Summations Only

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

You seem to be the one who doesn't understand your quote. It says that IF you think the geological record is perfect, you will reject evolution. But nobody thinks the geological record is perfect.

The thing to remember is that the fossil evidence is not the foundational evidence for the Theory of Evolution -- that is the evidence we see in the world around us -- it is the test for the prediction of the theory, that the process of evolution is sufficient to explain all the fossil evidence.What this means is not that each fossil must demonstrate evolution, but that every fossil tests the theory of evolution -- meaning each fossil is an opportunity to falsify evolution.So it doesn't matter how fast or slow evolution appears to be in the geological strata.This is also why it doesn't matter that the fossils are in the deep "unwitnessed" past ... or that they can be absolutely dated ... all that is needed is relative dating (which cannot be altered by flood fantasies due to the law of superposition).

Bs'dHere I agree with you. And therefore you'll understand that I'm not going to be swayed by you post nr 5, because that is just something that somebody says, somebody I don't know, an anonymous person. Your post is spiced up by some pictures, which, for all intends and purposes, might be taken from a fairy tale book. So therefore, I won't pay too much attention to that.I go by the scientific method.And I also believe that big well known scientists who were/are leaders in their field, who managed to turn their field around and managed to make the rest follow them, like for instance Gould and Eldredge, who went with danger for life and limb, well, lets make that: with danger for job and career, against the grain, and who managed to change the field from the erronous postion: "The fossil record supports gradual Darwinistic evolution" to PE, I believe that if they say something about the fossil record, you can be reasonably sure about it.
And that is why I hold the words of Gould and Eldredge in a much higher regard then those of a certain "RAZD".And that is why whatever a cerain "RAZD" says, it cannot overthrow the opinion of established experts like Gould and Elfdredge. Like I made clear to you, message 5 is not evidence, it is the ramblings of an anonymous nobody, not to be wasted too many words on.Remember, we don't go by what people say, and we definitely don't go by what an anonymous layman says.

Bs'dSince the beginning of time.Here is what evolutionary experts say about that one:Stasis, or non-change, of most fossil species during their lengthy geological lifespans was tacitly acknowledged by all paleontologists, but almost never studied explicitly because prevailing theory treated stasis as uninteresting nonevidence for nonevolution. .... The overwhelming prevalence of STASIS became an embarrassing feature of the fossil record, best left ignored as a manifestation of nothing (that is, NON-EVOLUTION)."Gould, Stephen J., "Cordelia's Dilemma," Natural History, 1993, p. 15.
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.Edited by Eliyahu, : No reason given.Edited by AdminPhat, : No reason given.

Which is, ummm, ... evolution!I'm glad you hold the work of Gould and Eldredge in such esteem and now agree with evolution.Thank you for playing.

You are sure about that? But stasis is part of PE, is it not?And what is PE?And how about what you say? Are you incapable of speaking for yourself?

Bs'dOr so you think. Environment cannot make new species. Actually, nobody knows what can. Evolution is always gradual, unless you believe in the now outdated term "hopefull monsters".It always takes millions of years to come up with a fundamentally different new species. Species don't change overnight in a totally new species. If evolution happens at all, it has to be gradual.
Therefore: Gradualism = evolution, and the other way around. That's strange, I see them saying things like this:"Paleontologists just were not seeing the expected changes in their fossils as they pursued them up through the rock record. ... That individual kinds of fossils remain recognizably the same throughout the length of their occurrence in the fossil record had been known to paleontologists long before Darwin published his Origin. 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. Nor is the problem a miserly fossil record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong.
The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor's new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin's predicted pattern, simply looked the other way."Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 45-46He says "No miserly fossil record".And also:"The record jumps, and all the evidence shows that the record is real: the gaps we see reflect real events in life’s history - not the artifact of a poor fossil record."Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 59Clear what? He does NOT hold by an imperfect fossil record. So we are no longer hampered by an imperfect fossil record, but we can deduct from it that gradualism just didn't happen.And according to PE, that what did happen, happened in out of the way small places, and therefore we cannot find any evidence of it.So the fossil record shows us that there is no evidence of evolution.And that is what I'm saying all the time. Oh. Well, I don't remember anything like that. That's of course my bad memory, but please give me some numbers of the posts where I can find that.
Thanks in advance. There is no non-gradual evolution. Amen. Yes it is. So we went from a fossil record that supported gradualism, to a fossil record that does not support it .So we went from stasis being proof for non-evolution to stasis being a part of evolution.Many times an about-face has occurred, and undoubtedly many more are going to come in the evo theory.So it is best not to take the statements of evolutionists too seriously, because tomorrow they may hold the opposite. Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Return subtitle to normal from large font color.

