Fossils aren't rare, there are billions of them. According to darwins theory, there should be an overwhelming number of transitional fossils, but there aren't any. There is absolutely no evidence showing one kind of animal changing into another kind, period. Which is what the entire theory is based on.

"Given enough time we'll probably find one" Yeah, that's what the theory is hinged on..the faith that they exist. It's been 120 years but don't give up..we've uncovered billions of fossils but i bet thyere in there somewhere! It's a metaphysical belief and you have way more faith than I do.

>> ^MaxWilder:
>> ^shinyblurry:
Actually, you can find all the best ones here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils
Brace yourself for the disclaimer:
"Ideally, this list would only recursively include 'true' transitionals, fossils representing ancestral specie from which later groups evolved, but most, if not all, of the fossils shown here represent extinct side branches, more or less closely related to the true ancestor" ie, no real transitions have ever been discovered..meaning evolution is a fraud
You accuse me of being blind to evidence..I just provided a mountain of evidence showing evolution to be a total fabrication..you do one google search and determine you're right..lol..pretty sad maxyboy. Shows the supreme level of ignorance im dealing with here.
>> ^MaxWilder:
I guess when you Google "transitional fossils" and see all those pages with huge lists of transitional fossils, they are all liars. But the religious people, they know science better than the scientists.
Duh, winning.


I'm glad to see that you accept that general transitional fossils exist. That is, we have many examples of fossils which demonstrated the transition from fish to amphibian, for example.
But you, like all creationists, demand more specificity. You need to see a single branch go from species A to B to C.
Here's the thing you don't seem to get, shiny. Fossils are rare. And during the process of evolution, extinct side branches are common. Well, "common" isn't exactly the right word. The branch that survives basically has to win the evolutionary lotto. So if an animal gets fossilized, it is by far more likely to come from an extinct side branch. It's simply statistics. So species A evolves into a zillion different species B, most of which are evolutionary dead ends. So to find fossil records of the exact variant of species B that fell directly between Species A (which we had a fossil) and Species C (which we had a fossil that wasn't close enough to species A to be sure about)... that's kinda like winning the lotto ten times in a row. We have plenty of them that are close. But the exact ones? You don't understand what you are asking for.
Given enough time, we'll probably find some. But they won't be proving evolution true. The Theory of Evolution is just the best explanation for the evidence we have. You can't really prove it true. The theory as it stands has made a ton of predictions that have been shown to be accurate, but none of those are "enough" for skeptics. Perhaps there is a piece of evidence which would be so bizarre that it could prove it false, but it doesn't really work the other way around. Only mathematical theorems can be "proven" true.
No, if we ever find a "true" transitional fossil as you have defined it, it will simply prove creationism false. But then again, you've never let logic or evidence dissuade you from your beliefs, so it probably wouldn't change anything.

>> ^shinyblurry:

Actually, you can find all the best ones here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils
Brace yourself for the disclaimer:
"Ideally, this list would only recursively include 'true' transitionals, fossils representing ancestral specie from which later groups evolved, but most, if not all, of the fossils shown here represent extinct side branches, more or less closely related to the true ancestor" ie, no real transitions have ever been discovered..meaning evolution is a fraud
You accuse me of being blind to evidence..I just provided a mountain of evidence showing evolution to be a total fabrication..you do one google search and determine you're right..lol..pretty sad maxyboy. Shows the supreme level of ignorance im dealing with here.
>> ^MaxWilder:
I guess when you Google "transitional fossils" and see all those pages with huge lists of transitional fossils, they are all liars. But the religious people, they know science better than the scientists.
Duh, winning.



I'm glad to see that you accept that general transitional fossils exist. That is, we have many examples of fossils which demonstrated the transition from fish to amphibian, for example.

But you, like all creationists, demand more specificity. You need to see a single branch go from species A to B to C.

