Post Mortem on the debunked horse series

Bob

I have had you all along. There can be no doubt.

YOu blathered on for pages about the "discredited" horse sequence that "never happened in nature."

As we went along, you were never able to present a single fact, just your quotes.

As we went along, we began to put your quotes into context to show what the authors meant. We were even able to use your own quotes.

You quotes Simpson as saying that it "never happened in nature." But when we look at the rest of that quote, we see that what never happened was continuous orthogenetic changes in horse evolution. He did not say that horse evolution itself did not happen.

But it gets even better. In a momentary lapse of reason, several actually, you then follow this up by quoting Simpson where he says that the horse sequence shows "continuous phyletic evolution." That was not a good quote for your cause.

So we have seen where even though Marsh was working with an incomplete series, (it should be noted that ALL series are more or less incomplete) he was able to get most of the details of horse evolution right.

Even the series of eight fossils that he had we put into the horse series correctly.

The only significant mistake he made was on the tempo of change. With only eight fossils, he mistakenly assumed that they were all part of an unbroken, gradual change. He did not have enough information to deduct the actual jerky, branching pattern.

Now this was his only significant mistake and it does not in the least case any problems with all the other parts that he got right.

Now you have thrown the word "fraud" around on this thread like it was about to be banned from the language and your wanted to get your lifetime of allotted uses in. But never have you made a case for how Marsh committed fraud by finding fossils and then correctly deducing all major parts of the story correctly for which he had information.

YOu keep calling the series discredited and debunked, but you have not even made a case for this. ALL major features of the horse series as proposed by Marsh still stand. The only real detail that has changed in the horse theory has been the pace of change.

This hardly sounds like an idea that has been abandoned and discredited. It is an idea that has been modified in an overall minor way.

And you have not made a case for anything different. Perhaps in your own mind you have done so. But I doubt any person who did not have their mind made up could read this thread and think that you have shown anyhting like what you think you have shown.

The perponderance of the evidence is against you. Tough.

You have not even been able to bring any facts or any references to bear. YOu have nothing but your quotes. And when we show what the authors intended, you loose even your beloved quotes.

Of course learning the truth behind the quotes does not stop you from continuing to misrepresent what the good men had to say.

And there we are able to tie back in to the evil doings that YECism brings to otherwise good men. It is a tool of Satan. And he welds it well.

 

Now, where exactly is it that "I got you"?

Well, as we have seen for pages, I have had you all along. You have misused quotes and failed to make a good case for what you claim.

But what I have been missing and what I have been asking for is for you to actually give us a single fact that supports your assertions.

You have been giving us all of these assertions that amounted to unique interpretaions of the quotes you have been providing.

The challenge to you had been to find any facts, any facts at all that would support your story. You never even attempted to do so. You never once tried to give a single fact that supported your story. You preferred to ride on your quotes, ignoring that obseravtion that your use of the quotes was contrary to how the wuthors inteded them.

But you finally gave us a "fact." You said "the modern Equus and Hyracotherium co-existed at the same time, since they are often found together in the same rock layers."

But your fact is not true.

Your only fact simply does not exist.

And to demonstrate this, I have asked you to provide documentation of where these two have been found together. It is a simple request. It is based on something you brought up.

But my how hard you tried to convince us that you do not need to provide such a reference.

Nice job at evasion. But it won't fly.

Provide a reference for your claim or withdraw it.

I can make this thread even more boring that it has already been. I can make this thread even more repetitive than it has already been. (Remember the months I spent hounding you to provide a document to support your assertion that a prominent Archaeopteryx conference said that it was just a bird? Yet another of your "facts" which you made up from whole cloth and could never support.)

I can ask you for support for your assertion after every post you make for a while.

But would it not be easier for you to either provide a source or to admit that you do not have one.

And I realize that many YEers alledge this "fact." So it does not do to simply refer to someone else making the claim without evidence. We need the original citation of where they were found together. YOu know, the original paper where the person who found them together published his original work.

And I have afew things for you to chew on. First look at this.



You will see that the two you say are together are separated by about 50 million years.

Now check this out.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/eohippus_equus.html

THis is the origin of your baseless "fact." You might want to read it before you respond. Because if you make any of the mistakes that have already been pointed out, there is now no excuse for you.

So where is your evidence for your solitary "fact?"

 

Poor Bob.

All you can do is fall back on your poor out of context quotes. It must be rough be so fdact poor that you must take quotes out of context in order to try and build a case.

Poor, poor Bob.

"The entire point of the thread is to CONTRAST the sequences FOUND IN the fossil record VS the ones that are simply MADE UP to "fit a story". Surely you remember that -- right?"

