Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

I'm the only one with any productive thought. That's why Ed has me on ignore. He just wants to come on wittering platitudes.

Religion is the premier conditioning force of our culture. It sets our festivals, our table manners, our language, our dress codes, our ceremonials at birth, marriage and death, and our sexual mores. How can it be kept out of schools?

Science classes are part of schools and communities not islands of special knowledge.

The members of the Electrical Trades Union didn't much care who ran their union and one day they woke up and found it had been taken over by communists. It's of no consequence that a couple of posters here say they don't care if religion exists. The people running the show which they help empower do care. They want to be the premier conditioning force.

Another question I have asked a few times and which has not been answered is what is the anti-IDers explanation for the length of time this debate has been going on (over 2000 years) and the ferocity in which it has been conducted. It seems rather odd that so much effort has been put into promoting anti-religion if nobody cares much about it. Both sides are proved to care a very great deal and that is inexplicable if the matter can be dealt with as simply as anti-IDers are trying to make out.

Anybody who thinks this is a simple, cut-and-dried, issue is not at the races.

Personal experiences are neither here nor there.

It's not obvious to me that there's any meaningful reply or response to that.

Punctuated Equilibrium was a "Special case" proposed by Gould and Eldredge to develop a mechanism for several species of animals that didnt appear gradualistic They only used two species of Brachipods .

"Niles Eldredge and I ...argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil record--geologically ‘sudden’ origin of new species and failure to change thereafter (stasis)--reflect the predictions of evolutionary theory, not the imperfections of the fossil record." (Gould, Stephen J., "Evolution as Fact and Theory," in Montagu, Science and Creationism, 1984, p. 123.)

"Stasis has become interesting as a central prediction of our theory." (Gould, Stephen J., "Opus 200," Natural History, 1991, p. 16.)

From (Gould, Stephen Jay, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 2002.):

"...the tale itself illustrates the central fact of the fossil record so well [the] geologically abrupt origin and subsequent extended stasis of most species...Anatomy may fluctuate through time, but the last remnants of a species look pretty much like the first representatives." (p. 749.)

"...the greatest and most biologically astute paleontologist of the 20th century...acknowledged the literal appearance of stasis and geologically abrupt origin as the outstanding general fact of the fossil record and as a pattern which would ‘pose one of the most important theoretical problems in the whole history of life.’" (p. 755 quoting George Gaylord Simpson.)

"...the long term stasis following geologically abrupt origin of most fossil morphospecies, has always been recognized by professional paleontologists."
(p. 752.)

"The great majority of species do not show any appreciable evolutionary change at all. These species appear in the section (first occurrence) without obvious ancestors in the underlying beds, are stable once established and disappear higher up without leaving any descendants." (p. 753.)

"...but stasis is data... Say it ten times before breakfast every day for a week, and the argument will surely seep in by osmosis: ‘stasis is data; stasis is data’..." (p. 759.)

Gould debunks the: "exceedingly few cases that became textbook ‘classics’ of coiling of Gryphaea and the increasing body size of the horses etc." (p. 760.).

"Indeed proclamations for the supposed ‘truth’ of gradualism - asserted against every working paleontologist’s knowledge of its rarity - emerged largely from such a restriction of attention to exceedingly rare cases under the false belief that they alone provided a record of evolution at all! The falsification of most ‘textbook classics’ upon restudy only accentuates the fallacy of the ‘case study’ method and its root in prior expectation rather than objective reading of the fossil record." (p. 773.)

"Eldredge and Gould, by contrast, decided to take the record at face value. On this view, there is little evidence of modification within species, or of forms intermediate between species because neither generally occurred. A species forms and evolves almost instantaneously (on the geological timescale) and then remains virtually unchanged until it disappears, yielding its habitat to a new species." (Smith, Peter J., "Evolution's Most Worrisome Questions," Review of Life Pulse by Niles Eldredge, New Scientist, volume 116, November 1987, p. 59.)

"The principal problem is morphological stasis. A theory is only as good as its predictions, and conventional neo-Darwinism, which claims to be a comprehensive explanation of evolutionary process, has failed to predict the widespread long-term morphological stasis now recognized as one of the most striking aspects of the fossil record." (Williamson, Peter G., "Morphological Stasis and Developmental Constraint: Real Problems for Neo-Darwinism," Nature, Vol. 294, 19 November 1981, p.214.)

