ur32212451 said:
I believe I'm responding to issues you have raised here on this thread. Yes, before I came here I was already quite familiar with the Fossil record. It does not support the Neo-Darwinian phyletic gradualism that you allude to in the alleged Therapsida ear movement.
WAIT! Strawman. Notice that "Neo-Darwinian phyletic gradualism that you allude to".
Neo-Darwinism is not committed to phyletic gradualism. Darwin tended to emphasize it, but he was not committed to it.
"Many species once formed never undergo any further change ... and the periods, during which species have undergone modification, though long as measured by years, have probably been short in comparison with the periods during which they retain the same form." Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species, 4th and later editions, pg. 727
Phyletic gradualism is when the
entire population transforms to a new species. Instead, what Mayr discovered in the 1940s is allopatric speciation. That is, most speciation occurs when a small part of a species is geographically isolated and faces a new environment. That small population transforms into a new species. But the parent population, in its original environment, is unaffected.
What Eldredge and Gould realized was that the fossil record looks exactly like it should
if the major mode of speciation was allopatric. Small populations geographically isolated in small areas, transforming to new species, and then the new species migrating out, "suddenly appearing" in the fossil record when they migrated into the area where we were looking for fossils.
Now, there are times when we are lucky enough to find the area and time where the allopatric speciation is occurring. Those are the sequences of transitional
individuals I posted, but which you are still ignoring. I can understand why: they blow creationism away and ruin your "debate" stand. So just pretend they don't exist and instead focus on your man of straw. However, it may be good debate but it's terrible
discussion, and that is what we are doing: discussing and searching for truth, not trying to "win" a debate.
The evolution of mammals from reptiles, amphibians from fish, birds from dinos, or whales from land animals
were NEVER claimed to be examples of phyletic gradualism. Instead, they are examples of
transitional species. That is, a series of intermediate species linking two "higher" taxa. So you are arguing against something that does not exist. Congratulations for a lot of wasted effort. Now, would you care to discuss the real issue?
The therapsida is a huge collection of diverse creature types, just as the reptiles and mammals are. As Thomas Kemp, a leading expert on Therapsids, pointed out, each type of Therapsida appear abruptly in the fossil record and disappear abruptly some time later, without any ancestral or descendant relationship to any other member of the Therapsida type.
Right. Exactly what should be there if evolution is continuing and exactly what should
not be there if creationism is true. What you have are a series of species spaced in time such that you can trace morphological changes in the bones from reptiles to mammals.
Dozens of species that are intermediate between the "kinds" reptiles and mammals. Exactly what we should see if evolution is descent with modification and a bush.
At the American Museum of Natural History, I've seen the Therapsida types that were used to show the alleged Evolution of ear bone movement. None of the specimens shared the same morphology, there were huge differnces between of them in size shape and structure.
That's because the museum didn't have the space to show you
all the Therapsid samples. What they did was take the chronological series that demonstrated the
ear bone movement. You were supposed to understand that
at each stage there are a multitude of evolutionary cousins of all different shapes and sizes that have nearly identical ear bones.
Instead, what they got was a person not interested in finding truth, but interested in nitpicking:
They clearly did not share an ancestral-descendant relationship with each other. They were simply picked to show how evolution of the ear might look if it were to be found in the fossil record.
It's circular reasoning to arrange a few specimens from a large mostly contemporaneous group
But the Therapsids are
not a "mostly contemporaneous" group. Instead, what you are seeing is evolution over a period of
80 million years or more. That isn't contemporaneous. Go to that Karoo site I posted and look thru the pages of the mammal-like reptiles found in that 50 million year period. Even within those strata, there are genera that are present in only one of periods. And there is a change as you go from bottom to top in the Karoo.
http://www.museums.org.za/sam/resource/palaeo/cluver/mamlike.htm
http://www.museums.org.za/sam/resource/palaeo/cluver/early.htm
http://www.museums.org.za/sam/resource/palaeo/cluver/later.htm
Dr.David Raup, curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago,"Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History, January 1979 has stated:
"Darwin's theory of natural selection has always been closely linked to evidence from fossils, and probably most people assume that the fossils
provide a very important part of the the general argument that is made in favor of Darwinian interpretations of the history of life.
Unfortunately this is not strictly true. ... 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 the 'Origin of the Species' to an attempt to explain and
rationalize the differences. ... Darwin's general solution to the incompatibility of fossil evidence and his theory was to say the fossil
record was a very incomplete one. ... 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 million fossil species, but the situation has not changed much. The record of evolution is surprisingly
jerky, and, ironically, we have 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 - that 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. ..."
