Posted on 09/20/2006 9:51:34 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Paraphrasing Dawkins: ignorant, stupid, lying, and/or insane. Note the "and/or".
Could it possibly be that the missing links (transitional forms) are still missing because they simply do not exist?
That's real, uhhm, logical.
It's clear you do.
Name the gap.
For the record, are you saying there is no gap?
you missed the sarcasm.....?
All 'missing links' (transitional forms) are certainly found in the fossil record. Missing by definition means found.
Only in Vade Retro's world
And in Darwin's world, Gould's world, and the world of 21st-century science. You have been showered with supporting material at this point and you are staying dumb.
Hint: dumb is not smart. Never mind you force the lurker to ask, "Is he really THAT dumb?"
If Gould says that PE is not a hopeful monster theory, it shouldn't matter what Sarfati or Coulter or whatever other nonsense-peddler has told you. I can link the stuff, but I can't read it to you. You have to WANT to not look like a retard.
So, what, I wonder, is the mechanism that overcomes the 2nd law and causes the formation of so much order and complexity over such a vast amount of space for such long periods of time?
Perhaps the evolutionists could answer that. But oh wait, that's not part of the ToE. Can't answer that one.
I have been trying to educate you on this but you have your fingers securely in your ears and your eyes squeezed shut.
Hint: dumb is not smart.
Yet for some reason you fail to take your own advice. hmmm.
If Gould says that PE is not a hopeful monster theory,
PE is not a hopeful monster theory. It is something designed to account for the gaps in the fossil record and save neo-Darwinism.
You have to WANT to not look like a retard.
Again, follow your own advice. Take the fingers out of your ears and open your eyes.
I'm feeling lucky tonight. None of the common-descent, variation, and selection processes involved in evolution violate the 2nd LOT used by physicists. Reproduction with variation is thermodynamically OK. Duplication mutations are thermodynamically OK. Copy errors and cosmic ray zaps violate no law of physics. Natural selection, the way in which some things live to reproduce and some things do not, violates no law of physics.
The version of the 2nd LOT quoted by creationists is not that of physics and is not correct. It would not only forbid the evolution of complex organisms but the formation of ice crystals from liquid or gaseous water, the formation of tornadoes from warm air and surface water, and the growth of adult humans from zygotes.
What science says about the formation of complexity came to fullness in the work of one Ilya Prigogine, who got the 1977 Nobel for Chemistry by describing the mathematics of "systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium" and their tendency to "self-organization." The Earth, sitting in the outflow of energy from the Sun to the cold vaccuum of space, is a system far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Lots of squirrely stuff gets to happen here because it's sun-powered.
It doesn't matter. Gradual in the sense of "Nothing is that different from it's parent" and "Populations evolve" is incompatible with "Geologically sudden" as in "Happens in 20,000 years."
And when someone says "Many large groups of facts are intelligible only on the principle that species have been evolved by very small steps" that person is a gradualist.
Science isn't a lawyer's game.
Note to lurkers:
It probably looks like I'm been mean to some poor noob graduate of an AiG/ICR/M-O-U-S-E seminar who is in shock at seeing the things they told him not holding up too well. Nah! T7 has been on these threads for about the time he's been a freeper. I've probably linked the PE stuff to him once every six months or so, just myself, never mind all the other people who have wasted electrons answering his simple Back-Again-Dumb-As-A-Stump-isms.PE is not a hopeful monster theory. It is something designed to account for the gaps in the fossil record and save neo-Darwinism.
PE is based on positive evidence, instances where we find the actual site of the gradual changes from which a species has spread to "suddenly appear" everywhere else. You have been presented with examples.
OK, Genius! Here's where you get to show you've been paying attention. What web page has the examples?
Contemplate the life cycle of a hurricane. You have a bunch of updrafts and low pressure areas off the coast of Africa. They start to coalesce, develop a spin, eh voila!
The hurricane is clearly much more orderly than the scattered updrafts and lows. What happened?
Missed a "not" here, or better, should have just said "is compatible." 20,000 years is both time enough for gradual change in the first sense and fast enough to appear "geologically sudden."
It's also very, very concentrated energy. Supposedly, as creatonists absolutely fight to understand things, dissipated energy will never concentrate itself.
God shouldn't tell people to do some of the things they think they do for Him. That much I'll say.
Oh for Pete's sake. If Eldridge's and Gould's claim that most most species experience stasis for most of their existence meshed with Darwin why was it controversial. Why would Eldridge and Gould claim Darwin to be a ""phyletic gradualist?" Why should I accept Douglas Theobald's claim that he wasn't?
It probably looks like I'm been mean . . .
Trust me Vade the only person any lurker will think you are being mean to is yourself.
What web page has the examples?
To return to Douglas Theobald, he's more a polemicist than a scientist despite his degree. Why should I accept his claims?
But here you go:
"To Darwin, therefore, speciation entailed the same expectation as phyletic evolution: a long and insensibly graded chain of intermediate forms.
[a few paragraphs later]
In this Darwinian perspective, paleontology formulated its picture for the origin of new taxa. This picture, though rarely articulated, is familiar to all of us. We refer to it here as 'phyletic gradualism' and identify the following as its tenets:
(1) New species arise by the transformation of an ancestral population into its modified descendants.
(2) The transformation is even and slow.
(3) The transformation involves large numbers, usually the entire ancestral population.
(4) The transformation occurs over all or a large part of the ancestral species' geographic range.
These statements imply several consequences, two of which seem especially important to paleontologists:
(1) Ideally, the fossil record for the origin of a new species should consist of a long sequence of continuous, insensibly graded intermediate forms linking ancestor and descendant.
(2) Morphological breaks in a postulated phyletic sequence are due to imperfections in the geological record." (Eldredge and Gould 1972)
You're an atheist Vade. You don't believe in God.
For the record, all living things that we are aware of are related by descent.
Which cannot be demonstrated by the fossil record.
Do you think he knew anyone we know?
Since he's British, he's probably dealt with more Muslem creationists and fewer Christian ones than we have. But Morton's Demon and the related Amnesia transcend cultures, that's for sure!
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