Speak for yourself. Please show your working.

But the evidence in Message 5 is not something said by people -- it is objective evidence presented for you to see, and you can follow the links to articles about the evidence and if you are truly interested you can look up the peer reviewed scientific articles and even contact the authors if you have any questions. So you say, but you have yet to demonstrate that you know how this works or that you have taken the first step. They developed a new hypothesis that had a better fit to the evidence, something all scientists try to do. They didn't make the rest follow, scientists accept new approaches when they work, when they explain the evidence better than the previous approach.Some, like Dawkins. don't accept PE as being a significant new idea, that the idea of different rates has been around for a long time, even being mentioned by Darwin, and when you look at the punctuated events they are only brief on a geological time scale, but still take many generations to occur, and that this fits in well with the known variation rates of evolution. A risk any good scientist will gladly take if they develop a new approach or develop a new hypothesis, because that is what science and the scientific method is all about. It's not for people who want to stay in their comfort zone with a fixed set of beliefs. To correct the common misunderstanding that Darwin proposed only gradualistic evolution (which came into the field with genetics), to revisit his view that evolution could occur a different speeds depending on evolutionary pressure, and to look at how this actually works in the evidence.You need only understand how the process of evolution works to understand this, as I mentioned in Message 63:

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... the fossil record shows the opposite of evolution, namely STASIS, and sudden appearance ...

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Curiously stasis is predicted by evolution, but I have to wonder if you know what stasis really means (on top of your ignorance of how evolution works).

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(1) The process of evolution involves changes in the composition of hereditary traits, and changes to the frequency of their distributions within breeding populations from generation to generation, in response to ecological challenges and opportunities.

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The selection process means that those that have better adaptation to an ecology will have higher reproductive and survival success and their traits will become predominant in the breeding population if there are no changes to the ecological pressures.

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Thus in a stable ecology selection will occur against detrimental changes (that make individuals less fit) and for stasis (for the average population traits being reproduced).

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Even during stasis the process of evolution continues, and this will still allow neutral traits to develop and be dispersed within the breeding population -- new traits that are not under any selection process but which increase the diversity of the breeding population -- traits that may enable individuals to make use of a wider range of ecologies in the surrounding areas.

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As the population breeds, normally with more offspring than necessary to replace deaths, there will be pressure for individuals to move into surrounding ecologies to expand the breeding population further. This virtually ensures that some individuals will move into less optimum ecologies where selection pressure will be different than the main body of the breeding population.

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This is where "punctuation" comes into the picture.

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... and sudden appearance ...

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Sudden in geological timescales of course. You would not recognize it as sudden if you were living at the time and observing it, ...

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Here are two more pictures of the Pelycodus fossil data, now with some additional Copelemur fossil data from a neighboring ecology: These show the "gradualistic view" on the left, and the "punctuational view" on the right. Both show the data is the same: the horizontal bars represent the size distribution of the fossils in each layer, and these size distributions are seen to evolve from one generation to the next, from level to level, even when only size is measured (there are other differences as well, but this is a convenient way to document the data).Note that the only "interpretations" here are how the lines are drawn, not where the data is plotted.Note further that the first branching, between Copelemur praetatus and Pelycodus trigonodus either ends abruptly (with the extinction of Copelemur praetatus) or that Copelemur praetatus is absorbed back into the main breeding population as that population shifts strongly to the left just above the Pelycodus trigonodus labelled layer.The horizontal bars are the fossil data, not any persons interpretation nor are they "something that somebody says" ... and I can provide further links to scientific articles with this data as presented by Gingrich in the original scientific articles. There you go falling back on putting more 'faith' in quotes\statements than on the objective data again ...... so when Gould commented on the Foraminifera (as noted in Message 5), that indeed it showed gradualistic evolution, we can be reasonably sure about it? Curiously I am not swayed by Gould's opinion but by the fact that the Foraminifera demonstrate gradualistic evolution in a continuous and virtually complete picture covering 65 million years of evolution.Curiously, the data of Foraminifera does not show the same rate of evolution at all times, but a varying one dependent on evolutionary pressure, fully in accordance with both Darwin and modern thinking. We know that this represents gradualistic evolution because we can follow all the lines of development, all the speciation events, and observe how new species arise and then come to dominate the ecological niche that Foraminifera inhabit. Again from the reference in Message 5: Foraminifera evolution

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"The forams may not be representative of all organisms but, at least in this group, we can actually see how evolution happened," says Parker. "We can see transitions from one species to another. And that's a very rare observation."

