Summations Only

don't be ridiculous. the specimens that are represented do in fact agree extremely strongly with darwin.

quote:

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Darwin himself, .... prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search .... One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions.

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again, this is silly. darwin's book, on the origin of species by means of natural selection was published in 1859. the first complete skeleton of this thing was found in 1863: it was so damned convenient that creationists at the time argued it must be a forgery.seriously, this argument is totally ignorant of 150 years of paleontology. i don't have to go more than four years from darwin to find probably the single most dramatic example of a transitional species in the public eye, nevermind 120 years.

because it was. and it is today as well, to a much lesser degree. unless the fossil record were to present every individual that ever lived, it would necessarily be incomplete. but we have far more species described than is necessary to piece together a nearly complete picture of the history of evolution on this planet. very few mysteries, "missing links" remain. some of those major apparent transitions, like non-avian dinosaurs to avian dinosaurs are extremely strongly represented.archaeopteryx there is the oldest and most hotly debated example. there are 6 complete specimens of archaeopteryx. but we have five or six dozen examples of primitive birds that come after it, showing varying degrees of more avian adaptations (eg: fusing of the carpometacarpus from the manus, reversing of the hallux, beaks) and countless feathered theropods that come both before and after archaeopteryx presenting many avian adaptations initially thought to be unique to archaeopteryx and its descendants (eg: the furcula, pneumatized bones). feathers themselves are an interesting case, as we have an extremely wide variety of various developmental stages in the evolution of feathers, including feathered ornithischians with extremely primitive feathers, showing that they might go all the way back to the earliest dinosaurs. and we have crocodiles, the only other living archosaurs, that were somewhat recently found to have part of a primitive version of the avian respiratory system. living dinosaurs (birds) are easily identified as such by the skeletal formations that identify dinosaurs. this may come as a surprise to you, but darwin's been dead a long time. he doesn't keep on saying anything.also, this may come as another surprise, but paleontology was kind of new in darwin's time. they modern science paleontology began in the same century, and the term itself was first used only about 37 years before darwin's book. it was a new science, and they didn't know much at the time. we've come a long, long way in 150 years.

it's been a long time since i read these kinds of quote mines. quote darwin, eldredge and gould as if they disagree with themselves is an interesting tactic.

how can we do that, if we don't have the complete writings of darwin, eldredge and gould?

considering there must have been millions of living neanderthals, we have a long way to go!

this is way, way less insulting than the time i asked randman to play connect the dotsEdited by AdminModulous, : edited subtitle; obnoxiously large on topic lists