FunkyBrother said:
Back to my original topic!
Certainly --- I'll take a traditional quote-mining approach, because creationists seem to respond to it better.
This is a good article for exposing errancy in school textbooks, but it does little to refute evolution. It begins by citing the embryo drawings by Ernst Haeckel.
Even Stephen J Gould in 2000 noted that "We do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks."
Even one of the strongest supporters for biological evolution agrees with the author here. These drawings are mindlessly repeated in textbooks even though they have been shown to be false evidence.
The article continues and notes the Piltdown man - this was also revealed to be a hoax - false evidence
NOT contradictory evidence. But even Wells notes that "Most modern biology textbooks do not even mention
Piltdown." So he backtracks a bit.
Wells mentions the finch beaks at the Galapagos and notes that "In the
1970s, Peter and Rosemary Grant and their colleagues noted a 5 percent increase in beak size after a severe drought, because the finches were left with only hard-tocrack seeds." He then notes that when the rain returned the beaks changed back and "No net evolution occurred." No
net evolution? So, evolution actually ocurred? Biological change over time?!
Of course! In fact our buddy Wells notes that "No one doubts, of course, that a certain amount of descent with modification occurs within species." His entire paper, however, is an attempt to discredit the theory of speciation within evolution. Yet he admits change within a species is possible due to environmental conditions (he accepts minute relatively rapid change in the finches for instance). I fail to see why he cannot accept that when an isolated population of single species developes in a seperate environment cannot change enough over time that it can no longer breed with the original species.
In short - Wells reveals false evidence for evolution beings used in textbooks. However, false evidence does not support or contradict the theory - the evidence is
false not contradictory. ToE has survived this tripe... good try Wells.
