The fact is, if there are kinds of organism, such as bats, and they show no evolution even their earliest form, when we might expect to find their ancestors if the fossils are an evolutionary history, then this isn't good evidence of macro evolution if we find identical kinds that look the same today.
1. Bats do show evolution from their early forms. 2. There is no expectation of finding their ancestors. 3. If you want good fossil evidence, probably best to look to animals that fossilize well.
Just picking out shrimp, and using observer bias to ignore all of the specific ones on that list, doesn't change the fact that some have simply remained unchanged, and don't show any intermediates for how they allegedly evolved.
Pretty sure they have changed, and you are picking out some and ignoring others by looking at the list. We don't expect every taxon to evolve at the same rate or to leave fossil evidence of its ancestry. It is predicted by evolutionary mathematics that certain forms will be stable (see Sewell Wright), and moving from them to a significant degree will result in a reduction in fitness. Stasis in some branches of life is expected and there is nothing to suggest that stasis must ever be broken to any significant degree (significant enough to satisfy you that is)
We don't expect the murderer's fingerprints to exist at every murder scene. Where they exist, they provide evidence - but just because fingerprints are sometimes left behind it doesn't mean that if we don't find them no murder has occurred. That's simply not a logical position to take.
For example a bat had to evolve from a quadrupedal progenitor, so it's forelimbs had to become wings as they presently are, but all we find is bats with the fully designed wing,
Whatever we find, if we ever find it, and there's no reason to propose any of its remains are still around to be found - will be fully designed.
none of the intermediates because they never existed
Not a logical conclusion. That's a reason. Another reason is that they were never preserved. Another reason is that those that were preserved in such a way as to survive till today were destroyed by erosion or other geological movement. Another reason would be that they are preserved but they are in a place we haven't discovered yet. There's a lot of ground - and most of it doesn't get excavated for fossils.
same for pterosaurs, we only find a variety of pterosaurs, or a variety of bats, variety of Ichthyosaurs, never the transitionals they purportedly evolved from.
So there are some things which don't provide great fossil evidence of the kind of evolution you want to see. So what? If we want to study their evolutionary position - molecular / genetic methods still exist.
No, but rather what I am saying is that this record of 100% stasis that actually has no evolution but either still extant or extinct animal kinds, doesn't show any evolution and this is evidence bats were always bats, since I expect to see some ancestors somewhere, heck show me just one that has it's intermediates, that can't be debunked?
To reiterate - this is not evidence that bats were always bats. It's simply evidence of bats, it does not say anything about whether or not they evolved from ancestral forms.
You can expect to see ancestors, but evolution doesn't. Evolution says nothing about whether certain things will fossilize or whether certain primates will uncover any such fossils should they exist.
Of the hundreds of thousands, or millions of Archaeopteryx that ever lived only about a dozen fossils have been found - all in the same geographical area that offered as favourable conditions for fossilization as one can hope for. Had that layer been buried deep, eroded away or had the environment been such that it never formed - we'd have zero fossils.
The fossil record is a sample of life on earth, not an encyclopaedic bestiary of all life.
I can not just show you one bat that has intermediates, but all of them. Meet Eomaia. I understand it's not what you were looking for, but it meets the description nevertheless.
But one is not enough, what about the Cambrian? An explosion indeed, extinct forms yes, but where is their evolution?
Erm, in the pre-Cambrian. The 'explosion' is a sampling artefact. It represents a time when more fossilizable forms appeared. It was an explosions over a very long period, and there is a pre-Cambrian period that does have fossils. And again, evolution does not predict all organisms' ancestors will fossilize and be preserved for all time.
This is a backwards way of looking. The fossils we have give us a clear picture of the changes life has gone through over time. The fact that the Cambrian fossils exists show that life changed from the types of fossils that existed pre-Cambrian and that life changed to what we find post-Cambrian.
Not being able to construct a complete history of all life due to insufficient evidence does not suggest evolution didn't happen. What we have shows that it did - life has changed, the fossils clearly show that.