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Had Darwin been able to examine the fossil record of forams, he could have fortified many of his arguments on how new species come into being, and perhaps eased a nagging worry about the terribly incomplete fossil record yielded by terrestrial research.

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In the hands of less scrupulous observers, the foram record may have been construed to support Gould's hypothesis about the suddeness of speciation. Darwin would have been shocked to find out just how fast the great family of forams churns out new species, says Parker. Through dating analysis, he and his colleague showed that the forams could produce a whole new species in as little as 200,000 years--speedy by Darwinian standards. "But as fast as this is, it's still far too slow to be classed as punctuational," says Arnold.

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One of the last great extinctions occurred roughly 66 million years ago and, according to one popular theory, it resulted from Earth's receiving a direct hit from a large asteroid. Whatever the cause, the event proved to be the dinosaurs' coup de grace, and so wiped out a good portion of the marine life--including almost all species of planktonic forams.

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This period of massive death, which ended the Cretaceous Period, ushered in the modern chapter of biological development. Earth entered the new era, the Cenozoic, with a wide range of ecosystems virtually deviod of life (and thus competition between species), yet quite fertile and primed for repopulation.

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Other scientists have theorized, but never been able to demonstrate, that in the absence of competition, an explosion of life takes place. The evolution of new species greatly accelerates, and a profusion of body shapes and sizes bursts across the horizon, filling up vacant spaces like weeds overtaking a pristine lawn. An array of new forms fans out into these limited niches, where crowding soon forces most of the new forms to spin out into oblivion similar to sparks from a bonfire.

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The ancient record of foram evolution reveals that the story of recovery after extinction is indeed busy and colorful. "What we've found suggests that the rate of speciation increases dramatically in a biological vacuum," says Parker. "After the Cretaceous extinction, the few surviving foram species rapidly evolved into new species, and for the first time we're able to see just how this happens, and how fast."

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So there you have it: rapid evolution when selection pressure is low and slower evolution as selection pressure increases. All documented in the Foraminifera fossil record Denial of the evidence does not make it go away. Curious that you build your arguments solely on your interpretations of the words you quote, but don't want to look at the evidence presented in these articles.That's the logical fallacy of special pleading, also known as hypocrisy. Then look at the data, look at what the scientists that you are so fond of quoting say about the evidence, look up the scientific articles and look for reviews by scientists -- do some actual research rather than cherry pick quotes with confirmation bias and misrepresentations. Confirmation Bias, Cognitive Dissonance, cherry picking and ide fixes, are not the tools of an open-mind or an honest skeptic, and continued belief in the face of contradictory evidence is delusion.

Punctuated Equilibrium is still gradual in biological timescales, its that in geological timescales it looks spurty.The fossil record shows us geological timescales, not biological ones.Can you understand the difference between two different timescales and how that can make things look different?Edited by Catholic Scientist, : changed obnoxious subtitle

Thank you for confirming that your whole argument is based on ignorance.On the other hand, we rely on evidence for evolution. Please show us anything in the modern synthesis of evolution that says evolution must occur at a given rate. Please tell us what that rate is. Please explain this line of reasoning. How can the rate of evolution also be evolution? Okay, so according to you, Eldredge is saying that evolution is wrong and yet, Eldredge is an 'evolutionist'.Why do you suppose that is?What convolutions must you go through to rationalize this logic?Isn't it more reasonable to say that Eldredge is saying that evolution occurs at variable rates? But you said a while ago that the fossil record is imperfect.So which is it? Not really. We can say that gradualism is accompanied by punctuation just as well. Actually, we do see evidence of that. In fact, your own experts (Gould and Eldredge) interpreted evidence to come up with PE. Please explain your logic here. Gould and Eldredge were both evolutionists and they used evidence to arrive at the theory of PE. So, how is that 'no evidence' for evolution? Actually, you aren't saying very much, particularly since your experts say the opposite of what you attribute to them. Not sure how you got that. When did the fossil record support gradualism and when did it change?Could it also be that both occur? Wouldn't that solve your problem? What is this 'proof' business? Have you ever actually studies science? Not sure what you mean by an 'about face'. I don't see anyone saying that species have not evolved, just a dispute as to the rate of evolution.But yes, we have added to our knowledge of evolution and revised the theory of evolution.It's called learning.You should try it. You have not shown this.