Here's the thing you don't seem to get, shiny. Fossils are rare. And during the process of evolution, extinct side branches are common. Well, "common" isn't exactly the right word. The branch that survives basically has to win the evolutionary lotto. So if an animal gets fossilized, it is by far more likely to come from an extinct side branch. It's simply statistics. So species A evolves into a zillion different species B, most of which are evolutionary dead ends. So to find fossil records of the exact variant of species B that fell directly between Species A (which we had a fossil) and Species C (which we had a fossil that wasn't close enough to species A to be sure about)... that's kinda like winning the lotto ten times in a row. We have plenty of them that are close. But the exact ones? You don't understand what you are asking for.

Given enough time, we'll probably find some. But they won't be proving evolution true. The Theory of Evolution is just the best explanation for the evidence we have. You can't really prove it true. The theory as it stands has made a ton of predictions that have been shown to be accurate, but none of those are "enough" for skeptics. Perhaps there is a piece of evidence which would be so bizarre that it could prove it false, but it doesn't really work the other way around. Only mathematical theorems can be "proven" true.

No, if we ever find a "true" transitional fossil as you have defined it, it will simply prove creationism false. But then again, you've never let logic or evidence dissuade you from your beliefs, so it probably wouldn't change anything.

Actually, you can find all the best ones here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils

Brace yourself for the disclaimer:

"Ideally, this list would only recursively include 'true' transitionals, fossils representing ancestral specie from which later groups evolved, but most, if not all, of the fossils shown here represent extinct side branches, more or less closely related to the true ancestor" ie, no real transitions have ever been discovered..meaning evolution is a fraud

You accuse me of being blind to evidence..I just provided a mountain of evidence showing evolution to be a total fabrication..you do one google search and determine you're right..lol..pretty sad maxyboy. Shows the supreme level of ignorance im dealing with here.

>> ^MaxWilder:
I guess when you Google "transitional fossils" and see all those pages with huge lists of transitional fossils, they are all liars. But the religious people, they know science better than the scientists.
Duh, winning.

I guess when you Google "transitional fossils" and see all those pages with huge lists of transitional fossils, they are all liars. But the religious people, they know science better than the scientists.

Duh, winning.

@TheGenk @Skeeve @Boise_Lib @gwiz665 @packo @IronDwarf @MaxWilder @westy @BicycleRepairMan @shuac @KnivesOut

Evolution is pseudo-science. It exists in the realm of imagination, and cannot be scientifically verified. At best, evolution science is forensic science, and what has been found not only does not support it, but entirely rules it out. I don't think any of you realize how weak the case for evolution really is. None of them quotes, as far as I know, are from creation scientists btw

No true transitional forms in the fossil record:

Darwins theory proposed that slow change over a great deal of time could evolve one kind of thing into another. Such as reptiles to birds. The theory proposed that we should see in the fossil records billions of these transitional forms, yet we have found none. When the theory was first proposed, darwinists pleaded poverty in the fossil record, claiming the missing links were yet to be found. It was then claimed that the links were missing because conditions conspired against fossilizing them, or that they had been eroded or destroyed in subsequent fossilization.

120 years have gone by since then. We have uncovered an extremely rich fossil record with billions of fossils, a record which has completely failed to produce the expected transitions. It has become obvious that there was no process that could have miraculously destroyed the transitionals yet left the terminal forms intact.

The next theory proposed was "hopeful monster" theory, which states that evolution occurs in large leaps instead of small ones. Some even suggested that a bird could have hatched from a reptile egg. This is against all genetic evidence, and has never been observed.

The complete lack of transitional forms is not even the worst problem for evolution, considering the big gaps between the higher categories, and the systemic absence of transitional forms between families classes orders and phyla.

"I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader?"

Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History (and a hardcore evolutionist), in a letter to Luther Sunderland, April 10, 1979 admitting no transitional forms exist.

"Contrary to what most scientists write, the fossil record does not support the Darwinian theory of evolution because it is this theory (there are several) which we use to interpret the fossil record. By doing so we are guilty of circular reasoning if we then say the fossil record supports this theory."

