Posted on 10/11/2005 4:07:11 AM PDT by mlc9852
MONDAY, Oct. 10 (HealthDay News) -- Head to the American Museum of Natural History's Web site, and you'll see the major draw this fall is a splashy exhibit on dinosaurs.
And not just any dinosaurs, but two-legged carnivorous, feathered "theropods" like the 30-inch-tall Bambiraptor -- somewhat less cuddly than its namesake.
The heyday of the theropods, which included scaly terrors like T. rex and velociraptor, stretched from the late Triassic (220 million years ago) to the late Cretaceous (65 million years ago) periods.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
See post 199.
Other than exposing a creationist as a liar, what's your point? Dog bites man. Ho Hum.
Well, you can read all 14 chapters if you want the complete context or just chapter 9. Below is the first paragraph of chapter 9. Darwin admits in his words "the extreme imperfection of the fossil record".
Chapter 9 On the Imperfection of the Geological Record.
IN the sixth chapter I enumerated the chief objections which might be justly urged against the views maintained in this volume. Most of them have now been discussed. One, namely the distinctness of specific forms, and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty. I assigned reasons why such links do not commonly occur at the present day, under the circumstances apparently most favourable for their presence, namely on an extensive and continuous area with graduated physical conditions. I endeavoured to show, that the life of each species depends in a more important manner on the presence of other already defined organic forms, than on climate; and, therefore, that the really governing conditions of life do not graduate away quite insensibly like heat or moisture. I endeavoured, also, to show that intermediate varieties, from existing in lesser numbers than the forms which they connect, will generally be beaten out and exterminated during the course of further modification and improvement. The main cause, however, of innumerable intermediate links not now occurring everywhere throughout nature depends on the very process of natural selection, through which new varieties continually take the places of and exterminate their parent-forms. But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.
You're correct, Darwin gives many rationales as to why the record is so poor. As one would expect from the proponent of a theory.
But 150 years later the record is still, shall we say "less than perfect". And when you couple that with the discovery of DNA by Crick and Watson 50 years ago and the realization that the cell is not simply a sack of protoplasm (as was thought in Darwin's day) but a micro factory teeming with information and activity, questions and doubts will and are being raised about the validity of Darwin's claims.
Darwin's theory has had a good run. About 150 years. He deserves all the accolades he gets and will long be remembered as one of the greatest scientists of all time.
However it's time for science to move on. And we are witnessing a great scientific revolution it in our life time. Amazing. The history of science is one of revolution and change. Theories get created, destroyed, modified and tweaked. That's the history of science.
A good read on this process is "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn 1962.
If so, it's a silent revolution. Check out how much scientific research ID has so far stimulated..
I guess this is just one more sighting of the Imminent Demise of Evolution. Yawn!
Thanks for the link. I found your thread and deployed the ping list. Better late than never.
The excerpt below will give you the flavor of the article.
"The current intelligent design controversy is a struggle within science between empiricism (what the evidence shows) and naturalism (the belief that no evidence that shows design can be admitted). … Surely, all the evidence must support naturalism! Unfortunately, many in science today seem incapable of a rational discussion of the problem of what happens when the evidence doesn't support it. Contrary evidence piles up, increasingly strained interpretations are invoked, the issues are politicized in order to gain time, and dissenters (real or imagined) are persecuted and suppressed."
Scientific revolutions are always resisted. As Kuhn makes clear. And they don't happen over night. The latest flap at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. over an article by Stephen Meyer is a case in point.
What makes ID so difficult to get accepted is its insistence of an intelligent agent. This is anathema to modern science. This in-spite of the obvious weakness of Darwin's theory.
Made my day.
Thanks for your effort.
Meyer's paper is just a hackneyed warming over of creationist arguments. It contains no new data and no original thought. The flap was over how an apparently creationist editor abused his position to publish something that doesn't conform to the generally accepted standards for reporting of scientific results.
What makes ID so difficult to get accepted is its insistence of an intelligent agent. This is anathema to modern science. This in-spite of the obvious weakness of Darwin's theory.
No, the problem is that ID gives us no objective ways of determining whether an intelligent agent was involved. It reduces to 'godiddit'.
And there are no obvious weaknesses in Darwin's theory.
Yes, I'm well aware of the many rationales Darwin's defenders provide to explain away the gaps in the record. And they may seem valid to many people. But there are many others, and there numbers are growing, who disagree.
