> "Jeanne Douglas" wrote in messagenews:hlwdjsd2-42A4D8...@c-131-121-196-216.gonavy.usna.edu...
After all, laboring away day after day in those
dank quote mines has to take something out of a guy.
:
> "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 of the nodes of their branches;
> the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."
> -- Stephen Jay Gould
Yep. Gould was quite the writer. In fact, let's
let him talk a bit further on this subject:
"[T]ransitions are often found in the fossil record. Preserved
transitions are not common -- and should not be, according to our
understanding of evolution (see next section) but they are not
entirely
wanting, as creationists often claim. [He then discusses two
examples:
therapsid intermediaries between reptiles and mammals, and the
half-
dozen human species - found as of 1981 - that appear in an
unbroken
temporal sequence of progressively more modern features.]
Faced with these facts of evolution and the philosophical
bankruptcy of
their own position, creationists rely upon distortion and innuendo
to
buttress their rhetorical claim. If I sound sharp or bitter,
indeed I
am -- for I have become a major target of these practices.
I count myself among the evolutionists who argue for a jerky, or
episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change. In 1972
my
colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory of punctuated
equilibrium. We 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. In most theories,
small
isolated populations are the source of new species, and the
process of
speciation takes thousands or tens of thousands of years. This
amount
of time, so long when measured against our lives, is a geological
microsecond . . .
Since we proposed punctuated equilibria 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 they are abundant
between
larger groups.
[taken from the quote-mining FAQ, section 3.2]
Perhaps you can answer Gould's question, Andrew --
intentional "misunderstanding", or old-fashion "stupidity"?
Seth