How quickly you forget.

Now if you remember, back in this post

http://www.baptistboard.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php/topic/66/131/9.html#000122

I gave you the fossil proto horses available to Marsh. They were Anchippus, Anchitherium, Equus, Hipparion, Miohippus, Orohippus, Pliohippus and Protohippus.

Now tell us just where his inclusion of these fossil horses has been discredited.

Tell just who says that any of these really are not part of the lineage leading to horses.

You cannot do so. So your assertion is false.

"#2. OBVIOUSLY the chart you just presented is NOT A SEQUENCE FOUND in the fossil record anywhere on earth!!

Rather it is "an arrangement" (just as Marsh would have done it) - since in fact the sequence you show above can not be reproduced such that only those specific horse fossils appear at each layer at any given site!!"

Everyone watch Bob move the goalposts here.

Now I cannot go to any one site and find all of my relatives stacked up either. Even in the course of the last hundred years my family has moved around quite a bit.

So why is it that you insist that all fossil horses be available in one location over a time span of tens of millions of years?

It is because you do not have an argument to make so instead you suggest unreasonable and illogical demands hoping that no one will see through your fallacy.

But the point still remains that your claim was that "the modern Equus and Hyracotherium co-existed at the same time, since they are often found together in the same rock layers."

But they are not ever found together are they?

You have made up a fact out of whole cloth and you refuse to support the assertion.

You cannot support it because it is false.

"#3. The PAGE ONE POST ONE challenge for you was to SHOW that the fossil record of Marsh's day actually showed the very SEQUENCE (in the layers) that he NEEDED for his story to work out INSTEAD of having MULTIPLES fossils at EACH layer leaving him with nothing better to do than PICK AND CHOOSE sequences friendly to his bias prejudice and "story telling"."

You have not given us a single reference to show that fossils were found together that should not have been. You have absolutely no basis for this assertion.

Yet it has not stopped you from repeating it ad nausem.

 

I guess we can pretty much ignore the repeated quotes. We have shown where Bob uses them in a mannrer contrary to the author's intent.

"Here we have your duplicity exposed. you claim that "When you quote me" you have FACTS to prove or disprove some argument or point I have made."

YOu made the assertion. YOu provide the citation.

It is really hard to argue against someone who repeatedly changes their assertions and then refuses to provide references to support their assertions. Perhaps one day you will see the need to provide data to support your reinterpretaion of your quotes.

"But when I quote Simpson, Eldredge, Patterson, Gould, etc "what THOSE recognized sources say" contain NO FACTS AT ALL according to an obscure quote from "you". (As you continue to deny that there is air)."

How difficult it must be to be a YEer and have no facts to work with.

What never existed in nature was orthogenetic change. Waht was lamentable was that decades after discovering that the change was phyletic, the museum still had an old orthogenetic display.

Your assertions to the contrary do not change these facts.

"Matthew has shown and insisted that Hyracotherium (including Eohippus) is so primative that it is not much more definitely equid than tapir, rhinocerotid, etc, but it is customary to place it at the root of the equid group.
G.G. Simpson, as quoted by Kerkut in Implications of evolution "

Another Bob mistake in choosing this quote.

The same ancestor DID give rise to both the horses and the rhinos and the tapirs as documented by the fossil record that Bob claims is so flawed. The connection has been confirmed by genetic testing.

Use of mitochondrial DNA sequences to test the Ceratomorpha (Perissodactyla:Mammalia) hypothesis, C. Pitra and J. Veits, Journal of Zoological Systematics & Evolutionary Research, Volume 38 Issue 2 Page 65 - June 2000.

"Calling a badger a horse. The first of the horses has been called "Eohippus" (dawn horse), but experts frequently prefer to call it Hyracotherium, since it is like our modern hyrax, or rock badger Some museums exclude Eohippus entirely because it is identical to the rabbit-like hyrax (daman) now living in Africa."

Oh bob. Another false claim which you cannot support.

Here is the skull of Hyracotherium.



And here is the skull of a Hyrax.



Do those two look like the same animal to you?

A picture really is worth a thousand words.

""The first animal in the series, Hyracotherium (Eohippus) is so different from the modern horse and so different from the next one in the series that there is a big question concerning its right to a place in the series . . [It has] a slender face with the eyes midway along the side, the presence of canine teeth, and not much of a diastema (space between front teeth and back teeth), arched back and long tail."—H.G. Coffin, Creation: Accident or Design? (1969), pp. 194-195."

