Creation Orchard to Nowhere

I just want to make a point about the Creationist Orchard.  When a biologist draws a phylogeny; the lines mean something, whether species, families, or even classes.  When Ken Ham presents this chart, he's just drawing lines.  

There is no fossil record for any canids or apes until after the cretaceous.  There have been more than 214 species of canids throughout history 37 of them exist today.  177 of them are known only from the fossil record. All 177 of them are found in the Cenozoic fossil record, which Ham believes happened after Noah's flood.[1]  The earliest canid does not appear until the Eocene, but earliest ape does not appear until the Oligocene.  Those pre-Cenozoic branches come out of inspired imaginations.  Likewise there are no Cenozoic ceratopsians in the fossil record.  Those also originate in inspired imaginations. 

I am unclear about the bird.  Certainly there are pre-cenozoic birds, and some that would fit into one of the avian kinds. 

Correction 3-6-14:  Originally the last sentence said that no Mesozoic bird would fit into one of the avian kinds.  However, this probably is not true.  The entire order of Psittaciformes is considered the "Parrot Kind" by Lightner.  A Cretaceous parrot was found in 1998.  

Also, a fossil Anseriformes has been found.  Here, it gets more complicated.  Lightner divides the order Anseriformes into three kinds.  While the fossil appears more closely related to the family Anatidae which Lightner calls the "Duck Kind" it is unclear if Lightner would place the fossil in this group.  In fact, the initial kind estimates as a rule tend to avoid all fossils.  Also, if there were Cretaceous Anseriformes, that seems to suggest that there were Cretaceous Galliformes, because molecular data suggests that Anseriformes and Galliformes both belong to the clade Galloanserae.  Lightner, of course, believes that Galliformes coexisted with dinosaurs, but for other reasons.  While she subdivided the order Anseriformes into three kinds, she kept the order Galliformes as one created kind.  She was forced to do this, because four of the five families have examples of cross family hybridization.   

[1] Wang, Xiaoming and Richard H. Tedford Dogs Their Fossil Relatives & Evolutionary History (New York: Columbia Press, 2008) 23

What do you see?

ICR recently posted the following to facebook.

Evolution necessarily implies the concept of "descent from a common ancestor or ancestors." But no ancestor-descendant relationship can be advocated with certainty based on the fossils. In fact, for every proposed transitional form, there is at least one evolutionist who has refuted it on scientific grounds.#PlanBehindTheHand #AmazingCreation

I'll bite. What evolutionist has disagreed that tree squirrels and ground hogs have a common ancestor? How about another, what evolutionist has refuted the assertion that Psittacosaurus is basal to Triceratops? Ken Ham asserts that they are part of the same "kind".

Ceratopsians and Phylogeny

I have been writing a series, critiquing Carl Kerby’s critique of a phylogenic chart. My main point has been that the chart does not say what Kerby says that it says. Kerby argues that the chart shows that “one thing stayed one thing and never changed into anything else.” I’ve brought up that the lines on the chart represent orders and sub-orders of animals. One of the limbs on the tree even represents birds. Within these orders and sub-orders are immense diversity. In the original post, I brought this up.

Just look at "W" which represents the suborder Ceratopsians. They were both bipedal and quadrupeds.

Kerby works with Answers in Genesis and both he and they generally argue that all ceratopsians are one created kind.

Even though breeding studies are impossible with dinosaurs, by studying fossils one can ascertain that there was likely one Ceratopsian kind with variation in that kind and so on.[1]

As I pointed out, ceratopsians do not just include the four legged dinosaurs that remind everyone of Triceratops. It also includes bipeds like Yinlong[2] and Psittacosaurus[3]. There are actually three different families of bipedal ceratopsians[4]. Clearly, Kerby and Answers in Genesis both accept Yinlong and Triceratops as diversity within created kinds.

 If this amount of diversity is accepted, I fail to see why feliformia cannot be considered a single created kind.  Surely the differences between Yinlong and Triceratops are no bigger than the differences between Hyaenidae (hyenas) and Felidae (biting cats and Sabre-tooth cats).[5]

Jack Horner: Shape shifting dinosaurs