From: kck+@cs.cmu.edu (Karl Kluge)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Creationists citing the Burgess Shale fauna -- gotta love it
Date: 8 Apr 92 06:32:42 GMT
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon

> Subject: Coffin Seminar Creation Seminar
> From: ford@hpmcaa.mcm.hp.com (Dan Ford)
> Date: 6 Apr 92 16:28:33 GMT
> 
> Summary of Harold Coffin's Seminar on Science and Creation
> by Dan Ford
> 
> Time:		Friday, April 4, 1992, 7:00pm
> Location:	McMinnville SDA Church
> 
> 2. Claimed that there are two viable views on origins:
>    a) God created the earth, plants and animals.  Stated that there has 
>       been some change but that the changes are limited to within 
>       "basic kinds".
>    b) "Spontaneous Generation", where a basic "spark of life" arose by 
>       random chance, replicating itself to produce all forms of life 
>       currently known.

What about "God created the initial common ancestor and then evolution
operated"? What about "God loaded the dice and set up the laws of chemistry
so that carbon-based life was a probable outcome"?

> 6. Began showing slides of fossils removed from the Burgess Shale in Canada,
> although he didn't identify it as such until much later, and then just in 
> passing.
> He showed many slides of drawing of fossils from the Burgess shale, 
> primarily of very strange and bizarre creatures (if you have read 
> Wonderful Life by Stephen J. Gould you would have recognized most of them).
> He repeatedly pointed out that many of these creatures represent totally 
> different body plans than anything alive today.  After several minutes of 
> discussion and slides about Marrella, Wiwaxia, Anomalocaris (spelling?), 
> and other including Hallucinogenia, he came to his main point, which is: 
> 
> When you look in early Cambrian rock for evidence of the transitions from 
> simple unicellular life to complex multicellular life, you don't find it.
> Rather, you find suddenly a dizzying array of wildly diverse and complex 
> life forms. 

First, the Cambrian explosion occured "suddenly" only in geological terms.
Second, new species normally arise in peripheral isolates (like escaped
wallabies on Hawaii), so the first appearance of something in the fossil
record often reflects only the radiation of the species into that area. It
is precisely that fact the we do find exceptions to this rule that validates
punctuated equilibrium and makes hay of Creationist claims that punc. eq. is
an admission that there are no transitional forms.

> 4. Showed slides of drawings of the cross section of turtles.  Showing how 
> the shoulders attach inside the shell (which he claims is the analog of 
> the rib cage in mammals).  He claimed we should be able to find fossils 
> leading up to this unusual and unique design, but of course (according to 
> him) none are found.

Read Derek Brigg's AMERICAN SCIENTIST article on "Extraordinary Fossils"
(v79, n2, 1991) for a good idea of how sparse the fossil record is. The
amazing thing isn't the lack of transitional forms -- it's that we have as
many as we do. 

> 7. Discussed the Horse (of course).  His statements were plain and simple 
> assertions that eohippus was not a horse.  The first discoverer called it 
> a hyrachotherum. 

Taxonomic quibbles have nothing to do with the nature of the beast.

>  All the other fossils in the horse "lineage" are really 
> horses, he said that some have 3 toes while modern horses usually do not, 
> but they are all distinctly horses.  As he said it: "a horse is a horse is 
> a horse."  Here he quoted some Garret Hardin from a article entitled 
> "Nature and Man's Fate", Mentor, 1961 p. 225-226.  The quote was not up 
> long enough for me to even get a gist of it (he didn't even read the entire 
> quote on the slide to the audience, simply flashed it up, made a reference 
> to it and removed it; all I could get was the reference).  It was something 
> about the horse lineage being bogus.  Coffin's conclusion is that all the 
> horse fossils represent changes in a "basic created horse kind".

Sounds like our recent "but it was still a wallaby" poster. How convenient
to dismiss Eohippus as not being related to horses. When Eohippus appeared,
it was just another cony-like animal. Why not say that horses and rabbits
are just changes within the same "basic created cony kind"? But then you
have the fossil transition connecting the mammals with the reptiles and
showing very nicely the transformation of the jaw structure. So maybe
horses, rabbits, humans, and snakes are all just changes in the "basic
created vertebrate kind".

> Question and Answer Session
> 
> 1. The flood caused the deposition of virtually the entire geological 
> record.  He discussed the basic "hydrological sorting" argument.  
> The order he claimed is reasonable by hydrological sorting is:
> 	1) Sea bottom creatures
> 	2) Swimming fish
> 	3) Sea shore creatures and plants
> 	4) Amphibians
> 	5) Reptiles
> 	6) Mammals
> 	7) Birds
> He claimed that the order above matches the order in the geological column.

And here is where the Burgess Shale zaps him. The Burgess fauna were buried
in a mudslide. No opportunity for hydrological sorting or differential
mobility to work. Examples of 20 groups of now extinct arthropods (there are
currently 3 groups of arthropods, which account for 80% of all animal
species) -- more diversity in this one quarry than in all the modern oceans
-- and one lousy little worm-like chordate. No "modern" fish. Zero. None.
This is even worse for Flood Geology than the problem of the missing
angiosperms.

> 3. He said that because it is clear that the dinosaurs disappear 
> suddenly in the fossil record, that it seems likely that they all died 
> in the flood.

Suddenly is right. Very suddenly. The old conventional wisdom was that most
dinosaurs had bit the dust before the C-T boundary, and any impact that
occured didn't make much difference -- the extinction had already mostly
occured. People went back and looked harder at previously examined
formations. They found dinosaurs that were supposedly already extinct closer
and closer to the C-T boundary layer.  See Gould's essay in one of the last
couple issues of NATURAL HISTORY -- they're found right up to the C-T
boundary, then zap.  Interesting how the hydrological sorting deposited the
same iridium enriched clay, fractured quartz, etc. (in a very thin layer, I
might add) just above the dinosaurs at multiple sites.

Karl
Newsgroups: talk.origins