You sound like one of the scientists I am referring to. Short on grants? haha I love how you and your cronies like to assume so much about people and 'tell' them how to think. That's one of the reasons (besides thinking evolution on a massive scale is bunk) I have been so supportive of the Creationist Camp and their goal to send junk science back to the drawing board. Oh - and here are some famous quotes made by some famous scientists regarding evolution, since you obviously assume that evolution is so 'solid':
* "Biologists would dearly like to know how modern apes, modern humans and the various ancestral hominids have evolved from a common ancestor. Unfortunately, the fossil record is somewhat incomplete as far as the hominids are concerned, and it is all but blank for the apes. The best we can hope for is that more fossils will be found over the next few years which will fill the present gaps in the evidence.' The author goes on to say: 'David Pilbeam [a well-known expert in human evolution] comments wryly, "If you brought in a smart scientist from another discipline and showed him the meagre evidence we've got he'd surely say, 'forget it: there isn't enough to go on'."
(Richard E. Leakey, The Making of Mankind, Michael Joseph Limited, London, 1981, p. 43)
* "We have no acceptable theory of evolution at the present time. There is none; and I cannot accept the theory that I teach to my students each year. Let me explain. I teach the synthetic theory known as the neo-Darwinian one, for one reason only; not because it's good, we know it is bad, but because there isn't any other. Whilst waiting to find something better you are taught something which is known to be inexact, which is a first approximation. . .'"
Professor Jerome Lejeune (From a French recording of internationally recognised geneticist, Professor Jerome Lejeune, at a lecture given in Paris on March 17, 1985. Translated by Peter Wilders of Monaco.)
There are a thousand more just like this.
And you really don't want to get into a link-posting contest do you? What do YOU think? What is your definition of evolution. Can you speak to why scientists, after over 150 years, have been unable to prove the transition of MORE beneficial genetic information from specie to specie, minus any mutations, which are basically harmful almost 100% of the time?
Oh - and I said I wouldn't put a link on here, but I lied. I like this one: http://www.rae.org/
You sound like one of the scientists I am referring to.
I'm devastated. Oh, wait, no I'm not.
Short on grants? haha
Let me know when you wind down and start actually making a point.
I love how you and your cronies like to assume so much about people and 'tell' them how to think.
Ok, I'll bite -- where did I "assume so much about people and 'tell' them how to think"? You expressed your opinion, I expressed mine. That seems to bother you.
I also find it ironic that you would accuse me of "assuming so much about people" in the same sentence that you presume to know who my "cronies" are (and suggest that I am reliant upon grant money).
Oh - and here are some famous quotes made by some famous scientists regarding evolution, since you obviously assume that evolution is so 'solid':
Now see, this is precisely the sort of thing I was talking about when I suggested that you "Try actually checking out the 'scientific community' before you make silly pronouncements about it".
If you had -- that is, if you had actually bothered to get familiar with the tenets of evolution and scientists, instead of just getting erroneous information spoonfed to you by creationist sources -- you'd have realized the following things before you posted the Leakey quote and made a fool of yourself:
1. It hardly supports your wild claims that "the scientific community knows" that their case is so "filled with holes" that they have to "hope something will turn up" which might someday "solidify their theory". Leakey's 1981 quote was a simple, unremarkable comment on the incompleteness of representative fossils from the hominid family tree at the time. This was no surprise to anyone (unearthing significant fossils is a long-term project), and it was certainly *not* what creationists like to present it as -- a confession that the entire science of evolution had little to no supporting evidence. Other fossil lineages were much more complete even in 1981 and provided stunning confirmation of evolution, not to mention the hundreds of lines of studies other than fossils. If you were familiar enough with science to actually be able to critique it intelligently, you'd know that already.
2. You'd also have known that posting a quote about the incompleteness of fossil hominids from *1981* is about as smart and/or relevant as posting computer information from the 1980's. There have been a vast number of discoveries in this field in the last twenty-one years, making Leakey's 1981 statement completely obsolete -- as even Leakey himself confirms:
I did say that but it was 18 years ago and today there is a mass of new fossil evidence to show the certainty of human evolution. The record is so clear now that most creationists are stumped but as before, they dredge up old and honest quotes but they do not allow their readers to move on. I guess we need some really foolish people to remind us of what foolishness is.But you apparently just like to play cut-and-paste with quotes from creationist sources, without having the background to realize that they are hardly the damning "proof" you believe them to be.
