Posted on 07/31/2007 10:18:52 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
...His findings: Overall, approximately 35 percent of the 982 trilobite species exhibited some variation in some aspect of their appearance that was evolving. But more than 70 percent of early and middle Cambrian species exhibited variation, while only 13 percent of later trilobite species did so.
"There's hardly any variation in the post-Cambrian," he said. "Even the presence or absence or the kind of ornamentation on the head shield varies within these Cambrian trilobites and doesn't vary in the post-Cambrian trilobites."...
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
I find the idea of gradual change being rampant (i.e. unrestrained and violent) pretty funny. However, if he indeed predicted that (which I doubt), it only goes to show that he didn't fully understand his theory.
Only if you’re a Darwinist:
“Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented.”
Provine William B., [Professor of Biological Sciences, Cornell University], “Darwin Day” website, University of Tennessee Knoxville, 1998.
“Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.”
Provine, William B. [Professor of Biological Sciences, Cornell University], “, “Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life”, Abstract of Will Provine’s 1998 Darwin Day Keynote Address.
“It is no more heretical to say the Universe displays purpose, as Hoyle has done, than to say that it is pointless, as Steven Weinberg has done. Both statements are metaphysical and outside science. Yet it seems that scientists are permitted by their own colleagues to say metaphysical things about lack of purpose and not the reverse. This suggests to me that science, in allowing this metaphysical notion, sees itself as religion and presumably as an atheistic religion (if you can have such a thing).”
Shallis, Michael [Astrophysicist, Oxford University], “In the eye of a storm”, New Scientist, January 19, 1984, pp.42-43.
“Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material.”
Simpson, George Gaylord [late Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, USA], “The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of its Significance for Man,” [1949], Yale University Press: New Haven CT, 1960, reprint, p.344.
“I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.”
Aldous Huxley: Ends and Means, pp. 270 ff.
==Change does not imply an increase in diversity in a class.
Come again?
Since you seem to be enjoying this totally unrelated topic, and I have some time to kill ...
You may notice that when you post a thread, as you did this one, comment #1 is all yours. It is there for you to, stay with me on this, comment and editorialize all you want.
Oh, it's falsifiable all right. IDers just haven't been able to do it.
If he had actually read the article before deliberately misrepresenting it in the title, he might have noticed this quote:
Paleontologists for decades have suspected that highly variable species evolved more rapidly than others, said Nigel Hughes, Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Riverside. "Various studies have approached questions pertaining to it--but this is the first to convincingly document it in any group,"
Thanks for being honest. So many creationists pretend their opposition to evolution is based in the science even though it's transparently not.
I find your use of “church” in a pejorative sense to be ironically amusing. Thanks for that!
See post #82. Talk about politics! Talk about religion! Are you guys really that blind!!!
IMO, it’s silly to object to editorializing in the article’s title. It is a common practice here.
I would appreciate a follow-up on this, considering it took me about thirty seconds to locate a section of Origin of Species that flatly contradicts the whole premise of your posting this thread.
Darwin clearly understood varying rates of change, and recognized that there are living species that have changed little over millions of years.
I think it’s even more amusing that you take it that way. I was merely stating a simple truth about religious Darwinism:
Darwin’s House: A Religious Shrine?
“An article quoted Darwin scholar James Moore saying, ‘Muslims go to Mecca, Christians go to Jerusalem, Darwinians go to Downe.’ This seems to equate Darwinians with believers in a religion, but Nature quoted this proudly.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/^http://creationsafaris.com/crev200706.htm#20070628a
And let’s not forget Richard Dawkins, a scientists who speaks for millions of the Darwinist faithful:
“In 2005 online magazine ‘Edge The World Question Centre’ posed the following question to a number of scientific intellectuals: ‘What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?’ Dawkins revealingly answered: ‘I believe that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection.’”
http://www.iscid.org/papers/Williams_GodDelusionReview_02012007.pdf
Sounds like religion to me-—GGG
No, I’m not blind. I fully recognize that certain science popularizers mix philosophy with their science. But at least they have some scientific understanding unlike creationists. The thing is you guys continually hurt your own cause by being so ignorant.
==No, I’m not blind.
Yes you are. Otherwise you would know that Darwin is ignorance personified.
You may notice that I simply said I don’t understand the practice. I’ve been registered here for coming onto 6 years now. Pretty clear on the way stuff goes.
But thanks for your input.
Sorry, given the overall thrust of Darwin’s work, your quote is of no real value. Darwin was a gradualist to the core:
“That natural selection generally acts with extreme slowness, I duly admit.... As natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modifications; it can act only by short and slow steps.”
—Charles Darwin
Falsify evolution and the donations to the ID movement might dry up :)
Then you will no doubt have no trouble explaining how your revision to the title of this thread is compatible with what Darwin actually said about rates of change and occasional instances of stasis:
Species of different genera and classes have not changed at the same rate, or in the same degree. In the oldest tertiary beds a few living shells may still be found in the midst of a multitude of extinct forms. Falconer has given a striking instance of a similar fact, in an existing crocodile associated with many strange and lost mammals and reptiles in the sub-Himalayan deposits. The Silurian Lingula differs but little from the living species of this genus; whereas most of the other Silurian Molluscs and all the Crustaceans have changed greatly. The productions of the land seem to change at a quicker rate than those of the sea, of which a striking instance has lately been observed in Switzerland. There is some reason to believe that organisms, considered high in the scale of nature, change more quickly than those that are low: though there are exceptions to this rule. The amount of organic change, as Pictet has remarked, does not strictly correspond with the succession of our geological formations; so that between each two consecutive formations, the forms of life have seldom changed in exactly the same degree.
As for Dawkins' comment, stating a belief in something which can't be proven does not a religious zealot make.
And again, your attempts to disparage evolution by calling it a "church" or a "religion" (ostensibly to connote a mindlessness in its acceptance) is not only ironic, but pretty d@mned insulting to religious people. I guess the ones on your side are willing to look the other way when being insulted by one of their own. For the greater good and all that.
==Then you will no doubt have no trouble explaining how your revision to the title of this thread is compatible with what Darwin actually said about rates of change and occasional instances of stasis
I will defer to the founder of the Church of Darwin to answer your question:
...”The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, (must) 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.”
Darwin, C. (1859)
The Origin of Species (Reprint of the first edition)
Avenel Books, Crown Publishers, New York, 1979, p. 292
In case you’re wondering, and contrary to Darwin’s expectations, further study of the fossil record has made things much worse for Darwin’s “theory” since then:
“The fossil record suggests that the major pulse of diversification of phyla occurs before that of classes, classes before that of orders, and orders before families. This is not to say that each higher taxon originated before species (each phylum, class, or order contained at least one species, genus, family, etc. upon appearance), but the higher taxa do not seem to have diverged through an accumulation of lower taxa.”
Erwin, D., Valentine, J., and Sepkoski, J. (1988)
“A Comparative Study of Diversification Events”
Evolution, vol. 41, p. 1183
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