> Geoffrey Howells wrote:
>
> > Ive been reading a lot of the stuff on transitional species fascinating
> > stuff!! Nevertheless Ill stick with special creation. The design features of
> >animals are incredibly complex. Feathers for example are complex structures
> >which can only have been designed down to the microscopic level to perform as
> >they are supposed to! If Archeopterix was originally classified wrongly as a
> >dinosaur, that wouldnt be the first time 'biology without the soft parts' has
> >got it wrong.
> >
> >As for your amphibian transformations, they are interesting. Are they
> > conceivably all ancestors of one another though? Or simply a grab bag of
> > exotic creature which make a good story?
>
> If they were merely a grab bag of creatures, one would expect that another
> similar grab bag of creatures at a different layer in the geologic column
> could be put together telling the same story. It can't. There are no other
> periods containing such a sequence of characters in a temporal sequence as we
> find in the fish-amphibian transition.
>
> The problem is that anti-evolutionists from Gish to Phillip Johnson say that
> there are no transitional forms. There are. Even if one does what you are
> suggesting and say that this series is a grab bag, you cannot deny the fact
> that these are a series that appear transitional. They simply choose not to
> acknowledge them. To tell a student that there are no transitional forms
> without warning him of sequences like these is to leave him ill-prepared when
> he goes to college and learns of such things. And the anti-evolutionists never
> write about such sequences in enough detail to let us know what the
> evolutionist is saying.
>
> glenn
>
>
>
Are you trying to say that you have proof of transitions between all
living forms of life? Living as well as fossil?
If this is so then why do experts in the field not to mention even
Darwin in 1850's who said the following:
'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 serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The
explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the
geological record.'
Charles Darwin, 'On the imperfection of the geological rcord', Chapter X,
The Origin of Splecies, J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1971,pp292-293
And more currently, 'Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and
the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanbded. We now
have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't
changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and,
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 a result of
more detailed information- what appeared to be a nice simple progression
when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more
complex and much less gradualistic. so Darwin's problem has not been
alleviated in the last 120 years and we still have a record which does
show change but one that can hardly be looked upon as the most reasonable
consequence of natural selection. Also the major extinctions such as
those of the dinosaurs and trilobites are still very puzzling.'
Dr David M. Raup (Curator of Geology, Field Museum of Natural History,
Chicago),'Conflicts between Darwin and paleontology'. Field Museum of
Natural History Bullentin, vol.5091)January 1979,p.25.
and....
'The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major
fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in
organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to
construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent
and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.'
Stephen Jay Gould (Professor of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard
University), "Is a new and general theory of evaolution emerging?'
Paleobiology, vol.6(1),January 1980,p.127.
"Clarence Darrow once argued in the 1925 Scopes Trial that it is "bigotry
for public schools to teach only one theory of origins." Now that
evolution is entrenched in public education, the American Civil Liberties
Union, despite its own cries on behalf of pluralism, insists that only
one theory of origins be taught. Bigotry has returned to the public
classroom.
To settle for evolution or "the big bang" theory without God begs a
thousand scientific questions. Where did the original energy and matter
come from? What caused the explosion? How could impersonal forces acting
randomly construct a universe whose planets rotate with such precision
that we set our clocks by them? It is preposterous to believe that
"nothing times nobody equals everything!"
-Myths that could destroy America by Erwin Lutzer