"It is a simple ineluctable truth that virtually all members of a biota remain basically stable, with minor fluctuations, throughout their duration..." (Eldredge, Niles, The Pattern of Evolution, 1998, p. 157.)

"But fossil species remain unchanged throughout most of their history and the record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition." (Woodroff, D.S., Science, vol. 208, 1980, p.716.)

"But fossil species remain unchanged throughout most of their history and the record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition." (Woodroff, D.S., Science, vol. 208, 1980, p.716.)

"The record now reveals that species typically survive for a hundred thousand generations, or even a million or more, without evolving very much. We seem forced to conclude that most evolution takes place rapidly...a punctuational model of evolution...operated by a natural mechanism whose major effects are wrought exactly where we are least able to study them - in small, localized, transitory populations...The point here is that if the transition was typically rapid and the population small and localized, fossil evidence of the event would never be found." (Stanley, S.M., New Evolutionary Timetable, 1981, pp.77, 110.)

"...why after such rapid diversification did these microorganisms remain essentially unchanged for the next 3.465 billion years? Such stasis, common in biology, is puzzling..." (Corliss, William R., "Early Life Surprisingly Diverse," Science Frontiers, 88:2, 1993, p.2.)

"Just as we have long known about stasis and abrupt appearance, but have chose to fob it off upon an imperfect fossil record, so too have we long recognized the rapid, if not sudden, turnover of faunas in episodes of mass extinction. We have based our geological alphabet, the time scale, upon these faunal replacements. Yet we have chosen to blunt or mitigate the rapidity and extent of extinctions with two habits of argument rooted in uniformitarian commitments." (Gould, Stephen J., "The Paradox of the First Tier: An Agenda for Paleobiology," Paleobiology, 1985, p. 7.)

"Paleontologists ever since Darwin have been searching (largely in vain) for the sequences of insensibly graded series of fossils that would stand as examples of the sort of wholesale transformation of species that Darwin envisioned as the natural product of the evolutionary process. Few saw any reason to demur - though it is a startling fact that ...most species remain recognizably themselves, virtually unchanged throughout their occurrence in geological sediments of various ages." (Eldredge, Niles, "Progress in Evolution?" New Scientist, vol. 110, 1986, p. 55.)

The original formulation of evolution, Darwinian gradualism, demanded that living forms be in a permanent state of flux and therefore also that the vast bulk of all fossils be intermediate forms.

Nonetheless it is well known that there are no such transitional forms.

Steve Gould and a number of his associates went to the trouble to devise an entirely new version of evolution ( punctuated equilibria) precisely to explain this lack of intermediate forms and the actual geological record which indicates that animal species arise fully formed at fixed points in time, go on for long periods without meaningful change, and then either die out or are still walking around in their original forms other than for changes which one could call MICRO-evolution, which nobody disputes.

The sort of claim which farmerman makes is therefore seen as bullshit. If there actually were even as many as a hundred such forms in existence, Gould, Eldridge, Mayr et. al. very obviously would not have gone to all that trouble.

What evolutionites actually have is a little collection of oddities, the nature of which are open to interpretation, and most if not all of them are debunked within a few years of their turning up.

One recent such case is that of the 'tiktaalik', a supposed intermediate between fish and walking creatures:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1626926/posts
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/09/the_rise_and_fall_of_tiktaalik.html

Archeopteryx has long since been abandoned with similar stories involved and the only person who hasn't yet gotten the news appears to be farmerman, e.g.

Modern paleontology has consistently placed Archaeopteryx as the most primitive bird. It is not thought to be a true ancestor of modern birds but, rather, a close relative of that ancestor (see Avialae and Aves).[54]

Nonetheless, Archaeopteryx is so often used as a model of the true ancestral bird that it has seemed almost heretical to suggest otherwise.

Well, the mud skipper line didn't branch of from Tiktaalik or a closely-related population... it's an interesting case where a general similarity in evolution has occurred: fish which are partially terrestrial.

Yes, Gould was full of himself. He would often portray his opposition as "the orthodoxy" that didn't understand the evidence and then say his own position was far superior and the only defensible one

Thats an appeal to numbers .

Hes been invited to start threads about his own interests many times by almost everyone whose been on this board.

However, by saying that you DONT insult anyones intelligence is merely a way of insulting peoples intelligence.

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome , insects of the hour.

A sage once noted that everybody is entitled to his own opinions, but that nobody is entitled to his own FACTS.

As evolution theory is deterministic, bringing it into schools is the starting point of the removal of morality and ethics. Regulation is then all that is left.