“even leading evolutionists such as George Gaylord Simpson backed away from it. He said it was misleading.”
Here's an excellent example of how creationist Web sites distort what scientists say. Simpson certainly did not back away from "the horse evolution hypothesis." What he thought was misleading was the then-popular depiction of horse evolution as a straight line--the "linear" progression I referred to earlier. Here's what he really thought:
"Simpson made the evolution of the horse one of his specialties; his detailed, quantitative studies, published in his classic book Horses (1951), exploded Marsh's 'single-line' evolution of the horse from a fox-sized hoofless ancestor.
"Instead, Simpson showed the complex and diverse branching of the horse's ancient relatives, not only through time, but over geographica area, as early populations pushed into various habitats, adapting first to forests, then to open grasslands. Horses represented a complex, branching bush of diverging species—nothing like a line leading straight from Eohippus to old Dobbin."
And a direct quote: "Eohippus is referred to the Equidae because we happen to have more complete lines back to it from later members of this family than from other families."
‘Tempo and Mode in Evolution’ placemark
[[Here’s an excellent example of how creationist Web sites distort what scientists say. Simpson certainly did not back away from “the horse evolution hypothesis.” ]]
They didn’t distort anything- He DID back away from the graphs- Are you distorting by saying he didn’t?
As well what you are neglecting to point out is that the species are all the same KIND- and are nothign but variations- the toe issue as pointed out include genes being turned on and off- the only way htis can happen is if they are all the same KIND- As well the breaks in the ‘branches’ are so severe that one can not reconcile one species to another with any intellectual honesty.
“In 1980, a four-day symposium was held at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, with 150 evolutionists in attendance, to discuss the problems with the gradualistic evolutionary theory. In addressing this meeting, evolutionist Boyce Rensberger noted that the scenario of the evolution of the horse has no foundation in the fossil record, and that no evolutionary process has been observed that would account for the gradual evolution of horses:
The popularly told example of horse evolution, suggesting a gradual sequence of changes from four-toed fox-sized creatures living nearly 50 million years ago to today’s much larger one-toed horse, has long been known to be wrong. Instead of gradual change, fossils of each intermediate species appear fully distinct, persist unchanged, and then become extinct. Transitional forms are unknown.”
“The inconsistency of the theory of the evolution of the horse becomes increasingly apparent as more fossil findings are gathered. Fossils of modern horse species (Equus nevadensis and Equus occidentalis) have been discovered in the same layer as Eohippus.155 This is an indication that the modern horse and its so-called ancestor lived at the same time.
The evolutionist science writer Gordon R. Taylor explains this little-acknowledged truth in his book The Great Evolution Mystery:
But perhaps the most serious weakness of Darwinism is the failure of paleontologists to find convincing phylogenies or sequences of organisms demonstrating major evolutionary change... The horse is often cited as the only fully worked-out example. But the fact is that the line from Eohippus to Equus is very erratic. It is alleged to show a continual increase in size, but the truth is that some variants were smaller than Eohippus, not larger. Specimens from different sources can be brought together in a convincing-looking sequence, but there is no evidence that they were actually ranged in this order in time”
http://darwinismrefuted.com/natural_history_2_12.html
“It is interesting to note that while claiming that intermediate forms for the reptile-to-mammal transition have been found, some evolutionists admit that no immediate ancestors for any of the 32 mammalian orders have been discovered. Thus, George Gaylord Simpson, after stating that nowhere in the world is there any trace of a fossil that would close the considerable gap between Hyracotherium (”Eohippus”), which evolutionists assume was the first horse, and its supposed ancestral order Condylarthra, goes on to say “This is true of all the thirty-two orders of mammals…The earliest and most primitive known members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous sequence from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed.”3 http://www.icr.org/article/169/
The Eohippus had 18 ribs, and infact was more closely related to the hyrax, not hte horse- but you won’t find that in aNy propoganda branch graphs.
” The earliest of this series, Eohippus, is properly called Hyracotherium. This is not horse-like; it has 4 toes and 18 pairs of ribs, and its feet are padded and dog-like. The next-oldest, Orohippus, had 15 pairs of ribs. Pliohippus had 19 pairs, and the modern Equus has 18 pairs. Does this sound like a genuine series of transitions? Especially not, when we consider that fossils of Eohippus and the modern Equus have been found side by side in surface rocks.”
As well, the remainder of species in the KIND showed nothign but trait variation- nothign is said abotu hte fact that their supposed ancestors had entirely different gene instructions which could not have been biologically passed off to the horse- no NEW ifnromaiton was gaiend- however, what we do see is information dissappearing and even changing fully within KIND parameters.
[[And a direct quote: “Eohippus is referred to the Equidae because we happen to have more complete lines back to it from later members of this family than from other families.”]]
That is simply untrue