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.
If he had, that would have disproved Darwinism. Shame for you that it didn't happen.
"you're making the rest of us look bad."
Ahhhh. An admission finally. Rubbing elbows with us makes you 'look bad'.
Your Hollywood friends would fully understand the depth of your feelings. They are very concerned, all the time, about how they look too...
It can be, and you know that it can also be an escape. I hope you're not asking me for the criterion, but honesty usually admits that there's some truth to the best of lies.
All definition is human. Just don't jump off the cliff if that really bothers you. : )
Heaven is a most wonderful place. I can go there and talk with God and reach understanding with eternity and be rid of all the restraints on earth and remove myself from the flawed gene pool. I only have to accept God and end my life.
If one really believed this, they would be jumping off the cliff.
All right. Anyhow, definitions are human, including first causes, natural selection, and gravity, and intelligent design.
You got me. I freely admit that the association between conservatism and ID is harmful to conservatism. I wish Creationists and IDers would refrain from tying their beliefs to a political group, because the rest of us in that group don't like being wrong by association.
Your Hollywood friends would fully understand the depth of your feelings. They are very concerned, all the time, about how they look too...
I am not aware that I have any friends in Hollywood. My wife has family in Rancho Cucamonga, though. Does that count?
Well, not really. Some of them describe the physical world, like evolution and gravity. Even before we had words for them, they were a natural feature of the universe.
"Intelligent design" is an invention of humanity. Gravity is not. One has evidence to support it, one does not.
(Monty Burns voice): Exxxxcellllent!
If "evidence" is the criterion for a good definition, it doesn't make it any less true that such a definition is human. But I take it you are making a different point, not about it being human or not, but whether the definition is a good one? Is that right?
"Manatees are more closely related to elephants."Thanx for the info.Got a B(-)in biology.Hippopotami(?)Didn't do to well in English either.Like Cacti or Octopi?Sounds right.
The moon has gravity. I'm sure you don't assert that the moon has evolution as it is used in these discussions. AFAIK "gravity" is a feature of all matter.
It's only variation within the whaleppopotamus kind!
Remember the whole thrust of ID is to identify "design" by (supposedly) eliminating "natural causes". So do you have a problem with the implication of ID that, to the extent God uses natural processes, this wouldn't "count" as design (or maybe even as divine activity)?
Shouldn't a believer be schooled to see God's hand and His Providence in the mundane as well as the miraculous? In the end isn't ID, even if it avoids or suppresses some of its more untenable assertions, just like "creation science" in that it concedes the central premise of the militant scientific atheist: that to the extent the world can be seen to be seamlessly coherent in the operation of natural law, that atheism is the warranted conclusion?
If I follow you . . . since atheist and theist alike hold that something is eternal and fundamental (whether it is monist or dualist doesn't matter at this point) the distinction between theism and atheism drops away.
If he had framed his book as identifying a puzzle that scientists need to work out, it probably would be seen as a positive contribution.
I didn't mean to suggest anything that broad. After all we're basically talking about naive philosophical views on both sides here.
All I meant to suggest was that the "scientific atheist" asserts that the sufficiency of natural causes to explain the universe and it's functions warrants the conclusion that God does not exist; and that many or most religiously motivated antievolutionists (as well as ID'ers) implicitly agree with the logic of scientific atheism on this point since they invariable point to putative instances of the insufficiency of natural cause as evidence for creation or design, and thereby for God or the "designer".
All I'm saying is that the extremists on either side tend to agree about how the problem is to be understood, even if they disagree drastically about the resolution. Most of us, or course, even though we may be on one side or the other, don't see the problem as being nearly so simple and are somewhere in the middle.
This is not an uncommon phenomena. See the abortion debate, for instance, where there is endless debate about "when human life begins." This is considered a crucial question by both extremes, even though it is stupid. (Human life doesn't "begin," it continues, seamlessly in process at all stages of the reproductive process.)
I dunno. After all, even though he didn't use the term, Darwin wrote about irreducibly complex systems (ones where all components are necessary) and how they evolved (because components were first added that were merely helpful and only later became essential, because functional redundancies were eliminated, etc).
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