There are no transitional forms.
Well, that's a testable argument. Name us two major groups, said to be evolutionarily connected, and I'll see what I can find. Meantime, give us a testable definition of "transitional" so we can check for any misunderstandings on your part.
Your line of argument seems to be: let's run round the internet, find anything that looks like a transitional, and stick it into the ancestry of the animal/plant being discussed.
As you learned in so many other threads you abandoned when the facts came in, there are numerous transitionals, the termite thread, for example, showed you a gradual evolution from cockroaches to termites. And you were surprised to find that an entire array of woodpecker transitionals are still alive.
Failing to recognise that these 'transitional forms' are often extant today - which makes it difficult to take seriously the concept that they are in some way 'transitional' and in the ancestry of the species.
(Async believes that if you are alive, your uncle has to be dead)
Anybody can produce one of these deceptively impressive looking cladograms/ ancestral tree/ whatever.
Assuming they have the DNA data, and know how it works. BTW, we do know it works, because we can check it on organisms of known descent.
Reality, again.
When will you wake up to this fact and get real?
You've been blindsided by the real world, again, I'm afraid.
Barbarian observes:
The evidence indicates an origin of penguins with albatrosses as the most recent common ancestor. And the history of Antarctica indicates a northward movement and speciation during times of global cooling.
Climate data, compared to the genetic distances among transitional penguins.
And there's this:
We present the first detailed description of the giant Eocene penguin Icadyptes salasi. The species is characterized by a narrow skull with a hyper-elongate spear-like beak, a robust cervical column and a powerful flipper. The bony beak tip of Icadyptes is formed by fusion of several elements and is unique among penguins, differing markedly from previously described giant penguin beaks. Vascular canal patterning similar to that of boobies, frigatebirds and albatrosses suggests I. salasi may have had a thin, sheet-like rhamphotheca unlike the thick rugose rhamphotheca of modern penguins.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2526106/
Where are the transitional fossils?
Notice that one adds more evidence to the idea that they evolved from albatrosses (based on earlier genetic data). And then there's this:
It didn't take long before her team unearthed a nearly complete skeleton—with feathers—of a 36-million-year-old penguin whose swimming length measures about 1.5 meters. The new species, which the team dubbed Inkayacu paracasensis or "the water king," is one of the largest extinct penguins known (the largest living penguin, the Emperor, is about 1.2 meters long).
Clarke then called in Yale paleontologist Jakob Vinther of Briggs' group, who found melanosomes galore, as the team reports online today in Science. But the microscopic bodies looked nothing like those from living penguins, whose tightly clustered melanosomes are different from those of all other birds, according to co-author Matthew Shawkey of the University of Akron in Ohio. Shawkey, who has been helping researchers figure out the colors of dinosaurs, found that the melanosomes resembled those of most other, nonpenguin birds. And from their size and shape, the team concluded that unlike today's penguins, whose outer wings are black or brown, the wings of Inkayacu paracasensis were probably gray and reddish-brown.
That suggests that even though early penguins had the recognizable body shape of today's penguins, by 36 million years ago they had not yet evolved the kind of tightly clustered melanosomes needed to perform complex aquatic feats.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/09/how-penguins-got-their-water-wings.html
Why haven't you produced some of these, and not the foolish suggestion that albatrosses are somewhere in the ancestry/background?
Surprise.
What is your response to the serious points raised in the articles? Like: where have the wings gone, and why?
They still have wings. They just use them for swimming now. Other birds do that, too. Diving petrels, for example. Diving petrels are in the group that includes albatrosses, BTW.
Filght is an extremely useful ability, and albatrosses are incredibly good at it. Why did the albatrossess lose it to become penguins?
Diving petrels are pretty good fliers, but not so good as albatrosses. But they also swim pretty well. Not so good as penguins, of course. Kinda um, transitional.
How did the bald patch at the bird's lower end arise?
Colder weather or expansion into colder areas. Which of course would be a gradual process.
How did the hips move from approximately the centre of the bodies to the lower end, and how did the bird come to walk upright?
Random mutation and natural selection. We see that happening in other birds with similar lifestyles, like auks and puffins. So there's some kind of selective pressure for it.
And where did their ability to recognise their babies' voices, and their mates' voice in the middle of a vast throng of the birds come from?
Albatrosses and other related birds do that, so that's older than penguins.
And the design that places a thick subcutaneous layer of fat over the birds bodies, enabling them to live in the killing antarctic cold?
Diving petrels have bodies with more subcutaneous fat than other Procellariiformes, but less than penguins. It seems foolish to deny the possibility of transitional forms that still exist.
You know, interesting questions like those that demand answers.
Surprise.