If the evolution of life can be shown to be "in fact" inherently discontinuous then Darwin is falsified.
Proponents can no longer depend on the Fossil Record to support Darwin's thesis. It undermines it.
Anyone can give a rationale as to why there are gaps. But the gaps remain. The "only if" arguments will only convince true believers. And assertions such as "he was right" are not going to cut it.
So you decided on the Ad Hominem. Good way to debate. Keep up the good work.
No, this was a criticism of a paper, not a person. Possibly if you had some exposure to the scientific literature*, you'd realize that we criticize people's work all the time, and in no sense is that a criticism of them personally.
*see, now that's an ad hominem
Picky, picky, picky.
Darwin wasn't a geologist, either, although he knew plenty about the state of it in his day. If his statements are just a guy with a bad theory of biology making non-biological excuses, he might have been slapped down hard over the subsequent 146 years from then to now. I do not believe this has happened. Instead, his perception of the likelihood of fossil preservation has survived the discovery of plate tectonics, continental drift, space-rock catastrophism, etc. You can still see web pages today like this one echoing Darwin's basic ideas on fossil preservation.
There are two opposite errors which need to be countered about the fossil record: (1) that it is so incomplete as to be of no value in interpreting patterns and trends in the history of life, and (2) that it is so good that we should expect a relatively complete record of the details of evolutionary transitions within most lineages.So, basically, what is the point of claiming that Darwin was just making excuses? The point is to defend a dishonest strawman model, to be good little liar for the Lord and earn a special place in Heaven. But I thought He said some bad things about false witness.What then is the nature of the fossil record? It can be confidently stated that only a very small fraction of the species that once lived on Earth has been preserved in the rock record and subsequently discovered and described by science. Our knowledge of the history of life can be put into perspective by a comparison with our knowledge of living organisms. About 1.5 million living species have been described by biologists, while paleontologists have catalogued only about 250,000 fossil species representing over 540 million years of Earth history (Erwin, 1993)...
Face it. You don't really know.
Unless you're of some ancient, well-documented lineage, I suspect there are plenty of gaps in your own genealogy, even if you only try to go back a dozen generations. So what? There were undoubtedly ancestors who occupied those gaps. If you claim that the gaps are "evidence" for some divine origin, you won't find too many people who are impressed by that argument. You may learn who those missing ancestors were, or you may not. If you try to go back further, the gaps will be worse. Evidence of some ancestors may be lost forever. But there is no weakness in the theory that you are descended from a long unbroken line.
Isn't this just the same old "kids vs. teacher" story recycled? I think we can just fill in the blank "kids vs. _______" for the next evolution of the story.
The problem you have arguing with creationists is that every time you find a fossil that fits into a gap, you just have two (smaller) gaps!
More gaps! See, evolution is being disproved! There are more gaps than ever. See, we told you so!
[Sorry, sometimes it get to be a bit much.]
Yes, I'm well aware of the many rationales Darwin's defenders provide to explain away the gaps in the record.
Now you're just being offensively obnoxious.
I explained the nature of your fallacies to you in my earlier post, but rather than gain any englightenment from that, you decide to just bluster on with your same flawed arguments, while cranking up the "in-your-face' quotient several notches. Be honest: Do you actually want to discuss the science, and maybe learn something yourself in the process, or do you just want to "preach" at us about how evolution's days are allegedly numbered?
One more time, son: No one is "explaining away the gaps in the record". There *are* gaps in the record. No one denies them. But the point is that there will *always* be gaps in the record, even if smoothly gradualistic evolution is 100% correct. Fossilization is, by its nature, a "spotty" process which will produce a limited number of "snapshots" of living things in the past. It's kind of like a box of family photos -- it'll capture certain times, certain places, and certain events, but there will be other times, places, events, and people which just didn't get recorded; but that doesn't mean they never existed. You learn as much as you can from the records which are available, while realizing that not everything is going to have been preserved in pictures.
Look, I've ready your profile page -- you seem to be a reasonably bright fellow. You've worked as an engineer in aerospace. There aren't many complete dolts in jobs like that. So I have no doubt that you *can* understand the issues if you actually bother to sit down and have a look at them. But so far I see little indication that you *want* to actually apply analytical skills to the actual evidence and find out what conclusions are and are not appropriately drawn from it.
