Formation Of New Species Proves Gradual, Not Sudden

UniSci.com ^ | 28 May 2002

[AndrewC]

You say speciation, I say speculation. Let’s call the whole thing off.

You don't suppose they are talking about this bird?

Silvereye Zosterops lateralis 12cm

Gray-breasted white-eye found in forest, woodland and heaths in south-western, southern and eastern mainland Australia and Tasmania.

All eastern forms have gray backs, western form has olive back. Several identifiable forms occur; Tasmania form (race lateralis) with rufous flanks, grayish throat and undertail coverts, migrates to south-east north to about Caloundra, Queensland, in autumn; eastern forms (race halmaturina, familiaris and ramsayi) vary form buff-flanked with grayish throat and under tail coverts in South Australia to gray-flanked with yellow throat and undertail coverts in Queensalnd.

As there is autumn migration, different variants can be seen together in winter; Barrier Reef form(race chlorocephala) is larger, has white undertail coverts, confined to islands of Capricorn-Bunker Group of southern Barrier Reef; and western form (race gouldi) with olive-green back, form North-West Cape, Western Australia, to eastern coast of Bight in South Australia and isolated population at Kalgoorlie, Western Australia; intergrading with eastern birds on Eyre Peninsula and Kangaroo I.

Voice: loud "tsee"; pleasant warbling including mimicry; rapid "giggle".

Nesting: compact cup of grass, plant down and hair bound with cobweb, suspended in low fork or in vine; 2-4 pale blue eggs.

Range: common resident, nomad or migrant in south-western, southern and eastern Australia form North-West Cape, Western Australia, to Cape York, Queensland; and Tasmania.

[medved]

Yet another reason not to be an evolutionist...

[medved]

Yet another reason not to be an evolutionist...

[medved]

Yet another reason not to be an evolutionist...

[medved]

Ever wonder why the evos like to talk about the little freak-show items like the archaeopteryx and platypus the way they do? Basically, it's because so little is known about those things that they can talk about them all day long and not look or sound anywhere near as STUPID as they do when talking about ordinary things like flying birds (which I have explained) or modern man. In the case of modern man, there is not only zero evidence of our evolving, there is provably nothing on the planet we could have conceivably evolved FROM. Neanderthal DNA has been shown to be "about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee" thus eliminating him altogether as a plausible ancestor of ours, and all other hominids are much further removed from us THAN the neanderthal. You'd need some other hominid closer to us both in time and morphology, and the works and remains of such a thing would be all over the place if he had ever existed; they aren't, and he didn't.

Logically, you only have to think about it a little bit to realize how stupid it really is.

You are starting out with apes ten million years ago, in a world of fang and claw with 1000+ lb. carnivores running amok all over the place, and trying to evolve your way towards a more refined creature in modern man. Like:

HEY! Ya know, I'll betcha if I put on these lace sleeves and this powdered wig, them dire-wolves an sabertooth cats'll start to show me a little bitta RESPECT!!!"

What's wrong with that?

The problem gets worse when you try to imagine known human behavorial constants interacting with the requirements of having the extremely rare to imaginary beneficial mutation always prevail:

Let's start from about ten million years back and assume we have our ape ancestor, and two platonic ideals towards which this ape ancestor (call him "Oop") can evolve: One is a sort of a composite of Mozart, Beethoven, Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare, i.e. your archetypal dead white man, and the other platonic ideal, or evolutionary target, is going to be a sort of an "apier" ape, fuzzier, smellier, meaner, bigger Johnson, smaller brain, chews tobacco, drinks, gambles, gets into knife fights...

Further, let's be generous and assume that for every one chance mutation which is beneficial and leads towards the gentleman, you only have 1000 adverse mutations which lead towards the other guy. None of these mutations are going to be instantly fatal or anything like that at all; Darwinism posits change by insensible degree, hence all of these 1000 guys are fully functional.

The assumption which is being made is that these 1000 guys (with the bad mutation) are going to get together and decide something like:

"Hey, you know, the more I look at this thing, we're really messed-up, so what we need to do is to all get on our motorcycles and pack all our ole-ladies over to Dr. Jeckyll over there (the guy with the beneficial mutation), and try to arrange for the next generation of our kids to be in better genetic shape than we are..."

Now, it would be amazing enough if that were ever to happen once; Darwinism, however, requires that this happen EVERY GENERATION from Oop to us. What could possibly be stupider than that?

