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Originally Posted by willravel
When Darwain first proposed his brilliant theory, scientists assumed the fossil record would bear it out. We should be ablee to see the gradual progression from form to form, with slow changes accumulating over time untila new species emerged. But as most scientists know, thereality is that the fossil record DOES NOT show that. Ohj, there are transitional forms - take ichthyostega, which seems intermediate between fish and amphibians, or caudipteryx the median between dionsaur and bird, even the australopithecus 'ape/man'. The problem is that these are not gradual changes. These are not accumulations of tiny mutations over time. Sharks have been sharks for almost 400 million years, turtles have been turtles for 200 million years, and snakes have been snakes for 800 million years. In fact the fossil ecord is mostly lacking in gradual steps. The only good vertebrate sequence we have is that of a horse (which is why most museums have displays of equine evolution).
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look at the homo tree... you call the differences between the different species in that tree major? htere may be ancestors still missing, but there aren't any major jumps between species. and we've got fossils of animals that look like snakes but have legs, etc. a lot of your argument here isn't factually correct. there are some 'jumps' in the fossil record that do seem to use puncutated equilibrium, and even if that is incorrect that doesn't mean 'god did it!'. turtles, sharks and snakes haven't evolved much at all in a long time because they haven't had a need to.
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Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge responded to such claims, putting fourth a theory of punctuated equilibria (or 'punky-E', as it's sometimes called). Speciaes are stable for long periods of time, and then sudddenly, when environmental conditions change, they rapidly evolve into new forms! The problem is that punky-E states that environments stay the same for extended periods of time, which is absurd. When I lived in St. Louis I enjoyed 20 degree temperatures with snow almost hip deep. Fast forward to 6 months later and the temperature is breaking 100 and the humidity is making it impossible to dry off after a shower.
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hmm... lets see... in a one year time span, how many generations do you spawn? normally zero. occasionally one (unless you get lucky and have twins or triplets, etc). you're not going to have any mutations in that time and you're not going to pass them on because you're not reproducing. but when there's a sudden climate shift, like from a quick onset of an ice age, a normally warm or moderate area becomes super cold real quick, the animals have to evolve in a very quick time span relative to the norm because if they don't they'll die out. also, there is something that animals do during the normal year that you're talking about... it's kinda crazy... migration.
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Of course, evolutionists keep on going. We tried to incorporate punky-E into our understanding of evolution in order for everything to still make sense. We longed for the sense that it all made when someone originally explained it to us. "It all makes so much sense!" we'd say to ourselves. We were even condescending to people who asked about missingh links. Of course this isn't the first time we've been smug...
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pot meet kettle. puncutated equilibrium makes a lot of sense if you take the time to learn about it.
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I remember my grandfather (the inspiration of my early evolutionism) telling me about when Harold Urey and Stanly Miller created amino acids by putting an electric discharge through a primordial soup (what they thought, then, Earth's early atmosphere might have been like). We were half way to creating life in a jar. This was the triumph of evolutionary theory! If we zap the soup just rright, real self-replicating organsms might just appear.
Except we never did. We STILL don't know how to go from amino acids to self replication.
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the time it took for the primordial ooze to go from just lots of elements and a gaseous atmosphere to amino acids to the first self-replicating amino acids or whatever to cellular organisms was something like 3 billion years of random interactions. and you're complaining that we haven't replicated that in 50 years?
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When I look under an electron microscope at things like cilia that turn out to be extremly complex, Darwin must be turning in his grave. The single-step evolution theory can't account for cilia.
We ignored the biochemical argument, too. We all hear about the cascade sequence that causes blood to clot, or the complexity of the human eye, or the ATP driven system of cellular metabolism.
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read 'the blind watchmaker' for a start. and do some googling for info about cilia evolution and cascades. there are good theories out there that you seem to be discounting. based on the rest of your post, i have to assume it's due to a mis- or lack of understanding of the topics.
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My point?> creationism isn't fact or law. There are big wide gaps all over the theory. Evolution isn't fact or law. There are big wide gaps in the theory.
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creationism isn't a theory. it's a myth. it's not that there are holes in it as a 'theory' but that the 'theory' is a hole. a big black hole full of nothingness. evolution is a theory, and a fact in the same that gravity is a theory and a fact. yes, there are holes, but few of them are 'wide gaps' and people are actively trying to expand our knowledge about evolution to close those gaps. hell, punctuated equilibrium is one such theory (so far backed up by increased knowledge of the fossil record) and you decide to criticize it. i guess adding ideas to try to explain facts just doesn't cut it for you, eh?
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Newton's seventeenth-century laws of physics are mostly correct; you can use them to reliabally predict all sorts of things. We didn't disgard them; rather, in the 20th century, we subsumed them into a new, more comprehensive physics, a physics of relativity and quantum mechanics. Evolution is a 19th century notion, outlined in the famous "On the Orgin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life". But the more we learn, the more natural selection seems inadequate on its own as a mechanism for the creation of a new species; even our best attempts at artificial, intelligently guided selection apparently aren't up to the task-all dogs are still canis familiaris.
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again, punc. e. i just doing what we did with newtons. modifying the theory to include new information. in newtons case it was that his was encompassed by a new theory. in evolutions case it adds information into it. i don't really understadn your 'favoured races' thing. are you perpetuating the lie that darwin was racist? or are you misconstruing evolution to say that it deals with races? it doesn't, it deals with species, and white or black or yellow or pink with purple polka dots we're all human.
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And now at the start of the 21st century surtely it's not unreasonable to think that it's POSSIBLE that Darwin's ideas, like Newtons, can be subsumed into a greater whole, a more comprehensive understanding?
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it's completely possibe for evolution to be subsumed into a greater understanding, but unlike ID or creationism, newton was subsumed by <b>science</b> whereas you're asking us to invoke the <b>supernatural (aka not science)</b> and include evo into that.
/i should be in bed.