When it comes to "stories easy enough to make up" are they more "believable" - if they are accompanied by pictures?
"stories easy enough to tell - but they are not science" - Collin Patterson - atheist evolutionist - scientist
Collin Patterson - Paleontologist British Museum of Natural history
On April 10, 1979, Patterson replied to the author (Sunderland) in a most candid letter as follows:
April 10, 1979 Letter from Colin Patterson to Sunderland
======================================================
“ I
fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew
of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them.
You suggest that
an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from?
I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not
mislead the reader?
I wrote the text of my book four years ago. If I were to write it now, I think the book would be rather different. Gradualism is a concept I believe in, not just because of Darwin’s authority, but because my understanding of genetics seems to demand it.
Yet Gould and the American Museum people are
hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a paleontologist myself, I am much
occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record.
You say thatI should
at least show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.
I will lay it on the line-
there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.[
The reason is that
statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no
there is no way of answering the question. It is
easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection.
But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test. So, much
as I should like to oblige you by jumping to the defence of gradualism, and fleshing out the
transitions between the major types of animals and plants, I find myself a bit
short of the intellectual justification necessary for the job “
[Ref: Patterson, personal communication. Documented in Darwin’s Enigma, Luther Sunderland, Master Books, El Cajon, CA, 1988, pp. 88-90.]
============================
It's not "junk science" to sincere truth seekers. ..
It is a fact that the fossil record deposited over many different ages show signs of diverse life that lived at different times. That alone, without evolutionary speculation contradicts the Hebrews guesswork in Genesis.
Patterson said:
I will lay it on the line- there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.[The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science,