Also note that I have not seen a single original quote by Eliyahu -- his quote-mines can be found complete with ellipse etc on the webQuote Mine Project: "Sudden Appearance and Stasis"

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Quote #37

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"Paleontologists just were not seeing the expected changes in their fossils as they pursued them up through the rock record. ...That individual kinds of fossils remain recognizably the same throughout the length of their occurrence in the fossil record had been known to paleontologists long before Darwin published his Origin. 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. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong. ...The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor's new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin's predicted pattern, simply looked the other way." (Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 45-46)

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In the passages quoted, Eldredge and Tattersall are discussing the merits of gradualism, something the quote miner has left out, as we can see:

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The main impetus for expanding the view that species are discrete at any one point in time, to embrace their entire history, comes from the fossil record. Paleontologists just were not seeing the expected changes in their fossils as they pursued them up through the rock record. Instead, collections of nearly identical specimens, separated in some cases by 5 million years, suggested that the overwhelming majority of animal and plant species were tremendously conservative throughout their histories.

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That individual kinds of fossils remain recognizably the same throughout the length of their occurrence in the fossil record had been known to paleontologists long before Darwin published his Origin. Darwin himself, troubled by the stubbornness of the fossil record in refusing to yield abundant examples of gradual change, devoted two chapters to the fossil record. To preserve his argument he was forced to assert that the fossil record was too incomplete, to full of gaps, to produce the expected patterns of change. He prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search and then his major thesis - that evolutionary change is gradual and progressive - would be vindicated. 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. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong.

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The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor's new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin's predicted pattern, simply looked the other way. Rather than challenge well-entrenched evolutionary theory, paleontologists tacitly agreed with their zoological colleagues that the fossil record was too poor to do much beyond supporting, in a general sort of way, the basic thesis that life had evolved.

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Note the claim that the fossil record supports evolution.

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And we know that there are examples of evolution and speciation transitions in the fossil record, The record being "poor" does not mean it is non-existent -- the conclusion Eliyahu falsely derives from the abbreviated quotes.Further it doesn't look like he has actually read anything but these quotes as quoted from creationist websites.Nothing new there.

Bs'dYou seem to know something I don't. Please enlighten me and tell me through which mechanism new species which completely new organs and limbs can be made. Gradualism is not the rate of evolution, it is slow evolution. He doesn't say "evolution is wrong", he says that the fossil record does not show any evolution, and he says that Darwin was wrong when he prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search. Maybe he says so, but not in the above quote. It is imperfect according to all the evo's, who cannot prove evolution with it. With the difference that the punctuation, the gaps, are all over the fossil record, and the gradual evolution is nowhere to be found. It is only assumed. It's more like they interpreted non-evidence, the stasis, in order to come up with PE. Their "evidence" was in their brainwashing. They were convinced evolution had happened, yet they couldn't find any proof for it. Ergo: It must have happened in nooks and crannies and therefore the evidence cannot be found; behold: PE is born! The fossil record of course NEVER supported evolution, but we are here not talking about the fossil record changing, but about science changing its opinion about the fossil record.For more than 100 years science told the public the big lie about the fossil record, all the while knowing is was not true:".... we have proffered a collective tacit acceptance of the story of gradual adaptive change, a story that strengthened and became even more entrenched as the synthesis took hold. We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports that interpretation, all the while really knowing that it does not."Eldredge, Niles "Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1985, p. 44" There is only evidence for stasis, not for evolution.

I don't think that someone could be so stupid to keep repeating a blatant lie even after its been pointed out and explained to them and everyone can see that they are simply repeating the lie again.So, I'm convinced that Eliyahu is just trolling us. He's not interested in understanding anything, he's just trying to rile us up.