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."
But in principle a 'designer' could. Such things, which would show Darwinism to be wrong, have never been found.
Wildly different, don't you think?
Who cares what he said, he has no scientific proof either way, neither do the Darwinians. Punk-eek is not science, it can neither be proven or disproven, in other words, in words fit for a public forum, it is blatant hogwash.
God must be awfully disappointed to see that those made in his image get soundly trounced by the slime puddle people when it comes to the application of things like logic, mathematics, and general reasoning. I have it on good authority (we're tight, God and I) that he'll be borrowing genome from the slime puddle people for the next revision of His People.
The changes in the fossil record with time are a fact. The way in which that came about is the matter of dispute, whether natural selection is enough, or whether some 'designer' has to tweak it occasionally.
Remember Lamarck, he tried to explain evolution before Darwin, but his eplanation is false?
You are very much correct. Neither the Darwinians nor the Punks have any evidence to support their theory, while there is abundant evidence against both of them.
While I agree with you that some ID was introduced for practical reasons, the method of evolution is random. Actually, I have attempted many ways to introduce ID to speed up the process. Each attempted has actually decreased the performance!
How each "transitional" is selected has been chosen by me, and that is correct. However, obtaining a high score in matching a random portion of an image is not different that from being able to survive any other environmental challenge. In that aspect, it is a good model of natural selection.
Remember, they are only scored by the number of pixels shared between two images. The ability to hunt and find food would be simular.
Now when I tried to play "God", it sounded logical to me to average the transformation variables between breeding pairs. Hey, if two transforms are almost correct, just average them.
As I study this program, the more ID that I remove, the better it has been able to solve the problem.
Perhaps the above may be true, however what does nullify his theories is the total lack of scientific evidence for them. However, 2cents has a point, as we see in these threads, evolutionists make a habit of disguising their lack of proof with pompous arrogance.
One would think that after 150 years of digging for bones, they would have some proof for their stupid theory.
Arrogance?
Sir, I am pleading for anyone on the Creationist side to help me out with a software problem. If ID or other theories have a practical aspect, please help me out. I will be more than happy to test out your suggestions.
You are such a fan of Gould and evolution, perhaps you can tell us what evidence he has for his theory? Last I heard, he who proposes a theory is the one who has to back it up.
As to your other point...arrogance and pomposity are amply apparent on both sides of the crevo debate.
Wrong, homo sapiens has only been around for at most 50,000 years. His DNA is far too different from all other known similar species for man to have descended from them.
No one is asking for a complete fossil record of all species, no one is asking for a complete fossil record of any particular species. No one is even asking for a complete fossil record at all. What we are asking is for any kind of a record showing the transformation of a species into a more complex one. Not a single such record has been found since the charlatan Darwin first published his theory.
It also must be asked, why the evolutionists set their sights for proving their theory on the fossil record. Darwin knew quite well that the record was very scanty. While he might have hoped that the record would increase by leaps and bounds if people put their mind to it, as it did by some 100 times since he wrote, he knew quite well that it would remain very 'gappy' even then. So why did he stake his theory on fossils? For one very simple reason: it was a gambler's bet, he knew quite well he could not prove evolution with existing species so he had to bet his theory on proof perhaps being found later on. Of course, this is also the kind of bet made by liars of all stripes 'the future will vindicate them' they all say.
Integrity compels me to point out that assertions that evolution could not have taken place because the Almighty created us is as errant as asserting that evolution disproves the existence of God.
To presume to rule out evolution as the methodology whereby the Almighty created us is to presume to apprehend the infinite mind of God.
As bad a claim of certain knowledge impossible to own as the reverse.
While I share your faith in the Almighty, I can not claim to know his methods or purposes save what little has been reavealed to us by our Creator.
I assert that you can not either.
One gets tired of the above smug preaching from the evo atheists. Christians take God at his Word - the Bible. The Bible says that God created all life on Earth and man, his most special creation. It is atheists who in their search for an atheist answer to Christianity invented evolution in order to depict our Creator as impotent in being involved in the affairs of man. Their theory is therefore a total contradiction of His Word.
Wrong, homo sapiens has only been around for at most 50,000 years. His DNA is far too different from all other known similar species for man to have descended from them.
Do a little research next time instead of spewing your fake "facts".
200,000 years smart guy
Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm the larger herds. They are trying to resolve two basic problems, i.e. the lack of any intermediate fossil sequences, and the problems of population genetics, including the so-called Haldane dilemma, and the inordinate amount of time it takes to simply spread a genetic change amongst any large population.
Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:
1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) This kind of logic is obviously exhilerating and less limiting than the standard logic once taught in schools. For instace, I could claim that the fact that nobody ever saw me with Tina Turner was all the proof anybody should need that I was sleeping with her.2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance. He's probably never been to Saudi Arabia either...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack; the house could lose many rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
Given all of this, an obvious question presents itself, and anybody who should ever attend one of Dr. Gould's lectures or speeches should ask him this question: In view of the facts noted above, what reason might there be for anybody propounding such a theory (as punk-eek) to be viewed by the public as anything other than a blithering idiot?
You are quite correct. The anti-evolutionists are quite willing to meet them on the evolutionists supposed home ground - science. They are totally unwilling to engage in such a discussion and satisfy themselves with arrogant comments about how everyone who does not believe in evolution is an idiot. This arrogance can be clearly seen not just in the evolutionist posters here, but just as clearly in the article. The article does not in any way state what Gould's theory is. The article in no way gives any evidence for it. The article just attacks the opponents of evolution for quoting their hero! How lame can you get!
It has been long proven by minds much greater than his pea-brain that neither science nor philosophy can disprove God's existence. Nevertheless being an atheist perhaps due to moral failings, which he clearly has since he calls people who quote him liars, perhaps due to the good pay, he claims he can disprove God's existence.
what reason might there be for anybody propounding such a theory (as punk-eek) to be viewed by the public as anything other than a blithering idiot?
Tonight, I have already posted how a very simple software algorithm is showing sudden changes when a benificial mutation spreads into a population. I have also posted the exact algorithm that I am using.
I have also personally requested your outstanding knowledge to help me solve a difficult problem I must deal with.
Sir, help me out please. If your theories can be applied to a practical problem such as mine, please help.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.