New data indicates that it wasn't, and that the majority of the evolution involved occurred over the 200 million years prior to the beginning of what we now call the "Cambrian Explosion."

To put this in perspective, 200 million years ago the most sophisticated mammals looked something like shrews and were more like many reptiles than they are like us.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-team-explanation-cambrian-explosion.html

All because mankind discovered different kinds of bones settled in different layers of rock strata.

I've never been too impressed with that system of time dating. Way too many possibilities and unexpected variables to make any reasonable deductions.

We just have to maintain faith in the text book timelines, until they get adjusted (over and over again).

What if one layer of strata actually represented a much longer time period than comparatively believed, or suppose several layers were formed at nearly the same time. Then there's the possibility of layers getting eroded away or even mixed up in "improper order".

I'd go crazy trying to put faith in all of that stuff only to discover reality, out in the real world, is very different in actual dig sites.

It is always nice to have a system that projects a form of order to observational data. But there's always a very real likelyhood, that parts of that imparted organization does not correspond with reality. One should never forget this probability.

I'm not going to push it, here, as far as my scepticism. I salute you, Igakusei, for holding your ground. Perhaps you may even succeed in convincing a few of the poorly educated christians (or even several, highly educated nominal SDAs) how correct you are.

Those textbooks are written by geologists and paleontologists who have spent much of their career in "actual dig sites."

Do you have any examples of the unexpected variables and improper orders that you are assuming exist? You've admitted before that you don't know much outside of physics, so perhaps you should avoid so much liberal speculation. If you're not going to point out concrete examples of places modern geology is inconsistent or incoherent, then there's nothing for me to reply to.

This might be a good start for you; it is written and maintained by Christians.

http://www.answersincreation.org/geology.htm

Hmmm... Examples come to mind, but I know that you have me out gunned, knowledge wise.

Just being honest about it. The site posted is fixated on theories for explaining geologic phenomena via a global flood catastrophe. Do I believe that much geologic phenomena resulted from catastrophic events, yes. But it isn't universal.

My focus, then isn't proving "the flood" but rather sorting out personal scepticism in the actual accuracy of geologic dating schemes.

There's nothing quite like the wonderful magic of mutations, mixed with a few eons.



We should be grateful for the all of the localized walls of mud that buried so many life-forms around the world, most of which became extinct, except for the few living fossils that don't seem to have changed all that much from their fossilized counterparts. No localized mud=no fossils, no oil. (Oil and natural gas were created from organisms that lived in the water and were buried under ocean or river sediments. (from USDOE))

If scientists could explore the strata where the oil fields are located, thousands of feet below today's surface, what kind of fossilized life forms might they find? These life forms might have lived many "millions" or "billions" of years before the fossils now found thousands of feet above them were even dreaming of becoming fossils.

If one could locate and explore the original surface of the planet, so far down below, what sort of artifacts might one find on the ancient seabed?

Wow, that's a really good point. Accepting that coal, oil, and natural gas originates from dead life forms, the depths of these deposits very seriously damages the strata timeline for life on this planet.

Either the method for measuring time isn't linear, or the conveyed time periods are severely off.

There's no way around it.

If A is down there, and B is up here, then, B comes from A.

If bacteria fossils are down there in those rocks, and whale fossils are up here in these rocks, then, whales came from bacteria.

From a USDOE Publication

http://www.fossil.energy.gov/education/energylessons/coal/gen_howformed.html

I'm not sure I see the problem. Fossil fuel industries are thoroughly versed in the geologic column and how it relates to fossil fuels, and regularly use the fossil content of rocks to determine the likelihood of finding coal or oil.

Some of the posts in this thread make it sound as though the surface of the earth used to be uniformly thousands of feet lower and the layers have built up uniformly all over the earth. That's not how it is, of course: where would all that material have come from? (We do get a little dust from meteorites, but nowhere near enough.) The earth's surface is the story of dynamic geological processes and involves faults and folds, uplifts and subductions, volcanoes and earthquakes and floods and landslides. The 'geological column' is more of a concept, like 'the water cycle', than a physical artifact found intact anywhere, let alone everywhere.

But arguments from a simplistic personal (mis)understanding of geology don't stack up very strongly against the views of people who have spent lifetimes developing deep understandings.

This is relevant.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD101.html

Bravus's statement seems to lend support both ways.


The point of geological column being more a concept than than an artifact is brought up, while in the same breath, oversimplified personal arguments are insufficent to counterbalance specialists' premises on such topics.

Thank you Bravus, for making such an eloquent point.

