Paleontologists don’t decide on a whim how these creatures will look when they create graphical representations. They have the skeletons. The skeletons indicate where muscles/tendons attach. The configuration of bones and muscles indicate how an animal might walk/stand/run/etc. It may not be 100% perfect but to imply that it’s arbitrary is flat wrong and, frankly, ignorant.

One the availability of these bones for research, they’re millions of years old and rare. Lending them out to every Tom, Dick and Harry with some quack philosophy and bogus science is probably a bad preservation strategy.

As for Piltdown Man, science was able to let go of that one a long time ago, maybe it’s time you did the same. It’s sad that one paleo-anthropologist spent so many years pimping it. His wasted life’s work, however, is not enough to render the scientific method, or its fruits, meaningless.

I’ll give a more detailed answer later but I wanted to address this right away because it’s not the first time I’ve seen it. Your quote:
“Sertsey Island was formed by volcanic activity in the 50/60s. Dating of rocks which were of known age ranged from the low millions to hundreds of millions of years of age.” is false.

No radiometric dating has been performed at Surtsey. I did a quick google search and found this from from answers in Genesis (of all places):

“I do not think that any radiometric dating has been carried out, but judging from such measurements made on other recent lava flows, an apparent age of hundreds of millions of years might easily be obtained.”

Leaving aside the author’s complete ignorance, this is someone from your side of the debate admiting that no radiometric dating took place at Surtsey. The reason why, because scientists aren’t idiots. You don’t need special techniques to date rocks when you watch them form on TV.

The problem I have with the transitional fossil issue is that the evidence is at best debatable. There are no real convincing transitional fossils. The real problem with them is the underlying problem with evolution.
It is a prior belief in evolution that determines the evidence outcome. Lucy is a classic example. You say that this creature is convincing evidence of a transitional form from ape to man. Yet what is it? A 40% partially complete skeleton of a 3 foot high creature exhibiting features shared by other ape creatures. Most are not able to walk upright but some do, those with arboreal habitats where the ability to walk upright is useful when walking on branches high in the trees.
The hip and scapular arrangements are typical for arboreal monkey/ape creatures. The feet and hands were not recovered altho’ this did not stop museums having artists drawing fine, delicate human-like features.
The fact that this creature walked upright is not a proof. Some monkeys do that already.
The skeleton is incomplete. Few of these hominid finds have ever truly been examined other than by those who found them, as these specimens are kept in very secure situations and the best someone in the paleo-anthropological field can hope for is to work with a cast/copy or to work from papers written by other people in their field.

Piltdown man. Your response would suggest that you would make a great politician. The teeth were filed down! The femur was said to have been shaped like a cricket bat. A leading British paleo-anthropologist spent his life promoting this specimen and found out that it was a fake shortly before he died 40 years later. There were some who opposed it from it’s initial discovery but it was used to promote the theory of evolution for 40 years. One reason it remained undetected was for the reason I have given above. Few were allowed to examine it and only copies, where the filing would not have been evident, were generally the only things made available. Just like the modern specimens please note.

Even your reply to radiometric dating deficiencies should ring alarm bells. ‘Refining’ the process. If the date is ‘wrong’ how do you know unless you already have determined the date of the rock you are examining. It is still the case that most fossil finds are dated independent of the actual sedimentary layer they are found in and are usually dated using index fossils. Sedimentary rocks cannot be dated using these methods as you know.
To say that inconsistencies in dating are small is misleading at best. Sertsey Island was formed by volcanic activity in the 50/60s. Dating of rocks which were of known age ranged from the low millions to hundreds of millions of years of age. If the dating method fits, it’s used; if it doesn’t it’s put down to contamination etc.

This is a massive subject and we could both go on all day probably. The Bible to does provide a credible framework for explaining many earth processes that stump evolutionists. Worldwide sedimentary deposits on a massive scale in the past, not seen today. Fossilisation on a scale no longer seen; of soft parts, even fossils of ripple marks, animal footprints; fossil graveyards sometimes on stupendous scales [millions of fossil herring on your continent as one example]. Even the ice age which followed Noah’s flood is more readily explained; post-flood waters were warm ['fountains of the deep'], volcanic activity would have contributed to global cooling [ash high in stratosphere] but the warm waters to increased precipitation, snow and glaciation in northerly latitudes and even in some high sub-tropical areas; it’s end explained by the eventual cooling of the oceans, the decreased volcanic activity leading to warming of the land masses.
Global cooling does not cause an ice age, you need increased precipitation too which doesn’t happen in very cold air. I’ve rambled on but it is such a big subject isn’t it!

Hope you are well; I’m on annual leave at the moment but I’m responsible for cooking tonights meal so I’d better get on and do it.
God bless, Steve.

I’m not the best person to provide a spirited defense of punctuated equilibrium. My knowledge of the theory is superficial at best. So I’ll focus on your other points.

