Clarification/Follow-up by Toms777 on 09/23/03 12:41 am:
I have seen these before - again, note what i said - these are called new species after the definition was chnaged to allow for what is more appropriately called variation within a species.

Changing is semantics.

Clarification/Follow-up by fyvel on 09/25/03 4:10 pm:
Then please, define what you mean by "species" and I will see what I can find (I have a fairly extensive list of observed speciations to go through).

Clarification/Follow-up by Toms777 on 09/25/03 6:52 pm:
Show me something like a cat becoming a dog, or the like...a true chnage from one species to another.

Clarification/Follow-up by fyvel on 09/27/03 5:38 pm:
A cat becoming a dog is a much larger change than just species to species. There are different species of cats - and cats and dogs have been separated for many years (longer than we humans have been around). So, for observed speciations, what you are asking is impossible - you are looking for an order of change that would take so long that it takes longer than our species has even existed.

Your request is also inaccurate because a cat has never become a dog, nor ever will be. If you understood the mechanism of evolution, you would realize this.

For change on the order of scale that you want, I have no choice but to direct you to the fossil record - only over that long of a period of time will you see change in this scale. If a cat were to change enough of it's DNA in such a short period of time, it would never survive.

An interesting example that shows how organisms can evolve comes from a strain of bacteria that 'evolved' to be able to digest nylon. It isn't a speciation, but it is a significant change in physiology:

http://www.nmsr.org/nylon.htm

Clarification/Follow-up by Toms777 on 09/27/03 6:02 pm:
I gave an example - I was not expecting that specific chnage but it gives you an example of what you nedd to demonstrate to prove evolution - basically what I expect to see if evoluation is true and a complete change from aomstheing completely unrelated, in other words something identifiably different such that it cannot fall within the bounds of varaition within a species.

The fossil record is actually the worst evidence - even Darwin stated that the fossile record was the most serious problem to the theory of evolution, and one reason is because the fossil record shows only distinct species, no transitions.

When I was an evolutionist, I always pointed to the fossil record - that is until I took a closer look and realized that the fossil record was a major problem to evolution and understood what was actually in the fossil record. I ceased to be an evolutionist as I was gathering together ammunition to help strengthen me to defend evolution against creationists, and it was during that period that I became aware that the evidence was actually arguing against evoloution.

Again, no one argues variation within a species - so the argument about bacteria does not carry any weight.

Clarification/Follow-up by fyvel on 09/27/03 7:39 pm:
You said: "basically what I expect to see if evoluation is true and a complete change from aomstheing completely unrelated, in other words something identifiably different such that it cannot fall within the bounds of varaition within a species."

Again, you have not defined species, and without this, it is impossible to answer your question. You are asking a question that is impossible to answer for two reasons: 1)you will not give me a definition of species so that I could show you an example of a speciation, and 2) the amount of change you want to see cannot be observed because of how long it takes.


You also said: "The fossil record is actually the worst evidence - even Darwin stated that the fossile record was the most serious problem to the theory of evolution, and one reason is because the fossil record shows only distinct species, no transitions."

And Darwin said that a long time ago, when the fossil record had even more gaps in it than it does today. There have been great improvements in it since then. There have been many transitionals found in the fossil record. You can read about them here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html

I'd also like to ask: how do you explain the presences of so many different species in the fossil record? If you are going to say that all animals have been around since the beginning (I'm not sure if that is what you will say), how do you explain that some species are only found in certain strata? How do you explain that only very primitive species are found in the lower strata and more complex ones later?

"and it was during that period that I became aware that the evidence was actually arguing against evoloution."

And what was it, exactly, that changed your mind? (This is purely from curiosity). Was it one thing in particular or many?

Clarification/Follow-up by fyvel on 09/30/03 10:59 am:
"I could go into a detailed explanation, consider that if you have fast moving water during a flood, which slows down as time goes on. What would happen would be the depsiting of various types of material, earth, stones, etc in layers, along with various types and size of fossils. This is very simple to understand."

So you have fast moving water to begin with - you would expect the largest stones to settle during this time, because as the water slowed down it would no longer have the power to continue carrying them. So just based on rocks and stones alone, you would have very large rocks at the bottom, with a progression to smaller ones near the top. As far as I am aware, this is not validated by what we see.

I would also like to know how this explains the progression from primitive life forms at the beginning and more advanced forms later on. You certainly can't be saying that the primitive forms wouldn't survive as long and so died out faster and settled first. Even in this suggestion, you would expect some of the more advanced forms to die early on (weaker members of the species, etc) - and if this were the case, they would be seen in the same strata as the more primitive species.

"that what there was was based upon many many unvalidated assumptions."

Such as?


"I beg to differ with respect to the gaps - even the evolutionsist today are still trying to explain it away by a theory which suggests that evolution starts and stops in spurts with very small periods during the transitions stages."

Trying to "explain it away"? Which is worse? A scientist who fits their theory to what is observed, or one who ignores what is seen and keeps their theory as they like it?


"Of course, the problem there is that it contradicts the theory of evolution which requires lonmg periods of time, which then would result in fossls, which don't exist."

Actually, punctuated equilibrium fits quite nicely in with the theory of evolution. In evolution, a species will adapt as best as it can to its environment. If the environment stays the same over long periods of time, a species will become quite well adapted to that environment and we will see very little change. Environmental change drives evolution - without it, there is little need for a species to change. During mass extinction events, there is a lot of environmental change, and only those that can adapt to fit that change will survive. There will also be many new niches opened up by species that have gone extinct. Other species will move into that niche and evolve so that it best fits its habitat.

So the fossil record actually fits what you would expect to see given mass extinction events: a sharp decline in the number and variety of 'old' species that were present before the event, and the new emergence of many new species. Evolutionarily speaking, this process is quite quick, compared to during periods of time where no major environmental change has occured - so you wouldn't even expect to find any fossils during that period, unless we were lucky enough for one to become fossilized during that period, to survive until now, and for us to actually find it.

Clarification/Follow-up by peddler7118 on 08/30/06 1:57 pm:
fyvel

You keep referencing talk/origins for examples of transitional forms. Even you must agree that website is completely biased against creationists and therefore cannot be at all objective.
There were many more "transitional" forms accepted in Darwin’s day than today. The glaring example is the coelacanth.
I submit there is not one fossil that can be shown to be a transition between any 2 different kinds of animals.
Please provide a peer reviewed scientific paper proving one undisputed example.

There is not a single shred of observational evidence showing that natural selection has ever caused any living thing to evolve. A noted evolutionist, British paleontologist Colin Patterson confesses this fact:

No one has ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural selection. No one has ever got near it and most of the current argument in neo-Darwinism is about this question

COLIN PATTERSON, Senior Paleontologist, British Museum of Nat. History, "You say I should at least 'show a photo of the fossil from which each type or organism was derived.' I will lay it on the line-there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument." "It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another. ... But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test. ... I don't think we shall ever have any access to any form of tree which we can call factual." HARPER'S, Feb. 1984, p.56

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, in an interview on BBC television, said...
I mean the stories, the narratives about change over time. How the dinosaurs became extinct, how the mammals evolved, where man came from. These seem to me to be little more than story-telling. And this is the result about cladistics because as it turns out, as it seems to me, all one can learn about the history of life is learned from systematics, from groupings one finds in nature. The rest of it is story-telling of one sort or another. We have access to the tips of a tree, the tree itself is a theory and people who pretend to know about the tree and to describe what went on with it, how the branches came off and the twigs came off are, I think, telling storie