Lots has happened since W & C you know. Rather lots.
But in the meantime, alien DNA or not, you are good with the 30 million (+/- 20 million) species evolving from this bit of alien DNA? Cool. You stand out from this crowd of antis.
No, I think that is BULLSCHIT as well. Miller-Urey notwithstanding, the entire evolution enterprise is a [bleep] fraud, it always has been.
THERE ARE NO TRANSITIONAL FOSSILS, NONE. Darwin predicted they would be found, they obstinantly refuse to turn up.
You're right a lot has been learned about the cell since the 50's, it is a LOT more complicated than even they thought at the time. This means it is even less probable/possible for mankind to have ever crawled out of the slime.
It never happened dude. You figure out what your alternative belief system should be. I already have.
There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of transitional fossils that have been found.
So, a past curator of the British Museum is FOS? He said he didn't [bleep]' have any. I guess you had 'em hid out.
Imagine Red on the 70's show.....
"DUMBASS!"
I couldn't stay away, I had to hear what Take_A_ Knee had come up when he was standing around thinking and scratching his balls, maybe even wondering why he had a seam on his scrotum. (Reference to an earlier thread).
Here's the past curator of the British Museum of Natural History.
Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History.
I decided to get to the bottom of the matter. The quote is from a personal letter dated 10th April 1979 from Dr. Patterson to creationist Luther D. Sunderland and is referring to Dr. Patterson's book "Evolution" (1978, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.). My first step was to read the book. (I believe it is now out of print, but most university libraries should have a copy.) Anyone who has actually read the book can hardly say that Patterson believed in the absence of transitional forms. For example (p131-133):
"In several animal and plant groups, enough fossils are known to bridge the wide gaps between existing types. In mammals, for example, the gap between horses, asses and zebras (genus Equus) and their closest living relatives, the rhinoceroses and tapirs, is filled by an extensive series of fossils extending back sixty-million years to a small animal, Hyracotherium, which can only be distinguished from the rhinoceros-tapir group by one or two horse-like details of the skull. There are many other examples of fossil 'missing links', such as Archaeopteryx, the Jurassic bird which links birds with dinosaurs (Fig. 45), and Ichthyostega, the late Devonian amphibian which links land vertebrates and the extinct choanate (having internal nostrils) fishes. . ." Patterson goes on to acknowledge that there are gaps in the fossil record, but points out that this is possibly due to the limitations of what fossils can tell us. He finishes the paragraph with:
". . .Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else." It is actually this statement which is the key to interpreting the Sunderland quote correctly; it is not possible to say for certain whether a fossil is in the direct ancestral line of a species group. Archaeopteryx, for example, is not necessarily directly ancestral to birds. It may have been a species on a side-branch. However, that in no way disqualifies it as a transitional form, or as evidence for evolution. Evolution predicts that such fossils will exist, and if there was no link between reptiles and birds then Archaeopteryx would not exist, whether it is directly ancestral or not. What Patterson was saying to Sunderland was that, of the transitional forms that are known, he could not make a watertight argument for any being directly ancestral to living species groups.