Instead, it seems that you just want to "think" only as far as is needed to come up with an "aha, gotcha!" thought you can use as an accusation against evolutionary biology, and then you stop cold right there.
Furthermore, it looks very much as if you've cribbed most of your "conclusions" about the fossil data from creationist sources, and not actually taken the time to examine the fossil evidence yourself, and drawn your own conclusions. Warning: Trying to learn anything about science, evolution, or evidence from creationist sources is like trying to "learn" about conservatism from Michael Moore: You're not going to get the whole picture, and much of what you do "learn" will be heavily "spun", or just flat-out wrong.
Now, getting back to specifics, the point you keep missing -- even though I over-belabored the point and drove it into the ground in my last post to you -- is that regardless of the "gaps", there is a vast amount of "nongap" data that you seem very determined to totally ignore. That available data itself makes an overwhelming case for Darwinian evolution. Why do you keep failing to address any of it? Why do you keep fixating on the inevitable "gaps", and not on the evidence? The evidence is *far* more complete than the "gappers" like to imply, and makes an incredibly compelling case on its own. Why aren't you looking at *that*?
Now back to your specific charge. You write of, "the many rationales Darwin's defenders provide to explain away the gaps in the record". First, no one is trying to "explain away" the gaps. What we're trying to explain to the creationists who "can't see the forest for the gaps" is that:
1. There will always be gaps in the fossil record, for the obvious fact that not everything gets fossilized, then not everything that gets fossilized will survive (many are destroyed by erosion, subduction, etc.), then not every fossil that survives will be accessible (some will be buried deep in the Earth), then not every accessible fossil will be discovered (people can't scour every square inch of the planet), etc. etc. Hell, there aren't even fossils for each and every species that exists *today*, so obviously the fossil record will always be a small fractional slice of all life that has ever lived on the Earth.
2. Because there will always be gaps, one can't conclude a damned thing from the simple fact that gaps exist in the record. Of *course* they do. There would be gaps no matter *what* the reality of the history of life on Earth was, even if it *was* truly gradualistic change. Even then there would still be gaps in the fossil record, because that record *itself* is "gappy" -- fossilization occurs too rarely to cause a "snapshot" of every significant lifeform at every significant moment in time at every significant location on Earth. Period.
3. So the meaningful question (for anyone who actually *wants* to seek the truth, instead of seeking excuses to ignore the evidence like the creationists do) is this: Is the pattern of the fossil evidence we *do* manage to find (including the pattern of the "gaps" in that evidence) of the type we would expect to find if (a) Darwinian evolution actually happened in the way predicted by the Theory, and (b) fossilization produced imperfect snapshots of that process in the way fossilation is known to take place (and not take place)? The answer to *that* question is a resounding "yes".
Come on, DRF, if you've done real engineering, you *know* how to do these kinds of analyses. If you have a process that occurs in a certain way, *and* you can only take samples or observations of that process at certain intervals or from certain narrow viewing angles or whatever, you know how to work out how to test whether the results of your limited sampling method matches the expected operational results or not. It's not rocket science.
Similarly, it's not hard to determine whether the fossils that we *do* find (GIVEN THE KNOWN LIMITATIONS OF FOSSILIZATION AND RECOVERY) are of the number, kind, and pattern that we would expect to find if life arose by evolutionary processes. And when we do such determinations, we find that the actual fossil record *does* match the predictions of evolutionary biology. So any whining about "there are still gaps" is just tunnel-visioned naysaying.
These are not "rationales". These are informed analyses. And it's not just "Darwin's defenders". Anyone with any existing belief can perform the same analyses and get the same results -- if they honestly want to. The creationists don't.
And they may seem valid to many people.
Because they *are* valid.
But there are many others, and there numbers are growing, who disagree.
There will always be stubborn holdouts, no matter how valid and strong the evidence. Some people can't let go of their preconceptions. And you're wrong about "there [sic] numbers are growing". The creationists keep trying to give that impression through propaganda and PR, but the actual number of scientists in the relevant fields who are familiar with the data yet "disagree", are *not* growing.
If the evolution of life can be shown to be "in fact" inherently discontinuous then Darwin is falsified.
