rlQuote: Do you seriously propose that a fish 'crawled out onto the land', his descendants evolved into hoofed land-dwelling mammals and then one of them 'walked back into the sea' , as it were, and his descendants evolved into whales and dolphins?
First off, Deschlers paper didnt talk about crawling out on land. YET. His evidence , from two separate locations , each about 10 to 20 million years apart in stratigraphic chronology, show the morphological development of limb and skelatal features of a bony fish , these features clearly show a convergence onto a body plan that is antecedent of tetrapodal structures. The fish found in Pa had detailed , fully functional limbs and weight bearing skeletal features , the specimens from Ellsmere, the earlier forms, just showed the beginnings of these adaptive structures.
The geological significance ws that in both cases, the animals lived in braided shallow streams in an increasingly tropical environment. Sure theres inferential conclusions. However, no conclusions that Creationists offer can even include one aspect of the finds in a spectrum of events that "make sense".
As far as the story of the development of the Cetaceans and Sirenians and Pinnepeds, the similar evidence of developmental morphology can be easily discerned from the fossils that have been found in and around the Indian Ocean. The stratigraphy is similar in that the environments were of shallow prograding seas. The chronology ws able to be discerned by remnant magnetism and radioisotopes. The skeletal morphologies were able to be systematically classified as Cetaceans (due to facial and nares structures and ear ossicles).
It fits nicely . In the case of the whales, the evolution was adaptive, its too early to fully understand Deschlers finds, in an evolutionary pattern sense.
The entire problem of you Creationists is that you rely upon a false place of comfort that includes a kind of twisted logic that goes something like,
"We are here right now, anything thats gone on before, we cant possibly know about. We dont trust or like science especially when a number of disciplines coalesce into a simple but elegant explanation of the rise of life"
You (meaning Creation "scientists") dont even attempt to gather any information or evidence that supports their beliefs. At least Id want to have some data that shows that wooly mammoths lived at the dawn of time, since such a proposition is vital, nay indespensible to your beliefs. CReationists make no pretenses about their own lack of "expeditions of discovery". I think theyre afraid of what they may find. Its always good to keep a legend alive by ignorance.You can keep embellishing your stories with snippets of legend and myth.
Data and evidence always get in the way of keeping alive the stories Loch Nessies , Bigfeet, and worldwide floods and 6000 year old planets.
The way that Creationists try to discount the basics that science has provided, makes them, to me, seem like just another bunch of followers of Ned Lud.
