Do fossils disprove evolution?

Hi greyseal, [:wave:]See
Darwin Online
and
http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F373&...
the text is searchable.Also see
Sir Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1830 edition
with links to other original works by scientists in various fields.Lots of good information available.Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
Rebel American Zen Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

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This is not a snipe, I swear. I simply want to use an example that is almost completely parallel to biological. Consider the evolution of language. We know that all Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, etc.) all evolved from Latin. Now, look at your post.

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Why is there hardly any evidence in the fossil record of the millions & millions of complex organism with failed mutations?

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Evolution brings order out of chaos, the chaos must leave behind some "mess" surely? - this "mess" being millions of recorded failed mutations within the fossil record.

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Can the lack of evidence prove evolution is not a driving force in life as we see today?

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An analogy of this is leaving a group of monkeys in a room with a typewriter to produce a perfect copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet through random keystrokes. You return years later and find a copy of Hamlet, but in a mess of loads of meaningless paper.

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Why does the fossil record show little/no evidence of the millions of failed mutation which must have occurred for every successful one?
  —cpthiltz

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And let me rephrase your words to reflect the evolution of language.Why is there hardly any evidence in history of the millions & millions of complex languages with failed changes?

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Evolution of language brings order out of chaos, the chaos must leave behind some "mess" surely? - this "mess" being millions of recorded failed changes within the history book.

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Can the lack of evidence prove evolution of language is not a driving force in spoken languages as we see today?

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An analogy of this is leaving a group of monkeys in a room with a typewriter to produce a perfect copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet through random keystrokes. You return years later and find a copy of Hamlet, but in a mess of loads of meaningless paper.

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Why does history record show little/no evidence of the millions of failed changes at new languages which must have occurred for every successful one?Then of course I'm writing this hoping that you at least have the most basic understanding of evolution of language which, unlike biological evolution, is very observable. If you have the most rudimentary understanding of how modern languages came about, hopefully you will see the ridiculousness of your original post.

I recognize that you were more directly addressing his gross misconceptions about what to expect in the fossil record, but you're somewhat off on the "infinite monkeys" mistaken analogy. So this is intended much more as being for cpthiltz' edification than for disagreeing with you (what with my disagreement being on a minor point, which I feel certain you will grant).cpthiltz, laddie*, may I refer you to Chapter 3 of Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker? That addresses your piss-poor analogy quite well. In particular, his "Weasel" program, which directly addresses Eddington's old analogy (did you even know what that analogy had come from? Curious minds want to know!). When I first read it, I just simply could not believe it! So I put it to the test. And it worked! So then I analyzed the probabilities involved. And what I found was that the probability for Weasel's success approached 99.9999%, making it virtually inevitable. Or as one author had put it (from memory; I'll have to track that one down): "Natural selection makes the improbable, inevitable."I had written a page about this, but my ISP recently pulled abruptly out of the web hosting business, so I'm off-line at this time. So, quoting from my own MONKEY.HTML (since I had named my own program after Eddington's analogy). The main problem with the Eddington analogy is that it assumes single-step selection: that each and every attempt has to start from scratch. But rather, life never ever starts from scratch, but rather it starts from its parents' generation. Did you read that? Did you understand it? Just about every creationist probability argument assumes single-step selection, that you're trying to get a modern protein or whatever starting from scratch and just falling together. But that is not the way that life works! Life always, each and every time, starts from where its parents were already at and just takes it that little bit further. Single-step selection is abysmally incapable of producing results, whereas cumulative selection is incredibly capable. Creationist arguments rely almost entirely on single-step selection, whereas life itself uses cumulative selection. What should we expect life to produce, then?

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In single-step selection, the entire final product is generated at one time and must match the target in order to succeed. If it fails, then the next trial must start all over again from scratch. The probability for single-step selection to succeed is very small: my own example's probability is of the order 10^(-36) and would take about 10^28 years of independent trials on a supercomputer (eg, capable of one million trials per second) in order to have even odds of succeeding. This is the usual method of selection used by creationists to model evolution even though it obviously has nothing to do with evolution.

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In cumulative selection, when the initial randomly assembled trial fails, multiple copies are made of it which are very similar to, yet slightly different from, the original. Then the copy that comes closest to the target is selected and used to generate the next "generation" of copies. And so on. Obviously, this method better models living populations and natural selection. The probability of success is astoundingly better; instead of taking millions of billions of years, it succeeds in less than half a minute -- consistently, repeatedly, without fail.

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Since this seemed too good to be true, I undertook a study of the problem which calculated the actual probabilities. In one case, the probability of success within 80 generations is over 99.99%. In other cases, the probabilities of success within 100 generations are still relatively high and increase noticeably with more generations. Obviously, the repeated creationist description of evolution being change through pure random chance is simply not true and very misleading; natural selection can be very deterministic and not at all random.

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Instead, I found a quantitative reason behind the statement that natural selection can make the improbable inevitable.

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When I worked through the probabilities, what I discovered was that the probability of consistent failure became vanishingly small. InGodITrust, are you listening?[*FOOTNOTE: That's half my ancestry talking there, my mother's parents having both emigrated from the Galston area to the US. My apologies if I had inadvertantly caused offense.]PS
I had stopped to think about it, but better judgement has been put in the back seat. Here are the quotes I posted on my MONKEY page:

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A. S. Eddington. The Nature of the Physical World: The Gifford Lectures, 1927:

... If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that
my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on
typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of
their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules
returning to one half of the vessel.