Ronald R. West, PhD (paleoecology and geology) (Assistant Professor of Paleobiology at Kansas State University), "Paleoecology and uniformitarianism". Compass, vol. 45, May 1968, p. 216

"Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed. But, as by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?"

-Charles Darwin

"In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another."

-Evolutionist Stephen M. Stanley, Johns Hopkins University

Fossil record disputes evolutionary theory:

According to evolutionary theory we should see an evolutionary tree of organisms starting from the least complex to the most complex. Instead, what we do see in the fossil record is the very sudden appearance of fully-formed and fully-functional complex life.

If you examine the fossil record, you see all kinds of complex life suddenly jumping into existence during a period that evolutionists refer to as the "Cambrian explosion".

None of the fossilized life forms found in the "Cambrian period" have any predecessors prior to that time. In essence, the "Cambrian period" represents a "sudden explosion of life" in geological terms.

Evolutionists try to disprove this by stretching it over a period of 50 million years, but they have no transitional fossils to prove that theory before or during.

"The earliest and most primitive members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous series from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed"

-Paleontologist George Gaylord

What disturbs evolutionists greatly is that complex life just appears in the fossil record out of nowhere, fully functional and formed.

A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth's geological formations. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin's hypothetical intermediate variants - instead species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God.

-Paleontologist Mark Czarnecki (an evolutionist)

"It is as though they [fossils] were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. Both schools of thought (Punctuationists and Gradualists) despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. The only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation and both reject this alternative."

-Richard Dawkins, 'The Blind Watchmaker', W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1996, pp. 229-230

Evolution can't explain the addition of information that turns one kind into another kind

There is no example recorded of functional information being added to any creature, ever.

"The key issue is the type of change required — to change microbes into men requires changes that increase the genetic information content, from over half a million DNA ‘letters’ of even the ‘simplest’ self-reproducing organism to three billion ‘letters’ (stored in each human cell nucleus)."

Species just don't change. Kind only produces kind:

"Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change. That's bothersome....brings terrible distress. ....They may get a little bigger or bumpier but they remain the same species and that's not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don't change, its not evolution so you don't talk about it."

Evolutionist Stephen J. Gould of Harvard University

Not enough bones:

Today the population grows at 2% per year. If we set the population growth rate at just 0.5% per year, then total population reduces to zero at about 4500 years ago. If the first humans lived 1,000,000 years ago, then at this 0.5% growth rate, we would have 10^2100 (ten with 2100 zeroes following it) people right now. If the present population was a result of 1,000,000 years of human history, then several trillion people must have lived and died since the emergence of our species. Where are all the bones? And finally, if the population was sufficiently small until only recently, then how could a correspondingly infinitesimally small number of mutations have evolved the human race?

"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."

-Professor Louis Bounoure, past president of the Biological Society of Strassbourg, Director of the Strassbourg Zoological Museum and Director of Research at the French National Center of Scientific Research.

Try to debunk this if you can
http://www.youtube.com/watchv=tYLHxcqJmoM&feature=PlayList&p=C805D4953D9DEC66&index=0&playnext=1

More fun facts:

There are no records of any human civilization past 4000 BC

"The research in the development of the [radiocarbon] dating technique consisted of two stages—dating of samples from the historic and prehistoric epochs, respectively. Arnold [a co-worker] and I had our first shock when our advisors informed us that history extended back only for 5,000 years . . You read statements to the effect that such and such a society or archeological site is 20,000 years old. We learned rather that these numbers, these ancient ages, are not known accurately; in fact, the earliest historical date that has been established with any degree of certainty is about the time of the First Dynasty of Egypt."—*Willard Libby, Science, March 3, 1961, p. 624.

Prior to a certain point several thousand years ago, there was no trace of man having ever existed. After that point, civilization, writing, language, agriculture, domestication, and all the rest—suddenly exploded into intense activity!

