The Great Creationist Fossil Failure

Hello mindspawn, I hope you are well.I've not been very active at EvC recently, but I have been following the past couple of days worth of this thread and I can't help but weigh in. It's not so much your logic that's letting you down but the "facts" around which you're building it. Almost all of the "facts" upon which you have founded your argument are simply not true. They are misapprehensions based upon your bad habit of weaving narratives around fragments of poorly parsed papers.Case in point; you've got the order wrong here; No we don't. We have marine and terrestrial life well before anything even resembling an amphibian arises. PaulK has tried to tell you this. You don't seem to be taking it on board.The earliest terrestrial plants appear in the Ordovician. That's tens of millions of years before the carboniferous. Their record runs right through the Silurian and Devonian periods.The first land animals appear in the Devonian, but they are not amphibians. They're arthropods; millipedes, scorpions and so on. Amphibian-like tetrapods only appear later, towards the end of the Devonian and do not become common until the Carboniferous.Lissamphibians (the group that contains actual amphibians) do not even appear until the Permian.So your timeline is completely out.This isn't the only error upon which you've based your arguments. Heck, it's not even the only error in this one short post (Pre-Carboniferous landscapes, for instance, were not "wetlands", but rather had mountains and other features), but it is important.You can have the most impeccable logic in the world, but if you hang your theories upon fake "facts" your conclusions will be false every single time. Garbage in, garbage out (or check my signature).I would encourage you to do a more (and more thorough) fact-checking. I would also encourage you to listen a bit more when people tell you that you are wrong in some detail or other. Many of the people on this board have a great deal of knowledge and expertise. Some are professionals in relevant fields. You should listen to them. Even if you are not persuaded of the reality of evolution, you should at least be able to strengthen your own ideas by banishing a few of your misapprehensions and founding your beliefs upon a bedrock of real facts instead of silly things.Mutate and Survive

And you still have it wrong. Amphibians only appear in the geological record well after the emergence of the early land tetrapods. You don't seem to know what an amphibian actually is.You claimed that the amount of land increased during the Carboniferous, from a previous, swamp-like state. But somehow all the newts, frogs, salamanders, toads and others (including a great many extinct species as well) failed to capitalise upon this idyllic swamp environment for hundreds of millions of years. The first terrestrial tetrapods did not emerge from a marine environment. That's another error. Except that at the point where you suggest the drying took place there are no frogs. Not for millions of years. Really? In the Carboniferous?I am constantly surprised by how little creationists know about biology. I mean, this is a group of people who supposedly believe that life was created for their benefit by an omni-benevolent god and yet you show so little interest in his creations.Another case in point; you seem to have the idea that mammals are ill-suited to life in wetlands. These animals would like to disagree with you. The notion that mammals would have even the slightest trouble surviving in wetlands is so false as to be laughably absurd. And you're forgetting about another major tetrapod lineage; birds. Are you seriously going to tell us that birds were geographically isolated because they are unable to thrive in wetlands? Really? Because that would be insane.So, to recap;

Those are all wrong. Those are a bunch of silly notions you got hold of by desperately trying to make facts that you don't fully grasp fit your theory. If you carry on like this, founding your ideas upon misapprehensions like these ones, you will continue to spout silly gibberish for ever. All of these notions have been busted on this forum, but you don't seem to notice. I suggest that you take the time to engage with some of these issues instead of claiming to have presented facts when all you've really given us is fantasy.Mutate and Survive

Hi Pressie, It would be my distinct pleasure. Taken from the splendid Animals Riding Animals. Personally, I'm rather partial to these beauties; I love the pose as well. It's like they're saying "Hey mindspawn! Check out our vestigial toenails! Aren't they cool?".Presumably the hippo's, turtles and manatees, ill-adapted as they are to aquatic life, must have sheltered with the humans and other pre-Flood mammals in mindspawn's "boreal cradle". It must have been awfully crowded, what with them having share space with all those dinosaurs, but hey ho. No-one said that Flood geology was easy.Mutate and Survive

Hi mindspawn,Let's take a look at your latest howlers; Where on Earth did you get that notion from?

quote:

---

Trilobites occupied a huge set of habitats and paleolatitudes, from tropical shallows and reefs, to polar depths, and wide-ranging pelagic habitats in between. Their diversity of form suggests a complex ecology with many modes of life, including occupation of a variety of trophic (feeding) guilds. There has been a long history of speculation about the feeding habits of trilobites, ranging from predators, scavengers, filter-feeders, free-swimming planktivores, and even parasites or hosts of chemoautrophic symbionts. Using modern-day crustaceans as an analog, it is reasonable to suggest that the majority of trilobites may have been predator-scavengers, as the majority of marine crustaceans are today. Nonetheless, among today's crustaceans are filter-feeders (such as barnacles), planktivores (the majority of larval crustaceans fall into that category), herbivores (many small shrimp species), and parasites (a few copepods, isopods, and other taxa).

