The woolly mammoth and evolution...

This isn't a blow to evolution because evolution isn't about "better-equipped" animals according to some arbitrary scale of equipping.

So even if mammoths appear to be more "advanced" in certain features which probably lead them to thrive in the environment they found themself in, there was an obvious change in the environment that their "advances" could not survive through and they eventually died off. And evolution doesn't say that elephants are directly descended from mammoths, but that they probably had a common ancestor.

As populations diverge and evolve different characteristics and genetic makeups, they tend to lose the ability to reproduce with each other, one of the markers of speciation.

 

But obviously there was an environmental change(increased predation? inability to access food?) that even their "advances" couldn't survive. Natural selection isn't about survival of any particular types of traits, but those that can endure in that particular environment.

In a radical change in environment like nuclear holocaust, most "advanced" life forms would not survive while some of the more "simple" ones might. That is natural selection at work.

What you have just described is one mechanism of evolution, natural selection.

The science of taxonomy involves creating groupings that are arbitrary collections of living organisms based on common traits. So depending on how you classify and how fine your comb is, yes they are the same type of animal. Is a pygmy elephant a different creature from an African elephant? They have many shared characteristics, but they obviously also have many different ones resulting in a separate classification.
BBC : Borneo elephants gain recognition

That is a great question. I would like to know how God brought life to those areas and I wonder what evidence and theories about that evidence we have to show us how God did it.

 

Here is a particularly informative presentation on life found in the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park by the Yellowstone Association for Natural Science, History & Education.

Life at High Temperatures

 

That is a great question. I would like to know how God brought life to those areas and I wonder what evidence and theories about that evidence we have to show us how God did it.

Ummm ...ever heard of The flood? Fish do this really cool thing. It's called...swim.


In HIS service;
Jim

 

Just an fyi that in Yellowstone, fish are not found in the hot springs because it is too hot for them to survive. Some are found in the runoff streams from the hot springs where the water is cooler, and are connected to other bodies of water because they are not "sealed systems".

Maybe in other places, there are fish in apparently "sealed" hot springs that are cooler.

 

It appears that one of the most commonly cited fish that live in hot springs is the Australian Desert Goby (Chlamydogobius eremius). However, they are also not found in "sealed system" hot springs but ones that are connected to other bodies of water. And they also have temperatures much cooler than the ones found in Yellowstone.

Australian Desert Fishes - Chlamydogobius eremius

 

GD; Yes I followed the link. thanks, it is pretty cool.

My point should still be true don't you think? God did not have to create them in those sealed environments at all. The flood took care fo that.
It is interesting that there are such organisms found at great depths in the ocean around undersea volcanoes. Hence it is no great leap to assume they were transplanted by the flood into such places as Yellowstone.

BTW: I have been there many times growing up in Idaho and now living in Montana. Beautiful place.

In HIS service;
Jim

 

I agree that they swam there. But no flood was necessary. Those hot springs are not "sealed systems".

Maybe a global flood was involved in fish reaching landlocked bodies of water. But the simpler explanation is that those bodies were not always landlocked.

 

"The woolly mammoth is said by evolutionists to have been the ancestor of today's elephants."

Strike!

These animals are all part of the order Proboscidea. Mammoths and elephants are different families in this order.

Members of Proboscidea evolved from a more generalized odd toed ungulate through creatures like the Embrithopods and Paleomastodon. From here, they split into four different lines. There was Mammutidae, which were the mastadons. There was Gomphotheriidae. There was Stegodontidae. And there was Elephantidae which includes mammoths and true elephants.

Now the Elephantidae line split. One line became the true elephants while the other became the mammoths.

Now I understand that you will not accept this as fact. I even understand that it has not been presented in a convincing manner, merely asserted. But it does show that your very first statement is false. Scientists do NOT say that elephants evolved from mammoths. They share a common ancestor and are different enough to be in different families.

[snip discussion of differences]

You seem here to be trying to build a case that it is a problem for evolution that elephants survived and mammoths did not. How can this be?

I think we will all agree that they both were alive at the same time while mammoths went extinct and elephants did not. What ever forces were sufficient to kill off the mammoths and leave the elephants in one scenario are sufficient for the other scenario. In this case, the case of the extinction of the mammoths most likely was some combination of climate change and hunting.

" Here's a mystery: Most of the whole mammoth bodies found appeared to have died very quickly & unexpectedly, several with mouthfuls of food, with no sign of alarm."

That is an assertion for which you will have to provide some support. I think that there are far more skeletal remains than the few rather well preserved mammoth remains which attract attention. According to this reference (Farrand, William R., 1961. Frozen mammoths and modern geology. Science 133: 729-735.) There have only been 39 frozen mammoths found and of these only 4 were preserved nearly in tact.

