Photo of a Rare Transitional Water to Land Transitional Species circa 1952
Now, just a bit more seriously, one of the common claims that Young Earth Creationists make is that there are no transitional fossils. In actuality, given the low probability of anything ever becoming a fossil, it is amazing how many transitional fossils have been found. Nice lists of transitional fossils can be found here, here and here. There are at least hundreds, if not thousands of specimens demonstrating characteristics between species, with examples for fish, reptiles, dinosaurs, birds and mammals.
What is even more impressive than the transitional species shown above are extant transistional species such as the mudskipper, a fish that lives mainly on land and breaths air, and the more famous platypus.
10 comments:
After four more years of Obama, this smiling sea to land creature may want to slink back into the sea.
What I have always wondered is how is it possible for the earth to be 4.5 billion years old and in all that time hasn't cooled off? The center is still molten and even when you drill several hundred feet for oil, it comes up hot. Sounds more like a young earth to me. After 4.5 billion years, no cooling to speak of? Gimme a break. Or at least a scientific explanation.
I would say a cooling of 500 degrees C over that time period is a lot of cooling. A simple google search will take you to some science that is easy to understand:
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=35188.0 Things like the surface is a pretty good insulator; friction of the denser materials moving toward the center; and most importantly, the heat generated by the tremendous amount of radioactive decay that is occuring in the core. Of course most YEC's really don't want a scientific explanation that might be contrary to their suppositions.
SSS - the smiling sea creature is now over 60 years living on land and has evolved to the point where returning to the sea would be most difficult!!
How do you refute this?
The intelligence of humans is rapidly declining, whether measured by SAT scores,[14] music, personal letters,[15] quality of political debates,[16] the quality of news articles,[17] and many other measures. This means that if one goes back far enough, intelligence would measure at ridiculous heights, if humans were even tens of thousands of years old.
http://www.conservapedia.com/Counterexamples_to_an_Old_Earth
John - that's easy! :-) For at least 20,000 years now the human brain has been getting smaller, with its zenith being about 1500cc and now at about 1350cc. So obviously we are on the way down!!
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why-brain-shrinking
JR - I would have expected you to have a comment on Fibonacci numbers!
Schwarze --
Not sure how to reply to specific comments, but regarding the Fibonacci numbers, I avoid controversial subjects. :-)
http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/numberplay-phi-the-magic-and-the-myth/
For example, according to Devlin, "The Nautilus does grow its shell in a fashion that follows a logarithmic spiral, i.e., spiral that turns by a constant angle along its entire length, making it everywhere self-similar. But that constant angle is not the golden ratio."
John - Blogger doesn't seem to have nested comments like Wordpress [I mirrored this over there recently], but will check here to see if there is something new. So, I wondered how much of a stretch the numbers were for nature; I was looking for nice pictures rather than math :-)
PS - JR - love your photos!
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