Posted on 02/05/2002 8:18:30 AM PST by JediGirl
For those of us who are constantly checking up on the crevo threads, why do you debate the merits (or perceived lack thereof) of evolution?
Wow, it sounds like you have so much invested into this whole argument. Am I wrong about that?
Look, your quotes were shown to be ripped out of context, and fraudulently used to convey the opposite of what the sources intended to say. You just shrug it off and apparently you intend to continue to use this fraudulently presented material. So I assumed -- correct me if I'm wrong -- that truth is unimportant to you. Hence my suggestion that you may have served on the OJ jury. "My" theory is doing just fine; and if assaults such as yours are all that evolution needs to worry about, it has no worries at all.
Huh? Let me get this straight. You think its OK to quote people out of context??? So, tell me, if someone misquoted a bible verse and misattributed it to something vastly different than what it really said, and then you saw someone else take that verse, and post it to their web page with that misattribution, how would you respond? I'm geniunely curious.
Walter Brown, in his book In the Beginning, says: "Eugene Dubois conceded forty years after he discovered Java "man" that it was just a large gibbon." In support of this statement, Brown gives the following quote: "Pithecanthropus [Java man] was not a man, but a gigantic genus allied to the Gibbons ..." Eugene Dubois, "On the Fossil Human Skulls Recently Discovered in Java and Pithecanthropus Erectus," Man, Vol. 37, January 1937, p. 4.
However Dubois' complete sentence was as follows: "Pithecanthropus was not a man, but a gigantic genus allied to the Gibbons, however superior to the gibbons on account of its exceedingly large brain volume and distinguished at the same time by its faculty of assuming an erect attitude and gait."
se do not sound like the words of a man who is dismissing Java Man as a mere ape that had nothing to do with human evolution. Indeed, Dubois, an exceptionally stubborn man, never ceased to believe that Java Man was a primitive human ancestor.
What is the problem here?? DuBois clearly said "Pithecanthropus was not a man, but a gigantic genus allied to the Gibbons, and if DuBois said it is not a man, why the arguement about it being a large Gibbon at all? It is not man, it is a large ape like creature, a Gibbon, the evidence was just a skull cap with a femur found 100 yards down stream with no evidence to tie it to the skull cap of this large Gibbon and the founder said it himself!!
I am going to look some more, I saw some earlier on this page, and you guys are really stretching things with the mis-quote statements, I have yet to see a point refuted made by the creationist point by including more of the evolutionist's paragraph!
I am going to read more, I am sure somewhere, someone made a mistake somewhere, after all, evolutionists thought the tooth of a pig was the tooth of a man and they named the tooth NEBRASKA MAN and introduced it into the Scopes Trial, so, I do believe men can make mistakes. :-)
...a gibbon that walked upright, had a large brain, and was ancestral to humans. Dubois is probably incorrect in linking homo erectus and gibbons, but let's assume he's correct in all his suppositions. How, then, does this quote support the creationist position and not the evolutionist position? It's one of the cornerstones of evolutionary theory that man evolved from ape-like creatures. Of course, if we look back far enough, there comes a point where we stop calling our ancestors men and begin calling them, for want of a better word, apes.
By the way, the only thing that makes it an ancestor, is the theory of evolution, There is no evidence it is an ancestor, only the theory of evolution makes it an ancestor, and a discredited one since it is not australopithecine!
All it is is a SKULL cap and 3 teeth found in 1891, with a femur that was dug up 46 feet down stream and a year later in 1892.
There is NO EVIDENCE the two are even related!! All you have is the skull of an ape!!
The only 'evidence' of this being an ancestor is a theory that does not even apply!!
There is ZERO EVIDENCE of this creature ever becoming man. There is ZERO EVIDENCE of the femur being related to the Skulcap!! In fact, many think the femur is from a dead human.
DuBois also found 2 fully human skulls in the same strata on this expedition but never exhibited them becaue his JAVA MAN link would have been discredited. He later released these two human skulls in 1920, 30 years later!!
