Re: Oldest Plant species?

Glenn Morton (grmorton@waymark.net)
Mon, 06 Oct 1997 19:36:10 -0500

At 03:25 PM 10/6/97 -0700, My friend Arthur V. Chadwick wrote:
> The renaming of plant form genera
>has been in general a rather undisguised effort to dilute the effect of
>having no evolution subsequent to first appearance. Nearly all angiosperm
>families are known by upper Cretaceous and this is mostly based on leaf
>morphologies and some pollen, both of which are characteristically modern
>in form and clearly assignable to modern taxa at the genus level.

Art, it has always seemed strange to me that anti-evolutionists talk about
the lack of evolution by referring to the stability of families and orders.
To me this is a straw man. There is no living FAMILY and no living ORDER.
Only species live. Even genera are a construct. If the species are
different, then evolution has occurred. That is what is so important about
the fact that there are only slighly less than 300 species found living in
the Pleistocene, and only 2 SPECIES of living animals found as fossils in
the Miocene. Living forms are SPECIES and almost none of todays species are
found merely 5 million years ago. And the further one goes back in time, the
greater is the divergence between present forms and fossil forms. This leads
to three possible explanations:

1. Evolution occurred.
2. God not only progressively created animals and plants, but he
progressively exterminated them also.
3. The devil put those different forms in the rock to fool us into believing
evolution.

But one thing seems problematical to the global flood view: If the fossil
record is the remains of the preflood world, why are there so few living
forms found in the fossil record?

glenn

Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm