guthrie
Posts: 696
Joined: Jan. 2006
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For those of you still paying attention, Truthiness in science have another blog post up.
Its typical creationist mince.
From their website:
| Quote | | Yesterday’s issue of the journal Nature revealed a new twist in the controversy over the origin of animals. The “oldest known animal fossils” have been reidentified as fossilised giant bacteria. |
So far so good.
| Quote | | The animal fossil record is a conundrum to Darwinists. |
Not if you've actually read the Origin of the species and some of the other books on biology that have been written since then.
| Quote | | All of the main animal groups are found fossilised in Cambrian rocks, but there is little evidence for their ancestors in lower strata |
THats pretty much a lie if talkorigins is to be believed.
| Quote | As fossil expert Philip Donoghue put it in a commentary yesterday: “the degree to which animal evolutionary history extends beyong the Cambrian is a controversy rich in speculation but sparse in evidence.” If yesterday’s reidentification is correct, then the evidence has just become sparser.
In 1998 tiny fossils from southern China were identified as fossil animal embryos, providing evidence for the existence of animals before the Cambrian ‘explosion’. Now it seems that they might not be animals after all, but giant bacteria, similar to species still alive today in seafloor sediments along the Nambian coast. These giant bacteria species are able to control phosphate mineral precipitation and, correspondingly, the fossils are found preserved in calcium phosphate.
The reidentification is still controversial as some aspects of the fossils appear to be different to giant bacteria species today. If anything, the modern species might appear less complex than the fossils, with smaller sized clusters forming, and sometimes an absence of an enveloping membrane. Some of the fossils also seem to contain nuclei, which seems incompatible with them being bacteria.
Problems remain to be resolved, but “No matter” writes Dr Donoghue, “Such quibbles do not diminish the central message of the author’s report, which is that, like all other theories about Precambrian animals, the classification of these fossils is far from resolved, even at the kingdom level.”
As he wrote in the commentary's opening sentence, “The origin of the animals is almost as mysterious as the origin of life itself.” |
Or in other words, TiS still do not have a theory of ID and evidence to back it up, so they resort to slagging off the uncertainties of evolutionary biology.
Not to mention that the Nature article still talks about 600 million years ago, and unsurprisingly TiS do not acknowledge this in their article, possibly because they are all YEC's.
(Except Steve fuller, who is debating Lewis Wolpert in a few weeks. It should be a walkover for Wolpert, assuming proper debate rules are followed)
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