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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Harry" data-source="post: 891221" data-attributes="member: 5468">It is straightforward to discuss evolutionary biology without recourse to religion or politics, but as the creationist movement is solely religious / political, problems will arise at that point.  For example, the support for William Dembski's flawed attempt to treat evolutionary biology according to his theories of information sounds scientific as I write it here, but his support (and his argument, at its base) is in splinter religion and splinter politics.  Please see scientific evaluations of Dembski's work here:<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/design/faqs/nfl/" target="_blank">http://www.talkorigins.org/design/faqs/nfl/</a>Forgive me if this seems pedantic, but on such small details hang a lot of the opposition.  Evolutionary biology traces the links between early life and current life, among other things.  To speak of evolution in this way implies the common, but false, image of evolution as a ladder with us at the top, chimps one step down, chickens a little lower, and so on to amoebas.  Everything on Earth is just as "evolved" as everything else.  Sorry for the interruption, ust wanted to make that clear.How so?A simple example:  Archeopterix lithographica commonly held up as the poster child of evolution -- a clear cut case of a dinosaur-bird hybrid, right?  Wrong.  Archeopterix springs out of the fossil record like Athena from Zeus's head, fully formed with fully formed flight feathers, and there are no precursors anywhere in the fossil record to explain where it comes from.  Not only that, the closest relative it has amongst dinosaurs embarassingly occur many tens of millions of years later, in the mid Cretaceous.  ..., and all sides conveniently ignore glaring holes that remain unexplained.[/B]</blockquote>I am alive right now, as are not only my parents but a number of my uncles and aunts.  It is not necessary for all of a creature's evolutionary precursors and "relatives" to be extinct for a species to exist.If you are saying that a theory must fully map out all the lines of descent of all living creatures, especially given how rarely fossilization will occur, then you have set up an impossible - and I would say unreasonable- standard.Archeopterix does not spring out fully formed - the skeletal structures clearly illustrate relationships between that life form and other life forms that preceded it.[/QUOTE]

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