Barbarian
Member
I was recently asked this question. My reply was that marsupials diverges from therian placentals long before primates evolved. I asked him which of Darwin's four points he felt were not supported by evidence, and I got no response. The creationist later suggested that he might have been joking, but I often hear such questions in complete seriousness from ID creationists as well as more traditional creationists.
At first glance, this looks extremely odd, as if someone skeptical of the origin of Romance languages did not know the distribution and history of Latin, and would ask why there are no transitional languages between Thai and Italian.
But I think this is based on the old idea that there is a scala naturae, the Neoplantonic doctrine that there is a ladder of being in nature with each organism on a run just above the next lowest, and just below the next highest. The idea, until Darwin, was commonly held by many educated people.
Obviously, if evolution is true, we would see instead a bush comprised of living and extinct species, with groups distributed like branches and twigs. Which is what we see. The scala naturae is not supported by genetics, anatomy, and paleontological evidence.
The same error is made when people say "if humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?" Of course, the answer is that no ape living today is the ancestor of humans. Chimpanzees are undoubtedly as evolved from our common ancestor as we are, although in a different direction.
A large difficulty here is that while apes living away from forests are much, much more likely to leave fossils than apes living in forests. Forest soil and biota just don't allow much fossilization. So the various lines of apes that lived in more open areas tend to be at least partially represented, but that isn't the case for apes that lived in forests.
It's another way that education has failed to teach biology in public schools. If everyone understood what evolutionary theory actually is, we'd have less disagreement.
At first glance, this looks extremely odd, as if someone skeptical of the origin of Romance languages did not know the distribution and history of Latin, and would ask why there are no transitional languages between Thai and Italian.
But I think this is based on the old idea that there is a scala naturae, the Neoplantonic doctrine that there is a ladder of being in nature with each organism on a run just above the next lowest, and just below the next highest. The idea, until Darwin, was commonly held by many educated people.
Obviously, if evolution is true, we would see instead a bush comprised of living and extinct species, with groups distributed like branches and twigs. Which is what we see. The scala naturae is not supported by genetics, anatomy, and paleontological evidence.
The same error is made when people say "if humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?" Of course, the answer is that no ape living today is the ancestor of humans. Chimpanzees are undoubtedly as evolved from our common ancestor as we are, although in a different direction.
A large difficulty here is that while apes living away from forests are much, much more likely to leave fossils than apes living in forests. Forest soil and biota just don't allow much fossilization. So the various lines of apes that lived in more open areas tend to be at least partially represented, but that isn't the case for apes that lived in forests.
It's another way that education has failed to teach biology in public schools. If everyone understood what evolutionary theory actually is, we'd have less disagreement.
