The belief that evolution happened is the only reason you imagine any one creature gave birth step by step to any other creature that is fundamentally different.
We have been over this falsehood several times, most recently in the
Conclusion vs Presupposition. Evolution is a
conclusion based on the evidence and not a presupposition.
It is time you stopped repeating that falsehood.
Stephen Jay Gould said "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."
Well I suppose that makes him a fool for not agreeing with you even though he really believed in evolution -hence 'punctuated equilibrium' as a way out of the quandry.
Luckily now we don't have to look for transitional forms because the nagging problem will never be solved so everything is a transitional form -end of problem!
Glad that you mentioned this falsehood as well so we can correct it for you and you will stop repeating it.
That quote is simply another example of the dishonesty of Biblical Creationists. The folk that pulled that quote out of context had access obviously to ALL that Gould said, yet they pulled that one piece out of context to try to con gullible folk like you.
Why do they continue to lie?
The full quote is:
Gould writes:
" 2. The saltational initiation of major transitions: The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary states between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution. St. George Mivart (1871), Darwin's most cogent critic, referred to it as the dilemma of "the incipient stages of useful structures" -- of what possible benefit to a reptile is two percent of a wing? The dilemma has two potential solutions. The first, preferred by Darwinians because it preserves both gradualism and adaptation, is the principle of preadaptation: the intermediate stages functioned in another way but were, by good fortune in retrospect, pre-adapted to a new role they could play only after greater elaboration. Thus, if feathers first functioned "for" insulation and later "for" the trapping of insect prey (Ostrom 1979) a proto-wing might be built without any reference to flight.
I do not doubt the supreme importance of preadaptation, but the other alternative, treated with caution, reluctance, disdain or even fear by the modern synthesis, now deserves a rehearing in the light of renewed interest in development: perhaps, in many cases, the intermediates never existed. I do not refer to the saltational origin of entire new designs, complete in all their complex and integrated features -- a fantasy that would be truly anti-Darwinian in denying any creativity to selection and relegating it to the role of eliminating new models. Instead, I envisage a potential saltational origin for the essential features of key adaptations. Why may we not imagine that gill arch bones of an ancestral agnathan moved forward in one step to surround the mouth and form proto-jaws? Such a change would scarcely establish the Bauplan of the gnathostomes. So much more must be altered in the reconstruction of agnathan design -- the building of a true shoulder girdle with bony, paired appendages, to say the least. But the discontinuous origin of a proto-jaw might set up new regimes of development and selection that would quickly lead to other, coordinated modifications." (Gould, Stephen J., 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, pp. 126-127)
source
Not only is it an example of Biblical Creationists dishonesty, it is also from 1980, and quite a bit has been learned since then.
Finally, none of that has ANYTHING to do with the topic which is "Is Intelligent Design Religion in the Guise of Science?" and which you have already answered in the affirmative. You already admitted that ID is nothing but religion in
Message 77 when you said:
I'll go with the God of the Bible but the actual overall point of the debate is "can blind chance and mutation produce everything we see?
when asked "Who is the Designer.
Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!
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