An Evolutionist Debate

At least one Evolutionist can admit that transitional fossils are rare even thought lately, the Evolutionist make it them seem so common with their Ida and Ardi fossils.

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. (Gould)

Though later he changed his mind and said that they are one of the best evidence for the theory of Evolution.

Described recently as "the most important evolutionary event during the entire history of the Metazoa," the Cambrian explosion established virtually all the major animal body forms -- Bauplane or phyla -- that would exist thereafter, including many that were 'weeded out' and became extinct. Compared with the 30 or so extant phyla, some people estimate that the Cambrian explosion may have generated as many as 100. The evolutionary innovation of the Precambrian/Cambrian boundary had clearly been extremely broad: "unprecedented and unsurpassed," as James Valentine of the University of California, Santa Barbara, recently put it. (Lewin)

The gaps in the fossil record are real, however. The absence of a record of any important branching is quite phenomenal. Species are usually static, or nearly so, for long periods, species seldom and genera never show evolution into new species or genera but replacement of one by another, and change is more or less abrupt. (Wesson)
Source

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Mutations: Do they increase information? Part 12

The Naturalistic Evolutionary Model:	An Intelligent Design-Young Earth/Cataclysm Model:
Prediction: A mechanism for positive mutations that increases information to the genetic code must be discovered.	Prediction: Mutations will not be capable of enriching the gene pool, but will lead to degeneration and information loss.
No mechanism that increases information to the genetic code has as yet been described or experimentally demonstrated. Three thousand generations of radiated fruit flies gave many mutations leading to death or detriment to the species. None were positive. If there are zero positive mutations in 3000 generations, how many will there be in 100,000 generations? How about in 1,000,000? The only supposedly positive mutations have been those, which cause loss of information to the genetic structure of a living being. There is the reported example of a species of beetle that lost the ability to fly due to mutation. The resulting sub-species was able to survive better then its peers due to changes in the environment. The pictorial example given in the November 2004 edition of National Geographic in its defense of evolution showed an albino salamander as evidence for a mutated species. Is the loss of pigment capacity an indicator of a possible improvement in the gene structure? Does albinism improve viability of a species?

(Go To Part 13)

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