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.
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.
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.
This becomes exceedingly dishonest. It has repeatedly been pointed out to you that neither Darwin himself nor anyone after expected the fossil record to be continuous. This is for inevitable reasons of geology as much as biology.
All that said, there are certain known cases where millions of years of geological deposition have continued uninterrupted on certain areas of sea floor.
Cores from such deposists have been microscopically examined and, guess what? Very long and sweeping completely smooth transitions exist.
Smooth Change in the Fossil Record.
A Smooth Fossil Transition: Foraminifera.
So where we have a gap-free fossil record, we have found instances of gap free evolution. So what were you saying?
If the evolution of life can be shown to be "in fact" inherently discontinuous then Darwin is falsified.
Perhaps the out is that it doesn't matter how many continuous histories we find, any discontinuous process of evolution falsifies Darwin?
Not really. Such discontinuous events as speciations by hybridization and polyploidy (I can Google, you can Google) have been identified and, no, Darwin is not falsified. These are rather interesting special cases which Darwin, knowing nothing of genetics, did not anticipate but it's no big deal.