I wouldn't have used the word "concept," since it's substantially more than that. Did you read the link above your post? It's very short, and comes with links to substantially more information if you're interested.

Here's one of them:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/geocolumn/

I used the water cycle intentionally as an example. The water cycle clearly happens: water moves through a variety of processes. But the 'water cycle' is a human concept that allows us to understand the movement of water. The 'water cycle' doesn't exist in nature: there, there is sun, wind, snow, rain, rivers, lakes, ground water.

Similarly, there are fossils, there are layers, there are ages. There is not, in one single location, a well-ordered 4.5 billion year deep column. The concept 'geological column' is an organising principle in the same way as 'water cycle'.

Describing it as a 'concept' is not the equivalent of calling it 'just a theory' or whatever jiggery-pokery.

And the point that expert judgements about it will, in general, be superior to amateur judgements about it (especially when those amateurs have a particular pre-determined barrow to push) remains valid.

Bravus, how did you get so eloquent?

;-) "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"

I think I'm always stressed and in a hurry when I post on here because it usually means I'm procrastinating from studying something substantially more important. It certainly doesn't help.

Research team finds( makes up ) new explanation for Cambrian explosion

ABSTRACT
Diverse bilaterian clades emerged apparently within a few million years during the early Cambrian, and various environmental, developmental, and ecological causes have been proposed to explain this abrupt appearance. A compilation of the patterns of fossil and molecular diversification, comparative developmental data, and information on ecological feeding strategies indicate that the major animal clades diverged many tens of millions of years before their first appearance in the fossil record, demonstrating a macroevolutionary lag between the establishment of their developmental toolkits during the Cryogenian [(850 to 635 million years ago (Ma)], and the later ecological success of metazoans during the Ediacaran (635 to 541 Ma) and Cambrian (541 to 488 Ma) periods. We argue that this diversification involved new forms of developmental regulation, as well as innovations in networks of ecological interaction within the context of permissive environmental circumstances.

Now, new evidence by a team of biologists, paleobiologists and ecologists suggests that the sudden explosion of new life forms may not have been so sudden after all. In their paper published in Science, the teams says that it appears likely that most of the new life forms that show up in fossil finds, were well on their way to development before the Cambrian period and that many of them, by their behaviors, may have helped pave the way for others.

To better understand what was happening before and during the Cambrian period, the team took a two-pronged approach: one side studied, compiled and updated the fossil evidence, while the other focused on the molecular makeup of various organisms to uncover their gene history to create a more precise family tree. By combining the evidence from both sides, the team was able to put together a picture of what they believe went on.

From their work it appears that the basic genetic components for the organisms that seemingly sprang into existence during the Cambrian period were in place long before the fossil records show. In fact, there appeared to be evidence of a slow march of development for 200 million years before the sudden diversity became evident, which indicates that many such organisms were slowly evolving and only showed when conditions became ripe.

The team suggests that for many of those 200 million years, Earth went through some very cold periods where the entire planet was likely frozen, stagnating development. Then, there came a time of warming, partly brought about, they theorize, by the development of organisms that were capable of changing the environment by pulling carbon from seawater and releasing more oxygen when they died and also by those that burrowed into the seafloor aerating it, providing a new type of environment for new types of organisms.

As more organisms developed, environmental conditions changed as a result, allowing for more diversity and so on and so forth through the Cambrian period, resulting in the explosion of all those new kinds of life forms that scientists have been puzzling over for years.


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Yes. That is good, correct, careful, qualified scientific language.

Pretending there is more certainty than there is is a much worse problem in science than being appropriately modest and careful.

Oh hey Sweng, I've been waiting for you to show up.

You ever going to respond to this?

Also, what Bravus said is correct. Familiarize yourself with the concept of error bars, and spend less time listening to Ray Comfort.

Would you buy an automobile that had that kind of language describing its operation?

It's a "just so" story.

LOL - sweng is BobRyan and I claim my 5 pounds.

I'm beginning to think so.

One example are the very thin and well defined lines from one layer to the next in the strata. There isn't any room for evolution there, but we are told to believe they represent ten million plus years!

Even with this new interpretation of the fossil record in the Opening Post, the phyla still didn't show up until the Cambrian period! We need some rock solid evidence to the contrary.

I don't know what example you're talking about, but please provide a link. Also, you're not simply "told to believe" that the gap represents ten million plus years. This is science, not religion. There aren't any appeals to authority here. There is always a tangible reason why they're saying that, so go look it up and tell me what it is, and why it's wrong.