Eugene Dubois, "The proto-Australian Fossil man of Wadjuk, Java", Koninklijke Akadamie van Wetenschappan, proceedings, Vol 13, Koninklijke Akadamie , 1920), p. 131
I have a lot invested in fellow conservatives using honest arguments on important subjects. There is a split in the conservative movement between evolutionists & creationists. One side relies on a fundamentally dishonest tactic of out of context quotations of the other side to try to smear them. Should I not be passionately against that?
The people who developed modern astronomy were astrologers
Brahe and Galileo were astrologers?
Brahe was an astrologer. He is quoted as having said, "To deny astrology is to deny the glory of God!" I won't say anything about Galileo, but when you go back to the roots of any science, you find superstition and magic.
Certainly. The best example is the one I pointed out about Stephen Gould. Interestingly enough, most of Gould's posts that get misquoted are from the early to mid 1980's. Coincidentally, that is when one of the larger paradigm shifts in evolution was going on, with the debates between Gradualism and Punctuated Equilibrium(PE) going on in full swing. Gould, was on the side of PE, and was promoting his theory above gradualism. So taking in to account this knowledge, we can look at Gould's statement (along with my prior quote):
The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."
And there's the whole thing:
2. The saltational initiation of major transitions: The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution. In 1871 St. george Mivart, Darwins most congent critic, referred to it as the dilemma of 'the incipient stages of useful structures' - of what possible benifit to a reptile is two percent of a wing? The dilemma has two potential solutions. The first, perferred by Darwinians because it preserves both gradualism and adaption, is the principle of preadaption: the intermediary stages functioned in another way but were, by good fortune in retrospect, preadapted to a new role they could play only after greater elaboration. Thus, if feathers first functioned 'for' insulation and later 'for' the traping of insect prey, a proto-wing might be built without any reference to flight.
I do not doubt the supreme importance of preadaption [note: Gould later replaces this term with 'exadaption' -cn], but the other alternative, treated with caution, reluctance, distain or even fear by the modern synthesis, now deserves a rehearing in the light of renewed interest in development: perhaps, in many cases, the intermediates never existed. i do not refer to the saltational origin of entire new designs, complete in all their complex and intergrated features - a fantasy that would be truely anti-Darwinian in denying any creativity to selection and relegating it to the role of eliminating old models. Instead, I envisage a potential saltational origin for the essential features of key adaptions. Why may we not imagine that gill arch bones of an ancestral agnathan moved forward in one step to surround the mouth and form prot-jaws? Such a change would scarcely establish the _Bauplan_ of the gnathostomes. So much more must be altered in the reconstruction of agnathan design - the building of a true shoulder girdle with boney, paired appendages, to say the least. But the discontinuous origin of a proto-jaw might set up new regimes of development and selection that would quickly lead to other, coordinated modifications. Yet Darwin, conflating gradualism with natural selection as he did so often, wrongly proclaimed that any such discontinuity, even for organs (much less taxa) would destroy his theory: . . .
During the past 30 years, such proposals have generally been treated as a fantasy signifying surrender - an invocation of hopeful monsters rather than a square facing of a difficult issue. But our renewed interest in development, the only discipline of biology that might unify molecular and evolutionary approaches into a coherent science, suggests that such ideas are neither fantastic, utterly contrary to genetic principles, nor untestable.
Goldschmidt conflated two proposals as causes for hopeful monsters - 'systematic mutations' involving the entire genome 9a spinoff from his fallacious belief that the entire genome acted as a single unit), and small mutations with large impact upon adult phenotypes because they work upon the early stages of ontogeny and lead to cascading effects throughout embryology. We reject his first proposal, but the second, eminently plausible, theme might unite a Darwinian insistence upon continuity of genetic change with a macroevolutionary suspicion of phenetic discontinuity. It is, after all, a major focus in the study of heterochrony (effects, often profound, of small changes in developmental rate upon adult phenotypes); it is also implied in the emphasis now being placed upon regulatory genes in the genesis of macroevolutionary change- for regulation is fundamentally about timing in the complex orchestration of development." (Gould, S.J. (1982) Is a new and general theroy of evolution emerging? In:Maynard Smith, J. (ed.), Evolution now A century after Darwin. 129-145. Macmillan Press, London. 239 pp. [Note: First published (1980) Paleobiology, 6: 119-130] p. 140-141).
