Scrow said:
scientists openly admit there's a lot they don't know, that there's still lots to learn, and that as they learn more the theories will change. they are not stories, they are theories. theories that are based on what we currently know about the nature of things and that will change as we learn more. science is itself an evolutionary process. that is science.
the difference is that religion doesn't know either, but won't admit it and doesn't want to change.
But based on what we do know it is reasonable to infer that life was intelligently designed. We see incredible complexities of a cell, yes more complex than anything man has built, it is reasonable to infer design.
Kylehimself said:
http://darwiniana.org/whale1.gif
The fact is there is no consensus on the supposed whale evolution history. It is so open to interpretation and there are so many glaring gaps in the whale fossil record scientists don't know what to make of it. The same goes for the fossil record in general. Yet, some people call this science?
Indeed, if theory of Evolution were a fact we would expect find clear cut, non disputed examples of gradual fossil transitions. This would be strong evidence for the theory of Evolution - more specifically the theory of common descent with modification. The fact is the fossil record is woefully incomplete!
Charles Darwin knew of the problematic fossil record and wrote about it in his most famous book.
As by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed. Why do we not find them embedded in the crust of the earth? (p.139)
Firstly, why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined? (p. 143)
But, as by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? (p. 144)
Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed. (p. 149)
Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. (p. 230)
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, 1859
Nearly 150 years later nothing much has changed (Sorry to quote mine again but it's worth knowing what scientist say):
"Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series." (Ernst Mayr-Professor Emeritus, Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, What Evolution Is, 2001, p.14.)
"What is missing are the many intermediate forms hypothesized by Darwin, and the continual divergence of major lineages into the morphospace between distinct adaptive types." (Carroll, Robert L., "Towards a new evolutionary synthesis," in Trends in Evolution and Ecology 15(1):27-32, 2000, p. 27.)
David B. Kitts of the School of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Oklahoma wrote that "Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them
".
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
"The entire hominid collection known today would barely cover a billiard table, ... the collection is so tantalizingly incomplete, and the specimens themselves often so fragmented and inconclusive, that more can be said about what is missing than about what is present. ...but ever since Darwin's work inspired the notion that fossils linking modern man and extinct ancestor would provide the most convincing proof of human evolution, preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man."
John Reader (photo-journalist and author of "Missing Links"), "Whatever happened to Zinjanthropus?" New Scientist, 26 March 1981, p. 802
"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.'"
Dr. Tim White (anthropologist, University of California, Berkeley). As quoted by Ian Anderson "Hominoid collarbone exposed as dolphin's rib", in New Scientist, 28 April 1983, p. 199
"Indeed, it is the chief frustration of the fossil record that we do not have empirical evidence for sustained trends in the evolution of most complex morphological adaptations."Stephen J. Gould and Niles Eldredge, 'Species Selection: Its Range and Power,' 1988, p. 19
"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
But fossil species remain unchanged throughout most of their history and the record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition. David S. Woodruff, Evolution: The Paleobiological View, Science, Vol. 208, 16 May 1980, p. 716.
"In virtually all cases a new taxon appears for the first time in the fossil record with most definitive features already present, and practically no known stem-group forms." - Dr. T.S. Kemp (Curator of Zoological Collections at Oxford University) , Fossils and Evolution, Oxford University, Oxford University Press, p246, 1999
Preston Cloud & Martin F. Glaessner, "Ever since Darwin, the geologically abrupt appearance and rapid diversification of early animal life have fascinated biologist and students of Earth history alike....This interval, plus Early Cambrian, was the time during which metazoan life diversified into nearly all of the major phyla and most of the invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known." Science, Aug.27, 1982
Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from one ancestral form to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series. New types often appear quite suddenly, and their immediate ancestors are absent in the geological strata. The discovery of unbroken series of species changing gradually into descending species is very rare. Indeed the fossil record is one of discontinuities, seemingly documenting jumps (saltations) from one type of organism to a different type. This raises a puzzling question: Why does the fossil record fail to reflect the gradual change one would expect from evolution?
Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is, (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 14
Given that evolution, according to Darwin, was in a continual state of motion ... it followed logically that the fossil record should be rife with examples of transitional forms leading from the less to more evolved. ... Instead of filling the gaps in the fossil record with so-called missing links, most paleontologists found themselves facing a situation in which there were only gaps in the fossil record, with no evidence of transformational intermediates between documented fossil species.
