tgamble

Dr. Raup, with his doctorate from Harvard, is a highly competent geologist, serving as Curator of Geology at Chicago's great Field Museum, and formerly as Professor of Geology at the University of Rochester. He candidly acknowledges the complete absence of transitional forms in the fossil record and the complete absence of evidence for observable progressive evolution.

Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin's time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record.

And it is not always clear, in fact it's rarely clear, that the descendants were actually better adapted than their predecessors. In other words, biological improvement is hard to find. (David M. Raup, "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Bulletin of the Field Museum of Natural History, V. 50, January 1979)

Thus, in spite of the utter lack of evidence in either living populations or the fossil record that natural selection ever generates higher orders of complexity (or "biological improvement," or "better adaptation") the mere existence of "optimal structures" is taken by evolutionists as confirmation of the remarkable power of natural selection!

<a href="http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-073.htm" target="_blank">http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-073.htm</a>

What Raup actually wrote is this:

We must distinguish between the fact of evolution - defined as change in organisms over time - and the explanation of this change. Darwin's contribution, through his theory of natural selection, was to suggest how the evolutionary change took place. The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with Darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be. Darwin was completely aware of this. He was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn't look the way he predicted it would and, as a result, he devoted a long section of his Origin of Species to an attempt to explain and rationalize the differences.

Well, 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, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time. By this I mean that 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 - what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic.

So Darwin's problem has not been alleviated in the last 120 years and we still have a record which does show change but one that can hardly be looked upon as the most reasonable consequence of natural selection.

Now let me step back from the problem and very generally discuss natural selection and what we know about it. I think it is safe to say that we know for sure that natural selection, as a process, does work. There is a mountain of experimental and observational evidence, much of it predating genetics, which shows that natural selection as a biological process works."

- David M. Raup, "Conflicts Between Darwin and Palaeontology," Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, pp. 22, 25, Chicago, January 1979.

The text quote isn't given in what I quoted but it does make it pretty obvious that the quote is out of context. Maybe someone else can add to it.

Not to mention the fact that it's 20+ years out of date. I thought Lord Valentine could add this to his talkorigins FAQ. The more examples given there the better IMO.

And since when did evolution = progress and improvement anyway? <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" /> <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

[ April 06, 2002: Message edited by: tgamble ]</p>

ex-robot

If you look at the icr article again, you will notice that it was written in 1979, so it is the same year.

xr

tgamble

It's still there today and still being treated as accurate information. If it ever was.

ex-robot

Doesn't matter. Your post is still misleading.

xr