But should we be talking about a “Big Bang” of birds?

_{Denyse O'Leary

December 13, 2014

Evolution, Intelligent Design, News}

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Does the idea of an “explosion of organisms” reinforce a misleading perspective?

The evidence for intelligent design just keeps getting stronger. It’s long been known that the Cambrian explosion isn’t the only explosion of organisms in the fossil record. There’s also something of a fish explosion, an angiosperm explosion, and a mammal explosion. Paleontologists have even cited a “bird explosion,” with major bird groups appearing in a short time period. Frank Gill’s 2007 textbook Ornithology observes the “explosive evolution” of major living bird groups, and a paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution titled “Evolutionary Explosions and the Phylogenetic Fuse” explains:

A literal reading of the fossil record indicates that the early Cambrian (c. 545 million years ago) and early Tertiary (c. 65 million years ago) were characterized by enormously accelerated periods of morphological evolution marking the appearance of the animal phyla, and modern bird and placental mammal orders, respectively.

Now, a massive genetic study published in Science has confirmed the fossil evidence that birds arose explosively. According to an article titled, “Rapid bird evolution after the age of dinosaurs unprecedented”: More.

Okay, it all happened really fast, and so do explosions. (If it happened really slow, we would call it evolution.)

See the problem? Explosions aren’t just very fast, they are usually destructive. Yes, they can be constructive, but only if controlled for a constructive purpose like blasting a subway tunnel (intelligent design).

What actually happens, whether it’s the origin of the universe or the origin of birds most fits the pattern of a scheduled rollout.

You can often see antecedents, to be sure, as in the dinosaurian traits of birds. But the antecedents do nothing to account for later developments like the “enormously accelerated periods” or “unprecedented” rapidity of constructive change.

Don’t forget, Fred Hoyle called it the Big Bang theory to make fun of it. In doing so, he implanted an idea that fits what we are required to believe, but not what we see. Thoughts?