"No more surprising fact has been discovered, by recent excavation, than the suddenness with which civilization appeared in the world. This discovery is the very opposite to that anticipated. It was expected that the more ancient the period, the more primitive would excavators find it to be, until traces of civilization ceased altogether and aboriginal man appeared. Neither in Babylonia nor Egypt, the lands of the oldest known habitations of man, has this been the case."—P.J. Wiseman, New Discoveries, in Babylonia, about Genesis (1949 ), p. 28.

Oldest people/language recorded in c. 3000 B.C., and were located in Mesopotamia.

The various radiodating techniques could be so inaccurate that mankind has only been on earth a few thousand years.

"Dates determined by radioactive decay may be off—not only by a few years, but by orders of magnitude . . Man, instead of having walked the earth for 3.6 million years, may have been around for only a few thousand."—*Robert Gannon, "How Old Is It?" Popular Science, November 1979, p. 81.

Moonwalk disproves age of moon:

The moon is constantly being bombarded by cosmic dust particles. Scientists were able to measure the rate at which these particles would accumulate. Using their estimates according to their understanding that the age of the Earth was billions of years, their most conservative estimate predicted a dust layer 54 feet deep. This is why the lander had those huge balloon tires, to be prepared to land on a sea of dust. Neil Armstrong, after saying those famous words, uttered two more which disproved the age of the moon entirely "its solid!". Far from being 54 feet, they found the dust was 3/4 of an inch.

Evolution is a fairy tale that modern civilization has bought, hook line and sinker. Humorously, atheists accuse creationists of beiieving in myths without any evidence..when they place their entire faith in an unproven theory even evolutionists know is fatally flawed and invalid. Evolution is a meta physical belief that requires faith. Period.

Evolution is false, science affirms a divine Creator
http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Books,%20Tracts%20&%20Preaching/Tracts/big_daddy.htm

Though most of this is undisputable, I'm just getting started..

It's amusing that no one here can actually just present their views without acting all incredulous "OMG I CANT BELIEVE WHAT YOU BELIEVE OMG UR SO DUMB OMG!!!" How about you just let your logic speak for itself. If you want to talk about intelligence, I scored 149 on my last IQ test..how about you? You science worshippers are more dogmatic and sensitive than any religious person I know, and that's the truth.

You can repeat something is true over and over again, as forcefully and dramatically as you want..there are no, and I repeat ZERO true transitionals. Yes of course every fossil is a transitional by definition..lol..but we're talking about actual records showing a change in kind to another kind. There aren't any. Here is a list of all the best ones science has found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils

And here is the disclaimer:

Ideally, this list would only recursively include 'true' transitionals, fossils representing ancestral specie from which later groups evolved, but most, if not all, of the fossils shown here represent extinct side branches, more or less closely related to the true ancestor

Read that a few times and let it sink in. None have ever been found, those are all extinct side branches, not true transitionals. Why don't you get a background and know you're talking about before you try to get into a debate with someone, let alone imply they themselves are ignorant.


>> ^BicycleRepairMan:
>> ^shinyblurry:
And of course there is the embarassment of not having any true transitional forms..which should be abundent by now I would think.

Oh god.
Every animal and every fossil there ever was, is, and ever will be, IS a transitional form, by definition. If we limit ourselves to the human/homo linaege , please check out a video I recently posted about human evolution: http://videosift.com/video/Human-Evolution-and-Why-it-matters
If you watch that video, you will see how scientists are working to piece togheter a very large number of hominids with a large variety. its not like "Apes turned into human" in some neat movie-style morph, but a complex mess up populations of gradually more humanoid apes, the large majority of which formed long lineages that lived for thousands of years, before joining the vast collection of extinct species. Its become increasingly clear that we are one of many branches, and the last surviving in the hominid group so far.
The "no transitional fossils" is a laughable strawman argument, deeply ignorant and dishonest at the same time, in other words, typical creationist nonsense.
As for Irreducible complexity, , this is the most "sciencey" of the creationist drivel out there, but its still drivel. It's not even bad science, its just meaningless white noise designed to baffle people who has no knowledge of biology.