The question then is, what was the mechanism of change? The theory of evolution has this covered and a combination of evidence strongly supports this.
Detailed analysis further shows a nested cladogram that includes all life, strongly suggesting common ancestry of all extant life. It does not follow from anything anyone proposes that all ancestors must be found in the fossil record, nor that all fossils are ancestral to extant life.
If you rolled a six-sided dice every day and took a selfie whenever you rolled a six. The scar that appears over your eyebrow between two photographs may have unclear origins - but it doesn't prove the scar instantly appeared through divine intervention. The injury that caused the scar occurred over some period of time, a period of time too short to be captured by your sporadic selfie sampling method (ie., a few fractions of a second to a few seconds). There may be occasional moments where your selfie happens to take place at the exact moment a significant change occurs (eg you lose a baby tooth at the moment of one of the early shots and it can be seen unconnected on a floorwards trajectory as you smile).
Just admit it, the fossil record supports the creationist position
It does not. There is not a single fossil of an organism in the middle of being specially created by what can be nothing other than a deity. Which, using your reasoning, must mean that it didn't happen.
we would expect to find bats without any history of evolution because they were created to be bats.
Sure, but that doesn't support your position, it's a fact that doesn't falsify it. There are many such facts. The colour of grass, for instance.
All you have to do now, is tackle the fossil record as a whole, not just a select group of them which don't falsify whatever version of creationism you are thinking of. The patterns, the synergy with biogeography and genetics. The whole evidence, not ...what was it you said... ' using observer bias to ignore all' the evidence that challenges it.
You can deny it if you want, I myself as a student of logical, cannot ignore sound deductive reason.
You didn't use deductive reasoning to make your point. You suggested a lack of some evidence proves that God must be responsible. This is obviously not a logically deductive statement, nor is it sound. Here is your position in a logically sound form
P1) If there is no evidence of the origins of something, God is responsible for its creation. P2) There is no evidence of the origins of bats C) God created bats.
P1 is complete not necessarily true. P2 is not true C cannot be therefore be made.
It simply follows this is the evidence expected from created kinds, not evolution, or show me the intermediates to all of them.
Let's say you are correct that the evidence of bat fossils (and others) is consistent with created kinds. It is also consistent with evolution which does not say all intermediate forms will be both fossilized and discovered by humans by February 2018. Therefore the evidence of bats is not evidence that can allow us to discern between the special creation hypothesis and the evolution hypothesis.
Of course I've said all this to you before, I predict your position will not change as a result of this.
So if you are implying that mud might have ended up as a flat mudstone rock in the stratigraphic column, the task I'm asking of you is to show how the lake bottom mud became that rock.
Erm, I...erm...OK.
Mud piles on top of mud. This compresses the mud underneath it. This squeezes the water out. As more mud settles on the top, the more pressure compresses the lower mud, the less water it holds as the gaps where the water sits shrink. Eventually sufficient water is expelled to 'cement' the mud into mudrock. This process is called lithification
Now show how it gets so very flat over a very extensive area and gets itself sandwiched between other sedimentary rocks of different types containing different fossils, all the surrounding terrain no longer in evidence.
Well, the lake would have to form on something, so that would be bottom of the sandwhich. Water and wind would tend towards eroding lumpiness of the bottom layer.
The mud that goes on top of it is likely to form a flat surface because it is wet and it will settle flat. Any additional lumpiness that forms may also be eroded over time by the water. When the lake dries up the top layer of mud may well be eroded away leaving the flat middle layer of the sandwich. Then some other depositional environment deposits sediment in a different way on top of this middle layer to create the top layer. The different depositional environment results in a different type of sedimentary rock formation.
If the sediment is derived from the surrounding terrain, this would take care of that part of the situation too, but maybe some of that that was eroded and deposited elsewhere by wind.
