Posted on 10/15/2005 3:44:16 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
A paleontologist testified in the Dover school board trial about how fossils connect species.
The ancestor of the whale and its first cousin the hippopotamus walked the Earth for 40 million years, munching on plants, before dying out in the ice ages.
Known as the anthracotheres, it became extinct 50 to 60 million years ago, but not before its evolutionary tree diverged — the whale forging into the oceans, the hippopotamus to the African swamps.
Kevin Padian, a University of California-Berkeley paleontologist, told the story of the whale’s journey, along with the travels of its closest living relative, in U.S. Middle District Court Friday to illustrate how the fossil record connects us to our past.
In the First Amendment lawsuit over Dover Area High School’s intelligent design policy, Padian was the plaintiffs’ final science expert to testify. The defense will begin to present its side Monday.
Padian’s testimony was essentially a response to intelligent-design proponents’ claims that paleontology does not account for missing links and the fossil record belies evolutionary theory.
“The problem is that there are no clear transitional fossils linking land mammals to whales,” the pro-intelligent-design textbook “Of Pandas and People” states.
“How many intermediates do you need to suggest relationships?” Padian wondered.
He pointed to numerous transitional fossils as he traced the lineage of the whale to its early ancestors, a group of cloven-hoofed mammals of a group named cetartiodactyla, illustrating the gradual changes of features along the way.
“We think the transitions are pretty good,” he said.
One of Padian’s concerns with intelligent design — the idea that life’s complexities demand an intelligent designer — is that it shuts down the search for answers, he said. “It worries me that students would be told that you can’t get from A to B with natural causes,” he said.
One of the complaints of 11 parents suing the school district is that, after Dover biology students are told about intelligent design, they are referred to “Pandas,” which is housed in the high school library.
While the connection between the whale and hippopotamus is recent, Padian said some of the fossils linking whales to land-dwelling mammals go back to the Civil War but were ignored by the authors of “Pandas.”
The curator of Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology and author of the “Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs” also testified to the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds.
“Pandas” states, “Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agent, with their distinctive features already intact — fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.”
But Padian, at times affectionately, showed numerous pictures and diagrams of different reptiles evolving from ones possessing scales to ones possessing feathers.
Of a fossil of an archaeopteryx found in the 1860s, Padian said, “Now this is a beautiful critter.”
He also criticized the book’s assertions on homology — the study of similar characteristics of living organisms used to explain their relationships to other organisms.
As he cross-examined Padian, Dover’s attorney Robert Muise brought up one of science’s most ardent evolutionists in raising questions about the fossil record.
Muise asked Padian about the late Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, the idea that rather than Darwin’s characterization of evolution as slow and gradual change, it may be better described as taking place in fits and starts.
Gould offered the idea as an explanation for the patterns found in the fossil record, which shows abrupt appearances of new species, followed by long stagnant periods with little change.
While “Pandas” argues that intelligent-design proponents consider punctuated equilibrium unprovable, Padian said Gould offered the theory as an explanation to gaps in the fossil record.
“Is natural selection responsible for punctuated equilibrium?” Muise asked at one point.
“That’s a great question,” Padian said. While it may raise questions about the mechanism of evolution, he answered, it doesn’t contradict the idea of common descent.
Tried replying once and got nowhere, 2nd try:
Stupid enough to confuse the two, no. But I'm sure you'll give us the mystery religion version of how they differ. Everyone got their koolaid? Mr. Jones, if you please... lol.
Well, Imagine that, can't get one; but can get two. Pick yer poison ROFL.
And the same scientific method that can't be bothered with proofs - proved flight theory in the hands of two brothers. The same method that people are trying to beg support of in evolution provided us with the demise of George Washington. It isn't the method that is wanting. It's who usurps it and pretends it gives them credibility that is wanting. Evolution doesn't get a free ride off the credibility of Flight anymore than flight gets a free ride off the credibility of electric light. Lightbulbs don't work because someone made an airplane by the same methodologies. In fact, As a matter of fact, the same methods used by the Wrights were largely used by others though not with the success Orville and Wilbur enjoyed. There are old black and white movie reals of the countless quackeries that came about in the search for flight - only one of them was right. But I'm sure all those that used scientific methodology and failed should get a pass on the shoulders of Orville and Wilbure just like Evolution? Let me restate that - The known failures should have equal footing with known successes because they use the same method? No. Obviously not. Fallacy destroyed. Next junk argument.