[medved]

They say that the darkest gloom clouds sometimes have a silver lining, and that April showers bring May flowers.

In the case of science and technology, it sometimes turns out that a project which utterly fails in its original intent or application, is useful for something else.

If evolution cannot rationally be viewed as a way to get from ape-like creatures to man, then cannot the use of evolutionism as an ideological belief system get us from man to an ape-like creature? Such a capability would be of enormous value in politics and a number of other fields in which IQ reduction is known to be a positive advantage, but in which drugs, alcohol, and the normal means of achieving this are increasingly in disfavor for social and political reasons.

The following testimonial pretty much sums it all up.

---

BEFORE and AFTER

---

Marty Z. Renfield writes: "I'd tried everything; drugs, narcotics, weeklong drinking bouts; I'd listened to rap music at ear-splitting levels for days on end; I'd taken all of the yuppie science courses at our local community college, and I'd worked for years at becoming both politically and scientifically correct, but nothing helped. Nothing I could think of or do was making me STUPID enough to get that big government grant. As you can see in the before picture, I had achieved some noticable results, but I just wasn't where I needed to be.

The after picture shows me today, after the brain-deadening effects of the talk.origins Ediacara propaganda/indoctrination program on the internet. This program has turned my whole life around. I now drive a BMW and can take my pick of government grants and research projects.

THANK YOU, CHRIS!!!!!

[Dimensio]

A Pygmy and an Eskimo… Different species?

Are they able to produce fertile offspring (as a general rule, discounting individual anomolies)? The answer to your question is the inverse of the answer to mine.

[Junior]

Haven't these quotes of yours been shown to be either A) outdated or B) out of context?

[medved]

Haven't these quotes of yours been shown to be either A) outdated or B) out of context?

No.

[VadeRetro]

No.

Liar.

[VadeRetro]

Answered you already on "God hates idiots, too!"

[VadeRetro]

Francis Hitching is sometimes represented as being a scientist by antievolutionist sources that quote him -- a "well-known evolutionist" as one antievolutionist put it -- when he was really a sensationalistic television script writer who was neither a scientist nor had scientific training.

Quotations and Misquotations. (Why What Antievolutionists Quote is Not Valid Evidence Against Evolution) by Michael Hopkins

[medved]

Francis Hitching is sometimes represented as being a scientist by antievolutionist sources that quote him -- a "well-known evolutionist" as one antievolutionist put it -- when he was really....

So what?

Are you claiming that I represented him that way??

I mean, all I represented him as was the author of a book called "Neck of the Giraffe, and Amazon.com lists that book, so I assume you're not calling me a liar for making that claim.

What about Steven Gould, Reep? Arencha gonna try to claim that Gould never made the sttements I quoted, or that he at least only made them when he thought no creationists were listening, or that the context ran for 12000 pages and that they're all lifted from context???

Aren't you going to try to claim that Steven Gould was not an evolutionist and that creationists are lairs for trying to represent him that way??

[Junior]

Haven't these quotes of yours been shown to be either A) outdated or B) out of context?

No.

You can't think I wouldn't just let that slide, would you? 

From Quotations and Misquotations:  Why Creationist Quotes are Not Valid Evidence Against Evolution:

Creationists often use out-of-date quotes

One must ask whether a quote reflects current knowledge or whether it is out-of-date. Creationists often use quotations that are decades old. A lot of progress has happened in the last several decades. What the quoted person thought was an unsolved problem may have been solved. What the quoted person said has little evidence might now have lots of evidence. For example this site³ quotes Richard Leakey as concluding that the australopithecines were not bipedal (walking with two legs) as those who study human evolution almost always claim. But what the creationists do not mention is that Leakey changed his opinion with the discovery of more fossils (including "Lucy") that helped demonstrate that his earlier opinion was wrong. Thus this quote is nearly three decades out-of-date and is simply worthless as evidence against modern notions of human evolution.

The most recent quote you've presented is dated 1988 -- 14 years old.  There has been a lot done in the field since then.  Hell, you had to go back to 1967 to find quotes to support your contention.

Francis Hitching is sometimes represented as being a scientist by creationist sources that quote him -- a "well-known evolutionist" as one creationist put it -- when he was really a sensationalistic television script writer who was neither a scientist nor had scientific training.

And yet you use a quote from that same fellow as proof of your position:

"The curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps; the fossils are missing in all the important places."