-- Richard Leakey, email to rjtolle@express-news.net, 13 Jul 1999 08:28:29
3. You'd also have known that far from being the doubter of evolution you falsey try to point him as, Leakey is as strongly convinced that the evidence supports evolution today as he ever was:
We are very lucky that the earth's history is recorded in fossilized remains. And we can see the changes. Unfortunately, there will always be gaps in our knowledge, but there is no doubt that we and everything living today has evolved.
-- Richard Leakey, in an online interview: "TIME 100 Scientist & Thinker: Dr. Richard Leakey, Head of the Kenya Wildlife Service," America Online (April 11, 1999)
4. And finally, you'd have known that he's far more troubling to your side of the fence than the scientific side:
Question: What is your impression of groups, such as exist in the US, that deny evolution in favor of the Biblical theory of creation?[Note: Some creationists have tried to deflect this comment by saying, "hey, creationists don't believe the earth is flat, what's he talking about". But Leakey was clearly speaking metaphorically, comparing the preposterous stubbornness of creationists to that of flat-earthers.]Dr. Richard Leakey: I have been raised to believe in freedom of thought and speech. If a minority wishes to accept that position it's their right. What I fear is that this minority may seem to be larger than it truly is. What is strange is that there are still people who believe the world is not a globe.
-- Ibid.
Again, if you were actually *familiar* with the topic you attempt to disprove, you'd have known how badly you were putting your foot into your mouth by trying to use Leakey as an example of an evolutionary "doubting Thomas". It only betrays your own ignorance of the topic.
As for the Lejeune quote, the cite seems awfully shaky. Just how trustworthy is a short quote from a translation (published location of full text unspecified) allegedly from an audiotape (unavailable) of a lecture (location and venue left unstated)? Just how are we supposed to verify the accuracy of the translation and transcription, or even whether the speech ever actually took place?
Note also that the translator (Peter Wilders) has an axe to grind (he's an evengelical anti-evolutionist) who may not have left all of his own views at the door when he undertook to make a translation and choose which quote to excerpt and present without larger context.
Even his skill as a French-English translator is in question when one considers a letter-to-the-editor in response to an article Wilders had written in the Homelitic & Pastoral Review:
Editor: I read the article “The Pope and Evolutionary Theory” by Peter Wilders in the October 1997 issue of HPR and was utterly appalled. Mr. Wilders is a self-appointed anti-evolutionist without portfolio who lacks even the most fundamental knowledge of science and history. It now appears that we must add to his list of deficiencies that he also does not understand the French language. (This latter fact being odd for someone from Monaco.)Wilders had mistranslated a simple four-word French phrase, in a way that completely twisted the meaning of the original statement (from the Pope, nonetheless). One has to wonder what changes he might have wrought on Lejuene's lecture...
This is especially worth considering in light of the fact that the quote, as presented, seems at odds with other more reliably cited statements by Lejeune. For example:
With my colleagues at the Institut de Progénèse of Paris, we are involved in the description of basic facts in human heredity. By a comparative study of many mammalian species, including the great apes, we are studying the chromosomal variations which occurred during Evolution.He seems pretty comfortable with the idea of "basic facts of human heredity", including the variations which occurred "during Evolution", to wit our evolutionary relatedness to the great apes and, more distantly, all mammals.
-- Jerome Lejeune, Testimony before the the Senate subcommittee on separation of powers on the beginning of human life. University of René Descartes, Paris, France. April 23,1981.
On the other hand, Lejuene was known to be a bit of a crank, I've run across several accounts of him getting into a public shouting match with a student who dared question one of his ideas at a public lecture, after which he stomped out.
In any case, a few dissenters would hardly support your sneering implication that scientists huddle together in fear that their house of cards will be exposed as empty -- it simply isn't true, and in fact is wildly ludicrous. Not to mention quite insulting.
There are a thousand more just like this.
No, actually, there aren't.
Unless you have a secret cache of hundreds of statements "just like this" that you've been hiding from your fellow creationists, no, you don't actually have "a thousand more". I've seen all the favorite "scientists who [allegedly] denounce evolution" quotes that the creationists love to trot out time and again, and there are really only a couple dozen golden oldies.
And like your Leakey quote above, most of them don't even say what the creationists claim they do. Many are, in fact, quite simply misquoted, or quoted widly out of context, or simply made up.
