excellent responses ros and ray. However, I still get back to rl's thesis
Quote: When evolutionists state, 'Species X appears in the fossil record at this juncture' , then we are not discussing it's total absence. My point is that just because we do not have fossils of Species X from earlier periods does not mean they did not exist earlier, even back to the beginning.
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See what I mean? It strongly implies that everything living harkens back, immutably, to "the beginning". As ros said, we have no evidence that what rl implies has occured, in fact we have evidence of just the opposite, that organisms , through time have adapted to changing environments by leaving fossil evidence of their own morphological changes. The systematics are quite compelling and robust . My biggest argument(and I must leave it at that , is that the systematics of morphological change through time are very useful disgnostic tools. We use the fossil species radiation data to correlate to continental margins and continental breakup "dates". The morphological evolution of specific microfossils are quite useful in detecting specific mineral and most petroleum deposits. This is all done by applying the predictive mechanisms inferred from natural selection and geological distribution diagrams.
For example,Most coal deposits are taken for granted today but the early discovery of unique deposits called "cyclothems" coupled with basal conglomerates and containing evidences of specific series of plants, were responsible for an early application transfer to detect these fields from English and Welsh coalfields to the Paleozoic coals of the Appalachian US and Canada and Russia. Today we dont even bat an eye at these applications, in fact a geologically savvy child could find productive coal measures just from stratigraphy and evolution data.
Most museum and academic paleontologists haveno connections to the real world applications of their findings, and most of those that do are employed by resource companies and most are tied to strict confidentiality agreements (including yours truly). The oil companies are most famous for "locking up" their findings for years after their field discoveries are made because they are not interested in sharing the knowledge , but of protecting their "intellectual property" to enhance their market share. The recent mega gas field finds in the Trenton Black River Formations of the Eastern US are still not written up in detail in journals. The discovery , as far as the oil companies are sharing now, relate to a unique geochemical pathway that is related to a type of depositional environment that is interpretable by a series of fossil sequences . Evolution of organisms wasnt responsible for the gas, but was responsible for the ability to locate and isolate the field.
The ability to apply these findings in the field, to utilitarian (applied ) sciences and not just be part of intellectual patois, drives the Creationists nuts. What is predictable and works in the field, is, as ray said, merely an inferential thingy, but its damn hard to deny when it works.
By the way, by the development of microgeophysics and the systematics of geological distribution of specific fossil sequences has taken oil exloration from a hit or miss inexact science to a highly accurate applie mix of science and engineering. 50 years ago we wouldnt have been able to "slant" drill a wellfield and tap its mass from just one spot, now, thanks to foram evolution and "diagenetic baking" we can spend lots less money in developing fields
However, having said that, one must approach these data with an open mind and no preset worldviews. We have very few Creationist geologists, and those we do have , arent in the marketplace of the applied. (Or they havent had a great success trail).