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Douglas Adams. The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy:

"Ford!" [Arthur] said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who
want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out."

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Lennon and McCartney:

Everybody's got something to hide, except for me and my monkey!

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RFC 2795: The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS)

Abstract

This memo describes a protocol suite which supports an infinite
number of monkeys that sit at an infinite number of typewriters in
order to determine when they have either produced the entire works of
William Shakespeare or a good television show. The suite includes
communications and control protocols for monkeys and the
organizations that interact with them.

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Share and enjoy!

Thanks for the detailed replies, and to those who saw this as an ego-ride not so much. But I now understand a little more which was the point of joining this forum.

rather than tell us how glad you were to have some hand-holding and that everyone else was a big meanie head, did any of the information sink in, did it change your mind, illuminate your consciousness?

Hi folksMy opinion is that fossils do not disprove evolution, but the lack of evidence (gaps) reveal that there has been an additional influence and that is immigration to Earth, which also happens to explain population growth. My website provides compelling evidence that immigration combined with reincarnation provides the key to a number of issues that science struggles with. Crazy? That's for others to decide.Cheers
DJ
http://www.atotalawareness.com
"Darwinian evolution creates primitive creatures with an ability to host visitors with language skills."

We don't debate websites here, nor are we a self-promotional medium. If you have thought up an argument then bring it here to debate it, don't just refer us to it. If it is particularly long, then please give key excerpts and an overview along with the link.

Thanks AdminModulus.There is obviously interest in the site because of the level of response. The model is unique and provides remarkable deductions that haven't been suggested before. It is difficult to provide information in isolation because of the amount of cross-referencing. But for your benefit, on this occasion, I will do my best."A major mystery in human evolution concerns why there is such a gigantic jump between the brains of H. habilis and H. erectus. The earlier hominoid has a brain only slightly larger than an ape; the later one a cortex as large as that of modern humanity."  - Robert Ornstein, The Evolution of ConsciousnessPackaged evolution provides a simple explanation. Packages are installed into the upright, home grown H. habilis, producing the upright H. erectus with language skills. The child is a different species to the parents.One of the major reasons for making this deduction is that the so called package includes support for the scientifically-established Language Of Thought. It does this by implementing functions that are executed in real-time on a multi-tasking, multi-threading quantum computer. Each function represents a "way of thinking".
The package is installed during a reunion that begins in early pregnancy and...
The other reasons are...
Fossils don't disprove evolution because...
The reasons that there are gaps in the fossil record are because...
This is too hard. Why reinvent the wheel? I can't provide a smaller overview. "Unfortunately" it is in a large document.The site does not contain advertising. I will not mention it again. I will find more appropriate places to "promote" the subjects of fossils, reincarnation, the role of God, population growth etc.Sorry for wasting your valuable time.Regards,DJ

Note that the cranial capacity of H. erectus specimens overlaps that of habilis.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

"Why is there hardly any evidence in the fossil record of the millions & millions of complex organism with failed mutations?"Well, it seems that we do have such fossils. Almost all the fossils we have are of species that are now extinct, and almost all of them are evolutionary dead ends. Furthermore, they fit very well into the family trees that we build from existing species. Many of them are transitions that we would expect. These fossils include clear transitions between fish and amphibians, amphibians to reptiles, reptiles to mammals, dinosaurs to birds, primitive monkey to primitive ape, and primitive ape to human. I made a thread on the Archaeopteryx you may like to check out.Another important point is that fossilization is extremely rare, and fossils are even rarer to find. It most often takes a quick burial followed by a quick solidification in order to prevent the decay of the bones. Most of the time, bones are simply consumed by microbes and other life.We do have much more redundancy than we would expect. The evolution, given the fossils, seems step-wise rather than continuous. I think this is pretty well explaned with punctuated equilibrium, where the fossils tend to represent the stable majority population instead of the evolving minority. I bring that up because it seems to be a common objection, and I am not sure if that helps or not.

Welcome to the fray, ApostateAbe There's an easy way to mark quotes:type [qs]quotes are easy[/qs] and it becomes: or type [quote]quotes are easy[/quote] and it becomes:

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quotes are easy

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also check out (help) links on any formatting questions when in the reply window.For other formatting tips see Posting TipsBut even punk-eek can take many generations to develop, it just seems rapid by comparison to the timeline of fossils.Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
Rebel American Zen Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

---

• • • Join the effort to solve medical problems, AIDS/HIV, Cancer and more with Team EvC! (click) • • •

RAZD, thank you, that is a big help.

Its a proven fact that the vast majority of mutations are negative. Four billion years is nowhere near enough time for all the needed positive mutations to have occured that would have had to happen to produce the vast array of complex life forms we see today.I see post after post of evolutionists calling everyone who disagrees with them stupid when they can't even do this simple math.

Then please show the math you have done. Thank you.(oh you haven't have you? You have no clue about it do you?)

No it isn't. You could certainly make a justifiable claim that the vast majority are neutral and also that the number of deleterious mutations, both actual and possible, vastly outnumber beneficial ones, regardless of considerations of context. To claim that the vast majority are negative as a proven fact however is just to make things up to fit your preconceptions. If this isn't the case then please direct us to the scientific literature in which this fact has been proven? The simple math of making a bald assertion with no mathematics in it?TTFN,WK