The Fossil Record Provides Scientific Evidence for Macroevolution

Pro tries to illustrate how apes outlived Neanderthals with a roach who outlives a human when they are both exposed to radiation; but this illustration fails because radiation would kill both apes and humans. The fact that Pro prefers to give a hypothetical scenario instead of telling us how apes outlived Neanderthals should tell you that he has no idea, and frankly, neither do other evolutionists. I have already shown that their long cherished theory that homo sapiens were able to eradicate them by the invention of blades is totally wrong. . http://www.sciencedaily.com... The creationist view that Neanderthals were human hasn"t compromised one bit, but over the years evolutionists" depiction of Neanderthals has come a great deal closer to what creationists were saying all along. "Early artistic reconstructions mostly presented Neanderthals as beastly creatures, emphasizing hairiness and rough, dark complexion. More recent reconstructions acknowledge that"there is reason to believe that Neanderthals were fair-skinned and probably with no more facial hair than modern man. Also, archaeological evidence exists indicating that they may have communicated by speech, used tools and engaged in artistic endeavours. Reconstructions of Neanderthal men, women and children have become much more intelligent-looking and pleasing to the modern eye. " (Wikipedia: Neanderthal) This record should have made evolutionist less dogmatic in their assertions! What of archaeopteryx reptile-like features? Well, lack of a bill is no more a reptile feature than a lack of blonde hair. A "feature" is defined as characteristics a thing possesses, not what it does not possess, so I don"t see where Pro was going with that argument. It had teeth, but there are birds today which still have teeth and yet are nothing more or less than birds as you can see in the photos in these links:. http://www.debate.org... . http://www.debate.org... Archae"s teeth were the same as the teeth of other birds of his time (unserrated with expanded roots), but were not like the teeth of dinosaurs (serrated with strait roots). (The Auk, by Martin, Stewart, and Whetstone, p.86) As for other reptilian features, I"ll simply say that just because an animal displays features shared by another phyla does not make it a missing link: The duckbill platypus has fur like mammals, lays eggs and has a bill like birds, but no one thinks this is an intermediate between mammals and birds; it nurses its young with milk like mammals but uses sonar underwater like whales, but nobody thinks this is an intermediate between whales and mammals. Some painters use similar styles in their art, why can"t God use similar features in his? The evolutionary view that reptilian scales and fins eventually developed into feathered wings is both fanciful and baseless. No intermediate specimens, exhibiting scales developing into feathers or front legs into wings have ever been found. Archaeopteryx already had fully developed wings perfectly feathered (not scales half developed into feathers). "But in Archaeopteryx, it is to be noted, the feathers differ in no way from the most perfectly developed feathers known to us. " (A. Feduccia and H. B. Tordoff, in Science, 203 (1979), p. 1020) "Perhaps the final argument against Archaeopteryx as a transitional form has come from a rock quarry in Texas. Here scientists from Texas Tech University found bird bones encased in rock layers farther down the geological column than Archaeopteryx fossils. " (Richard Bliss, Origins: Creation or Evolution (1988), p. 46) I don"t have room to discuss all of archaeopteryx features, but ask yourself: if this is an example of when dinosaurs were evolving into birds, then how come birds existed before archaeopteryx? Two crow-sized birds were discovered in the Triassic Dockum Formation in Texas, 75 million years older than Archaeopteryx! (Nature, 322 (1986), p. 677) Four-winged birds were also discovered in rock layers below those containing archaeopteryx: (Xu, X. et al. 2011. An Archaeopteryx-like theropod from China and the origin of Avialae. Nature. 475 (7357): 465-470) There are no intermediate stages between archaeopteryx and the dinosaurs as evolution requires. "No intermediate fossils link Archaeopteryx with any of the groups from which it might have evolved. "( Vertebrate Life, 3rd ed. by Heiser Pough and McFarland; New York: McMillan, 1989, pp. 468, 470) Since Pro seems occupied in attacking my sources, I"ll give him one to ponder on. Dr. Alan Feduccia is a die-hard evolutionist in every sense of the word. He is professor and former head of biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he authored an encyclopedia on evolution called The Origin and Evolution of Birds (1999). Yet even he had to admit: "Archaeopteryx probably cannot tell us much about the early origins of feathers and flight in true protobirds because Archaeopteryx was, in a modern sense, a bird. " Science 259:790-793 (1993) He also says: "There are insurmountable problems with that theory. Beyond what we have just reported, there is the time problem in that superficially bird-like dinosaurs occurred some 25 million to 80 million years after the earliest known bird, which is 150 million years old. " (Hypography Sci-Tech, Study confirms birds not dinosaurs, . http://www.hypography.com..., 8/21/02) In other words, birds were around before dinosaurs even began evolving into birds, a complete contradiction of what the phylogenic tree of evolution predicts! Archaeopteryx"s grandfather wasn"t a dinosaur, he was a bird! As for Neanderthals, anyone can look at the most recent reconstructions of their faces and see how human they are: . http://www.google.com... . http://www.debate.org... In the 1957 Quarterly Review of Biology, Cave and Straus wrote that a Neanderthal dressed in modern clothes would pass unnoticed on the subway. What if a scientist were to show you proof that your mother"s genes differed from yours by 27.2 substitutions; would that be enough for you to deny her humanity? If so, what then would she be to you? An animal? Or could it be there is more to being human than evolutionists are willing to admit? Earlier in this debate I gave evidence that it is the expression of our genes that distinguishes us from the ape and not the sequencing itself. But what makes Pro"s mtDNA argument so silly, is that scientist tested the mtDNA of literally thousands of human beings to get the average divergence of substitution in our genes. How many Neanderthals did they test to get their average? Scientists only have five specimens, so they don"t really have an accurate average to tell how different they were! Pro asked me what is a "kind," well, if two animals can interbreed they are of the same kind. He asked me why there were no one-toed horses in the Miocene period, but according to the National Geographic magazine of January 1981, p.74, the fossils of a three-toed and a one-toed horse were found trapped together in the same volcanic eruption (10 mya), proving they both lived together. But the entire horse series never appears in one location, it was constructed from fossils found in many different parts of the world. The series is formulated on the assumption of evolutionary progression, and then used to 'prove' evolution! This is circular reasoning. Its just another example showing that evolution does more accommodating the fossil record than predicting it.