Posted on 04/09/2002 11:31:41 AM PDT by JediGirl
Stephen Jay Gould, one of the great evolutionary biologists of our time, will publish his "magnum opus", this month, in which he lambasts creationists for deliberately distorting his theories to undermine the teaching of Darwinism in schools.
Professor Gould accuses creationists of having exploited the sometimes bitter dispute between him and his fellow Darwinists to promulgate the myth that the theory of evolution is riven with doubts and is, therefore, just as valid as biblical explanations for life on Earth.
The distinguished professor of zoology at Harvard University, whose 1,400-page book, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, has been 10 years in the writing, was intimately involved with the fight against creationist teaching during the 1970s and 1980s in the American Deep South.
The arguments have resurfaced in Britain after the news that a school in Gateshead has been teaching creationism alongside evolution, arguing both are equal valid viewpoints.
Creationists still use Professor Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibrium" – which argues for the sudden appearance of new species – to support their view that Darwinism is being challenged by some of the leading thinkers in biology.
Although Professor Gould never disputed the central tenet of Darwinism, natural selection, his explanation for how new species might rapidly arise is often presented by creationists as a direct challenge to the scientific orthodoxy at the heart of Darwinism.
Evangelical creationists in particular have argued the universally accepted gaps in the fossil record and the frequent absence of intermediate forms between fossilised species are evidence that evolution cannot fully account for the diversity of life on Earth.
They have used Professor Gould's theory – which proposes long periods of stable "equilibrium" punctuated by sudden changes that are not captured as fossils – as proof that Darwinist "gradualism" was wrong and it should therefore be taught, at the very minimum, alongside creationism in schools.
Stephen Layfield, a science teacher at Emmanuel College in Gateshead, which is at the centre of the row, used the lack of intermediate fossils between ancestral species and their descendants to question Darwinist evolution.
Professor Gould says creationists have unwittingly misinterpreted or deliberately misquoted his work in a manner that would otherwise be laughable, were it not for the impact it can have on the teaching of science in schools.
"Such inane and basically harmless perorations may boil the blood but creationist attempts to use punctuated equilibrium in their campaigns for suppressing the teaching of evolution raise genuine worries," Professor Gould said.
Fundamentalist teaching reached its height in the United States in the early 1920s and culminated in the famous Scopes "monkey" trial in Tennessee in 1925 when John Scopes, a biology teacher, was arrested for teaching evolution in contravention of state law.
A second creationist surge occurred in the US during the 1970s, which led to the "equal time" laws for the teaching of creationism and evolution in the state schools of Arkansas and Louisiana. The rule was overturned in two court cases in 1982 and 1987.
At the same time, Professor Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium was being debated among scientists. With the fellow Darwinist, Niles Eldredge, who cited the unchanging nature of Trilobite fossils in support of the idea, Professor Gould presented the theory at a scientific conference in 1971. A seminal scientific paper followed a year later.
"But I had no premonition about the hubbub that punctuated equilibrium would generate," Professor Gould said. Some "absurdly-hyped popular accounts" proclaimed the death of Darwinism, with punctuated equilibrium as the primary assassin, he says.
"Our theory became the public symbol and stalking horse for all debate within evolutionary theory. Moreover, since popular impression now falsely linked the supposed 'trouble' within evolutionary theory to the rise of creationism, some intemperate colleagues began to blame Eldredge and me for the growing strength of creationism.
"Thus, we stood falsely accused by some colleagues both for dishonestly exaggerating our theory to proclaim the death of Darwin (presumably for our own cynical quest for fame), and for unwittingly fostering the scourge of creationism as well," he said.
Not every scientist, however, would agree that Professor Gould was innocent in the dispute, which was exploited by evangelical creationists.
What was essentially an arcane argument between consenting academics soon became a public schism between Gould and his Darwinist rivals, whose position was best articulated by the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins.
At its most simplistic, the idea of punctuated equilibrium was presented as an alternative to the "gradualism" of traditional Darwinism. Rather than species evolving gradually, mutation by mutation, over a long period of time, Professor Gould argued they arose within a period of tens of thousands rather than tens of millions of years – a blink of the eye in geological terms.
Professor Dawkins savaged the Gould-Eldredge idea, arguing gaps in the fossil record could be explained by evolutionary change occurring in a different place from where most fossils were found. In any case, Dawkins said, we would need an extraordinarily rich fossil record to track evolutionary change.
Gould and Eldredge could have made that point themselves, he said. "But no, instead they chose, especially in their later writings, in which they were eagerly followed by journalists, to sell their ideas as being radically opposed to Darwin's and opposed to the neo-Darwinian synthesis," Dawkins writes in his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker.
