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Larry, I find Morton’s paragraph on what a transition is very revealing as to the problem. If he can’t know for sure what is in a direct line of decent, how can he then know for sure its *near* a line of decent?
Given all of the lines of evidence for common descent, your avoidance of all of the areas where there is solid evidence is amusing. Are the specific lines correct? Maybe not, but what you haven't provided is a falsification. You have provided an argument that our understanding is incomplete, but nothing that contradicts evolution.
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The problem is that there are no clear-cut lineages despite the fact we have unearthed billion upon billions of these organisms, over a million species in all. It would seem there would be some solid evidence somewhere of their ancestors. If there were evidence in this vast cache of data, you would think my evolution biology textbooks would mention them. They don’t.
Actually there are very clear lineages, just for invertebrates as often. I'm not even sure what you are complaining about here given the great deal of fossil and genetic evidence amongst vertebrates. Are you somehow trying to argue that invertebrates came about in an entirely different way? And what about Doolittle's discovery with the Sea Cucumber and a fibrogen like gene?
Cheers,
Larry