Claim:
Given all the species that exist and have existed, there should be billions of transitional fossils in the fossil record; we should have found tens of thousands at least.
Source:
Gish, Duane T., 1994. When is a whale a whale?
Impact 250 (Apr.).
http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=379
Response:
- Some important factors prevent the formation of fossils from being common:
- Fossilization itself is not a particularly common event. It requires conditions that preserve the fossil before it becomes scavenged or decayed. Such conditions are common only in a very few habitats, such as river deltas, peat bogs, and tar pits. Organisms that do not live in or near these habitats will be preserved only rarely.
- Many types of animals are fragile and do not preserve well.
- Many species have small ranges. Their chance of fossilization will be proportionally small.
- The evolution of new species probably is fairly rapid in geological terms, so the transitions between species will be uncommon.
Passenger pigeons, once numbered in the billions, went extinct less than 200 years ago. How many passenger pigeon fossils can you find? If they are hard to find, why should we expect to find fossils that are likely from smaller populations and have been subject to millions of years of potential erosion?
- Other processes destroy fossils. Erosion (and/or lack of deposition in the first place) often destroys hundreds of millions of years or more of the geological record, so the geological record at any place usually has long gaps. Fossils can also be destroyed by heat or pressure when buried deep underground.
- As rare as fossils are, fossil discovery is still rarer. For the most part, we find only fossils that have been exposed by erosion, and only if the exposure is recent enough that the fossils themselves do not erode.
As climates change, species will move, so we cannot expect a transition to occur all at one spot. Fossils often must be collected from all over a continent to find the transitions.
Only Europe and North America have been well explored for fossils because that is where most of the paleontologists lived. Furthermore, regional politics interfere with collecting fossils. Some fabulous fossils have been found in China only recently because before then the politics prevented most paleontology there.
- The shortage is not just in fossils but in paleontologists and taxonomists. Preparing and analyzing the material for just one lineage can take a decade of work. There are likely hundreds of transitional fossils sitting in museum drawers, unknown because nobody knowledgeable has examined them.
- Description of fossils is often limited to professional literature and does not get popularized. This is especially true of marine microfossils, which have the best record.
- If fossilization were so prevalent and young-earth creationism were true, we should find indications in the fossil record of animals migrating from the Ark to other continents.
--- надополнето ---
Claim:
At current rates of erosion, only thirty million years are needed to account for all the sediments in the ocean. If the earth were as ancient as is claimed, there should be more sediments.
Source:
Morris, Henry M., 1974.
Scientific Creationism, Green Forest, AR: Master Books, pp. 155-156.
Response:
- The thickness of sediment in the oceans varies, and it is consistent with the age of the ocean floor. The thickness is zero at the mid-Atlantic Ridge, where new ocean crust is forming, and there is about 150 million years' worth of sediment at the continental margins. The average age of the ocean floor is younger than the earth due to subduction at some plate margins and formation of new crust at others.
- The age of the ocean floor can be determined in various ways -- measured via radiometric dating, estimated from the measured rate of seafloor spreading as a result of plate tectonics, and estimated from the ocean depth that predicted from the sea floor sinking as it cools. All these measurements are consistent, and all fit with sediment thickness.
--- надополнето ---
Claim:
The eye that enables some organisms to see in the dark is so complex that no proven theories for its evolutionary development have yet been put forth. As the CreationWiki puts it, the Compound Eye "has all of the hallmarks of intelligent design and defies attempts to explain it through natural mechanisms".
Response:
Weird. Why pluck out one seemingly random organ out of all the many to choose from? We know how the compound eye develops, we know many of the molecules involved — there are no miracles going on. It's proteins and small diffusible molecules interacting to negotiate the construction of a repeating pattern of simple optical elements. We also know the
similarities between different lineages that link them.
--- надополнето ---
Claim:
For what purpose is all of this? Evolutionists have never offered a satisfactory explanation.
Response:
Flip a coin. Can you come up with a 'satisfactory' explanation for why it comes up on whatever side it does? This is a non-argument. There is no purpose. It's that simple. He's assuming his premise, that any explanation must disclose some cosmic intent, and rejecting evolution because it says there isn't one.
--- надополнето ---
Еден од најупотребуваните "Аргументи" на креационистите се "bacterial flagellum" и самопрогласениот квази научен термин на креационистите познат како "Irreducible Compexity"! Научниците одамна ги имаат побиено овие тврдења но тие сепак се широко употребувани од креационистите. Еве едно кратко видео на кое се побива темелот на кој се повикува креационизмот:
За оние кој сакаат да го погледнат целото детално видео, на линков го имате 2 часовното предавање на Кен Милер -
