Cladograms and Mosaic Critters

Cladograms are fun examples of begging the question, since cladistics is a way of classifying organisms according to their features and their evolutionary ancestors. It's fun and easy to do, just arrange things according to your personal preference and molecules-to-metallurgist evolutionary bias, and lookie here, we got us science!

Pardon the sarcasm, but cladistics is laden with biases and subjective reasoning.

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A kissin' cousin of cladistics is the concept of mosaic creatures is when there are features that seem to belong to different kinds (birds with teeth, fish with lungs), so they are assumed to be transitional forms and called "mosaic". This phoney evidence is evolutionary wishful thinking. Fact is, those creatures were created to be what they are, with no stages of evolution in evidence.

When describing so-called ‘transitional’ fossils, we often call such fossils ‘mosaic fossils’. What do we mean? Ryan B. from the United States writes:

Hi CMI, I have been reading some of your articles about mosaic fossils such as Archaeopteryx, Tiktaalik and the mudskippers and you say that mosaic fossils don’t qualify as transitional fossils. I am having trouble understanding the whole mosaic idea; if a fossil contains both fish and reptile features doesn’t that make them transitional? Same thing with archaeopteryx. I was talking to my brother’s friend who is going to med school and his professor showed him Archaeopteryx as “proof” of bird evolution and proceeded to show me how Archaeopteryx had bird and dino features. Can you explain to me how “Mosaic” features is not the same as transitional features? And also do evolutionists recognize this difference?

CMI’s Shaun Doyle responds:

To see Shaun's response, click on "Mosaic fossils?"