Evolution/The Triassic Period

Lightkeeper · #1 (**permalink**) 31st May 2007, 03:30 AM

Quote:

I Believe In Evolution, Except For The Whole Triassic Period

By Stephen Jossler
May 30, 2007 | Issue 43•22
I consider myself a rational person. When I have a question, I turn to science and logic to find the answer. Regarding the origins of life, science tells us that humans evolved from single-celled organisms to our current form through a process of natural selection that took billions of years.

This much is clear to anyone with any background in modern thinking. We can look at the fossil record and trace many of our genetic traits back to ancient species. In fact, scientific reasoning can explain nearly every stage of life from the Big Bang to the present day. I say "nearly" because the period that scientists claim lasted from roughly 205 to 250 million years ago, commonly known as the Triassic period, was quite obviously the work of the Lord God Almighty.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not one of those religious nut cases who denies that evolution is real. Of course evolution is real, just not during the "Triassic period."

This so-called Triassic period saw the formation of scleractinian corals and a slight changeover from warm-blooded therapsids to cold-blooded archosauromorphs. Clearly, such breathtakingly subtle modifications could only have been achieved by an active intelligence.

The secular Triassicists would have you believe that these changes were just the result of millions of years of nature favoring certain genes over others in order to adapt, the same way evolution worked prior to the Triassic. Obviously, that doesn't make any sense. Think about it: I'm supposed to believe that the same process that we know slowly changed us from simple bacteria into highly advanced reptiles over the course of the Paleozoic era is also responsible for turning us into highly advanced reptiles with different body lengths? Do these people ever pause to think how ridiculous they sound as they advance these theories?

For a half-dozen million years, life advanced from prokaryotes to primitive fish to mammal-like reptiles via natural selection, and we're supposed to believe that that just continued happening? I don't think so. Isn't it much more likely that a formless, invisible deity intervened, temporarily stopped the course of evolution, and shaped each and every trilobite over a period of six days? Of course it is, at least to any objective observer.

So, if you follow my reasoning to its logical end, the only sound conclusion is that, at some point, God paused evolution and stepped in, made a few modifications, and boom! Pterosaurs. There is simply no way evolution alone could be responsible for the giant leap between archosaurs and other, different archosaurs with better developed hip joints and slightly differently shaped teeth.

Everything about the Triassic period points to divine involvement. Let me ask you this: Could some kind of random genetic chance make the population of shelled cephalopods grow significantly? No, of course not. So the only logical explanation is that there was an infinite and all-knowing cephalopod creator who modified their mollusk foot into a muscular hydrostat that eventually, on the sixth day, became a tentacle.

So, when I tell you that after the Paleozoic era, Ceratodon lungfish became relatively common, it naturally follows that someone created that lungfish by hand and then took out one of its lungfish ribs and combined it with the dust of the Earth to create a female lungfish.

In the beginning, there were a few billion years of speciation and gene drift. And then nothing. And then, God made the lungfish and the trilobites, the ichthyosaurs and ammonoids with more complex suture patterns. He also made a couple new ferns.

And the Lord saw that these slight modifications were good, and allowed evolution to resume as normal in the Jurassic period and on up to the present day.

Now that I've inarguably proven the truth, we need to take a stand against these pseudoscientists who are misrepresenting 300-million-year-old fossils as 230-million-year-old fossils and claiming the Earth is 44 million years and 51 weeks older than it really is.

We need to get the Triassic period expunged from our public schools' evolutionary textbooks. I don't want my children to be exposed to this blasphemous Triassic garbage, and I assume you don't want your children to be, either. They need to know that God is watching over them always, and that he has a plan for each and every one of them—a nonlinear, probabilistic plan he set in motion more than three billion years ago with single-celled organisms, ended with a group of small, lizard-like herbivores, infused with a bunch of miracles, and then restarted.

We can no longer ignore the empirical evidence.
http://www.theonion.com/content/opin...olution_except

Does he have a case?

Eolas Pellor · #2 (**permalink**) 31st May 2007, 01:36 PM

Of course, the case that this spokeslizard (I am assuming it is a dinosaur speaking) makes is superficially plausible, in much the same way that the cases made by ID advocates is superficially plausible.

Both arguments, fundamanetally, rely on the presumption of "specialness"; humans, in particular tend to harp on this over and over...it's ego-stroking, I expect and, like any other mastubatory behavior, may be pleasant but achieves very little.

**metis** · #3 (**permalink**) 31st May 2007, 06:13 PM

No, he really doesn't have a case at all. When it comes to technology, the rule of thumb is that the more tools you have, the more you can have. Tool cultures tend to expand not arithmetically, but geometrically.

Evolution works much the same way-- the more species you have, the more species you can have and at a geometric rate (as long as the environment allows). And this rapid expansion is not unusual, for we see much the same during the "cambrian explosion".

Of course, what I have posted doesn't disprove or prove there is a deity/deities, but the rapid evolutionary rate at certain times is not unusual.

Shalom,
Vern

Lightkeeper · #4 (**permalink**) 31st May 2007, 11:27 PM

Couldn't the length of time between species have a lot to do with climate, atmospheric conditions, chemicals in the soil or water, etc. Maybe the food the lungfish needed to eat had to evolve before the lungfish evolved.

vivamis123 · #5 (**permalink**) 31st May 2007, 11:50 PM

Quote:
Regarding the origins of life, science tells us that humans evolved from single-celled organisms to our current form through a process of natural selection that took billions of years.

I don't believe he has a case, actually I thought he was joking.

In the movie "What the Bleep do we know?" we see a single-celled organisms popping in and out of existence. Scientist are asking themselves in this movie: Where do the they appear when they are not appearing here? I don't believe they appear anywhere else, I believe that we are witnessing the creation of billions of years in the moment we see.

**metis** · #6 (**permalink**) 3rd June 2007, 11:31 PM

Lightkeeper:>>Couldn't the length of time between species have a lot to do with climate, atmospheric conditions, chemicals in the soil or water, etc. Maybe the food the lungfish needed to eat had to evolve before the lungfish evolved.<<

Absolutely. There can be a great many factors involved many of which we may never know about. And your point is correct in that other organisms that may or may not affect any given species also evolve whereas one may co-depend on the other.

Shalom,
Vern

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