He's saying that Gradualism is having problems finding intermediary forms within species to explain the smooth transitions between species. Note that this statement does not count out PE, which says that transitionals happen in short bursts, notably when species expand to fill new habitats, which is what Gould is talking about.
So did you dishonestly miscast Gould's quote (and many of the other quotes) to make it look like they were bashing evolution? It sure looks like it to me, although you don't really explain what you are trying to get at with the statement: Some quotes for you... As you can see, most are from scientists. It sounds like you are trying to promote creationism over evolution to me...
Either way, your academic honesty has taken a hit today.
God is the source of all truth. That his truth can and has been discovered by magicians, alchemists or astrologers doesn't suprise or disturb me in the least. So to suggest that anyone who is interested in knowing the truth would want astrononmy, chemistry and mathematics thrown out of schools is ridiculous.
Exactly! And the main question to deal with in evolution is not who came up with it, or who advocated it, or who misused it for what purpose, but whether it's true.
Let's each quit calling the other side names, and look at the data.
What is your evidence that life arose by anything other than natural processes operating under natural law?
I'll agree, that quoting correctly is essential, but when I can use a single sentence out of a paragraph, and get screamed at because I didnt use the paragraph, told I am mis-quoting because of that, that is intellectually dishonest, especially about the one I used above.
I forgot some facts, and used the 100 yards distance, I looked it up, it was 46 feet away from the skull that the femur was found, but it was a year later, there were 2 fully human skulls found in the same strata that DuBois intentionally did NOT reveal because it would have ruined his attempt to call JAVA man was a missing link...that is much more serious than leaving out more of a quote than some would like. In the pages you sent me to, I did NOT find one innacurate quote, only the pulling of sentences out of paragraphs, where it is just like I said: The evolutionists states some of his evidence goes against evo theory, but he still believes in evolution.
Sorry, Jenny, that site needs better reasearch than that, those claims are whining, not revealing!
Not heresy, just an honest error. First of all, we didn't know about australopithecines in the 1890's. Second, not everyone (for example, the honored Leakeys) accepts that australopithecines were human ancestors. Disagreement is common in science; in fact, it's a sign of health.
All it is is a SKULL cap and 3 teeth found in 1891, with a femur that was dug up 46 feet down stream and a year later in 1892.
That's as may be, but we have much better examples of Java man--homo erectus--that have been found since. That species was almost certainly ancestral to modern man; that conclusion rests on much firmer footing than that one fossil.
Is anyone else as amused by this straw man as I am?
If you don't understand the point of the webpage, I can explain it to you at a later date...
Well, it was begun by people who happened to believe in special creation. This is not evidence that special creation is true.And NAZI Germany was started by those who believed in a MASTER RACE, EVOLUTION.
Yeah. Sure. And communism is the logical extension of "If a man asks for your coat, give him your cloak as well."
You are proving my point with this. Gould clearly said the absence of transitional forms is a problem. Just because he goes on with an explanation for these missing forms does not make the first point incorrect: GOULD HIMSELF STATES THAT THE LACK OF TRANSITIONAL FORMS IS A PROBLEM for evolutionists!!
This quote is completely in context, it is the evolutionists that are in a tizzy here, they are upset that the Creationists don't believe the self given answer by Gould as final, instead, they AGREE with Gould, as YOU POSTED WHAT HE SAID, Creationists AGREE with Gould: Transitional forms are missing, and it proves a problem for evolutinists; Just because Gould posts another theory to defend the lack of fossils does not remove his own admission there is a lack of transitional forms!!
THE QUOTE IS ACCURATE!!
I know that. If I remember correctly, Gould supports PE, does he not? Again (for the 3rd time) I never said that he was a creationist or even an anti-evolutionist. I posted the quote because IMO (and in the opinion of others) there is very little evidence of transitional forms... and that is a problem if you want to prove evolution.
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