Alan Kleinman's beliefs

[Vincent Maycock]

On Mon, 18 Sep 2017 08:17:14 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
<nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:

(this wouldn't post as a reply to Peter, so I'm starting a new thread
with it)

snip

>The USEFUL meaning of "evolved gradually" is seen in the sequence
>that creationists avoid rationally dealing with like the plague:
>the evolution by about ten stages from the agile, browsing,
>four-toes-in-front-and-three-in-back *Hyracotherium* with its
>low-crowned teeth, to the rigid built-for-straight-line-speed
>grazing, one-toed *Equus* with its ever-growing cement-rich molars.
>
>That's four parallel gradual changes, seen in about ten
>intermediate species at finely graded intervals, every one
>of them easily attributable to various selection pressures.
>
>I've tried to pin Alan down on whether he thinks of
>these changes as being explainable by natural selection.
>
>> because that's the model Alan proposes as necessary.
>
>There is a huge gap between this unsupported claim and
>where Alan stands: he's never tried to argue for separate
>creation of ANY of the descendants of *Hyracotherium*
>[or, to humor you, the descendants of it or of closely
>related genera with essentially the same characters].

Alan believes that evolution ("rmns") does not occur outside the
specialized environments created by humans.

Outside those environments, he believes, there is no evolution because
there are too many selection pressures acting at once.

So that means separate creation of, for example, the polar bear -- all
the more so for the larger changes documented in the evolution of
horses.

That is, to the extent that he accepts the reality of fossils at all
(he used to call it all tea-leaf reading, but lately he's become more
reasonable on the topic).