randman

LC, I haven't had time to check out your link, but can do so this weekend.
By the way, noone disputes speciation. YEC even postulate much more rapid speciation within a "kind" than evolutionists, and I realize that begs the question of why complain about not seeing gradual transitions in the fossil record?
It is true then that this raises the bar of wating to see gradual speciation lead to macro-evolution. That may seem unfair, but after all, that is what evolutionists claim has happened and they have claimed the fossil record shows this.
Well, I will check out your site, and see, but for the decades prior, it is clear that the fossil record did not show such changes.
In fact, the fossil record showed that species exhibit "stasis", which really is the opposite of evolution.
That is why Gould and other paleonontologists are quoted so often by critics of evolution.

hezekiah jones

Suppose we teach 4th graders that the expansion of the universe is detected through the analysis of spectrographs. Are 4th graders qualified to assess this information?

Suppose we teach 4th graders the etymology of the words they are learning through their reading. Are 4th graders qualified to assess this information?

Suppose we teach 4th graders about Aristotle's Categories. Are 4th graders qualified to assess Aristotle?

Suppose we teach 4th graders that Jesus Christ is the son of god, was born of a virgin, performed miracles and sprang back from the dead. Are 4th graders qualified to assess this information?

What is your point?

This is amusing, coming from someone who continually links to articles at AiG. Back up your assertion.

Undoubtedly.

Frankly, your unsupported assertions are tiresome. The "evolutionists" on this board deal with evidence, not indoctrination and propaganda. Those techniques are the exclusive province of AiG and its ilk.

MrDarwin

Are you suggesting that stasis and evolution are mutually exclusive?

Liastaob

Hi all, I've been reading the myriad randman threads with interest.

Perhaps someone could explain to me exactly what randman means by "stasis", since I havn't been able to gather it from the ongoing discussion. His entire argument seems to hinge on MrDarwin's point above.

I'm also curious why randman leaps from "the science of evolution is wrong" to "everything was created by some intelligent being", but that would probably fit better into another thread.

--Dan

scombrid

I'm still trying to figure out why you repeatedly assert that stasis is counter to evolution. In periods of geologic and climatologic stability there isn't a great deal of selection pressure. We expect Oddballs that arise through mutation to be selected out of the population during stable periods. Therefore they won't exist in sufficient numbers to appear in the geologic record. By the fossil record most speciation events occur in short periods of time. Conveniently these events correspond to periods of rapid climate change or large-scale natural disasters. Such events are expected to crop the population as the environment shifts and individuals maladapted to the new conditions die off. In order for a mutation to become prevalent in a population it had better be damned advantageous or the population had better be pretty small so that the lineage stemming from the mutated individual be a significant portion of the population. Massive rapid climate change is just the thing to bottleneck populations. An ice age could effectively turn an entire continent into a giant Galapagos island chain. Instead of a founding population colonizing a new environment, the new environment comes to them.

Pure gradualism doesn’t seem to work in nature. Delta O18 isotope records show rapid transitions in and out of icehouse conditions and changes in oceanic bottom water temperatures. Just looking at the last 66my there are periods in which the O18/O16 ratio changed by as much as 1unit in 1my years indicating a change in the oceanic bottom water temperature of 2-3C in the same time. That’s pretty fast considering the oxygen isotope record then indicates 20million year periods in which the oceanic bottom water temp remains largely unchanged. (Damn benthic foraminifera just had to go and take up oxygen isotopes in proportion to isotope abundance in the water and then get buried so we could find em later). Seems like the climate has a habit of shifting kind of fast and then leveling off for a while.

In grade school we studied the Appalachian mountain system. We were presented this picture of wind and water slowly removing material at a constant rate over millions of years to turn mountains of Himalayan scale into the rolling hills of the Eastern US. Then I visit the mountains and see huge boulder fields strewn through the trees down in the ravines. Gradual erosion didn’t put those there. Then the Madison Country flood happen in June 1995. Funny things happen when you dump 20+inches of rain on a mountain in 48hours. Debris flows move a hell of a lot of material in short periods of time. Tropical Storm Camille did the same thing down in Nelson County back in the ‘60’s. Soon we get the picture that the major geomorphic force shaping the mountains is periodic catastrophic flooding. The west coasters are intimately acquainted with this concept.

Faults don’t gradually move past one another either. We report their rate of movement as XXmm per year but that is just mathematical smoothing of series of slips. Some slips can be several meters in one shot.

So why does this punctuated equilibrium stuff still agree with evolution? Well, the unstable periods in which species change represent what, 1 or 2% of geologic history. Combine that with the likelihood that populations were depressed during these changing times and the fact that only fractions of 1% of animals ever get fossilized. The likelihood of finding intermediate forms in significant numbers becomes really small. Of course that 1 or 2% of time in which the most change appears to be occurring is still on the time scale of 10s of millions of years. That allows for many generations in which to accumulate changes.

Biology has arisen from the physical earth. Biology depends on the physical earth and responds to it. Doesn’t it stand to reason that a biological process will mirror the nature of the physical processes to which it is exposed?


(Sorry that is written in layman’s form but I’m in a rush. If my rambling makes no sense just holler)

[ March 08, 2002: Message edited by: scombrid ]</p>

tronvillain

Liastaob:
"Stasis" is the observation that many species stay approximately the same for long periods of time in the fossil record. The thing is that a lot of change would appear to be stasis, and that some degree of stasis is expected since species may reach a local fitness maximum.

[ March 08, 2002: Message edited by: tronvillain ]</p>

tronvillain

<a href="http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:id5Rtz_YpvMC:www.talkorigins.org/faqs/punc-eq.html+darwin+on+punctuated+equilibrium&hl=en" target="_blank">Talkorigins Punctuated Equilibria</a>.

RufusAtticus

So you beleive in kinds. Could you please answer my questions in this thread.

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=000367" target="_blank">Challenge to those who beleive in kinds</a>

-RvFvS

Scrambles

randman,

Assume for a moment that a transitional form exists BETWEEN two species A and B. All members of the two species have become extinct as well as all individuals that, if fossilised, would be called "transitional" between the two species.

Suppose that a transitional individual is fossilised and then discovered. How would it be classified?

Answer:
either 1) The two species A and B are sufficiently similar that any "transitional form" could be classified as A or B at, say, at least 2 standard deviations from the norm of either species. For example if classified as A it might have quite big legs for an A and if classified as a B it might have quite small legs for a B.
In other words, you would not accept this as transitional. The reason you would give would be that the individual was a member of whatever species it was classified as.

or 2) The two species A and B are sufficiently different so that the fossilised individual is out of the range of characteristics of either A and B. For example in this case you might say that no individual from A would have legs that big and no individual from B would have legs that small. Hence the individual would then be classified as belonging to a different, new species. Call it C. In other words, you wouldn't accept it as transitional because "it belongs to it's own species" or similar reasoning.

To summarise. There are two possibilities when a fossil is found. Either the fossil is classified as belonging to a known species, or it classified as belonging to a new species. You would reject it as transitional in both cases. Also, since these are the only two possibilities anyone could reasonably expect, it means that you will never accept anything as "transitional".

Scrambles

Daggah

Either that or they're liars, because they so often DO take quotes out of context...