>> ^shinyblurry:
And of course there is the embarassment of not having any true transitional forms..which should be abundent by now I would think.


Oh god.

Every animal and every fossil there ever was, is, and ever will be, IS a transitional form, by definition. If we limit ourselves to the human/homo linaege , please check out a video I recently posted about human evolution: http://videosift.com/video/Human-Evolution-and-Why-it-matters

If you watch that video, you will see how scientists are working to piece togheter a very large number of hominids with a large variety. its not like "Apes turned into human" in some neat movie-style morph, but a complex mess up populations of gradually more humanoid apes, the large majority of which formed long lineages that lived for thousands of years, before joining the vast collection of extinct species. Its become increasingly clear that we are one of many branches, and the last surviving in the hominid group so far.

The "no transitional fossils" is a laughable strawman argument, deeply ignorant and dishonest at the same time, in other words, typical creationist nonsense.

As for Irreducible complexity, , this is the most "sciencey" of the creationist drivel out there, but its still drivel. It's not even bad science, its just meaningless white noise designed to baffle people who has no knowledge of biology.

I'm not sure how you see yourself as any less dogmatic than I am..and Im sorry for making you sad. I hope that you haven't wasted too many kleenexs on me, but save them for yourself..you'll need them when you figure out evolution is wrong.

Here is the key portion of your wiki article:

"Ideally, this list would only recursively include 'true' transitionals, fossils representing ancestral specie from which later groups evolved, but most, if not all, of the fossils shown here represent extinct side branches, more or less closely related to the true ancestor"

What we see in the fossil record is that when something new shows up its all at once and is fully formed and then never changes. Ie, no true transitionals have ever been discovered. What has never been witnessed in the fossil record is steady progressive change of one kind of thing into something completely different.

You think this is a gap? It's a super massive black hole, and the vacuum may be in your head if you believe it. Here's some info:

John Bonner, a biologist at Princeton, writes that traditional textbook discussions of ancestral descent are "a festering mass of unsupported assertions." In recent years, paleontologists have retreated from simple connect-the-dot scenarios linking earlier and later species. Instead of ladders, they now talk of bushes. What we see in the fossils, according to this view, are only the twigs, the final end-products of evolution, while the key transitional forms which would give a clue about the origin of major animal groups remain completely hidden.

The blank spots on evolutionary "tree" charts occur at just the points where, according to Darwin's theory, the crucial changes had to take place. The direct ancestors of all the major orders: primates, carnivores, and so forth are completely missing. There is no fossil evidence for a "grandparent" of the monkey, for example. "Modern gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees spring out of nowhere," writes paleontologist Donald Johansen. "They are here today; they have no yesterday." The same is true of giraffes, elephants, wolves, and all species; they all simply burst upon the scene de novo [anew], as it were.

I think you're the one who needs to re-evaluate your beliefs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6EiN-3uWak




>> ^Skeeve:
>> ^shinyblurry:
the bar is still incredibly low..one of the best transitional forms out there is based on a whales nostril..i would find that embarassing if i believed in evolution. show me something convincing. also, give me an example of mutation that increases information in a genome while you're at it.
You've said that you aren't ignorant of science, yet you ignore the science that proves these things. You, and people like you, are not really interested in the facts, you are interested in finding all the gaps so you can point and say "aha, there is a god!" I am truly saddened by people like you - it breaks my heart that you can be so smart and so blind at the same time.
But you asked for yet more proof so I am at your service.
A (comparatively) short list of transitional forms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils
As for the claim that mutations not increasing information in a genome:
"We have observed the evolution of
increased genetic variety in a population (Lenski 1995; Lenski et al. 1991)
increased genetic material (Alves et al. 2001; Brown et al. 1998; Hughes and Friedman 2003; Lynch and Conery 2000; Ohta 2003)
novel genetic material (Knox et al. 1996; Park et al. 1996)
novel genetically-regulated abilities (Prijambada et al. 1995)
If these do not qualify as information, then nothing about information is relevant to evolution in the first place."
You can look up those scholarly articles if you actually don't want to remain ignorant. They are listed here: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB102.html

EVERY FOSSIL IS A TRANSITIONAL FOSSIL. That is the only thing to say in this situation.