Finally, if you really want to try to continue to maintain that a few quotes somehow proves your contention that scientists as a whole have huge doubts about evolution, I'll see your doubters and raise them 72 Nobel Laureates, 17 State Academies of Science, and 7 other scientific organizations in an Amicus Curiae Brief to the US Supreme Court, in which they put their names to the statement that, "The evolutionary history of organisms has been as extensively tested and as thoroughly corroborated as any biological concept."
By the way, that was *every* Nobel Prize winner living in the US at the time (1986).
So cut out the nonsense about scientists not being confident of evolution, why don't you?
And you really don't want to get into a link-posting contest do you?
Actually, I had hoped you might actually *read* those links I provided for you so that you could learn something. Silly me.
You had claimed that science can't demonstrate what you call "MACRO-evolution", and I provided links which did that very thing. If you choose not to examine them, that's your choice. But don't continue to pretend that there *is* no such evidence.
What do YOU think?
I think you've made it clear that I'd be wasting my time to further discuss this topic with you.
What is your definition of evolution.
My definition of evolution is the same as the standard scientific one. You *do* know what that is, don't you? Don't make me do more of your homework for you.
Can you speak to why scientists, after over 150 years, have been unable to prove the transition of MORE beneficial genetic information from specie to specie, minus any mutations, which are basically harmful almost 100% of the time?
Why would I want to "speak to why" scientists have been unable to do something that they have, in fact, done?
Contrary to your loaded question, they have indeed been able to "prove the transition of MORE beneficial genetic information from specie to specie", quite easily. It's so simple even a child could grasp it -- so why do you seem to be totally unaware of it?
Here it is in a nutshell: Beneficial mutations, no matter how infrequent they may be compared to harmful mutations, will tend to be preserved and passed on and will thus spread throughout the population over succeeding generations. Harmful mutations, on the other hand, quickly get weeded out because the unfortunate individual which receives it either dies in the womb (if it interferes with embryonic development), dies or fails to prosper after birth, fails to mate, or otherwise has a poor likelihood of being able to pass on the mutation to succeeding generations.
Thus beneficial mutations tend to accumulate over time, and harmful ones do not, *regardless* of how much more often the harmful ones may crop up. It's that simple. It's not rocket science.
It's not a new idea, either -- Darwin wrote about it in 1859... Maybe news is just slow getting to your neighborhood...
I'd suggest hitting the library or doing a few websearches, that way you could discover answers to your own questions instead of having us do it for you.
Oh - and I said I wouldn't put a link on here, but I lied. I like this one: http://www.rae.org/
It's more sensible than many creationist websites (which unfortunately isn't saying too much). The smartest thing it does is try to bolster creationism and for the most part not directly try to attack evolution. But it's still chock-full of nonsense, straw men, and fallacious arguments that have been discredited for decades, and the authors show a poor grasp of rigorous reasoning.
For just one quick example:
Starving DinosaursThis is incredibly moronic. Anyone with even a slight knowledge of paleontology knows that in order for the body of a large creature to be successfully fossilized (most carcasses never do), it has to be quickly buried in one manner or another (mudslide, sandstorm, flash flood, fall into quicksand or tar pit, etc.)A further point of interest is that in some layers, supposedly representing millions of years, very few different species can be found. Often only a handful of different ones are present in a given layer representing thousands or even millions of years. Sometimes a large species of dinosaur will be found in a particular layer with almost nothing else in the same layer with this large meat-eating dinosaur. 1 What on earth did the dinosaur live on for millions of years?
A layer containing a dinosaur skeleton doesn't cover "millions of years", it covers a few hours or days. So it's no surprise that the dinosaur skeleton is seldom entombed with a box lunch...
Nor, contrary to the author's claim, does anyone *claim* that such layers, by themselves, represent a million years worth of deposition. The author is either grossly misrepresenting the actual geologic claims, or he is idiotically misunderstanding them. And neither option inspires confidence, does it?
The author then goes on to argue that since the particular layer which contains the dinosaur must not extend over millions of years of time, then neither must *any* of the geologic column, nor even the *entire* geologic column -- I guess the layers making up the complete height of the Grand Canyon just formed overnight, then... This "reasoning", if it can even be called that, is so obviously fallacious that I'm surprised the author can post it with a straight face.