And, how about this?

Many creationists quote Stephen Jay Gould and other punctuated equilibria proponents as saying that transitional forms are very rare. Most non-specialists get ideas of "missing links" between large groups of animals when they hear about transitional forms. Gould has been very clear that these are common and yet he has been quoted many times that transitional forms are rare. What is going on here? In the context of punctuated equilibria, a transitional form is between immediately related species (say two species of squirrels, species of similar Devonian trilobites, etc.), and is not referring to a transition between human and non-human, whales and primitive land mammals, etc. Indeed the transitions Gould and other punctuated equilibria proponents are arguing about would be generally be dismissed (inaccurately) as "microevolution" by many creationists. Thus creationists arguing against the existence of transitions between larger taxa are very likely guilty of misquotation if they quote Gould's writings on punctuated equilibria. For more details on this see Gould's⁷ classic essay "Evolution as Fact and Theory" where he explains his position on the fossil record as well as demonstrates creationist misrepresentations of his views. Another case of a word that different people use differently is "Darwinism." Some authors use that term very broadly and some use it in an extremely narrow sense. In general, any quote whose impact depends on what the reader does not know is probably out-of-context.

And yet you come along with:

"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."

Gould, of course, personally refutes your out-of-context quote:

"[S]ince we proposed punctuated equilibrium to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists - whether through design or stupidity, I do not know - as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level but are abundant between larger groups." (Gould 1983, p. 260).

"Archaeopteryx, the first bird, is as pretty an intermediate as paleontology could ever hope to find." (Gould 1991, p. 144-145)

Please note that these latter two quotes were made after your sourcing -- but you'd never bring that up, would you?  That would be bad for your position, wouldn't it.  This tactic of yours strikes me as, at best, disingenuous.

From Creationist Misquotes:

Another prominent biologist who has been the victim of creationist misquotes and dishonesty is Dr Colin Patterson of the British Museum of Natural History. In a private letter to creationist Luther Sunderland, who had asked Patterson why no transitional fossils were illustrated in his book, Patterson responded: "I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. . .I will lay it on the line, There is not one such fossil for which one might make a watertight argument." (Creation Science Foundation, Revised Quote Book, 1990). Since then, creationists in both the US and Australia have widely circulated this quote, contending that Patterson is "admitting that there aren’t any transitional fossils".

This is absurd on the face of it, since Patterson’s book contains several descriptions of different transitional fossils: "In several animal and plant groups, enough fossils are known to bridge the wide gaps between existing types. In mammals, for example, the gap between horses, asses and zebras (genus Equus) and their closest living relatives, the rhinoceroses and tapirs, is filled by an extensive series of fossils extending back sixty-million years to a small animal, Hyracotherium, which can only be distinguished from the rhinoceros-tapir group by one or two horse-like details of the skull. There are many other examples of fossil 'missing links', such as Archaeopteryx, the Jurassic bird which links birds with dinosaurs (Fig. 45), and Ichthyostega, the late Devonian amphibian which links land vertebrates and the extinct choanate (having internal nostrils) fishes." (Patterson, 1978, p. 130)

However, when one researcher wrote to Patterson to ask about the much-repeated quote, Patterson responded with yet another example of creationist selective editing: "The specific quote you mention, from a letter to Sunderland dated 10th April 1979, is accurate as far as it goes. The passage quoted continues ‘... a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question.’ " (Lionel Theunissen, "Patterson Misquoted: A Tale of Two 'Cites', 1997) Thus, it becomes apparent from the full context that Patterson was referring to the impossibility of establishing direct lines of descent from fossils, a position fully in keeping with his cladistic outlook. Patterson was not saying there were no fossil transitions, and Sunderland’s attempt to claim otherwise can only be viewed as an effort at deception.

Yet you have the temerity to post the following quote as accurate:

"...Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils ... I will lay it on the line, there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument."

This website goes on:

Dr. Patterson does believe that there are transitional fossils, as witness this quote from the book in question:

"In several animal and plant groups, enough fossils are known to bridge the wide gaps between existing types. In mammals, for example, the gap between horses, asses and zebras (genus Equus) and their closest living relatives, the rhinoceroses and tapirs, is filled by an extensive series of fossils extending back sixty-million years to a small animal, Hyracotherium, which can only be distinguished from the rhinoceros-tapir group by one or two horse-like details of the skull. There are many other examples of fossil 'missing links', such as Archaeopteryx, the Jurassic bird which links birds with dinosaurs (Fig. 45), and Ichthyostega, the late Devonian amphibian which links land vertebrates and the extinct choanate (having internal nostrils) fishes ..."