My favorite answer of all time to the "transition" fossil question is -- all fossils are transitional. They haven't found one that isn't.

I love that.

My favorite answer of all time to the "transition" fossil question is -- all fossils are transitional. They haven't found one that isn't.

I love that.

I laughed my ass off when she said 'Horse Shit.' I'm not entirely sure why.

One thing that gets my goat with every Intelligent Design person is the 'no transitional fossils.' They are either to stupid to realize every fossil is a transitional fossil or just plus their ears and go 'la la la la' because they just don't want to deal in 'facts'.

what you first all fail to understand... is that the proposed process of evolution involves gradual changes over many generations. We can agree to that correct?

So none of the so called 'Transitional Fossils' are remotely transitional.

A transitional form would be one going through the process of developing an arm / leg etc. These fossils should be plentiful considering it would take a sheerly ridiculous number of steps before the animals new form was fully developed... In otherwords.. how many generations and how many forms would it take for a arm to form in an animal which has no arms. How many millions of tries would be necessary by random mutation before it was successful.

I'm sure you can imagine the process.. considering the animal has no idea what it is trying for - the first form of an arm would be, I suppose a stump of some type... now considering this stump would serve it no actual purpose (and in the case of fish we have the peculiar situation where it randomly would need to form 4 of these in symetrical spots... all at once? or one at a time?) This stump would be a detriment.. not an improvement - and so would the tremendous number of other steps involved until this form was complete.

The key here being that every aspect of every animal and plant would need to go through this process.. and the vast majority of these changes could not occur in a beneficial manner - natural selection supposedly works because this change is an improvement.

We have no fossils which represent these transitions.. nothing that isn't fully functional. The ground should be littered with millions of these tiny changes.. in the development of eyes / limbs / and every other form. Instead we find animals which are finished products - just like IDA - well designed for their given purpose.. no works in progress.. no half-formed wings. Were these to even be demonstrated the question would still remain... if every species went through these changes for every single aspect of their development.. any fossil bed should be full of intermediates. By intermediates I mean something which is in the process of developing something.. not finished. IDA uses a thumb which we do not have to climb trees.. it is formed and completed.

One other thing to consider is that evolution's proposed mechanism is random mutation combined with natural selection.. it randomly makes changes.. the failures die out. At the heart of it the mechanism is simply random mutation. - so how many tries does a creature have to make before it randomly stumbles upon something which works? I would wager a vast number..

Thus the fossil record has a compound problem.. not only should it show transitional fossils that are in the lineage of the current form.. it should also show the millions and millions of failed attempts.. the millions of random tries toward a new limb of some kind that were rejected by natural selection.

Not only that - but the world around us should show living examples of these failed species.. because natural selection works on the flawed assumption that if something decides to start working on a new limb.. that since the new limb is a decidedly bad evolutionary change, that creature would die out. Not the case... every animal wants to survive.. and just because it has an inferior design in no way suggests they wouldn't still be around.

IDA is a lemur... a very old variety of lemur. - and no, you don't have a thumb on your foot.

No debate. No owning.

Even when he talks about no evidence for 'transitional fossils' Matthews's answer is "Right".

NO MATTHEWS, THAT'S FUCKING WRONG.

every single fossil is a transitional fossil...thats the great thing about creationists-every time a new "transitional fossil" pops up they now have two more "gaps" to use in their "argument" against evolution.