Schwartz, Jeffrey H., Sudden Origins, 1999, p. 89.
We have long known about stasis and abrupt appearance, but have chosen to fob it off upon an imperfect fossil record.
Gould, Stephen J., The Paradox of the First Tier: An Agenda for Paleobiology, Paleobiology, 1985, p. 7.
In other words, when the assumed evolutionary processes did not match the pattern of fossils that they were supposed to have generated, the pattern was judged to be wrong. A circular argument arises: interpret the fossil record in terms of a particular theory of evolution, inspect the interpretation, and note that it confirms the theory. Well, it would, wouldnt it?
Kemp, Tom S., A Fresh Look at the Fossil Record, New Scientist, vol. 108, 1985, p. 66-67.
George Gaylord Simpson, another leading evolutionist, sees this characteristic in practically the whole range of taxonomic categories:
Every paleontologist knows that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of family appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences. [George Gaylord Simpson (evolutionist), The Major Features of Evolution, New York, Columbia University Press]
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
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 Darwins 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 emperors new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwins predicted pattern, simply looked the other way.
Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 45-46.
It is as though they [fossils] were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. ... Both schools of thought (Punctuationists and Gradualists) despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. The only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation and (we) both reject this alternative.
Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1996, p. 229-230)
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.
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.
Given that evolution, according to Darwin, was in a continual state of motion ... it followed logically that the fossil record should be rife with examples of transitional forms leading from the less to more evolved. ... Instead of filling the gaps in the fossil record with so-called missing links, most paleontologists found themselves facing a situation in which there were only gaps in the fossil record, with no evidence of transformational intermediates between documented fossil species.
Schwartz, Jeffrey H., Sudden Origins, 1999, p. 89
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), Evolutions erratic pace, Natural History 86(5):14, May 1977.
Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwins argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of lifes history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.
Stephen Jay Gould, The Pandas Thumb, 1980,pp.179-181.
Many evolutionary biologists since Darwins 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, withouttransitional 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.
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.
The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms that lie between species, the more they have been frustrated.
Newsweek, November 3, 1980.
"Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums now are filled with over 100 million fossils of 250,000 different species. The availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track.
What is the picture which the fossils have given us? ... The gaps between major groups of organisms have been growing even wider and more undeniable. They can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection of the fossil record."
Luther Sunderland, Darwin's Enigma (1988), Fossils and Other Problems, 4th edition, Master Books, p. 9
Honest evolutionists do exist, and they are willing to admit the problems in the various evolutionary theories; even if they are not willing to change from an acceptance of evolution to an acceptance of creation.
I admired one such evolutionist, the late Dr. Colin Patterson (1933 1998), a lifelong evolutionist, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, London. He staggered his evolutionary colleagues by expressing serious doubts about the theory of evolution in a November 5, 1981 lecture presented to the Systematics Discussion Group at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Although lengthy, the following extract from his comments is accurate and enlightening:
... Im speaking on two subjects, evolutionism and creationism, and I believe its true to say that I know nothing whatever about either ... One of the reasons I started taking this antievolutionary view, well, lets call it non-evolutionary, was last year I had a sudden realization.
For over twenty years I had thought that I was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up, and something had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it.
That was quite a shock that one could be misled for so long ...
... Ive tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing you think is true?
I tried that question on the geology staff in the Field Museum of Natural History, and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time, and then eventually one person said: Yes, I do know one thing. It ought not to be taught in high school.
...It does seem that the level of knowledge about evolution is remarkably shallow. We know it ought not to be taught in high school, and perhaps thats all we know about it ... about eighteen months ago ... I woke up and I realized that all my life I had been duped into taking evolutionism as revealed truth in some way.
Patterson took the words of Neal C. Gillespie alleging that the pre-Darwinian creationist paradigm was ... not a research-governing theory, since its power to explain is only verbal, but an anti-theory, a void that has the function of knowledge, but conveys none and suggested ... It must seem to you that Im either misguided or malicious to suggest that such words can be applied to evolutionary theory.