See: Big Bang exterminator wanted, will train

Comments

ppolish: But they were created in an instant, boom. Birds didn't appear out of nowhere, but were preceded by theropods.Zachriel_{December 13, 2014
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MeThink, never mind the trillions - try to explain the first few birds appearing. Yes, they went forth and multiplied. But they were created in an instant, boom. Bird Explosion Boom.ppolish_{December 13, 2014
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MT #3
Sorry, but there is no known mechanism which helps a single being plan and build trillions of structures and processes in a week.
There is a single being who is known to raise the dead and heal the lame and give sight to the blind instantaneously by His Word. There is a single being who is known who said let their be light and now light is. If that being is the author of time, and He declares the week to which you refer as "creation" week, then I think there is evidence of a known mechanism that can build trillions of structures and processes in a week. At least a more reasonable explanation of the evidence than suggesting billions of years with no known mechanism for getting life, or even information, out of matter and energy.awstar_{December 13, 2014
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Me_think, I suppose He could have built the plans long ago and implemented them in a day. And He didn't have to create every individual at once. But most of us here are old earthers anyway.Collin_{December 13, 2014
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But alas, even when science gets around to proving things evolved very very rapidly in just one day followed by stasis of six thousand years, most people will still thumb their nose at the One who brought it about
Sorry, but there is no known mechanism which helps a single being plan and build trillions of structures and processes in a week.Me_Think_{December 13, 2014
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A literal reading of the fossil record indicates that the early Cambrian (c. 545 million years ago) and early Tertiary (c. 65 million years ago) were characterized by enormously accelerated periods of morphological evolution marking the appearance of the animal phyla, and modern bird and placental mammal orders, respectively.
That "enormously accelerated period of morphological evolution" would be day 5 and day 6 in the literal reading of the Genesis historical account. But alas, even when science gets around to proving things evolved very very rapidly in just one day followed by stasis of six thousand years, most people will still thumb their nose at the One who brought it about.awstar_{December 13, 2014
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This is a revealing quote from the paper:
"The absence of a single gene tree identical to the avian species tree is consistent with studies in yeast, indicating that phylogenetic studies based on one or several genes, especially for rapid radiations, will probably be insufficient." Further down Luskin comments: "The fundamental problem is this: They are finding data that doesn't fit a treelike pattern. But they aren't going to reject common ancestry. They're just going to appeal to ad hoc explanations whenever necessary to explain why the data doesn't fit a tree." http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/12/massive_genetic092001.html
as to this genetic study of birds being 'consistent with studies in yeast', well, it turns out that studies in yeast, as Dr. Hunter has pointed out, have revealed glaring weaknesses in the assumption of common descent:
Here Are Those Incongruent Trees From the Yeast Genome - Case Study - Cornelius Hunter - June 2013 Excerpt: We recently reported on a study of 1,070 genes and how they contradicted each other in a couple dozen yeast species. Specifically, evolutionists computed the evolutionary tree, using all 1,070 genes, showing how the different yeast species are related. This tree that uses all 1,070 genes is called the concatenation tree. They then repeated the computation 1,070 times, for each gene taken individually. Not only did none of the 1,070 trees match the concatenation tree, they also failed to show even a single match between themselves. In other words, out of the 1,071 trees, there were zero matches. Yet one of the fundamental predictions of evolution is that different features should generally agree. It was “a bit shocking” for evolutionists, as one explained: “We are trying to figure out the phylogenetic relationships of 1.8 million species and can’t even sort out 20 yeast.” In fact, as the figure above shows, the individual gene trees did not converge toward the concatenation tree. Evolutionary theory does not expect all the trees to be identical, but it does expect them to be consistently similar. They should mostly be identical or close to the concatenation tree, with a few at farther distances from the concatenation tree. Evolutionists have clearly and consistently claimed this consilience as an essential prediction. But instead, on a normalized scale from zero to one (where zero means the trees are identical), the gene trees were mostly around 0.4 from the concatenation tree with a huge gap in between. There were no trees anywhere close to the concatenation tree. This figure is a statistically significant, stark falsification of a highly acclaimed evolutionary prediction. http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2013/06/here-are-those-incongruent-trees-from.html That Yeast Study is a Good Example of How Evolutionary Theory Works - Cornelius Hunter - June 2013 Excerpt:,,, The evolutionists tried to fix the problem with all kinds of strategies. They removed parts of genes from the analysis, they removed a few genes that might have been outliers, they removed a few of the yeast species, they restricted the analysis to certain genes that agreed on parts of the evolutionary tree, they restricted the analysis to only those genes thought to be slowly evolving, and they tried restricting the gene comparisons to only certain parts of the gene. These various strategies each have their own rationale. That rationale may be dubious, but at least there is some underlying reasoning. Yet none of these strategies worked. In fact they sometimes exacerbated the incongruence problem. What the evolutionists finally had to do, simply put, was to select the subset of the genes or of the problem that gave the right evolutionary answer. They described those genes as having “strong phylogenetic signal.” And how do we know that these genes have strong phylogenetic signal. Because they give the right answer. This is an example of a classic tendency in science known as confirmation bias.,,, http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2013/06/that-yeast-study-is-good-example-of-how.html You Won’t Believe This New Epicycle: Both Congruence & Incongruence are Powerful Phylogenetic Signals - October - 7, 2013 Excerpt: Similar evolution trees are derived from completely different genes. Such congruence of independent data was predicted by evolution and evolutionists have consistently proclaimed it as a powerful confirmation of the fact of evolution. It is, as evolutionists like to say, a powerful phylogenetic signal. There’s only one problem: all of this is false. It is yet another example of evolution’s theory-laden science where the findings are dictated not by the data but by the doctrine. There is no powerful phylogenetic signal. That is a myth. For when evolutionists construct their phylogenies, they first filter out the anatomical comparisons that don’t cooperate. But that is not enough so after their first try they filter some more. As one evolutionist admitted, “We are trying to figure out the phylogenetic relationships of 1.8 million species and can’t even sort out 20 [types of] yeast.” And so it is good to see a new paper that admits that data are routinely filtered in order to satisfy stringent criteria so as to eliminate the possibility of incongruence. And what is the solution to this dilemma? As usual, a theoretical failure is converted into a success by adding yet more epicycles. Or as Lakatos might have put it, the core idea is protected by the addition of yet more auxiliary hypotheses. In this case, the incredible emerging view is that incongruence is now to be interpreted as a powerful phylogenetic signal that is desirable, as it often illuminates previously poorly understood evolutionary phenomena. Once again a prediction that was hailed as a powerful proof of evolution turns out to be false, and the story is simply flipped on its head, thus preserving the success of the theory. Where congruence was once claimed as a powerful phylogenetic signal, now incongruence takes its place as the powerful phylogenetic signal. You cannot make this stuff up. http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2013/10/you-wont-believe-this-new-epicycle.html
of related interest:
More Fossil-Molecule Contradictions: Now Even the Errors Have Errors - Cornelius Hunter - June 2014 Excerpt: a new massive (phylogenetic) study shows that not only is the problem (for Darwinist) worse than previously thought, but the errors increase with those species that are supposed to have evolved more recently.,,, "Our results suggest that, for Aves (Birds), discord between molecular divergence estimates and the fossil record is pervasive across clades and of consistently higher magnitude for younger clades." http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2014/06/more-fossil-molecule-contradictions-now.html Bird Evolution vs. The Actual Fossil Evidence - video and notes http://vimeo.com/30926629
bornagain77_{December 13, 2014
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