"They did this by emphasising the 'gradualism' of the Darwinian view of evolution as opposed to the sudden 'jerky', sporadic 'punctuationism' of their own ... The fact is that, in the fullest and most serious sense, Eldredge and Gould are really just as gradualist as Darwin or any of his followers," Professor Dawkins wrote.
The subtleties of the dispute were, however, lost on commentators outside the rarefied field of evolutionary theory.
It was certainly lost on many creationists who just revelled in the vitriolic spat between the leading Darwinists. (The dispute was so vitriolic it became personal – in his book, Gould relegates his critics to a section titled "The Wages of Jealousy".)
Richard Fortey, the Collier Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Bristol University, says Professors Gould and Dawkins are closer than many people realise.
With some of Britain's leading scientists and theologians writing to the Prime Minister to voice their concerns about the teaching of creationism, the issue has come to the fore.
"It's absurd we are now facing this creationist threat," Professor Fortey said. "It's a debate that belongs to the 1840s. Evolution is not just a theory, it's as much of a fact as the existence of the solar system."
For the last two months, I have been working on a rather difficult problem to register high resolution images from multiple cameras together. Using the standard methods, it was taking around 5 minutes to process and that was way too long.
Since I love to read these E vs C threads, one day it dawned upon me. Could I evolve a transformation matrix which would register the multiple cameras?
Today I gave the new software it's first test. I was simply stunned and amazed at how well it worked. Not only was it accurate, but it reduced the processing time from the previous 5 minutes down to 30 seconds.
Not bad for a bunch of random mutations with a little natural selection mixed in. Perhaps I will try to implement the new information you provided tomorrow.
Huh? Everything? No, it's more like changing the last decimal on some physical constant, not deciding that hydrogen is really phlogiston after all. Keep in mind that Gould appears to be a publicity hound, and exagerates the differences between his work and that of his predecessors.
The observed fact of evolution (changes in species over time) is still a fact, just as it was before Darwin's observations and theorizing; Cambrian rocks still have trilobites, Jurasic ones have dinosaurs.; the scientific problem is to account for these observations.
Don't take every single word in the bible as ultimate fact and immutable
You have more faith in the scientific method than a scientific appraisal of it would allow. We can't even unify the strong force with the weak force in a satisfactory fashion.
Creationism employs strategies outside the scientific method that do not unify to it,
By creationism do you mean a belief in a creator? Or are you refering to those who express doubt that all animal and vegetable life did not evolve from a single ancestor?
which, if implemented to facilitate technology, would probably not even have yet arrived at the abacus.
I'm not real sure about ancient Chinese cosmology but I suspect the inventor of the abacus had a world view based on some sort of creation story. He certainly was not an evolutionist.
Nor would nuclear weapons, or anything else work within such a framework.
Using the Theory of Relativity we were able to split the atom and unleash much energy. Can you cite me a comparable feat using the Theory of Evolution?
Yes, for the most part, I think I do...absent any other disqualifying information...which even itself may be fundamental, as in matter, energy and the information that relates them.
So, absent any disqualifying information you reject the premise of a slow, gradual evolution of life?
OK, here is what I don't get. You obviously believe that one aspect of the biblical creation story is suspect(6 days). But you can't see that the act of God creating all forms of animals and Man could have come about in different ways?
OK, I'll try to make this short, but....
You believe in an old universe, so I will assume you believe the general figure of around 15 billion years(+/- a couple billion). If you believe that figure , then you are also lending credence to the Big Bang theory. A single event from which the universe was created. Not only all matter, but time itself was created in the Big Bang(so the theory goes). By definition, there was no such thing as a place nor a time before the big bang. So following that, and your belief(mine too BTW) God exists in a way that we can not even begin to understand.
One last little mental experiment before I get to my conclusion.
Lets say you and God decide to go play a game of pool. You not wanting to offend God say, "You don't have to take it easy on my, play your best". Do you think God could sink every pool ball off the break? My guess would be yes. Now imagine that ability(beyond our understanding) several dozens of orders of magnitude more complex . One quick look on Google netted me a guestimate of 10^81 number of atoms in the universe.
What I am ultimatly trying to get at is that if believe in an old universe and God, then you must beleive he exists beyond our ability to comprehend. I bet you also believed he could sink all of the pool balls in one shot and has even greater abilities than that =) So Why is it soo far out the realm of possibility that God set the whole thing in motion at one point in time. And has interacted with the universe throughout it's existence (he created time you know).
I prefer that way of viewing creation than God floating around and snapping his fingers and saying "All T-Rex's come into existance right, now" Waiting a little while, "All T-Rex's die right now". Wash, Rinse, Repeat
We have barely scratched the surface of the fossil record. As someone correted me. Up until 1990 there were only 9 incomplete T-Rex skeletons ever found. Absence of proof is not proof of absence.