​

Fortey and Owens (1999) conducted a review of trilobite feeding habits in which several patterns were highlighted

---

Trilobite Feeding HabitsFortey, R.A., & R.M.Owens. 1999. Feeding habits in TrilobitesSeriously, where do you even get this stuff from? It's just bizarre.

quote:

---

It was once thought that lobsters were scavengers, and ate primarily dead things. However, lobsters are really more opportunists, catching mainly fresh food which includes fish, crabs, clams, mussels, sea urchins. Lobsters are also cannibalistic and sometimes will eat other lobsters.

---

Life of the American Lobster - Diet & Digestion, Lobster Institute, University of MaineGiven that you are almost always wrong about the individual details, do you really think that you stand a chance of being right about the big picture? Remember; Garbage In, Garbage Out. No, they bear a superficial resemblance. To you they may look alike, but that's because you, with the best will in the world, know absolutely nothing about archosaurs, reptiles or any other related group. I'm not trying to belittle you or upset you, but given some of the things you've said on this thread, it's plain that you know nothing about this topic. In Message 779 for instance, you describe dicynodonts as archosaurs (there were in fact therapsids) and dimetrodons as "pre-flood reptiles" (they were synapsids). Forgive me mindspawn, but when you get these details wrong, I have difficulty trusting your ability to make meaningful comparisons between these species.Archosaurs, lissamphibians, therapsids and dinosaurs look alike to you because you are not looking at them with a naturalist's eye. You are looking at them with the untrained eye of a layman. Now there's nothing wrong with that; you've never claimed to be anything other than an interested layman. But you are still left ill-equipped to make any kind of judgement on these issues. You lack the training to know what points of difference to look at. If you want to talk about these organisms you need to look at them more closely. You need to look at them in exacting detail, as a professional would look at them. And when you do that, the superficial similarities fall away.I would like to join Dr A in suggesting that you attempt an answer to post Message 790, which deals with these anatomical details. If you do, you will see that early tetrapods are not the free-for-all that you seem to imagine.Mutate and SurviveEdited by Granny Magda, : No reason given.

Perhaps the lesson you should learn from this is that you do not have sufficient knowledge or understanding of biology to get away with making stuff up. You understand that this is one of the central predictions of the ToE, right? No, because that's not what we find. Fossil decapods pre-date the emergence of modern crayfish. This is a blatant excuse. This is one of the most glaring errors in your style of argument; you have no evidence to present, so you make excuses for why you can't provide it. You have no pre-flood humans, so you make an excuse, hiding them away in locations that you (wrongly) imagine to be inaccessible. You have no pre-flood whales, so you conjure up dome "inland sea" where they might hide. You have no Cambrian lobsters, so you grope for excuses about sulphur and CO². All of this to avoid the fact that you have no positive evidence for your position. Ad hoc excuses are a poor substitute for evidence. Because the ToE matches the evidence of the fossil record (as well as in numerous other lines of evidence). The ToE makes clear predictions and these have been vindicated by all subsequent evidence. Your theory is a shameless exercise in excuse-making, backed up by zero evidence. Remember, implausible excuses for why you don't have any fossils to back up your position are not equivalent to hard, positive evidence. Pointing to a cave system with a handful of unusual species is by no means comparable to your suggestion that most of the life forms on Earth spent hundreds of millions of years co-existing in a conveniently hidden lost world.If you could point to a single such location or a single suitably anachronistic fossil, you would have some evidence. Instead you have nothing but half-baked speculation and excuse-making. Really? To me, that looks like quite a few. More than zero at any rate.Mutate and Survive

