Why are the (expected) countless millions of transitional fossils missing?

Question

Fossils are the preserved remains of once-living organisms (Wile). They are usually formed when mineral-rich water makes its way into the organism's body. The minerals within the water aggregate within the spaces within the body and solidify. Once the organism's tissues have dissolved away, all that is left behind is a rock mold of the creature's shape.

Wile, Jay L. "Exploring Creation with Biology." Apologia Educational Ministries, 1998. Print.

Biblical creationists (such as creationist pastor Gary E. Parker) ("Fossil Record") see most of the fossil record as a record of the burial of creatures during Noah's Flood, wherein the creatures dwelling on the seafloor were buried first, then other marine creatures, amphibians, slow-moving reptiles, faster-moving mammals and birds, and finally, humans, the most able to escape the floodwaters the longest.

"What Does the Fossil Record Teach Us About Evolution?" Christian Answers Network, 1995. Web. 16 Jun. 2012. http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-c006.html

Atheistic paleontologists (Collins), geologists, and evolutionists believe that the fossil record is a record of the evolution of life on Earth, with the oldest fossils, those of the earliest and simplest creatures, being at the base of the fossil record, and more recent and more advanced creatures higher up. This assumes no folding or bending of the geological strata.

Collins, Allen G. "Geologic Time Scale." U of California Museum of Paleontology, 26 Nov. 1994. Web. 16 Jun. 2012. http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/help/timeform.html

Fossils are usually not able to be directly dated by any radiometric dating method. Carbon dating can only be used if carbon remains, which is not the case with most fossils. Most other dating methods work on volcanic rock, whereas most fossils are contained in sedimentary rock. Instead, fossils are often dated by evolutionists according to ages that have already been assigned to various rock layers. Radiometric dating may be used to narrow this down, by dating available volcanic layers above and/or below the fossil-containing layer. However, radiometric dating is not a reliable method of dating fossils, and is rejected by creationary scientists.

Organic matter has been found in some fossils. In 1997, Dr. Mary Schweitzer of Montana State University reported finding red blood cells inside a Tyrannosaurus Rex bone (Wieland). And in 2005 the same scientist reported finding blood vessels that were still "soft and stretchy" in another Tyrannosaurus Rex bone claimed to be 65 million years old (C. Wieland).

Wieland, Carl. "Sensational Dinosaur Blood Report." Creation.com. Creation Ministries International, Sept. 1997. Web. 16 Jun. 2012. http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/606

--- "Still Soft and Stretchy." Creation Ministries International, 25 Mar. 2005. Web. 16 Jun. 2012. http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/3042

It is well-accepted that biological matter cannot last anything like 65 million years ("Squirming Squishosaur").

Wieland, Carl. "Squirming at the Squishosaur." Creation Ministries International, 16 May 2005. Web. 16 Jun. 2012. http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/3427/

Creationists argue that this constitutes evidence that the fossils are not that old (Wieland; C. Wieland), whilst evolutionists argue either that this constitutes evidence that it can last that long, or that the apparent blood cells (which passed several tests for blood) were not really blood cells.

Charles Darwin noted the "transitional fossil" problem and it still remains. The evolutionary family trees in textbooks are based on imagination, not fossil evidence. Famous Harvard paleontologist (and evolutionist), Stephen Jay Gould, wrote, “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.” Other evolutionist fossil experts also
acknowledge the problem.

Gould, Stephen. "Evolution's Erratic Pace." Natural History 86 (1977): 5-14. Print.

Link:

Bates, Gary. "That Quote! - About the Missing Transitional Fossils." Creation.com. Creation Ministries International, 2006. Web. 16 Jun. 2012. http://creation.com/pattquote

Answer 1

The transitional fossils are missing and there is no reasonable explanation to explain all cases. Punctuated equilibrium is feasible to expalin why some are missing but not to explain why all are missing. Generally we find that animals remain substantially unchanged for the entire duration of their fossil record.



Darwin predicted that transitional fossils would be found and for some time that was the expaectation. Since it hasn't happened the usual response now is to claim that every fossil is transitional which still leaves the sudden appearance and disappearance of animals unexplained.



Regarding the quote from Dr Colin Patterson. It is often claimed that this is taken out of context, i.e. quote mining. I have seen a copy of the full letter and I can assure you that it is a fair quote and in keeping with the rest of the letter. The only valid criticism for it is that it is now quite old, but the situation hasn't really changed.



In recent years Tiktaalik was touted as "the perfect missing link—perfect, because it almost exactly splits the difference between fish and amphibian, and perfect because it is missing no longer." Besides the fact that it was based on few facts and a lot of speculation, tetrapod tracks predating Tiktaalik by about 18 million years, in evolutionary dating, were recently found in a quarry in Poland. Another "transitional fossil" into the dustbin.

Answer 2

1

Answer 3

> transitional fossils

Every population that does not end in extinction is transitional. Your mother is transitional between your grandmother and you. Be nice to your mother. Do not call her a fossil.