True, but you're being overly simplistic here. "Discontinuous" is not an either/or thing. There are wide degrees of discontinuity, as you should know if you're really an engineer. And discontinuous on what *scale* (both temporally and spatially, not to mention parametically)? Creationists like to misrepresent Punctuated Equilibrium as being "discontinuous", but as Gould has made very clear at every opportunity, it's *only* "discontinuous" when viewed on the scale of millions of years. It's still continuous when viewed at the scale of thousands of years.
Proponents can no longer depend on the Fossil Record to support Darwin's thesis. It undermines it.
Complete, utter, 100% horse manure. You really *are* relying on the creationist propaganda, aren't you? Because there's really no way you could be personally familiar with the fossil record and actually say something that boneheadedly wrong.
There's absolutely nothing in the fossil record that "undermines" Darwinian evolution. The *only* thing I've seen the creationists even *attempt* to offer in support of such a ludicrous statement is itself an obvious, blatant fallacy -- all such claims rest on the fallacy that "absence of evidence is evidence of absence". In other words, they rashly conclude that if there's a gap in the fossil record, it represents "proof" that there are no transitions to be found. The obvious nature of the fallacy is twofold:
1. Many of the gaps are simply spans where no fossils are available AT ALL, for ANY animals of any kind, because of subduction, deep deposition, or other obvious reasons. It really is obviously a "missing data" problem, *not* a "missing XYZ when everything else has been found" problem, as the creationists like to dishonestly imply. For example, it's extremely rare to find *any* mammal fossils of any kind from the Oligocene era. It's not just the "transitions" which are missing from that era, almost *all* fossils from that era are unobtainable.
2. You'd think the creationists would stop making this error, because they've fallen on their faces *so* many times already doing it. It seems that just when the creationists like to make a Poster Child of a particular "missing link", paleontologists find it after all. Whales with legs, proto-birds with partially formed wings, fish with feet, proto-mammals with jaw joints that are half reptilian and half mammalian... The list goes on and on. Creationists kept ridiculing biologists for not finding these "obviously" ludicrous life forms which would "obviously" remain "missing links" forever as an eternal "gap" in the fossil record -- and then such fossils *were* found to fill in the gaps that the creationists had wrongly presumed were "real" gaps. Oops.
Furthermore, by ranting obsessively about "gaps", you keep overlooking the fact that many, many, *MANY* lineages HAVE been filled by enough fortuitously found fossils to provide a clear, continuous record of evolutionary change across many millions of years, of the kind that the creationists keep falsely claiming aren't possible and don't actually happen. Oops again for the creationists. Any special reason you're not discussing *those*?
Additionally, you're glossing over the fact (I *hope* it's because of ignorance, not dishonesty) that even when "gaps" exist, they're often small and minor enough that the fossil sequences which have been found provide an overwhelmingly complete picture of the evolutionary relationships. Creationists often like to try to convince people that any gap at all is a vast discontinuity, but let's face it, when the gaps are minor enough and the nongap data is voluminous enough, it doesn't take a genius to literally "connect the dots" when the picture is that complete and obvious.
Finally, the creationists like to "forget" to deal with the fact that even when (often relatively minor) gaps exist in fossil sequences, DNA analysis and other kinds of independent evidence can and does provide overwhelming cross-confirmation of the fact that the apparent fossil lineages (gaps and all) are, indeed, true lines of descent. But the creationists don't like to talk about that...
Anyone can give a rationale as to why there are gaps.
Especially when they're right, and can demonstrate it through research and independent lines of evidence. Is there some reason you "forgot" to mention that?
But the gaps remain.
Big freaking deal. There are gaps in your own family tree history -- does that mean you didn't actually descend from other people? Get a clue.
The "only if" arguments will only convince true believers.
Then how handy that biologists don't actually rely on "only if arguments", they rely on vast amounts of evidence and analysis which demonstrates the truth of their conclusions.
And assertions such as "he was right" are not going to cut it.
Darwin *was* right, as 150 years of subsequent evidence and research have overwhelmingly demonstrated. And no amount of "gaps, gaps, oh my god gaps!" from you or other die-hard creationists is going to hand-wave away the evidence. Yeah, there are gaps. Whoop-de-doo. What you keep "forgetting" to consider is that the size, nature, and location of the gaps, ALONG WITH the vast amount of available evidence which you keep wanting to not talk about, exquisitely supports evolutionary biology. Deal with it.
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