Igakusei, can you tell us what the nature of this new data is that you refer to in the OP? What actual facts have been found? I read the page you linked to, and it was not very informative. Most of the links on that page are just general searched into the their own database. Do you have a more substantial reference?

This becomes a very tricky as how people relay certain proof to other. Both rely on appeal to authority or "common knowledge", as you demonstrate above.

I understand that it's difficult to paste the pages and pages of material, yet, isn't saying that science is superior because it relies on factual data, without actually providing that data... is in fact an appeal to authority?

Sure you may expect people to to their own research and make their own conclusions, but who has that time? Scientific language and publications are extensive and tedious. Much of these use the industry jargon that makes their publications less accessible to non-initiated.

That's why I sort of resent the high-horse approach to this issue. In one way or another, it actually is an appeal to authority. The scientific community is not except from relying on these, because it's a convenient shortcut for knowledge. In fact, any established fact that we are told to believe directly without verifying it firsthand is an appeal to authority of scientific community that established it.

So, any idea that science somehow above the appeal to authority is laughable. You do it in the very sentence in which you deny this idea :).

If I said something was true "because so-and-so said it was," that would be an appeal to authority.

What I'm pointing out is that in the scientific community, claims that are not supported by sufficient evidence are not taken seriously. Who a claim is made by has no bearing on how well the conclusion is supported by the data.

This is all in the context of Alchemy implying that scientists simply tell us what to believe, and we're supposed to take them at their word.

I'm not merely replying in context of your reply, but to the general idea that appeal to authority is somehow absent from scientific claims. Science greatly relies on the idea of scientific authority. The argument from authority dictates that:

1) The authority is a legitimate expert on the subject.
2) A consensus exists among legitimate experts on the matter under discussion.

Thus it implies the correctness of the issue from the consensus on certain subject, and not necessarily based on examination of the facts. Especially when the claims could not be grasped, and properly understood by non-experts.

To some extend, Alchemy is correct. The scientists do tell us what to believe. None of us have neither time or resources to verify their claims first-hand. Therefore, their claim to some degree an appeal to authority, because it expects the belief in spite of the lack of understanding and relies on expert findings as established knowledge.

I guess, these things are inevitable, as our societies become more and more technocratic. Nevertheless, I think it's important to avoid certain double-standards in logic.

But the consensus on any subject is derived directly from examination of the facts.

How can you claim to have a consensus on what the date for certain artifact is, when you never really seen it in person to examine it? How can you ever derive that consensus from examining the fact?

How can you examine the consensus that certain star has such and such chemical composition, if you never actually come to observe the data, or examine the process of how that data was derived?

In this case, you are not really examining the facts. You examining claims given by certain scientific authority which demands your trust that the data derived is both correct and verifiable based on the similar claim of other such authority.

Thus, your claim to consensus on certain view is based on appeal to these authorities, as the full data that supports the claim is both hard to come by, and requires thorough understanding of the subject discussed. Ordinary person would have little means or time to digest it to the point of examining the claim properly.

The higher-end scientific claims require trust in the peer-review system, and appeal to authority argument for the rest of the people.

Theoretically, newspaper reporters are supposed to report the facts of a story, then allow the readers to arrive at their own conclusions. Now, if archaeologists and geologists, etc., would just report the facts of their finds and allow the readers more of an opportunity to draw their own conclusions, there might be less suspicion of pro-evolutionary agendas by some. For example, fossil X was found between layers 1 and 2, fossil Y was found above layer 2, and fossil Z was located within layer 5. Fossil Y was similar to fossil X, but had two wings and no tail.

The YECs arrive at the conclusion that the Earth, too, was created on Day One, but they seem to be misinformed. The Earth could be quite old, which can be inferred by water-and-wind borne layers of deposits, sometimes miles deep. We can' rule out landmasses rising and falling throughout the unknown eons of our planet's primordial existence. We might expect to see massive amounts of erosion, scouring in some areas and filling in others, and perhaps evidence of multiple cataclysmic or major seismic events.

Perhaps early Earth was seeded with one-celled creatures designed to break down the elements to form organic layers on the surface or on the sea floor, perhaps not.

Why would I trust anyone who believes that a biological program could create itself, then self-replicate, without a designer, then change into more and more complex life forms through some magical self-improvement principle? Show me the facts, not the sequence of paintings of grunting, stooped primates transforming themselves into Homo sapiens.

I have no degrees and no magic card to flash here in the forums to prove that I know a lot about anything, but I'd pick extraterrestrial colonization of the Earth over the magic of extreme evolution at this point in time.