> burial of creatures during Noah's Flood

That doesn't work. We get stratification that is clearly based on time and not density.



> and it still remains.

Not so much as it did in Darwin's time. The Leakey family has been digging up hominin "transitions" for the past half century or so. Your mother apparently does not subscribe to National Geographic.



> The Bible shows an understanding of scientific knowledge beyond that believed to exist at the time the Bible was composed.



No it doesn't. Maybe you could say the same thing about Gulliver's Travels. Jonathan Swift reported the existence of two moons of Mars before they were discovered with telescopes. You know what? Swift guessed.



> The Bible unambiguously records that the entire time from the start of the universe to the appearance of humans was six ordinary days (creation week).



It does indeed. And it is unambiguously wrong about that, and about the order of the appearance of things on and off Earth. Note that plants (third day) are created before the sun (fourth day). How useful is that?

Answer 4

Exactly who is expecting these "countless millions" of fossils? Scientists don't, since they know how rare it is for a fossil to form in the first place.

Can you explain why we should expect a greater number of fossils than those we find?



>The Bible shows an understanding of scientific knowledge beyond that believed to exist at the time the Bible was composed



Bullshit.



>Many Christian scientists and apologists such as the Christian scientists and apologists at Creation Ministries International, Answers in Genesis, and CreationWiki assert that...



I'm sure they do. Let us know when they have more than assertions.



>The chronogenealogies in the Bible do not allow for the first humans existing longer ago than about 4,000 B.C



Which is not true. We have evidence of WHOLE CITIES older than that.

Just one more thing the bible is wrong about.



EDIT: Actually, let me modify that. I'm not sure it's fair to call those settlements "cities". True cities aren't quite that old, I think. However, there's still plenty of evidence for organized societies and settlements going back further than 4000 BC.

Incidentally, this is an example of what happens when you start talking about things outside your field.

Answer 5

As evolution is a continuous process of gradual change over millions of years, every single generation is a transition between parent and offspring.



Therefore the term "transitional fossil" is as totally meaningless as any other argument based on a Biblical Bronze Age Book of Bullshit. It means that every fossil represents a transition between earlier and later forms. Anyone expecting to uncover the fossil of a "crocoduck" or some other hybrid needs to go and get themselves an education because they simply haven't got the basic wit to understand evolution.



There is another problem with fossilisation which creates the "gaps" that all uneducated creationists seem to pounce on: Fossilisation is a rare phenomenon, requiring particular conditions for the organism to be preserved and fossilised. In fact, many scientists agree that an estimated 90 - 95% of all species that ahve ever lived have left no fossil record at all. This means that, at best, we only get snapshots of evolution at particular stages: you are never going to get a fossil record of every generation of an organism over millions of years of evolution.



To take an example:

If a creature the size of mouse grew in size every generation by such a tiny amount that a man wouldn't notice any change in size over his entrire lifetime, that creature would still reach the size of an elephant in about 60,000 years. Yet 60,000 years is nothing in terms of evolution and fossilisation: there would be a very high probability that not one of those creatures would be preserved as a fossil during the whole of that 60,000 years. All you would see (if you were very, very lucky) is a mouse-size creature and an elephant-sized creature preserved as fossils.



[and you might want to make a note that creationists websites do not quote factual information. Of course biological material doesn't survive 65 million years - and not one true scientist says it does. Fossils are formed by the *replacement* of biological materials by minerals which use the original organism as a matrix. And minerals last for billions of years]



EDIT: "assert that the Bible contains knowledge that shows an understanding of scientific knowledge beyond that believed to exist at the time the Bible was composed"

~ assertions are not facts. The facts are simple: the bible was written in the Bronze Age by people who thought the earth was flat and that whales were fish. They thought the entire universe rotated around the Earth and had not the faintest idea about biology, astronomy, chemistry or most of the rest of science. If you assert otherwise then please provide a list of facts that the bible gets right. And that doesn't mean biblical mumbo-jumbo that can be interpreted in numerous different ways to suit the occasion.



My tactic is to quote facts. I have quoted facts. What you've done is cut and paste from creationist websites that are not based on facts but on deluded religionist bullshit.

Answer 6

If we ignore the fossil record and look instead at the archaeological record, where bones can be dated accurately we find that even the last animals to be domesticate, namely horses, were domesticated around 5000 years ago, the earliest grazing mammals to be domesticated sheep and goats were domesticated around 9000 years ago. The changes in human diet from hunted to farmed animals is also recorded in the pottery layers of the neolithic.



When it comes to fossils in themselves, working with them is a hugely skilled profession and people who don't understand that shouldn't be pronouncing. The rocks in which they are found can be dated in many different ways, you can ignore that if you want, that's fine.



There are plenty of transitional fossils too, fish that walked on 'legs' on the bottom of the sea floor are just one example.