Why not let some of the experts help you out:
The Fossils In General
"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing'
evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the
most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record.
Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does
not provide them ..."
David B. Kitts, PhD (Zoology)
Head Curator, Dept of Geology, Stoval Museum
Evolution, vol 28, Sep 1974, p 467
"The curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps;
the fossils are missing in all the important places."
Francis Hitching
The Neck of the Giraffe or Where Darwin Went Wrong
Penguin Books, 1982, p.19
"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."
Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
"Is a new general theory of evolution emerging?"
Paleobiology, vol 6, January 1980, p. 127
"...Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when
they say there are no transitional fossils ... I will lay it on the line,
there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight
argument."
Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist,
British Museum of Natural History, London
As quoted by: L. D. Sunderland
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 89
"We do not have any available fossil group which can categorically be
claimed to be the ancestor of any other group. We do not have in the fossil
record any specific point of divergence of one life form for another, and
generally each of the major life groups has retained its fundamental
structural and physiological characteristics throughout its life history
and has been conservative in habitat."
G. S. Carter, Professor & author
Fellow of Corpus Christi College
Cambridge, England
Structure and Habit in Vertebrate Evolution
University of Washington Press, 1967
"The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with
gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during
their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the
same as when they disappear ... 2. Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a
species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its
ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'."
Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
Natural History, 86(5):13, 1977
"But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed,
why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the
earth?" (p. 206)
"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 (of evolution)." (p. 292)
Charles Robert Darwin
The Origin of Species, 1st edition reprint
Avenel Books, 1979
The Abundance of Fossils
"Darwin... was embarrassed by the fossil record... we are now about
120-years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been
greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the
situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still
surprisingly jerky and, ironically, ... some of the classic cases of
Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse
in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more
detailed information."
David M. Raup, Curator of Geology
Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago
"Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology"
Field Museum of Natural History
Vol. 50, No. 1, (Jan, 1979), p. 25
"Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological
exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely
more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been
discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are
filled with over 100-million fossils of 250,000 different species. The
availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit
objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What
is the picture which the fossils have given us? ... The gaps between major
groups of organisms have been growing even wide and more undeniable. They
can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection
of the fossil record."
Luther D. Sunderland (Creationist)
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems,
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 9
Don't feel sorry for me. I was fearfully and wonderful made in the image of God. You evolved from a puddle of slime. I think I better start feeling sorry for you.
P.S. Say hello to your great, great, great, great grandfather Cheetah for me. LOL!
Let me recommend Niles Eldridge's Time Frames, In which Eldridge admits that many paleontologists are close to desperate to demonstrate evolution, because to fail to do so brings one to a professional dead end. There will be no funding.
What's also interesting is the flimsy "evidence" that he found, after specifically selecting Trilobites because of their great numbers in the fossil record and their morphological "high definition." After exhaustive exploration, he ended up cataloging a change in a type of trilobite (Phacops rana). What change? A reduction in the number of columns of compound eyes from 18 to 17, and then ("suddenly") to 15 (get it?--punc-eq!!! Eureka!!!
This isn't even evolution. It's DE-volution. It's going from the (slightly) more complex to the (slightly) less complex. Which is not very instructive. It's like filming a novel running through a paper shredder and then running the film backwards to understand how a novel is put together.
Admittedly, it is possible that there would be some shred principles of process, but it is not an example of evolution.
My new software has demonstrated this aspect of sudden evolution shifts, so I have no problem with Gould's theory.
I display the images as the transformation matrix evolves and often see sudden shifts, but most of the time things remain rather static.
Here is how my software works:
1) A population of 200 transforms are created. Each transform has 6 variables, which are initialized with random number.
2) A random coordinate in one image is selected. For each of the 200 transforms, a new coordinate is predicted.
3) The image at the predicted coordinate is compared with the original image. If the pixels are the same, a count is incremented. A final score of the number of matching pixels is awarded to that transform. This is repeated for all 200 transforms.
4) All of the transforms are sorted by their scores and the best one is selected. The top 50 percent of the population is allowed to breed the next generation.
5) Breeding is rather simple. Pairs are selected from the top 50 percent and will create two "children". Each child will have 50 percent of the transform variables from it's two parents, which are exchanged in random order. The new children will replace the lower 50 percent of the population.
6) Twins (transforms with the same variable values) are replaced with a new set of randomly selected variable values.
6) Each parent is incremented in age and the children are initialized as being new.
7) The process repeats at step 2 until the best candidate selected in step 4 has achieved maturity.
As you can see, there is nothing fancy going on. But from this simple algorithm, I am able to evolve a six variable transformation in about 50 generations, which is my arbitrary maturity level.
The result? I am able to match multiple cameras with different orientations together in 30 seconds.