I might change my mind if someone could show me the facts, the whole facts, and nothing but the facts. Show me a map of where the Cambrian fossils are found, and in what layers of sediment so I can make my own, more-informed conclusion.

Meantime, I might poke a little fun at a few theories at the risk of being called simple or ignorant.

Tnx for the links.

Following are a few quotes from those in the business of Evolution.


Quite amazing, isn't it, that this "ball of gas" contained all of the elements that exist on the Earth. Now how did this "ball of gas" originate?







































And so we have the Esoteric Wisdom of the Priesthood of Scientists whose God of Evolution, The Emasculated One, can only operate within the confines of extremely limited human imagination. As we might expect, the mythological God of Mutations is merely a passive and impotent deity, worshipped only by those who demonstrate that they travel down a different road than those possessing a little more common sense and an awareness of the failure of the fossil record to prove evolution.

Once upon a time...

Quote-mining of ancient (early 80s) sources. How much new evidence and new theory has arisen in the last 3 decades?

A more recent such quote is by T S Kemp (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~tskemp/index.htm) in Fossils and Evolution from 1999. He says on page 253:

"With few exceptions, radically new kinds of organisms appear for the first time in the fossil record already fully evolved, with most of their characteristic features present. ... It is remarkably interesting and not at all what might have been expected"

But facts don't automatically age with time. So, given all those quotes, it is incumbent on the evolutionists to show change.

One recent find strengthens the anti-evolution case. A whale jaw has been found that is represents "the oldest fully aquatic whale yet discovered"(1), thus compressing the time available for a land mammal to evolve into a whale from 10 My to 5 My.

When you look at the number of generations of evolution in Lenski's experiments, you have an experimentally based idea of the rate of possible change. Over all the time it has been running, only one beneficial multi-point mutation has been known, and that occurred after 31,500(2) generations of large populations with consistent environment and evolutionary pressure. And that change was in fact slight - the cell added a mode of digesting citrate. With much lower numbers and a much slower reproduction rate, and varying conditions etc, it looks unlikely that the development of a fully aquatic mammal could be achieved in so short a time.

Yet land-mammal to whale evolution is one of the most cited cases. Greatest Show takes some time over it, and I don't think there are many cases of apparent gradual change compared with all such changes that must have occurred. And what will happen if some whale fossil appears below where the point of divergence is believed to be? Are the mentions of these apparent sequences not so much an attempt to explain what the evidence points to, but rather a way to read evolution into the fossils, which overall don't support the theory?

1) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44867222/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.Tt1Z-Zi9nZc
2) http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14094-bacteria-make-major-evolutionary-shift-in-the-lab.html

Interesting: I googled that Kemp quote, because it sounded very much like an S J Gould quote, but the only place on the web it appears is right here!

Um, Mark did give links to the quotes, Bravus. Did you not look them up? Googling doesn't always provide the best research results. I've googled quotes from my own posts and they don't always come up.

Link is to Tom Kemp's home page. Mark's quote seems to come from a book, so may well *not* be on the web. Here's the description of Kemp's 1999 book:

1999. T.S. Kemp Fossils and evolution.
Oxford University Press: Oxford. Pp vi+284 View cover
An account of the ideas, methodology and scope of contemporary palaeobiology. It addresses the central issue of how to combine palaeobiological and neontological evidence in order to understand the mechanisms of evolution over the geological timescale. Attention is thus focussed on those fundamentally important long term aspects of evolution for which the fossil record gives unique insight: long-term species stasis, major patterns of radiation and extinction including mass extinction, and the large treks through morphospace characteristic of the origin of radically new kinds of organisms.

Would love to see the context of the quote, because Kemp obviously doesn't think it invalidates evolution.

It was a few months ago that I got that quote. I think it was google books, or Amazon Look inside that I copied it from.

Kemp is definitely an evolutionist. In fact BornagainAtheist was impressed to contact the guy directly to see if he thought his observation was evidence against evolution.

But that's why it's so relevant: it's hardly some Chick publication saying that the fossils don't show gradual development: it's a current published worker saying so from the position of the status quo.

What's impressive is that men and magazines of great stature would make statements of doubt concerning single-cell-to-human evolution, listed in the mined quotes in my previous post. But then, here's some real proof...I personally have some genetic material from a donkey in my ancestral line. Periodically you can hear me braying and see me kicking in resistance to...change.

I have begun to better inform myself by looking up pro-evolutionary material online. In fact, one gentleman, from England, I believe, claimed he created a simple, test-tube rna molecule, in two stages.