This is interesting:
the find is important for two reasons: First, Pampaphoneus is the first Paleozoic terrestrial carnivore discovered in South America. Combining this find with earlier discoveries of plant-eaters from the same time frame will help paleontologists “picture a more complete ecosystem during the Permian period,” the statement said.
Second, the skull suggests that this South American species was a close relative to similar dinocephalians previously found in Russia and South Africa. That supports the idea that therapsids were able to disperse easily from one part of the Pangaea supercontinent to the other, during an age when most of Earth’s modern-day land masses were linked together.
Emphasis mine. South America’s a big place, and this is the first time they’ve seen this. It just shows how rare fossils are, and how ridiculous it is for the creationists to demand to see all “transitional species” (a notion that demonstrates nothing except the demander’s ignorance of evolution, because every species is a “transitional” species).
“…Because every species is a “transitional” species).” Great point. Also, every species is perfectly evolved for the time in which it’s alive. That’s why it’s alive. That’s also why comparing animals across epochs is apples and oranges. Is an elephant “more advanced than a mastodon? Is a mastodon more advanced than the pig-like creature it evolved from?” It’s ultimately unanswerable.
every species is a “transitional”
That remains an article of faith.
It’s worth noting that punctuated equilibrium was not something creationists came up with.
When you say creationists I realize you are referring to those yahoos that spread idiocy, but remember… God loves idiots… he made so many of them.
That is a very interesting skull.
No, it’s not an “article of faith.” It’s an article of rationality, and of how evolution works.
It’s an example of circular reasoning. We can speculate about how evolution works. That’s why it keeps changing.
There are lots of facts accumulating all the time. But these do not conclusively refute that everything breeds in its kind. Someday perhaps they will. That day has not yet arrived.
With apologies for my stubbornness. After over a decade, ya know me by now. I’m very easy to convince of things in some areas. Not so much in others.
I’m amazed you keep putting up with me. …and thankful. Your rationality and ability to express yourself has kept me sane… really, I’m sane. Don’t listen to all those other voices in my head. :0
I’m sure this is going to get my butt handed to me around here, but if the intuition or the objective or whatever is to believe in Evolution, the rigorous process is to accept Creationism or something else as the null hypothesis and to require the burden of proof to be on Evolution. So, the rigorous re-phrasing should be “how ridiculous it is for Evolutionists to try to provide any ‘transitional species’….” If paleontology cannot provide enough resolution to demonstrate the transition between species, then it can only prove things where the existence of a fossil makes a statement. Change detection or other things that require a large amount of data aren’t possible. Put in modern pop-statistics, they can prove “black swans”, but not normal processes.
That being said, I also don’t know that modern biology supports the idea of “transitional species”. They are finding that certain features seem to be like “stable nodes” in differential equations, like spiders have eyes, humans have eyes, but no common ancestor of spiders and humans had eyes. This and the Cambrian Explosion (an event that requires change detection, not existance proofs, so beware) seem to suggest that a slow, evolutionary change through natural selection didn’t happen, but rather “punctuated equilibrium” type movements like modern genetic algorithms, like Ken Anthony said. Which just makes Paleontology more useless in demonstrating Evolution. There doesn’t seem much left of Darwin’s Evolution in modern Evolution.
For what it’s worth, I do “believe” in Evolution, but demonstrating that Evolution could happen, based on modern biology and chemistry and memetic analysis is a scientific question requiring the Scientific Method and demonstrating that Evolution did happen is a historical question requiring the Evidential Method.
I’m sure this is going to get my butt handed to me around here, but if the intuition or the objective or whatever is to believe in Evolution, the rigorous process is to accept Creationism or something else as the null hypothesis and to require the burden of proof to be on Evolution.
Creationism isn’t a scientific theory, in the sense that it can be tested or disproven. The burden is never to prove a theory, but to disprove theories until only one remains. Creationism might be true, but it’s not science, and creationist theories are not alternative theories, they’re simply critiques of a theory. The goal of scientists is to find a scientific explanation, not reveal Truth.