C'mon mindspawn, roll back the persecution act. No-one is deriding or insulting you. True, I have said that you lack understanding of biology and palaeontology, but that's not an insult. 99.99% of people lack understanding of this subject, simply because it's a vast and complicated subject that's extremely difficult to get a handle on. There's no shame in not knowing these things. I don't pretend to be an expert myself; my palaeontological knowledge is decidedly lacking. But you know what? I'm not the one telling the scientific community that they're all wrong and that I know better! And if any of the "facts" in your posts were actually real facts, you might have a point. In reality, 90% of the "facts" you rely upon are bogus. And yes, everyone but you can see it. And that's how you see yourself is it? The lone voice in the wilderness, surrounded by biased fools who scoff at your genius?Hubristic rubbish.I'm not going to lather you up by offering false flattery; that really would be an insult. I tell it as I see it because it would be patronising to do otherwise. And what I see is someone who is out of his depth and who is wrong about nearly every single claim he makes. Worse, you are insistently wrong, making the same false claims, over and over, ignoring contradictory evidence as if it had never been raised. That is not the path to truth.I applaud you for walking back your error about arthropod diets. That was cool of you. But it's worth nothing if you immediately replace it with another falsehood that you just made up.You need to grow a thicker skin, take responsibility for your own arguments and, above all, fact check. Unless you start to do these things, you'll continue to spout bizarre nonsense forever.Mutate and Survive

Hi mindspawn, Aw shucks! You may recall that Dr A did challenge that post. You are not being ganged up against arbitrarily. As a matter of fact, all of the most severe dressings down that I've had on this board have come from other evolutionists. I think that stems from the way you argue; it comes across as intrinsically dishonest. For starters, your ideas are so... shall we say, idiosyncratic, that many observers find it hard to believe that anyone could honestly hold so patently absurd an opinion. Further, you are prone to sweeping dismissive statements like "evolutionists have presented no evidence". This comes across as dishonest; you know perfectly well that we have, you just disagree with it. That's your prerogative, but since you have declined to engage with any of the evidence you have been given, your dismissive attitude is unwarranted.If it's scientific truth you want, you need to engage more with the evidence and do so in much more detail. If you were to do that, I think that the insults would dry up quickly. In the mean time, you're kind of exasperating to debate with. No problem. But that still leaves countless errors unacknowledged. Dimetrodon is still not a reptile. Highlands were not rare in the Paleozoic. Mammals are not ill-suited to swamps. Those are all mistakes mindspawn. I looked them up. You're going to have a long wait. Best to bring snacks. Quite right, it wouldn't be enough.As it goes, the evidence is considerably more compelling than that. Multiple whale intermediates have been found. They share morphological features that go beyond the superficial. They appear in exactly the right period. In short, they repeatedly and independently match the predictions of the ToE. If that isn't evidence in favour of evolution, I can only wonder what would be.By the way, you keep using that word "clades". I do not think it means what you think it means. Evidence of clades is evidence of evolution. Clades are groupings based upon the notion of evolutionary inter-relatedness.

quote:

---

A clade (from Ancient Greek: κλάδος, klados, "branch") is a group of organisms that consists of a common ancestor and all its lineal descendants, and represents a single "branch" on the "tree of life".

​

The common ancestor may be an individual, a population, a species (extinct or extant), and so on right up to a kingdom. Clades are nested, one in another, as each branch in turn splits into smaller branches. These splits reflect evolutionary history as populations diverged and evolved independently. Clades are termed monophyletic (Greek: "one clan").

---

Since a clade consists of an organism and all of its evolutionary descendants, it is quite absurd to talk of "changes beyond a clade" and to claim that clades are a prediction of creationism is just too funny. Darwin admitted a weakness in the fossil evidence, not the theory itself. And he did this over 150 years ago. Newsflash! Fossil evidence has improved quite a lot over the intervening century and a half. You waste your time attacking the fossil record as it was understood by our great-great-great-grandfathers. Modern palaeontology has moved on. Leave it to creationists to be stuck in the Nineteenth century.Darwin predicted that whale ancestors would be found and we now have fossils of creatures intermediate between a modern whale and a land-dwelling mammal. Any way you slice it, that is evidence in favour of evolution. I look forward to feeling better. Tell you what, I'll join you in that little fantasy right after you produce a Cambrian rabbit. Or a Carboniferous squirrel. Or a Devonian eagle. Or a single tangible shred of positive evidence for your position. Because right now, we have an embarrassment of fossils that validate the predictions of the ToE and you have not a single goddamn thing.Mutate and Survive

Indeed. Let's take a look a a Cambrian example of a chordate, the phylum that includes humans. Pikaia - WikipediaNow I'm no palaeontologist, but I'm going to go ahead and say that it's not a dead ringer for a human being. Your mileage may vary.Is mindspawn going to concede that this little critter shares a clade with humans? Or is he going to stop crowing about how all the phyla were present in the Cambrian?Mutate and Survive

Hi edge, Oh God, let's not pull at that thread. If we start wondering whether anything we write here is a waste of time we're screwed.Mutate and Survive