A YE quote. YOu know that such an assertion demands evidence from the literature. YEers tend to just make things up. In any case, secondary sourses are not sourses at all.

 

"Imaginary, not real. The sequence from small many-toed forms to large one-toed forms is completely absent in the fossil record. Some smaller creatures have one or two toes; some larger ones have two or three."

Completely false. For this transition see

Merychippus primus
M. sejunctus
M. isonesus
M. intermontanus
M. stylodontus
M. carrizoensis
Dinohippus spectans
D. interpolatus
D. leidyanus

Once again a YEer has claimed that something never existed which is well known to have existed.

 

"Number of rib bones. The number of rib bones does not agree with the sequence. The four toed Hyracothedum has 18 pairs of ribs; the next creature has 19; there is a jump to 15; and finally back to 18 for Equus, the modern horse."

First off, you do not even tell us which horses had which number of ribs. Well, except for the endpoints which have the same number.

Second, in light of the overall jerky nature of horse evolution (remember your Simpson quote talking about the lack of sustained trends?), why do you think it shows horse evolution to not have happened at all for the number of rib pairs to have varied slightly above and below some value?

Finally, just how hard do you expect it would be to change the timing of some homeobox genes slightly to change the number of pairs of the same thing being produced in fairly large numbers? Do you assert that this is too difficult a step?

 

There's the additional hitch that rib numbers are not always constant in a species. Most people have 12 pairs, but some people have one pair more or less.

 

" No transitional teeth. The teeth of the "horse" animals are either grazing or browsing types. There are no transitional types of teeth between these two basic types. of teeth between these two basic types."

There seems to be a pattern developing.

Hyracotherium had very generalized browsing teeth. It had 3 incisors, 1 canine, 4 distinct premolars and 3 molars used in grinding foos which had cusps which were slightly connected with low crests.

In Orohippus, the last premolar had turned into a molar and the crests were more pronounced indicating a change to tougher plant material in its diet.

In Epihippus another premolar had become a molar which gave it 5 teeth for grinding.

Next, in Mesohippus, yet another premolar had become a molar giving it 6 grinding teeth. The shape of the molars was still much like that of Orohippus with slightly more raised crests than Hyracotherium.

In Miohippus, an extra crest began to appear. This would become a defining trait of horse teeth.

In Parahippus we saw a change in the cusps of the teeth, a series of stronger crests for grinding and taller tooth crowns.

In Merychippus, we see the teeth become very high crowned and a continuation of the grazing crests that we saw devloping in Parahippus.

We could continue but your assertion has been shown to be completely baseless.

Again.

 

"Not from in-order strata. The "horse" creatures do not come from the "proper" lower-to-upper rock strata sequence. (Sometimes the smallest "horse" is found in the highest strata.)"

This is merely a repeat of your earlier assertion for which you have not provided support.

As I am still waiting for you to tell us which fossils are not found in the right places there is really nothing to which I can respond.

 

"I guess now you are back to "denying that there is air" when it comes to "Facts found in quotes" eh?

Get well soon!

It is not "surprising" that atheist darwinists are "atheist darwinists". How many times does this fact have to be brought to your attention? A zillion??"

[YAWN]

If only your assertions were true. But, as has been shown, the authors of your quotes did not intend them in the manner you use them. For example, all Simpson said "did not exist in nature" was a continuous, orthogenetic horse lineage. He did say that there was a "continuous phyletic" lineage however.

"Now while I have you apparently conscious for a few seconds let me just introduced you to one more "detail" from PAGE ONE!! The salient point is that Marsh ARRANGED WHAT HE HAD instead of REPORTING the arrangement that was known NOT to be LAYERED in the fossile record AS HE represented!!"

Yes, please keep asserting this without providing any documentation. We all enjoy seeing you make assertions and then try and squirm out of requests to support them.

We can't get you to provide facts to support your alternate interpretations of the quotes and we cannot get you to provide facts that support your assertion that the orders are all mixed up.

"#1. After whining incesantly that I am QUOTING atheist darwinists you NOW WHINE about one quote from an YE source??

Can you say "duplicitous"??

#2. After whining that "quotes are not facts" you now say that I have to "quote the literature" would that be "a darwinist" author??"

YOu have no earthly idea how to get a quote that actually matters in a debate, do you?

Quotes of opinion are not facts.

Now if you want to quote the results of study, that is more than welcome.

But that means you need to quote the primary literature or at least be able to provide references to such.

The problem with your quote of a YE source is not that it is YE. THe problem is that there is nothing to support it. You can quote a YE source all you wish, but if facts from primary literature do not exist to substantiate what is being claimed, then it is a quote without any basis in fact.