There should be transitionals among living creatures
From EvoWiki
Contents |
Claim
There should be transitionals among living creatures, not just between fossils.
Source
- Brown, Walter, n.d. 20 Questions for evolutionists. [1].
Response
- "Transitional" is a term bestowed in retrospect: only after a future branch of species has become established can we look back and declare that some past species (or their living descendants) was transitional. Transitional forms are also defined more by the clues they give to common ancestry than they are about their own direct descent or direct ancestry.
- Common descent requires a continuity among animals over time, but extinction allows for discrete groups of creatures in the present.
- No, there shouldn't. There should be morphological intermediates between living creatures, not transitionals. Transitional fossils illustrate a vertical progression, whereas intermediates illustrate a horizontal progression. Since there can be no depth of time among "living creatures", you can only get intermediates. And yes, there are many.
- Intermediates could never live today because natural selection would have weeded them out.
- In fact all living creatures will be considered 'transitional', except the forms that will go extinct and leave no descendants, because all clades have some features found in the previous clade and some features of the present clade will also found in the future clade.
- The creationists who make this claim are painfully ignorant of ring-species, as well as species gradients.