One of the more famous misquotes in creationist literature. Funny how you never refer to the fossils, but only partial quotes.
BTW, you have a number of ellipses there (the ...). Please prove to us that you have read Raup by giving us the whole quote with the ellipses filled in. Thank you.
You won't, of course, because you have never read it, but copied it off a creationist website without telling us which site. I think that falls under false witness, ur. You might want to be a bit more careful of that; it is breaking a commandment.
Now, Raup did the same essay as Chapter 9, pages 147-162 in Scientists Confront Creationism edited by Laurie R. Godfrey, 1983. Now, let's look at what Raup says
next.
"How does the evolutionist explain the lack of intermediates? I see three principal areas of explanation, all of which probably operate to some degree. The fist of these is a simple artifact of our taxonomic system of classification. The practicing paleontologist is obliged to place any newly found fossil in the Linnean system of taxonomy. Thus, if one finds a birdlike reptile or a reptilelike bird (such as Archaeopteryx), there is no procedure in the taxonomic system for labeling and classifying the as an intermediate between the two classes Aves and Reptilia. Rather, the practicing paleontologist must decide to place his fossil in one category or the other. The impossibility of officially recognizing transitional forms produces an artificial dichotomy between biologic groups. It is conventional to classify Archaeopteryx as a bird. I have no doubt, however, that if it were permissible under the rules of taxonomy to put Archaeopteryx in some sort of category intermediate between birds and reptiles that we would indeed do that. Thus, because of the nature of classification, there appear to be many fewer intermediates than probably exist."
There's one problem: the classification system.
"A second line of explanation for the underrepresentation of intermediates is the same one that Darwin used, namely that the fossil record is incomplete. We have as fossils a tiny fraction of the species that have existed. There are many ways of documenting this, but one is simply to look at the comparative numbers of extinct and living species. There are something like 2 million species known to be living today. We know that the average duration of a species is short relative to the total span of geologic time. Therefore, there must have been turnover in the species composition of the earth many times since the beginning of the fossil record. If we had even reasonably good fossil preservation, the number of known fossil species should thus be some large multiple of the number of species living today. Yet only about a quarter of a million fossil species have been found. Also, ... the fossils that we do see depend largely upon occasional or unusual physical and biological events, and therefore the record is not a uniform or random sampling of life of the past. Under these circumstances, finding transitional forms (or any other particular form) is unlikely, and it is thus not surprising that our record appears to be quite uneven and jerky."
"A third explanation for the relative lack of intermediates is that transitional forms constitute very short intervals of geologic time if, as many evolutionary theorists now believe, the change from one major type to another occurs rather rapidly (the punctuated equilibrium model of Eldredge and Gould 1972). This simply lessons the probability of finding intermediates." Page 158
The next paragraph is the kicker: "
With these considerations in mind, one must argue that the fossil record is compatible with the predictions of evolutionary theory."
So much for using Raup as "evidence".
Steven Stanley (1979) points out:
"In part, the role of paleontology in evolutionary research has been defined narrowly because of a false belief, tracing back to Darwin
and his early followers, that the fossil record is woefully incomplete. Actually, the record is of sufficiently high quality to
allow us to undertake certain kinds of meaningful analysis at the level of the species."
In his book ('Macro-evolution: Pattern and Process', 1979, p.39),
Stanley points out evidence #5 for Punctuated Equilibrium:
"The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid."
Again, this is the strawman of phyletic gradualism. Stanley is arguing against anagenesis being the major mode of speciation. However, Stanley is actually wrong. That's another problem of using quotes as your "facts". The accuracy of the quote must be tested against the
true facts -- the fossils. These sequences document morphologic transition enough to be called a separate class -- and remember that reptiles and mammals are classes:
1. Principles of Paleontology by DM Raup and SM Stanley, 1971, there are transitional series between classes. (mammals and reptiles are examples of a class)
2. HK Erben, Uber den Ursprung der Ammonoidea. Biol. Rev. 41: 641-658, 1966.
But wait! One of the authors of the first one is none other than
Stanley! This lets you know that you are arguing a strawman and misquoted Stanley, not the real one. Because Stanley does have examples of transitional
individuals linking classes in the book. Oh yes,
Raup is the other author!
Aren't you embarrassed misrepresenting people like this?
