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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 891534" data-attributes="member: 2205">Well, yes and no.  Some life forms are clearly more derived that others, and on such rests cladistic analysis.  I'm not sure how anything I said implies that evolution has been leading up to humans or anything like that; certainly humans are a life form that lives currently, but as you say, if evolution works at all as posited, then it could just as well have given us something else.I gave one example.  In dinosaur paleontology there are dozens of other examples I can think of easily.  Ceratopsians are supposed to have arisen from something very similar to Psittacosaurus for example.  But not exactly, because Psittacosaurus has certain derived features that disqualify it for ancestry.  My example with Archeopterix is another.No, no clearly and closely related species appear until tens of millions of years later, when there is a virtual explosion of closely related (although clearly flightless and not necessarily feathered) relatives in the form of the Maniraptoriformes.  I don't certainly require that all living forms be fossilized and catalogued, but that particular incident is most embarrassing for the dinosaur-bird hypothesis, and is one that it's detractors (who come from the Protoavis camp, or the "thecodont" camp) hold up in askance to the theory.  It's not something that alone could kill the theory, because the "blotchiness" of the fossil record is certainly a well-known attribute, but at the same time, this particular absense is very glaring and very hard to explain.Certainly Einstein's theory replaced Newton's.  That doesn't imply that it didn't derive from Newton's earlier work -- Newton's work is quite accurate despite it's lack of refinements, and as I understand it (not having the level of expertise that you do) Einstein's work itself will probably require more refinement yet, as it doesn't completely describe what we see in some extreme situations, such as supermassive black holes and the like, but Einstein's "refinements" over Newton's earlier work increased our understanding of the universe on an order of magnitude not seen in many, many years.  I am quite well aware of the nature of Newton's theories to Einstein's and picked that example for a reason.  Evolution is a very useful tool.  The relationships between species that it allows us to construct, especially with the tool of cladistic analysis, is most probably entirely correct.  But it's explanation of exactly how that happened is full of holes, conjecture and speculation.</blockquote>

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