Trite saying. Absence of proof is absence of proof for everything but absence of proof. Thus it is certainly no proof of evidence for your point which requires evidence known to be missing. Thus the patch job by Gould et al.
I been workin' in a quote mine
Goin' down down
Workin' in a quote mine
Whew! about to slip down
Five o'clock in the mornin'
I'm up before the sun
When my work day is over
I'm too tired for havin' fun
(Well) I been workin' in a quote mine
Goin' down down
Workin' in a quote mine
Whew! about to slip down
Lord, I am so tired
How long can this go on
(Well) I been workin' in a quote mine
Goin' down down
Workin' in a quote mine
Whew! about to slip down
Five o'clock in the mornin'
I'm up before the sun
When my work day is over
I'm too tired for havin' fun
(Well) I been workin' in a quote mine
Goin' down down
Workin' in a quote mine
Whew! about to slip down
Lord, I am so tired
How long can this go on
I been workin', goin', workin',
Whew! about to slip down (repeat)
- Evo Devo, Working in the Quote Mine
Here, then, is our orthodox neo-Darwinian picture of how a typical species is 'born', by divergence from an ancestral species. We start with the ancestral species, a large population of rather uniform, mutually interbreeding animals, spread over a large land mass. They could be any sort of animal, but let's carry on the thinking of shrews. The landmass is cut in two by a mountain range. [A small population of shrews somehow make it to the other side, and create a new isolated population that gradually diverges from the ancestral population. Eventually the two races of shrew become two species. If the second population were to migrate back to the ancestral homeland, they wouldn't be able to interbreed with the first.][T]he likelihood is that the two species would not coexist for very long. ... It is a widely accepted principle of ecology that two species with the same way of life will not coexist for long in one place, because they will compete and one or other will be driven extinct. ... If it happened to be the original, ancestral species that was driven extinct, we should say that it had been replaced by the new, immigrant species.
The theory of speciation resulting from initial geographical separation has long been a cornerstone of mainstream, orthodox neo-Darwinism, and it is still accepted on all sides as the main process by which new species come into existence (some people think there are others as well). Its incorporation into modern Darwinism was largely due to the influence of the distinguished zoologist Ernst Mayr. [The punctuationists asked themselves:] Given that, like most neo-Darwinians, we accept the orthodox theory that speciation starts with geographical isolation, what should we expect to see in the fossil record?
... The 'gaps', far from being annoying imperfections or awkward embarrassments, turn out to be exactly what we should positively expect, if we take seriously our orthodox neo-Darwinian theory of speciation. ... [W]hen we look at a series of fossils from any one place, we are probably not looking at an evolutionary event at all: we are looking at a migrational event....
The point that Eldredge and Gould were making, then, could have been modestly presented as a helpful rescuing of Darwin and his successors from what had seemed to them an awkward difficulty. Indeed that is, at least in part, how it was presented - initially. ...
Eldredge and Gould could have said:
Darwin, when you said that the fossil record was imperfect, you were understating it. Not only is it imperfect, there are good reasons for expecting it to be particularly imperfect just when it gets interesting, just when evolutionary change is taking place; this is partly because evolution usually occurred in a different place from where we find most of our fossils; and it is partly because, even if we are fortunate enough to dig in one of the small outlying areas where most evolutionary change went on, that evolutionary change (though still gradual) occupies such a short time that we should need an extra rich fossil record in order to track it!But no, instead they chose, especially in their later writings in which they were eagerly followed by journalists, to sell their ideas as being radically opposed to Darwin's and opposed to the neo-Darwinian view of evolution ....
... The proper way to characterize the beliefs of punctuationists is: 'gradualistic, but with long periods of "stasis" (evolutionary stagnation) punctuating brief episodes of rapid gradual change'. The emphasis is then thrown onto the long periods of stasis as being the previously overlooked phenomenon that really needs explaining. It is the emphasis on stasis that is the punctuationists' real contribution, not their claimed opposition to gradualism, for they are truly as gradualist as anybody else.
Even the emphasis on stasis can be found, in less-exaggerated form, in Mayr's theory of speciation. [Mayer believed that large populations have more inertia, in a sense, against change than small populations.]
The proponents of punctuated equilibrium took this suggestion of Mayr, and exaggerated it into a strong belief that 'stasis', or lack of evolutionary change, is the norm for a species. They believe that there are genetic forces in large populations that actively resist evolutionary change ... [This question - whether or not there really are active forces for stasis - is where the controversies do lie within neo-Darwinism; but creationists try to paint these minor controversies as evidence of a crumbling ideology.]
-- Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1996 edition, pp238-252
Believe me, this problem has been extreamly frustrating to solve, and I have attemped every method that I know of.
If your ideas have a practical application, I will be the very first to applaud your wisdom.
Please help, I am open to all suggestions on how to make this software work faster.
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