Evolution 1978, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. pp. 131-133

And poor David Raup.  You quote him as saying:

"Darwin... was embarrassed by the fossil record... we are now about 120-years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, ... some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information."

But this website completes the quote (there were words after the word "information," believe it or not:

...what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic.

Completely changes the meaning, doesn't it?

And finally:

Pseudoscientists often reveal themselves by their handling of the scientific literature. Their idea of doing scientific research is simply to read the scientific periodicals and monographs. They focus on the words, not on the underlying facts and reasoning. They take science to be all statements by scientists. Science degenerates into a secular substitute for sacred literature. Any statement by any scientist can be cited against any other statement. Every statement counts and every statement is open to interpretation.

I believe this about sums up the validity of your posting.  I'm not the only one who has taken note of your propensity toward misleading people, as is noted by this particular web page.  You may consider me and the other folks on the evo side to be "legends in our own minds" but I would point out that none of us has ever blatantly misrepresented any information we post (there have been occasional errors on our parts which we owned up to as soon as they were pointed out), but you, sir, make it a habit to knowingly lie and then you try to brazen your way through those lies.  This in unconscionable. Good day, sir.

Additional References:

Creationist Arguments: Misquotes

SciCre Misquotes: The Archive

[medved]

Francis Hitching is sometimes represented as being a scientist by antievolutionist sources that quote him -- a "well-known evolutionist" as one antievolutionist put it -- when he was really....

So what?

Are you claiming that I represented him that way??

I mean, all I represented him as was the author of a book called "Neck of the Giraffe, and Amazon.com lists that book, so I assume you're not calling me a liar for making that claim.

What about Steven Gould, Reep? Arencha gonna try to claim that Gould never made the sttements I quoted, or that he at least only made them when he thought no creationists were listening, or that the context ran for 12000 pages and that they're all lifted from context???

Aren't you going to try to claim that Steven Gould was not an evolutionist and that creationists are lairs for trying to represent him that way??

[medved]

Francis Hitching is sometimes represented as being a scientist by antievolutionist sources that quote him -- a "well-known evolutionist" as one antievolutionist put it -- when he was really....

So what?

Are you claiming that I represented him that way??

I mean, all I represented him as was the author of a book called "Neck of the Giraffe, and Amazon.com lists that book, so I assume you're not calling me a liar for making that claim.

What about Steven Gould, Reep? Arencha gonna try to claim that Gould never made the sttements I quoted, or that he at least only made them when he thought no creationists were listening, or that the context ran for 12000 pages and that they're all lifted from context???

Aren't you going to try to claim that Steven Gould was not an evolutionist and that creationists are lairs for trying to represent him that way??

[medved]

Francis Hitching is sometimes represented as being a scientist by antievolutionist sources that quote him -- a "well-known evolutionist" as one antievolutionist put it -- when he was really....

So what?

Are you claiming that I represented him that way??

I mean, all I represented him as was the author of a book called "Neck of the Giraffe, and Amazon.com lists that book, so I assume you're not calling me a liar for making that claim.

What about Steven Gould, Reep? Arencha gonna try to claim that Gould never made the sttements I quoted, or that he at least only made them when he thought no creationists were listening, or that the context ran for 12000 pages and that they're all lifted from context???

Aren't you going to try to claim that Steven Gould was not an evolutionist and that creationists are lairs for trying to represent him that way??

[VadeRetro]

Gould and Patterson disown your creative extracting. Hitching is another cosmic nutcase who likes to borrow from creationist arguments. Raup, as Junior points out, was mangled by selective omission from pointing to a complex punk-eek scenario to pointing to no evoluton at all.

Yeah, you're on the level. And Velikovsky was probably right, as was Ptolemy.

[medved]

Sorry for the multiple posts. Something major has gotten lost between the new version of FR software and the new version of KDE's Konqueror browser and just keying the preview button is resending old posts, sometimes on unrelated threads. I might be forced to use netscape here.

[medved]

Sorry for the multiple posts. Something major has gotten lost between the new version of FR software and the new version of KDE's Konqueror browser and just keying the preview button is resending old posts, sometimes on unrelated threads. I might be forced to use netscape here.