... Most of us think that we are working in evolutionary research. But is its explanatory power any more than verbal? ... I feel that the effect of hypotheses of common ancestry in systematics has not been merely void, not just a lack of knowledge - I think it has been positively anti-knowledge.
... What about evolution? It certainly has the function of knowledge but has it conveyed any? ... It is true, evolution does not convey any knowledge, or if so, I havent yet heard it.
Well, here we all are with all our shelves full of books on evolution. Weve all read tons of them, and most of us have written one or two. And how could it be that weve done all that, weve read these books and learned nothing from them? And how could I have worked on evolution for twenty years, and learned nothing from it?
... There is some sort of a revolution going on in evolutionary theory at the moment ... It concerns the possible mechanisms that are responsible for the transformation ... natural selection is under fire, and we hear a rash of new and alternative theories ...
Again quoting Gillespie accusing that those ...holding creationist ideas could plead ignorance of the means and affirm only the fact, Patterson countered, That seems to summarize the feeling I get in talking to evolutionists today. They plead ignorance of the means of transformation, but affirm only the fact: Yes it has ... we know it has taken place.
... Now I think that many people in this room would acknowledge that during the last few years, if you had thought about it at all, youve experienced a shift from evolution as knowledge to evolution as faith. I know thats true of me, and I think its true of a good many of you in here ...
...Evolution not only conveys no knowledge, but seems somehow to convey anti-knowledge, apparent knowledge which is actually harmful to systematics ...
Any knowledgeable evolutionist knows that the lack of physical evidence is their biggest problem.
Darwin struggled with the issue of the total lack of evidence to support his theory. As noted earlier, his famous book is full of references to the void of physical evidence. Fossils certainly exist in the ground, but they are simply the remains of animals, plants and human beings that once existed. Fossils cannot tell you when they lived, how they lived or what chemicals were in them when they died.
Scientists concede that their most cherished theories are based on embarrassingly few fossil fragments and that huge gaps exist in the fossil record.
Time magazine, Nov. 7, 1977
What I did say was that there are gaps in the fossil graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms but where there is nothing whatsoever ... No paleontologist writing in English (R. Carroll, Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution, 1988), French (J. Chaline, Modalites, rythmes, mecanismes de levolution biologique: gradualisme phyletique ou equilibres ponctues?, reprinted in Editions du CNRS, 1983), or German (V. Fahlbusch, Makroevolution, Punktualismus, in Palaontologie 57, 1983), denies that this is so. It is simply a fact. Darwins theory and the fossil record are in conflict. There may be excellent reasons for the conflict; it may in time be exposed as an artifact. But nothing is to be gained by suggesting that what is a fact in plain sight is nothing of the sort.
David Berlinski, A Tour of the Calculus, Pantheon Books, New York, 1995, p. 28.
What about Haeckel's drawings which was supposedly evidence for Evolution?
To support his theory, however, Haeckel, whose knowledge of embryology was self-taught, faked some of his evidence. He not only altered his illustrations of embryos but also printed the same plate of an embryo three times, and labeled one a human, the second a dog and the third a rabbit to show their similarity (Bowden, Malcolm, 1977, Ape-Men: Fact or Fallacy? Bromley, England: Sovereign Publications).
Michael Richardson Embryologist at St. Georges Medical School:
This is one of the worst cases of scientific fraud. It's shocking to find that somebody one thought was a great scientist was deliberately misleading. It makes me angry. What Haeckel did was to take a human embryo and copy it, pretending that the salamander and the pig and all the others looked the same at the same stage of development. They don't. These are fakes. "An Embryonic Liar" The London Times August 11, 1997 p.14
During the trial, Haeckel confessed that he had altered his drawings, but excused himself by saying: I should feel utterly condemned and annihilated by the admission, were it not that hundreds of the best observers and biologists lie under the same charge. The great majority of all morphological, anatomical, histological, and embryological diagrams are not true to nature, but are more or less doctored, schematized and reconstructed (Bowden, Malcolm (1977), Ape-Men: Fact or Fallacy? (Bromley, England: Sovereign Publications), p. 128).
Harvard evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson wrote: Haeckel misstated the evolutionary principle involved. It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny." (G.G. Simpson and W. Beck, An Introduction to Biology (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1965), p. 241).
