Comment on MBA employee discourages students from attending LSU by Bravus.

You still don’t understand what you’re quoting, Bob.

You say that I should at least show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived. I will lay it on the line- there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no there is no way of answering the question.

It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test. – Colin Patterson, emphasis Bob Ryan’s

Now, actually read what is being said. Patterson is saying that it is impossible to take a particular fossil and know with certainty (including hypothesis testing, the heart of science) that it is the descendent of a particular other fossil or the ancestor of yet another fossil. That is absolutely true, as far as it goes: there is no genetic information involved in most fossils, only information about structure. Yet we see in nature today the same structures in creatures that the DNA shows us are not related in a close familial way.

Take Patterson’s example of archaeopteryx. It was a lizard-like bird or a bird-like lizard that had wings, and something like feathers. It is possible to say quite a lot about its structure, but without its DNA it is impossible to say with certainty that it is the ancestor of all – or even any – modern birds. It may have been a complete evolutionary dead end with no descendants at all, or it may be related to some modern lizards, and so on.

Colin Patterson’s point is that our approach to the fossil record and the Tree of Life (Darwin’s, not the one in the Garden) cannot work at the level of ‘this specific fossil is the ancestor of that specific fossil (or that modern species)’. He’s quite correct to say that if he were to simply make up such a sequence for convenience or to meet the demands of the person to whom he is writing (Sunderland?) then he would simply be story-telling in the absence of a testable hypothesis: not science.

What he is not saying is that all of evolution is simply story-telling, not science, no matter how many times you quote him out of context to make that claim. He would (if he were here to say it) say two things:

1. We can look in considerable detail at the genetic relationships between modern species using DNA evidence, and that evidence strongly bears out the notion of common descent.

2. We can look at the fossil record and the geological column and know that at one stage there were only dinosaurs (including flying ones like the pterosaurs) and at a later stage there were birds. Given the DNA links as well as the structural ones it is plausible that some birds are descended from some dinosaurs: it is if we were to make claims for *particular* cases in the fossil record, such as archaeopteryx, that we would be engaged in story-telling.

You said it yourself:

I am asking for reason and critical thinking, dealing with facts not emotions – and stating what is truth – Bob Ryan

Eminently laudable.

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