I didn't say it isn't "easy". I said it doesn't work unless you have solid data to tie it to. You can guess at patterns that you think should hold true in an imaginary world where things are predictable and nothing unpredictable ever happens. You can also assume certain things into the mix. The problem with that is that in the doing, you've generated a fairytale to tie your data to, not reality. If you only have data for 200 years and 500 years ago a warming trend melted all the snow in greenland to nothing, then followed it with severe conditions for an equal period, what then are you looking at in the data? Thousands of years or a few hundred. Simple answer, you are as clueless on that point as the next person. And you can say "well, that's unlikely" but, it isn't unlikely. In a world where random events like Katrina hit us with a regularity, there is no such thing as "unlikely". That alone gives us a high confidence in stating that this method not only doesn't work absent actual historical data to tie it to, It cannot but fail without said data. Life and life's happenings aren't "average". I spent a week this year with a cold. Does that mean I spend a week every year with a cold? No. Maybe I've had 40 colds in my life and I'm 40, so the data should average 1 per year - but then if I find evidence of none.. then what. We don't agree that it isn't easy. I agree that it is impossible without hard data to tie it to. You posit that it merely is difficult. You don't know that St. Helens erupted in the 80s.. now old is the geological formation shown around spirit lake today. 20 years or 20million. Your processes can't account for that. How are we to believe they can count for what we don't know when they can't account for what we do? Bottom line. It don't work.
After a bit of googling I found that "rings" is a fairly common term, but not in the same sense as annual tree rings.
As you have pointed out, the calibration of ice cores is not done by counting rings.
But what can one expect from someone who thinks Kent Hovind is an actual doctor...
No, but it is the answer to everything.
Actually, I think you could make a pretty good calendar by counting the rings formed by decaying threads.
BTW, you're wrong.
If you try to use ice cores to date anything where I live, you can't go back more than a few months, and that only at certain times of the year and only if we have ice on the ground at the time of your measurement.
IOW, it matters where you are. You can't compare the Andes to coastal Greenland. You also can't compare coastal Greenland, which has huge annual snowfalls, to much drier areas inland. That is your problem.
Need specifics? http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD410.html.
I assume you are specifically speaking about annual 'ice' rings as a dating method.
What other methods do we have to date material and the age of the earth? Hmmm. How shall I count the ways?
How about varves, which are quite easy to use since specific organic material that is season dependent can be used to validate the change of year. Or how about any number of radiometric methods that have been cross referenced through dating methods who themselves have been verified? How about the distance to the nearest stars that can be measured through parallax? And of course for short time periods, there is always tree rings which are corrected for seasonal data as well. I'm afraid that if you want to argue against these dating methods you'll have to attack them all at once, considering that they, according to their application, all agree that the earth is quite old.
PatrickHenry's List-O-Links has a few more I believe.
"Please, humor us because there isn't a single method in use today that doesn't have behind it a pile of unproveable assumptions.
Not like dating the age of the earth by adding up ages in a book, eh?
[Sarcasm]
Of course all the assumptions used to 'refute' the dating methods used by science are very realistic and stick to physical laws. I especially like the one about the change in the speed of light and decay rates.
[/Sarcasm]
"The assumptions are no less fragile in any of the cases. And as they get sunlight cast in on them, the reverberant whails and moans are always the same, "well what do you recommend we use then?" Something, perhaps, that can actually do what you say it can do would be nice. In absence of that, shutting up would also be nice until you can come up with it. "I don't know" is always preferred over dogmatic pretense.
Very poetic. Misguided, but poetic.
placemarker
How is this a similarity between Mt. St. Helens and the Grand Canyon? Stick to the subject please.
You didn't mention any of the putative similarities between the two so I'll mention a couple of differences. The Grand Canyon contains meanders and oxbows, results of slow constant water flow. Old slow rivers have them, new fast rivers don't. The Grand Canyon has HooDoos, also the result of slow flow. The walls of the Grand canyon are more vertical than Mt. St. Helens' showing water cutting through hardened igneous and hardened, compressed sedimentary rock rather than lightly compressed ash.
Oh, by the way, that little 'uphill' problem? The river never had to run uphill, the area it runs through has been constantly uplifting as the river cuts through it. We can actually measure it doing so now.
"Well, that's a problem isn't it. Cause you've no evidence that a canyon was cut through "age old rock". The formations are very much the same upon review. St. Helens laid down hundreds if not thousands of layers of sorted sediment before the backed up waters burst through and carved out the river bed area again, leaving the Grand canyon like view behind.
