Tried but couldn't resist...
quote:
Don't take my word for it, let's read what the scientists say:
To begin with, as has been said already, using thirty year old sources doesn't cut it in real science. That's ancient history. Ten years is old when writing a thesis for an
art history degree, let alone the ever moving world of cutting edge science. Get with the program.
I also believe you should investigate your sources better...
quote:
Mark Ridley, Oxford, "...a lot of people just do not know what evidence the theory of evolution stands upon. They think that the main evidence is the gradual descent of one species from another in the fossil record. ...In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation." New Scientist, June, 1981, p.831
31 years old.
This is actually used as an example of
quote mining on rationalwiki. Googling it gives you a list of creationist webvomit a mile long - all the same. Note that the sentence always left out by the creationist sites is "This does not mean that the theory of evolution is unproven."
quote:
John Reader (photo-journalist and author of "Missing Links"), "Whatever happened to Zinjanthropus?" New Scientist, 26 March 1981, p. 802
21 years old.
I got beaten to this one so I'll leave it alone.
Message 16
quote:
"A five million-year-old piece of bone that was thought to be a collarbone of a humanlike creature is actually part of a dolphin rib, ...He [Dr. T. White] puts the incident on par with two other embarrassing [sic] faux pas by fossil hunters: Hesperopithecus, the fossil pig's tooth that was cited as evidence of very early man in North America, and Eoanthropus or 'Piltdown Man,' the jaw of an orangutan and the skull of a modern human that were claimed to be the 'earliest Englishman'.
"The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone.'"
"Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations. Fossil evidence of chimpanzee evolution is absent altogether". Henry Gee?, Return to the Planet of the Apes?, Nature, Vol. 412, 12 July 2001, p. 131
11 years old.
It's funny - I usually see other stuff by Gee quote mined.
Of course you do realise that the fact that anthropologists make mistakes doesn't invalidate the science in any way. Science has built in systems to weed out errors and hoaxes. Religions generally have built in systems to treat ancient traditions as the only truth and may bend reality to suit them.
All evidence is open to interpretation. This is called
science. The thing to remember is that it needs to be interpreted with the help of supporting evidence, not misrepresentation and outright lies.
quote:
The lack of ancestral or intermediate forms between fossil species is not a bizarre peculiarity of early metazoan history. Gaps are general and prevalent throughout the fossil record.
R. A. Raff and T. C. Kaufman, Embryos, Genes and Evolution: The Developmental Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, Indiana University Press, 1991, p. 34
21 years old.
As above. Of course our knowledge is incomplete. Do you seriously expect us to have found an record of
every living thing that ever existed? This is not evidence against homonid evolution and it is such a broad statement that is not really evidence of anything.
It's a good thing that genetics does such a good job of backing up the theory that the fossil record is superfluous. It is, however strong supporting evidence and also really cool.
quote:
In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation.
(Ridley, Mark, Who doubts evolution? New Scientist, vol. 90, 25 June 1981, p. 831.
Still 31 years old.
I can't believe you used the same PRATT again. Could this be considered a PRATT fall?
Please, please, read what you are posting. Don't just cut and paste this on here and expect us to take it seriously.
quote:
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 gradualist accounts of evolution.
Gould, Stephen J., ‘Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?’ Paleobiology, Vol. 6(1), January 1980, p. 127.
32 years old.
This is another classic
quote mine. Once you read the quote in context, you should see what I mean. If not, I, and I'm sure many others will be happy to help.
The Quote Mine Project is a wonderful thing and I hope you make it your friend.
quote:
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the gradual transformation of its ancestors: it appears all at once and ‘fully formed.’
Steven Jay Gould (Harvard University), Evolution’s erratic pace, Natural History 86(5):14, May 1977.
35 years old. Wow! That's as old as
Star Wars!
Oh, look. Another
quote mine. What a surprise.
In this one, Gould is supporting his idea of
punctuated equilibrium, not showing that evolution is false.
quote:
Many evolutionary biologists since Darwin’s time, and even Darwin himself, have been struck by how few sequences of fossils have ever been found that clearly show a gradual, steady accumulation of small changes in evolutionary lineages. Instead, most fossil species appear suddenly, without transitional forms, in a layer of rock and persist essentially unchanged until disappearing from the record of rocks as suddenly as they appeared.
Campbell, et al., Biology Concepts and Connections, 3rd Ed., p 290, 2000.
12 years old.
Sigh. Another one?
Most fossils. There is a tendency for species to hang around for a while and then die out. What a shocking revelation. This is why Gould argued for punctuated equilibrium.
quote:
In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been found - yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks.
Dr. David M. Raup (U. of Chicago - Field Museum), Evolution and the Fossil Record, Science, Vol. 213 (July 17, 1981), p. 289.
31 years old.
Once again, talking about the fact that humans are fallible does nothing to support your point.
quote:
Dr. Richard Leakey?, discoverer of Skull 1470 (Homo habilis), one of world’s foremost paleo-anthropologists,said in a PBS documentary in 1990:
If pressed about man’s ancestry, I would have to unequivocally say that all we have is a huge question mark. To date, there has been nothing found to truthfully purport as a transitional specie to man, including Lucy, since 1470 was as old and probably older. If further pressed, I would have to state that there is more evidence to suggest an abrupt arrival of man rather than a gradual process of evolving.
22 years old.
I love this one and
Leakey's response
In his own words...
Richard Leakey writes:
The Creationist movement is lead by a dishonest bunch of operators and misquotation is the hall mark of their work. Responding to them is time wasting and a letter would not be adequate to put your questions to rest. There are some things best ignored and the stupidity of these so called religious fanatics continues to astonish me
Enough said
quote:
Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations. Fossil evidence of chimpanzee evolution is absent altogether.
Henry Gee, Return to the Planet of the Apes, Nature, Vol. 412, 12 July 2001, p. 131.
Still 11 years old.
Henry?
Again?
I'm getting tired of this now, so I'll just say that the rest of them have already been addressed using examples above.
Special mention goes to the second Leakey quote, which weighs in at 39 years old!
From the beginning...
quote:
I am aware that there is a dispute about the hominid fossils and its interpretations.
It would appear that the greatest dispute would be where creationists get their facts from and why are they so willing to lie to people about this. Why does it scare them so?
quote:
I find it quite funny that they all just so happen to be extinct. Evolutionists will give ad hoc explanations for why it is so. It's one of the many reasons why I doubt their evolution story.
I find it absolutely hilarious that you would actually present any of this as
evidence at all. You have not given any cogent argument as to why other hominids should still be alive according to the ToE. No reason at all to assume this at all.
Maybe you should also be asking why the
coelocanth order has living representatives , while
tiktaalik is extinct.
Now, show us some actual evidence so that we have something to talk about. Why
shouldn't the other hominids be extinct?
quote:
Please don't post ad hoc explanations with no scientific evidence to back up it up.
Edited by Warthog, : Typos. I hate typos
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Willful Ignorance is a Sin
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