So let's see - the first layer contains marine life from a million years ago, the middle layer contains lake life from 600,000 years ago and the third layer contains land fossils from 250,000 years ago as it was I dunno a swamp. Each layer is flat, the surrounding contemporaneous terrain was eroded away to create those layers, and organisms that died in the sea/lake/swamp may have been buried in such a ways to preserve their remains in some fashion.
Could this be occurring on top of a stack of lithified layered flat sediments of different types?
Yes.
If so the one the lake sits on would have to have been extremely dry
As I understand the process, being dry is an important component in lithification.
Each has to be hard and dry before the next is deposited.
As hard and dry as stone, in fact.
But in that case nothing could live on any of the rocks while they are drying. Goodbye life of the Permian or the Triassic periods.
There can be mud on top of the rock. Its the buried mud that turns to mudstone as the pressure caused by the weight of the mud above it compacts it and squeezes out the water. That mud may erode away before the next depositional scenario begins, or it may be present when it begins. That doesn't really matter. The point is that as stuff gets added to the top, it compresses what's beneath into stone. Over time, the types of stuff that gets added to the top changes as the environment changes resulting in layers of rocks.
that must have been completely hard and dry or it would all mix together and not look at all like the clearly demarcated layers of the stratigraphic column
This does seem to be a problem for the Flood scenario. Don't see the problem for geology.
. If you pile more mud on it before it's dry, or any other wet sediment, you get them mixed or at least stuck together, but the stratigraphic column shows nicely demarcated separated layers.
Adding mud on top won't mix with rock formation 40 metres beneath where the mud is being added. The mud on top of the forming mudstone will perhaps mix a little with the top, and will certainly stick to the top of forming mudstone - but I don't see why that is a problem.
As you know - applying pressure to something flattens it. So that's why its flat. You get a demarcation when a different type of sediment or cementing agent enters the scene. That new sediment may mix a little with any remaining sediment of the old time that hasn't been eroded away, but not much. It's not like if you pour sand on a field the sand mixes up with several metres of earth is it?
The Flood would have sorted the sediments as water does, separating them neatly as we see in many examples of how rivers do it.
So why do you think wetness is a problem then? Rivers are wet, as are global floods. If adding new sediment to prior wet sediment doesn't cause mixing today, if it didn't cause mixing during the flood - why on earth do you think it would happen if water comes and goes over a long period of time?
Of course not but I had the impresswion you were talking about adding the mud directly to the top of the rock that isn't yet dry.
You keep adding sediment until there is lots of it. Let's say 40 metres of it. Then the pressure at the bottom of the sediment is enough to squeeze the water out. Then a cementing agent comes through (say underground flowing water, and deposits small mineral particles like a filter which fills in any gaps. Then you have rock.
However SOMETHING is added on top of that rock and if it's not yet dry that something will stick to it and destroy its flat surface.
There is heavily compacted mud on top of the rock. It is squeezed of a lot of water by the pressure of the metres of sediment above it, but it is ether not enough for the cementing to work - or the cementing water flow doesn't go that high.
Because the rocks in the stratigraphic column are (relatively) flat and clean.
Right, and the formation I described creates a flat piece of rock with mud on top of it. That mud will either get eroded away or will have more sediment added to the top, turning that into stone over time too. If that sediment/cementing element is different than the first you get a different rock type. Both of which are flat.
Not as flat as the rocks in the column.
Why not?
But that destroys the demarcation.
No it doesn't.
Grass in the field would interfere. But if you pour sand on wet mud it's going to mix into the surface and it will no longer be a flat mudstone surface.
But only a few centimetres, and that doesn't pose much a problem as far as I can tell. This will either form its own layer as it gets compressed by more sediment or get eroded away until the next depositional phase.
When water deposits the layers there is no mixing. You are describing a rock being created by compression due to burial, not laid down by water.
I am describing it being deposited by water. It deposits on top of existing mud. Eventually you have metres and metres of mud. The mud at the bottom is getting compressed and the water is squeezed out. I am describing deposition by water, followed by compression by burial.
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