I’m still confused by what you call the lack of “transitional” fossils. Take another look at the Smithsonian website, it contains information not only on Lucy but on a range of Hominids leading up to modern humans. It seems to me that there is indeed a transition towards modern humans.

You dismiss Lucy as one step in that transition because she exhibits ape-like characteristics (small brain, arms for tree climbing, etc.). Yet you ignore the human like traits she also has (hips and legs capable of walking upright). The excitement that find generated has everything to do with the fact that she’s an excellent example of a transitional form. She exhibits both Ape-like and modern-human-like characteristics.

As an aside, I’ve never heard her described as only 2M years old, the original estimate from 1973 was 3 – 3.9 M years old. That estimate has since been refined to the commonly accepted 3.2 MYO. That number has been arrived at using radiometric dating and confirmed via a number of other dating techniques.

On the topic of dating, your dismissal of it as a circular is grossly inaccurate. (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dating.html) This website discusses that misconception, excerpt below.

“When a geologist collects a rock sample for radiometric age dating, or collects a fossil, there are independent constraints on the relative and numerical age of the resulting data. Stratigraphic position is an obvious one, but there are many others. There is no way for a geologist to choose what numerical value a radiometric date will yield, or what position a fossil will be found at in a stratigraphic section. Every piece of data collected like this is an independent check of what has been previously studied. The data are determined by the rocks, not by preconceived notions about what will be found. Every time a rock is picked up it is a test of the predictions made by the current understanding of the geological time scale. The time scale is refined to reflect the relatively few and progressively smaller inconsistencies that are found. This is not circularity, it is the normal scientific process of refining one’s understanding with new data. It happens in all sciences.”

As for Piltdown Man, scientists suspected he was a fake long before they could prove it. However, it’s not enough to say “This doesn’t feel right!” In order to fully debunk something, you must prove it. Part of that proof is offering a plausible alternate explanation. So far you’ve given me a whole lot of “This doesn’t feel right” and a lot of hand waving. Hoaxes and errors, long since corrected, aren’t enough to throw out all of the good work that science has done in this field.

At the beginning of this discussion, you referred to the “faith” in evolution. Yet you’ve pointed to 2 examples where scientists have examined their theories, found them to be in error and corrected them. You also referred to creation as a science yet failed to offer any evidence, any theories that can be verified (or not) or any solid research.

On a personal note, hope your wife had a happy birthday. Late May is clearly an auspicious time for birthdays as mine was yesterday.

Here’s another article on radiometric dating
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/benton.html

We’ll get to Lucy in a moment. The fact that there are no missing links because they are all around us, we are the missing links in action so to speak, is yet another example of this circular reasoning. Once again we are told there is no evidence because we wouldn’t expect to find any. So how do we know we evolved then? Because evolution proves evolution.
As a side issue, the dating of rock layers [no, not done by radiometric dating] is performed using index fossils. As an example, we have an index fossil we’ll call ‘fossil x’, which is found only in the Jurassic layer. Fossil x is 65 million years old. How do we know? Because it is found in the Jurassic layer. So how do we know that the Jurassic layer is 65 million years old, because we find ‘fossil x’ in it. Do you feel another circle coming on?

Lucy [2 million years old..oh, no, it's 3.2 now isn't it!]; someone desperate to find the missing links that you say are not important, goes off to Africa and low and behold finds one. What is Lucy? For a starter only 40% of the skeleton was found; she has an undisputed ape skull, with a less than average cranial capacity even for an ape. The teeth however were ’small’, like humans [and some apes] and had ‘thick enamel’ like humans [yes you've guessed it, like some apes, orangutans] and that’s why they got excited. There were no fingers or feet found but you’ll often see her reconstructed with delicate straight human like fingers. Other examples of Austr. afaren. have the typically curved fingers of tree dwelling monkeys. Her shoulder again is typical of a tree dwelling monkey, the glenoid fossa in humans (where your arm connects to the scapula [shoulder blade]) is lateral/outward facing. It’s why we struggle to hang from our arms. Monkeys that live in trees have a tilted glenoid fossa, it points upward. She had a great time hanging from trees. The poor girl, famous as she is, was only about 3 foot high. Human ancestor? Don’t think so.

The point with Piltdown Man was that it was announced in 1912 and not denounced as a fraud until 1953. Rigorous? As a Brit it particularly tickles me that the femur was actually shaped to look like a cricket bat. Science does make mistakes but it is symptomatic of this data poor, imagination rich field, that there is such a desperation to prove evolution true. And it only took 41 years for them to find out. Nebraska man was used as evidence of human evolution in the famous Scopes Trial. No good saying some years later that we got it wrong, your honour. The case was closed.

I’ll try n look at these links later but it’s the missus birthday and the in-laws have just arrived.
God bless.