Hey Creationists! It's been a while and i'm ready for some more debates about EVOLUTION! Yeah!

@MalteseFalconPunch Where do you even read that in anything I have said or written. The universe and the life withing it is in constant flux and has been since it began. What I am simply and repeatedly pointing out is that those who limit themselves to pure physicality lose perspective and insight. As I pointed out to someone else. "Here is a bucket of nothing. Now bring about a broad spectrum of life we see everywhere we look. Those who are in the scientism cult are functioning at a lobotomy victim's level.

@MalteseFalconPunch That guy is a troll. No need to even bother with them.

@hippyjoe1955 So, now you want to not only avoid addressing the genetic evidence, you also want to avoid addressing fossil evidence?

Well, OK... looks like we're going to be busy!

To show gradual evolutionary change within a single lineage, you need a good succession of sediments, preferably laid down quickly (so that each time period represents a thick slice of rock, making change easier to see)

Very small marine organisms, such as plankton, are ideal for this. There are countless billions of them, many with hard parts, and they conveniently fall directly to the seafloor after death, piling up in a continuous sequence of layers. Sampling the layers in order is easy: you can thrust a long tube into the seafloor, pull up a columnar core sample, and read it from bottom to top (Well, it sounds easy, but marine scienists tell me that it's technically extremely demanding)

Nevertheless, the results are well worth the effort. Tracing a single fossil species through a two-hundred-meter-long core sample taken from the ocean floor near New Zealand (representing eight million years of evolution) gave an [u]unbroken[/u] fossil sequence as the marine foraminiferan [i]Globorotalia conoidea[/i] diverged into a new species. The same method, using an eighteen-meter-long core extracted near Antarctica (representing two million years of sediments) allowed us to see the [u]unbroken[/u] fossil sequence as [i]Eucyrtidium calvertense[/i] gradually diverged into the new species [i]Eucyrtidium matuyamai[/i]

I could fill our day with such examples (and that's exactly what I intend to do... for variety, we'll discuss [i]Tiktaalik roseae[/i] next).

Before that, however, I was wondering, Joe, what your reaction is to my statement that all fossils are transitional fossils. Additionally, I was wondering if you realise that 'transitional species' is not the same thing as 'ancestral species'?

I ask because I'd like to avoid the confusion and misunderstandings that often arise when creationists try to discuss fossils, so I'd like to get those two points cleared up from the outset.


In the meantime, let's look at retroviruses in apes...