If you really want to understand evolution, posting a bunch of quotes from the first creationist website that shows up on google on an internet forum is not an effective way to do this.
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Originally Posted by questor
Quote:'' Tiktaalik is a transitional fossil; it is to tetrapods what Archaeopteryx is to birds. While neither may be ancestor to any living animal, they serve as proof that intermediates between very different types of vertebrates did once exist. '' This indicates that out of the thousands of fossils, two transitional were found? Is there any line of succession we can follow either backward or forward?
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You should try a scientific source or wikipedia before looking to creationist websites questor.
THere are a great many transitional forms found, those are just two historically significant ones:
List of transitional fossils - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Of course, most creationists at this point backpedal and then claim that they would need to see every single animal in a continuous gradation before they would accept this. Fortunately, with the help of DNA evidence, we can see how long ago lineages diverged and just how closely animals are related, and all of them share one common ancestor. Of course, all of this evidence is meaningless to creationists who already have their minds made up.
I also posted a summary of the transition in the lineage of elephants from a probing nose to the trunk over here, with several transitional fossils mentioned:
http://hypography.com/forums/biology...tml#post247324
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Originally Posted by questor
The Project Steve proves nothing to me. You could have a million signatures on a subject and still be wrong.
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That was the point. Science is not done by getting signatures. I now quote from the Project Steve page:
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Creationists draw up these lists to try to convince the public that evolution is somehow being rejected by scientists, that it is a "theory in crisis." Not everyone realizes that this claim is unfounded. NCSE has been asked numerous times to compile a list of thousands of scientists affirming the validity of the theory of evolution. Although we easily could have done so, we have resisted. We did not wish to mislead the public into thinking that scientific issues are decided by who has the longer list of scientists!
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You yourself just quoted one of these laughable lists. Had you actually read the project steve page, you would have seen that getting a bunch of signatures was not their point at all.
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Originally Posted by questor
If evolution to you is variation in a species due to environmental factors, I say yes, they are readily observable. If evolution means all life descended from a primordial soup, I say give some hard evidence. Several of the quotes were from Darwin himself.
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The quotes from Darwin were obviously out of context, and the pefectly adequate answer by Darwin ignored. The lack of transitional forms is only briefly mentioned in the chapter "Difficulties On Theory", and is dealt with more extensively in chapter 9 on "The Imperfection of the Geological Record". I now quote from the segment cherry-picked to show that he offers an explanation(bolded) that was also offered in this thread:
Literature.org - The Online Literature Library
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Originally Posted by Darwin
On the absence or rarity of transitional varieties.—As natural selection acts solely by the preservation of profitable modifications, each new form will tend in a fully-stocked country to take the place of, and finally to exterminate, its own less improved parent or other less-favoured forms with which it comes into competition. Thus extinction and natural selection will, as we have seen, go hand in hand. Hence, if we look at each species as descended from some other unknown form, both the parent and all the transitional varieties will generally have been exterminated by the very process of formation and perfection of the new form.
But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? It will be much more convenient to discuss this question in the chapter on the Imperfection of the geological record; and I will here only state that I believe the answer mainly lies in the record being incomparably less perfect than is generally supposed; the imperfection of the record being chiefly due to organic beings not inhabiting profound depths of the sea, and to their remains being embedded and preserved to a future age only in masses of sediment sufficiently thick and extensive to withstand an enormous amount of future degradation; and such fossiliferous masses can be accumulated only where much sediment is deposited on the shallow bed of the sea, whilst it slowly subsides. These contingencies will concur only rarely, and after enormously long intervals. Whilst the bed of the sea is stationary or is rising, or when very little sediment is being deposited, there will be blanks in our geological history. The crust of the earth is a vast museum; but the natural collections have been made only at intervals of time immensely remote.
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Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all the species of the same group together, must assuredly have existed; but the very process of natural selection constantly tends, as has been so often remarked, to exterminate the parent forms and the intermediate links. Consequently evidence of their former existence could be found only amongst fossil remains, which are preserved, as we shall in a future chapter attempt to show, in an extremely imperfect and intermittent record.
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Darwin gives the same explanation that is valid today. The odds that a body will fossilize are very low. If you doubt this, go kill a bunch of animals and try to have them preserved outside. You will find that only in certain rare naturally occurring scenarios will this happen. The fossil record looks exactly how evolutionary biologists and paleontologists would expect it to.
