Thread:TheSquidychicken/@comment-31308946-20170525193032/@comment-27388204-20170701223756

Before I address your argument, let me state that all of my facts are coming from peer-reviewed journal articles, or at least from credible secular sites, while yours are constantly coming from such biased sources as creation.com and AiG. Now, if we were to use the movement of animals as a reason for their distribution in the fossil record (discounting the dates at which they were layered; I might touch on that later, as I just last night watched an excellent commentary on the Nye/Ham debate by a youtube user and physics major under the name of King Crocoduck), then why, as Mithrandir pointed out, do we find fish, the best swimmers there are, in lower layers than land animals? In addition, how come we find aquatic arthropods in lower layers than the aforementioned creatures. There is simply no way that a lion could stay afloat longer than Anomalocaris, even though the latter is anatomically simpler. Due to the diversity of each of the great groups, we'd expect there to be anomalies all over the fossil record; mammals in Cambrian rocks, reptiles in Silurian rocks, fish in Cryogenian rocks, mammals in Pennsylvanian rocks. Guess what? We don't find any. They are only distributed in a manner which corresponds with evolution (I've mainly only concentrated on the palaeontological aspect of evolution throughout this debate as it is what I am most knowledgeable on; the genetics and morphology of modern animals in considered at least as strong in terms of evidence for evolution).

In regards to fossils being found outside of evolutionarily predicted strata, well, that's not as much of a terminating argument as people like Ken Ham and their followers seem to think. Every fossil found is still found in a location where it is possible to have evolved. One of the best examples, and one which creationists seem most fond of, is the case of a quadrupedal animal being found in older rocks than the infamous transitional form Tiktaalik roseae. So that settles it. Tiktaalik could not have been the ancestor to land vertebrates, but as I stated in regards to Ambulocetus earlier in the thread, it still shows that there were creatures like that in the past. While the ancient tracks did indeed bump our understanding of amphibian evolution back quite a distance, it was still possible for their evolution, as lobe-finned fish, the ancestors of Tiktaalik, were present long before. Tiktaalik is now considered to be most likely one of many cases of morphological preservation/conservation, and there are many instances of that, with scorpions being one of the best and most extreme examples. As a result, it is completely plausible that there were Tiktaalik-like creatures inhabiting the shorelines throughout the early-mid Palaeozoic era.

You see, the thing with you creationists is that you only listen to eachother. I could tell from your knowledge of evolution from the beginning of this thread that you had been reading creationist sites and nothing else. If they say there are no transitional forms, that's good enough for you guys, and when you are presented with counter-evidence, you just repeat the same statements like a broken record. That is just an example. All the creation sites are the very epitomy of poor science: immense presupposition and twisting of existing evidence so it fits in with a pre-determined conclusion. Why do you think that no creationist papers get published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals, while many on evolution have been, and continue to do so? Below is a link to a video by the aforementioned King Crocoduck, where he commentates on the Nye/Ham debate, demonstrating how Ham twists facts while under the clever guise of legitimate science. Please watch the whole thing, and do your research (creation.com, AiG, and Living Waters don't count as legitimate sources).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LITCCA212hg&t=7326s