Aside from directly dating the igneous rock, which of course has been done, we do have many indicators of great age including multiple lava flows sandwiched by multiple sedimentary layers (something else Mt. St. Helen does not have). An interesting feature of these layers is the evidence of erosion of solid rock covered by more layers, themselves eroded and sandwiched. None of the layers at Mt. St. Helens, that the water cut through, were lava flows, nor do they show signs of erosion between layers. This is another case of creationism going to great lengths to prove geology wrong by ignoring - no,... twisting physics.
"Based on what is seen in the spring lake region after St. Helens, one can look at the same thing happening in a once inundated region that is now Grand canyon. Further, if you were to fill in the canyon, you bury the river at the point where it enters the canyon, below ground level, so unless you know how to make water run up hill to carve all that out, you got a real credibility issue. We don't.
Only if you ignore what we see happening today. See above
"You mean it just hasn't been properly shaped by you guys yet. We understand that indoctrination only works if you submit to it. Those of us who didn't drink the koolaid can see that fossilized trees missing their root tips and standing upright and unbroken through dozens if not hundreds of layers of sediment can only get their one way, unless you intend to prove how trees dislodged from the ground can stand and petrify in place for eons without breaking or being bothered.
If you had bothered to follow the link I placed you would have seen that exact process in action, where a swamp is turning into a bog, holding logs, with and without root systems, at all sorts of angles.
For the lurkers
Just how does a massive flood, thousands of metres high that supposedly runs off the continents at a great rate, leave polystrate trees? Unless they are the remains of a continental shelf uplift. Are they?
How did the Ark survive the intense flow of water from the sky necessary to uproot and sweep trees away?
"Kinda begs lunacy doesn't it. That's the beauty of it - I don't need to do so because common sense begs if for everyone who looks at it. That's why it wins in public debates I'd imagine. LOL
Hovind, and his buds, win at public debates because they attack geology with little 30 second sound bites that prey on the audiences lack of knowledge and that take reeducation of the audience to explain the errors inherent in them.
My question is why the Hovindesque generally refuse to engage in written debates with scientists from the target fields? I suspect it is because they are afraid that the depth of response to their sound bites would be too much.
Your post is riddled with error but let's deal with them one at a time starting with the most egregious. You claim I have engaged in a Bandwagon Fallacy. Now, quoting me (and I mean me, not you, not Russel, nor anyone else, just me), show where, in the two posts I made to you, I have employed this fallacy.
Please tell me you aren't bringing up something that happened at the beginning of medicine to attack modern science. You might as well attack modern aeronautics engineers by stating that the ancient Greeks thought feathered wings could allow them to fly.
"See, it isn't as though we don't have some track record to look at here when scrutinizing claims of pseudo scientists.
If you run out of specific answers to the argument at hand, attack past mistakes. Don't you know that this is a bad written debate tactic?
"You can beg credulity in trying to disuade people of the facts at hand before ever examining them yourselves; but, as another here aptly showed, it isn't necessary to you guys in many instances to actually bother knowing what your "enemies" say before you demonize them.
I didn't do that. I attacked your assertion that all dating methods were inaccurate.
"It's the threat of them that seems to be the problem. And Hovind goes beyond merely mentioning the rings as I merely did, He shows pictures looking down into the cut holes showing the rings plane as day (no pun intended).
I'm going to reflect this back to you. Although I'm not the one you were arguing with about the planes under ice, it was easy to see that you assumed the 'rings' are all that is used to date the ice. This sounds as if you didn't investigate the science but relied on Hovind's grasp of science which is anything but accurate. His inability to understand science can be shown in the number of refutations of his ideas by the very scientists that do the work. You suggest that we evos don't check into what our opponents say, and this is true at times, but this happens in a big way on the part of creationists.
"As for how science actually uses Ice cores, there have been many shows put up on PBS, history channel and A&E. One I saw within the last year or so dealt with studying ice flows in the antartic. They Use the same terminology and explain it much the same way I did. Hmm. Wonder where I might have gotten such misleading information - from a science program where actual specialists in the field explain it perhaps.. nawww. Couldn't be. bwahahahaha.
This brings up a number of questions. Did the show(s) explain in detail how dating was done or did they skip over areas based on the intended audiences level of knowledge and attention span? Did they cut portions from the film because of time? Who set the script? What information did they want to impart? We shouldn't jump to conclusions without answering at least these questions.
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