Posted on 10/15/2005 3:44:16 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
A paleontologist testified in the Dover school board trial about how fossils connect species.
The ancestor of the whale and its first cousin the hippopotamus walked the Earth for 40 million years, munching on plants, before dying out in the ice ages.
Known as the anthracotheres, it became extinct 50 to 60 million years ago, but not before its evolutionary tree diverged — the whale forging into the oceans, the hippopotamus to the African swamps.
Kevin Padian, a University of California-Berkeley paleontologist, told the story of the whale’s journey, along with the travels of its closest living relative, in U.S. Middle District Court Friday to illustrate how the fossil record connects us to our past.
In the First Amendment lawsuit over Dover Area High School’s intelligent design policy, Padian was the plaintiffs’ final science expert to testify. The defense will begin to present its side Monday.
Padian’s testimony was essentially a response to intelligent-design proponents’ claims that paleontology does not account for missing links and the fossil record belies evolutionary theory.
“The problem is that there are no clear transitional fossils linking land mammals to whales,” the pro-intelligent-design textbook “Of Pandas and People” states.
“How many intermediates do you need to suggest relationships?” Padian wondered.
He pointed to numerous transitional fossils as he traced the lineage of the whale to its early ancestors, a group of cloven-hoofed mammals of a group named cetartiodactyla, illustrating the gradual changes of features along the way.
“We think the transitions are pretty good,” he said.
One of Padian’s concerns with intelligent design — the idea that life’s complexities demand an intelligent designer — is that it shuts down the search for answers, he said. “It worries me that students would be told that you can’t get from A to B with natural causes,” he said.
One of the complaints of 11 parents suing the school district is that, after Dover biology students are told about intelligent design, they are referred to “Pandas,” which is housed in the high school library.
While the connection between the whale and hippopotamus is recent, Padian said some of the fossils linking whales to land-dwelling mammals go back to the Civil War but were ignored by the authors of “Pandas.”
The curator of Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology and author of the “Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs” also testified to the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds.
“Pandas” states, “Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agent, with their distinctive features already intact — fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.”
But Padian, at times affectionately, showed numerous pictures and diagrams of different reptiles evolving from ones possessing scales to ones possessing feathers.
Of a fossil of an archaeopteryx found in the 1860s, Padian said, “Now this is a beautiful critter.”
He also criticized the book’s assertions on homology — the study of similar characteristics of living organisms used to explain their relationships to other organisms.
As he cross-examined Padian, Dover’s attorney Robert Muise brought up one of science’s most ardent evolutionists in raising questions about the fossil record.
Muise asked Padian about the late Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, the idea that rather than Darwin’s characterization of evolution as slow and gradual change, it may be better described as taking place in fits and starts.
Gould offered the idea as an explanation for the patterns found in the fossil record, which shows abrupt appearances of new species, followed by long stagnant periods with little change.
While “Pandas” argues that intelligent-design proponents consider punctuated equilibrium unprovable, Padian said Gould offered the theory as an explanation to gaps in the fossil record.
“Is natural selection responsible for punctuated equilibrium?” Muise asked at one point.
“That’s a great question,” Padian said. While it may raise questions about the mechanism of evolution, he answered, it doesn’t contradict the idea of common descent.
Now that's a Tale of a Whale.
Which brings up my own unscientific survey of FReeper ID advocates. A couple months ago I asked any ID advocate posting on FR to explain what they would teach in biology class after they got through teaching their opposition to evolution. No one responded, except with the usual criticism of evolution, which takes about 30 seconds to recite.
So let's hear it from the ID crowd. How old is the earth?
pasta be upon you
Agree. And even if the two are not 'one process', it is conceivable that The Hand of God (ID) has some influence over evolution and what evolves over time. Does evolution necessarily have to be random?
mutation appears to be random - ie: all evidence points to mutation being random, none indicates directed causation.
selection, on the other hand, is far from random. There is no positive evidence that some "higher being" monkeyed around with it, though.
Evolution is not, and has never been, random. The individual mutations might appear randomly, but the selection process is far from that.
Glad you recognize that the decision at trial will not be a ruling on the scientific merit of either of these two theories, for it cannot be.
According to the way its main proponents define it, it is. They claim certain biological organs and biochemical machines and processes are too complex to have evolved through natural selection.
In a sense, their use of the term "intelligent design" is an absue of language. One could just as easily label as intelligent design the belief that God intelligently designed the laws of nature so as a creature like Man would eventually arrise through purely natural processes. That is what I believe (and it doesn't necessarily conflict with abiogensis). Unfortunately, however, this is not what most people have in mind when they hear the words, "intelligent design."
Isn't that like putting the cart before the horse? The concept of God is Man's creation.
Isn't that like putting the cart before the horse? The concept of God is Man's creation.
I don't understand your objection. Would you mind clarifying it?
I'm not sure it is an objection. Did God create the evolutionary thread that produced Man or did Man produce the concept of God? What do you think?
God created the evolutionary thread.
Conceptualization is a product of human intelligence. One of the features of conceptualization is the communication about the reality of things. The goal is to come to a true conceptualization of other things. Some conceptualization is self-referential. Some is not. But in both cases, it is still a product of human intelligence. So, the fact that we produce concept does not negate the possibility of it being true or false.
Yesterday's talk on these threads was interesting to me because of a claim that went like this: if my arguments or statements or concepts of evolution appear to be in any way fallacious, that is not the fault of the process of evolution, that's simply the fault of our language. There's something fishy about that.
You could look at it that way. Ever since the Englightenment there's been some new light shed on the relativity of things. It still quite evident to me that the sun revolves around me and I need no further proof.
That is a good explanation. Thank you.
I wonder if concepts like speciation versus whether God created each species or not is similar to the debate over "Free Will" and "The Will of God".
Does Man (or evolution) have a free will, in that they have control over their destiny. Or is Man (or evolution) totally under the control of God? I believe this is also hotly debated in some circles.
One argument goes: If Man is totally dependent upon God's will, then Man has no incentive to be competitive. And we all know what that leads to...
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