napajohn said:
"Punctuated equilibria notes that large populations of species are in stasis for the lifetime of a species. That's because 1) it takes a lot of time for new alleles to be fixed in large populations and 2) the species is well-adapted to its environment and thus isn't going to change"...
Lucaspa this theory was not a part of Darwins proposal but just a recent adjustment to preserve evolution from the lack of graduated development in the fossil record.
1. Darwin did write this
"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 That's PE.
2. PE wasn't devised because the fossil record didn't back evolution. It does. Both Eldredge and Gould have published papers observing gradual change. What the fossil record doesn't support is an idea called
phyletic gradualism. (I wrote all this in another thread to you, napa. Oh well, I'm sure the lurkers can get something from it even tho you will ignore it.) In this idea of Darwin's, the
majority of evolution happens by entire populations slowly transform to new species. However in the 1940s Mayr thought that most speciation comes from allopatric speciation. A small population isolated from the main one and gradually transforming over generations. What Eldredge and Gould realized was that the fossil record looked exactly like it should if most speciation was allopatric.
change it so that a Goldschmidt monster pops up..a reptile has an egg and boom(evolutionary speaking of thousands of years) a bird hatches.
False witness. Gould explicitly rejected this form of Goldschmidt in several essays. Nor was PE
ever devised like this. You only find this in creationist misrepresentations of PE, never in Gould himself.
Please see the history of your theory as very plastic in nature..it will be made to fit any evidence and anything contradictory must cause a change in how evolution works because evolution is fact and any concession to an intelligent design has ramifications to many atheistic scientists.
Nice try at the atheistic conspiracy, but there are too many theistic scientists to put it over.
Napajohn, be careful of throwing stones while living in glass houses. Remember that creationism had no change in species. At all. But now, guess what? Creationism accepts microevolution. Creationism never had new species forming. In fact, in
Origin of the Species Darwin falsified creationism, which was what the big fuss was about. But guess what? Speciation is now accepted by creationism! Talk about plastic!!
But no. Theories have core statements and auxiliarly statements. The core statements of evolution are common ancestry and natural selection. "Descent with modification" IOW. Exactly how that modification takes place and exactly how fast the modification takes place are part of the auxiliary statements. PE does not challenge either common ancestry or gradual change in terms of generations. It simply says that most speciation is allopatric (which means we are unlikely to find that exact location and time in the fossil record) and that speciation happens in less than 50,000 years, which is normally too short to show up in the fossil record, because most layers of sediment represent more than 50,000 years of deposition.
Here, read Gould yourself:
"Punctuated equilibrium is neither a creationist idea nor even a non-Darwinian evolutionary theory about sudden change that produces a new species all at once in a single generation. Punctuated equilibrium accepts the conventional idea that new species form over hundreds or thousands of generations and through an extensive series of intermediate changes. But geological time is so long that even a few thousand years may appear as a mere "moment" relative to the several million years of existence for most species. Thus, rates of evolution vary enourmously and new species may appear to arise "suddenly" in geological time, even though the time involved woudl seem long, and the change very slow, when compared to a human lifetime." Stephen J. Gould, Science and Creationism, A view from the National Academy of Sciences, 2nd edition, pg 29, 1999.
www.nap.edu
Napajohn, you are not doing Christianity any good by these continued false witnesses. With friends like you, Christianity doesn't need any enemies.