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.
The sound of one hand clapping.
I think this thread is about done.
Are you sure it wasn't "gonads" and not "genome"? :)
If that is what is apparent to you, then it's no wonder you are, where you are.
I expected more (including, but not limited to, silence) from one of the royal members of the team. I am so disappointed.
You've broken into the Grand Master's wine cellar again, haven't you?
a cylindrical transverse or diametrical core of a tree would be... a core OF RINGS
whereas
a cylindrical perpendicular core of layers would be... a core OF LAYERS
Let's see if you can comprehend an analogy: Just as some folks incorrectly call the ice layers in ice-core samples "rings", some idiots call an AR15 an "assault rifle" and an M-16 an "assault weapon" they are incorrect.
Do you understand?
Commonality of incorrect or sloppy verbiage does not equate to that use being correct.
do you understand THAT?
Feel better now.
Here's a clue: You can correlate, temporally, ice cores from different geographic regions. If my analogy is invalid, then so are such correlations.
Think big. Think real big...or better yet, I'd be statisfied if you were to just think, period.
yeah, and? do you have a point to make?
Good night Gracie...
Nice prime. I was feeding the dogs, so I never had a shot at it.
You noticed that too
Even young earth creationists concede microevolutoin. Most IDers go even further. They'll concede that natural selection explains some macroevolutoin. They just deny that it can explain it all.
It seems to me, that once all you are saying is that these changes which scientists attribute to random chance, are actually controlled by God, there is no scientific means of disagreement, and in fact, there would be no problem with evolution being taught in the classroom.
That's true. However, intelligent design folks take it one step futher and say that this divine control can be scientifically detected. This is what gets them in trouble.
Really, I'll need to look into this further, because the whole idea of irreducible complexity requires that some species were just created from nothing, or that God came down and inserted an eye into an animal at some point.
They're more sublte that that. As far as I caan tell, all they're asserting is that at some point God (or excuse me, an unspecified designer) inserted DNA sequences for certain "irreducibly complex" biochemical processes. Of course, they have no evidence.
42 is the answer to what question?
...obviously I am. Sad state of affairs indeed.
Frustrating, isn't it? But then, the theory and the behavior behind it follow a similar course. From their perspective, all is well in the house of Darwin.
So did I.
To life, the universe, and everything.
What is the significance of 42?
If you really want to know, google 42.
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