"What could've killed them on their feet without leaving any wound? Ther weren't burned, either, nor was radiation involved. There seems only one explanation left...a sudden blast of super-cold air. Their bodies quick-frozen, and not even the intense cold of Siberia in winter could freeze a ten-ton animal that quickly so that no frost formed within their organs."

As shown by the above reference, most were not "killed on their feet" and flash frozen. And most of the frozen mammoths found show evidence of how they got that way, not the mystery you assert. Some froze after sinking into muddy silt. (Guthrie, R. Dale, 1990. Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.) Some were killed by predators and frozen and buried over the winter. (Guthrie, R. Dale, 1990.) Some were frozen after being trapped in a landslide. ( Kurtén, Björn, 1986. How to Deep-Freeze a Mammoth. New York: Columbia University Press.)

So there is no mystery on how the animals were frozen nor do they appear to have been flash frozen by some mystery process.

"It appears that every 15 years, beginning in the early 700s BC, the earth and Mars had "close encounters of the worst kind", as Mars was in a cigar-shaped orbit that intersected the orbit of the earth. Perhaps these near-misses caused atmospheric disturbances and several polar displacements. "

Sheer and utter speculation. What is your evidence for these close encounters of the Mars kind? What perturbed the orbit of Mars? How did it get put back?

"After all, the Ice Ages were MUCH more-recent than first believed."

Would you care to explain this? YOu may want to read this first.

http://130.92.227.10/download/qsr2000-papers/beer.pdf

There is good evidence of climate forcing by regular changes in the orbital parameters of the earth. You may want to tell how you compress the ice ages and still account for the regularity of the changes in atmospheric gas concentrations that match exactly changes in the observed orbit of the earth in the traditional dating methods.

" AT ANY RATE...This is yet another blow against evolution, as the better-equipped mammoth did not live into mpdern times while the elephant did. And besides that, the DNA evidence shows mammoths & elephants to have been so genetically different that they could not have produced an offspring together. In the meantime, the cause of the mammoths' quick-freeze remains a mystery."

At any rate we start with a flase assertion about where elephants came from, followed by a false assertion that mammoths should have survived, followed by a false assertion about mysteriously quick frozen mammoths, followed by some wild unsupported claims about the orbit of Mars and then draw the conclusion that this is a problem for evolution.

This is the problem with YE "science." There is none and claims such as these serve to discredit Christians as a whole. They may sound good to those who already accept the premise, but they crumble like a house of cards when even casually examined.

 

Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species

Woolly Mammoths belonged to an entirely different order than modern elephants? I never would have imagined that.

UT, you mentioned that Mammoths might have, at least partially, succumbed to predators. Was there a creature besides humans that actually preyed on these things?

 

Oops, looks like I misread. Sorry for that.

Same order, different family.

 

I'll bet flies and fleas sure had their day with them.

 

No, they just went to Petsmart and got some Hartz Woolly Mammoth flea & tick preventative. If that didn't work then you had to get them dipped.

 

" Woolly Mammoths belonged to an entirely different order than modern elephants? I never would have imagined that...

...Oops, looks like I misread. Sorry for that. Same order, different family."

Sorry if I was not clear. They are in the same order. They are just different families. There may have been more than one family of mammoth, but I am not sure.

"T, you mentioned that Mammoths might have, at least partially, succumbed to predators. Was there a creature besides humans that actually preyed on these things?"

Saber toothed tigers were capable of killing juvenile mammoths and packs of wolves, dire wolves, could kill adults.

 

"Bot the large gators & small horses wete skeletally the same as today's creatures, which makes quite the strong case for their being anatomically the same save for size."

So if I show some major morphological differences, then that makes it a strong case for them not being the same, right? Comparing Hyracotherium with Equus...

Let's start with the toes. H. walked on pads on the toes, somewhat like the pads of a dog or cat. E. have hooves.

H. had four toes on the front feet and three on the back. E. have one toes on each foot. Two other toes have shrunk into shin splints on each side.

E. walks on the tips of its single big toe. The ligaments that support to weight on this toe are springy giving the foot a spring like action adapted to running.

H. had bones that provided a lot of flexibility of movement and rotation. In E. the radius and ulna have fused together while the fibula has been reduced in size. In E., the joints have lost their rotational flexibility in order to be better adapted to running.

H. had a long narrow skull, with eyes set forward and a small brain. E. has a larger brain with a larger cerebellum and a fissured neocortex. E. has a long, flexible muzzle. E. has the eyes set further back on the skull and a deep jaw.

H. had very generalized, simple browsing teeth. In E. 3 of the 4 premolars of H. have been turned into molars. The molars of E. have high, straight crests with a complicated folding of the enamel specialized for grazing. The incisors are also wider than in H.

H. has a rather flexible spine while E. has a very rigid spine.

E. has proportionally longer legs and neck than H.

These differences do not support the assertion that the only difference between the earliest horses and the modern horses was merely in size. There are significant morphology differences.