Yes. But I’m willing to listen to the evidence for the evolution of Man. I’ve heard there is as much variation in modern skulls to make a proposed transitional sequence of prehistoric skulls look very shakey indeed.[/quot]
Citation please.
I Leatherman;1708891:
it wasn’t an argument
Stephen J Gould, while I’m not a fan of his, found it necessary to modify his own view of what the “evolution of species” meant.
To him it was necessary, as a ‘practicing paleontologist’ (so to speak), to change evolution from a logical, reasonable, gradual, continous change from one species through variations into, eventually, another species.
That was not what he found in the rocks.
Change he saw was sudden, and unexplained, with no gradual and continuous transition. To my mind, the practical ‘evolution’ he saw was not the evolution of the textbooks. ….
Which textbooks?
I said nothing about the debate between punctured equilibrium or slow and steady evolution (which aer just variations on a theme). It is a non-issue and red herring. (Rate can be meaningless depending upon your timescale after all)
As I stated above, while there may be debate over the details of the mechanism(s), no one is debating whether it happened or not.
It leaves lots of questions to be answered about just what evolution means. Is it something chaotic and random, blindly rushing in every direction.
It is pretty obvious that there are both a random and a deterministic aspects to the process.
If it is then surely the world would be literally swimming in failed experiments as the chances of randomly hitting on a perfect creature would be vastly outweighed by all the millions of combinations of failures.
99 + % of every species that ever existed are extinct
how’s that for failures?
My own theory, for what its worth, is that there is a mechanism within a representative of a species which allows for, if you can imagine it, a set of perfect variations within that species. Evolution then is a response of a species with a known outcome, a sort of jump to a higher or lower gear.
A known outcome? In response to what? Known by whom? If it is known to God then why couldn’t He just have set up the first simple life to “jump” to a higher gear to humans and daisys and used car salesmen given the right conditions and enough time?
I’m not sure how part of what you’re saying is any different from old fashion variance within a population. Bio-chemistry and what has gone before limits how a population will (and can and might) respond to selective pressures.
And what makes an organism “perfect”
But thats just my idea, I don’t tell anyone its true, its reasonable, possible - has all the evidence of any other evolution theory.
Well to say that you would have to predict a “known outcome” for a given set of conditions and then look for it
And since isolated populations diverge form each other genetically (whether from run of the mill genetic drift or some other factor) how does that factor into your theory.
You would also have to show how your theory conforms with the existing evidence more than current models,
But it leaves a lot of mystery. I did read a paper someone provided as proof of evolution between species.
which paper was this?
But the paper said there was no known examples of animals evolving cross-species or whatever the term is. There were a few examples of plants and fewer again of insects but none of more complex animals.
Plants and insects are quite complex. Many of our domesticated crops and animals are new species
We’ve only been studying this in the lab for 100 years or so and these things tend to take many generations to become evident so putting long-lived organisms under selective pressure is both impractical and (depending on what you do) unethical.
Let them interpret what they wish, what they ‘interpret’ and what the truth is are two different things altogether. We have here science vs. the Bible. One has to make their own choices.
If the first human to sin was a stooping creature only recently come down from the trees who could not even talk, the point made by St. Paul would still be perfectly validated. **