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Tiger skull from 2.5 mya: Evolution “got it right”? Actually, unacknowledged stasis

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File:Tiger in Ranthambhore.jpg
Bengal tiger/Bjørn Christian Tørrissen

In “Oldest Tiger-like Skull Yet—Hints Evolution Got It Right From Start” (National Geographic, October 18, 2011), Dave Mosher reports, “Fossil mini “tiger” skull is “surprisingly similar” to modern tigers’.” And here we thought evolution was, as ultra-Darwinist Richard Dawkins preaches, blind, and therefore not the sort of thing that could get something right the first time. You might as well say that the falling tree that didn’t happen to land on anyone “got something right.” That said, we learn,

The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center’s Meachen said the skull’s similarity to those of living tigers and jaguars is more striking than the differences.

“[Big cats] were great at what they did right away in their evolution, so their [anatomy] hasn’t changed much … ,” she said. “They were—and still are—really good predators, in part because of their extremely successful body plan.”

Okay, this is another failure to acknowledge sudden emergence followed by stasis (very long period of no change), the true pattern of evolution, not the Darwin version.
It even scores a 1 on the “surprising” index (where adverb “surprisingly” is taken as equivalent).

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Comments
The tiger fossil found is only from some 4000 years ago by biblical timelines. What happened was that after the flood diversity went crazy in order to fill the earth quick. So we today simply have the remaining types of cats. The rest went extinct after a couple of centuries after the flood. One of the flaws of thinking on these things is a presumption that diversity came later and not right away. Everyone misses the point that the modern amazon was the norm for biology. Just two centuries after the flood there might of been 20,000 types of "cats".Robert Byers
October 26, 2011
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Did you put this in the right thread?kairosfocus
October 24, 2011
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Please remove this and the above comment - posted in wrong thread.William J Murray
October 24, 2011
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Before any investigation into the nature of a putative designer can begin (by whatever investigatory methodology that might call for), one must first reach the conclusion that the best explanation for a phenomena is ID. What ID theory is about, is identifying (as best provisional explantion) cases of ID. From that point there may be many investigatory paths to pursue. Earlier, you issued this challenge:
So, tell me KF, what advantage does allowing the divine foot in the door bring? Give me a *single* example of that advancing the cause of human knowledge? Just a *single* example. Go on, dare you.
The examples are too numerous to mention, because virtually all modern science (up until relatively recently) was conducted from the premise of a "divine foot"; that the universe was lawfully and rationally ordered by god, and that humans had the bestowed and correlational capacity to investigate and comprehend this rationally ordered cosmos - something that materialist atheism doesn't have any grounds for as an a priori. The "divine foot" provides a reason for the ensuing categorical methodology, which was unavailabe in other kinds of cultures, which accounts for explosion of progress in science and technology under rational Christianity. Biological features were "backwards engineered" to understand the design theory and purpose of the phenomena, and still are today even if scientists attempt to avoid design language and inferences. The idea that something is designed provides an entirely different investigatory heuristic that the idea that things are just happening haphazardly, chaotically or by the intentions of billions of willful, invisible entities; even the concept of a "physical law" comes from the heuristic that a prescriptive, invisible, universal force operates "at a distance" and guides predictable behavior throught the cosmos. As another example, if we find an object on a planet we discover, how would one know if it was a natural object, or a designed one, without some sort of metric that made a scientific distinction? Would we appeal to instinct, anthropic recognition by comparison to our own artificial artifacts? Think of the different kinds of investigations that would ensue depending on the finding of "natural" or "artificial"; from the former, we spend decades attempting to explain the artifact in terms of natural causes,and from the latter we might attempt to understand the design theory, reverse engineer the object, and even attempt to find clues to the location or nature of those who created it. More broadly than that, the understanding that such an object is natural, compared to the understanding that it is a designed, artificial object, have radically different effects on our understanding of ourselves and aspects of our existence. If we find intelligent design to be necessary causal factors both for life and the structure of the cosmos, then that has a tremendous impact in and of itself on every aspect of human existence, including scientific investigation, even if we never find the identity of the designer.William J Murray
October 24, 2011
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related article: Evolution Is Impossible to Falsify http://crev.info/content/111018-evolution_is_impossible_to_falsifybornagain77
October 24, 2011
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Something bugs me about the headline 'Evolution Got It Right From Start'; Let's see; “Oldest Tiger-like Skull Yet—Hints Evolution God Got It Right From Start.” OK much better!!!bornagain77
October 24, 2011
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