Summations Only

BfDAnd I'm sorry that you are unable to accept that your quote-mines are wrong.Unlike you, I have read some of those original works, and I have studied a good many of the fossils, as casts, of course. (Mrs. Ples -- now there's a real cutie!)There has been a recent debate in paleontology about the rate of evolution. That is what these authors are discussing.But creationists, ever hopeful, twist and manipulate their writings to make it seem that these paleontologists are saying something far different from what they are actually saying.Those creationist websites are lying, and you fell for it.Edited by Coyote, : minor add

BfDDid your last quite in the above post leave out the following?

quote:

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"Evolutionists of all stripes believe, however, that this really does represent a very large gap in the fossil record, a gap that is simply due to the fact that, for some reason, very few fossils have lasted from periods before about 600 million years ago. One good reason might be that many of these animals had only soft parts to their bodies: no shells or bones to fossilize. If you are a creationist you may think that this is special pleading. My point here is that, when we are talking about gaps of this magnitude, there is no difference whatever in the interpretations of 'punctuationists' and 'gradualists'."

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And does that missing bit suggest that the topic of discussion was only the period prior to 600 million years ago?Edited by Coyote, : Forgot the "BfD"

You still have not responded to Post 5, which shows you are wrong.Can we look forward to a response to that nice figure in Post 5 anytime soon?Or are you just stuck in a rut with quote-mining?

BfDYou are attempting to ignore evidence that shows you are wrong.This is the figure from Message 5, and the text that accompanied it.

Pelycodus was a tree-dwelling primate that looked [picture omitted] much like a modern lemur. The skull shown is probably 7.5 centimeters long.

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The numbers down the left hand side indicate the depth (in feet) at which each group of fossils was found. As is usual in geology, the diagram gives the data for the deepest (oldest) fossils at the bottom, and the upper (youngest) fossils at the top. The diagram covers about five million years.

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The numbers across the bottom are a measure of body size. Each horizontal line shows the range of sizes that were found at that depth. The dark part of each line shows the average value, and the standard deviation around the average.

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The dashed lines show the overall trend. The species at the bottom is Pelycodus ralstoni, but at the top we find two species, Notharctus nunienus and Notharctus venticolus. The two species later became even more distinct, and the descendants of nunienus are now labeled as genus Smilodectes instead of genus Notharctus.

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As you look from bottom to top, you will see that each group has some overlap with what came before. There are no major breaks or sudden jumps. And the form of the creatures was changing steadily.

So, there you have it--evidence of evolution, including change from one species to another and change from one genus to another.And this blows the whole idea of a young earth out of the water at the same time. A twoofer!

I am just reposting a graphic with text, that has been posted several times by RAZD, in an attempt to get some reaction.I am not the original author of the piece so any technical questions would have to go to them.But I would guess that, based on the graph, there is quite a temporal separation between those two species, prohibiting interbreeding much as you would not be able to interbreed with archaic Homo sapiens or Homo erectus. With this large temporal separation, the question of interfertility would seem moot.Maybe RAZD could also comment here.

BfDBecause Darwin was writing in the 1850s, and the fossil record was incomplete! (It still is.)When Darwin published in 1859, one Neanderthal fossil had been identified, and that was in 1857. We now have fossils from over 400 individuals.I'd say that was an incomplete fossil record in Darwin's day, wouldn't you?

BfDHow? Because I spent about four years studying the fossil evidence, not ten minutes quote-mining the creationist websites, which seems to be the pinnacle of your research.Edited by Coyote, : Forgot the BfD

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start (examining evolution), and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science-or of any honest intellectual inquiry."The anatomical transition from reptiles to mammals is particularly well documented in the key anatomical change of jaw articulation to hearing bones. Only one bone, called the dentary, builds the mammalian jaw, while reptiles retain several small bones in the rear portion of the jaw. We can trace, through a lovely sequence of intermediates, the reduction of these small reptilian bones, and their eventual disappearance or exclusion from the jaw, including the remarkable passage of the reptilian articulation bones into the mammalian middle ear (where they became our malleus and incus, or hammer and anvil). We have even found the transitional form that creationists often proclaim inconceivable in theory for how can jawbones become ear bones if intermediaries must live with an unhinged jaw before the new joint forms? The transitional species maintains a double jaw joint, with both the old articulation of reptiles (quadrate to articular bones) and the new connection of mammals (squamosal to dentary) already in place! Thus, one joint could be lost, with passage of its bones into the ear, while the other articulation continued to guarantee a properly hinged jaw. Still, our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence of all transitional forms by ignoring those that have been found, and continuing to taunt us with admittedly frequent examples of absence.Stephen Jay Gould=========="Of course in science there are things that are open to doubt and things need to be discussed. But among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know.""The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.""If every fossil were magicked away, the comparative study of modern organisms, of how their patterns of resemblances, especially of their genetic sequences, are distributed among species, and of how species are distributed among continents and islands, would still demonstrate, beyond all sane doubt, that our history is evolutionary, and that all living creatures are cousins. Fossils are a bonus. A welcome bonus, to be sure, but not an essential one. It is worth remembering this when creationists go on (as they tediously do) about "gaps" in the fossil record. The fossil record could be one big gap, and the evidence for evolution would still be overwhelmingly strong. At the same time, if we had only fossils and no other evidence, the fact of evolution would again be overwhelmingly supported. As things stand, we are blessed with both."Richard Dawkins=========="Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles."Dr. James D. Watson==========And to sum it all up:"A lie repeated often enough convinces the liar, and many creationists may now have forgotten that they are lying at all."Frederick Turner, Professor of Arts and Humanities, University of Dallas

There, fixed it for you.With my addition that statement is now accurate.As we have seen with Faith, and now you, there is no amount of any kind of evidence that will convince a hard-core creationist of the accuracy of the theory of evolution because they simply will not or can not see that evidence!While they may pretend to follow the scientific method, their bias makes that impossible.And as Heinlein noted:

Belief gets in the way of learning.

He's read the Koran or something.

Quote mining to make paleontologists say something they did not say does nothing to change either what they did say--over a long career--or the evidence.Creationists who use this kind of an argument demonstrate just how bankrupt their case really is.