evolution is to indeed explain the history of life on earth.
I liked your post, it does mention new developments that will bear on evolution of the various species on our planet. These new development do not invalidate the key Darwin message on Natural Selection, they simply reveal that Darwin's hypothesis of adaptive evolution is incomplete, and there is much more to learn beyond natural selection. Natural selection adequately explains why some species thrive, and reproduce, but inadequately explains the mechanism of intra-species evolution. Darwin's hypothesis also adequately explains why some species die out, but there too, it is incomplete. Today it is hard to imagine the impact Darwin had, at least until we recall his hypothesis ran smack up against the entrenched common wisdom of 6 days and a day of rest to create everything. Darwin's hypothesis does not explain how species arise in the first place. In Darwin's time, of course, any thought of evolutionary mechanisms at a molecular level was out of the question. One of the widely accepted but possibly incorrect current hypotheses is the "Out of Africa" hypothesis of the paleontologists and anthropologists for the origin of hominids. This is still an hypothesis only, though it is true that the oldest remains, so far, of hominids have been found on the African Continent. But this alone is an inadequate proof. It could simply be due to circumstance. A highly questionable, yet popular, hypothesis is "the single origin for life forms hypothesis." This has not been dis-proven any more than "the seeding from another planet hypothesis" has been, but it is called into serious question by the existence of primitive species that have no redundancy in their DNA codons, with two different species having either this or that codon for the same amino acid. This strongly suggests multiple origins.* The chance of there being googolplex of genesis sites where life on the planet could potentially begin is very high, and it is virtually certain that a googolplex of similar sites exist today. At each site the exact same rules of chemistry and physics must be followed, leading to similar but not identical results. Although the possible paths are highly limited at the outset, the possible paths increase with each step. Because there are so many genesis sites, even though events at each individual site have a vanishingly small probability of leading to the formation of living matter, a number of genesis sites that approaches infinity will virtually assure that some matter will evolve to create living species. According to this hypothesis the spontaneous formation of living matter of Earth is beyond possible, it's a virtual certainty. Other hypotheses explain why some species eventually evolve far more rapidly than could be explained by even an evolutionary process highly directed by the laws of physics and chemistry, which limit possible paths and thus speeds evolution. One hypothesis, for which very strong arguments can be made, is that hominids eventually began to unconsciously effect their own evolutionary rate, greatly accelerating it. There is at least one thing we can be absolutely certain of, however, God did not create the Earth and everything on it in six days and then rest for a day. We can be similarly certain that all religions, to the extent they teach at all, teach truth mingled with falsehoods. We will learn nothing of value with regard to evolution of the species from religious teaching. In that respect, religion is a waste of time. _____________________ *Advocates of the seeding from another planet hypothesis" will note that this observation of unique codons in some primitive species would probably require more than one flying saucer landing.
You'd make a great campaign chairman, or press secretary, for Donald Trump! You have the perfect mentality.
What does this have to do with Donald Trump? You made some good points in your previous post, but now I think you are just trying to be disagreeable, which does not interest me. So, I'm simply going to ignore you.