| Subject: faith in rapid evolution |
Author:
Peter Flickinger
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Date Posted: 02/24/03 12:53pm
In reply to:
Wade A. Tisthammer
's message, "Some quotes from Darwin." on 02/27/02 1:49pm
You have great faith to conclude that an incredible lack of evidence means rapid evolution. It is like saying "there is no evidence - so change the theory to something where the evidence does not exist - and therefore it cannot be proved/disproved".
>>>Maybe, but to what extent? IIRC Darwin did not
>expect
>>>evolution was so rapid that it would leave such huge
>>>gaps in the fossil record.
>
>[snipped part of the reply]
>
>>So though Darwin doesn't say explicitly that the gaps
>>in the fossil record could be explained by rapid
>>evolution, when we take his other statements in his
>>theory, and combine them, we get a more specified PE
>>explanation that was generally evident throughout the
>>pages of Darwin's book.
>
>As far as I can tell, the idea of rapid evolution to
>explain the gaps in the fossil record did not exist in
>the Origin of Species. Quoting
>Darwin:Why then is not every geological
>formation and every stratum full of such intermediate
>links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such
>finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is
>the most obvious and serious objection which can be
>urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I
>believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological
>record.
-Origin of Species (Chapter 10)
> Contrary to what you almost seemed to
>suggest Damoclese, the idea of rapid evolution to
>explain the gaps in the fossil record did not exist in
>the Origin of Species. Apparently, the
>“imperfection” was the only credible explanation.
>Quoting Darwin again:He who rejects this
>view of the imperfection of the geological record,
>will rightly reject the whole theory.
-Origin
>of Species (Chapter 11) No mention here of
>“except for rapid evolution” or anything of the sort.
>Evolution can happen more rapidly in some cases than
>others, but Darwin patently did not think it could be
>rapid enough to explain the gaps. I think the
>imperfection argument was very valid at the time, but
>after the massive quantities of fossils that have now
>been unearthed this is no longer legitimate, and it
>would seem that Darwin did not believe evolution
>happening rapidly would be sufficient to explain the
>gaps that we have now, because of the above quote and
>this one from David Raup in “Conflicts between Darwin
>and Paleontology,” Field Museum of Natural History
>Bulletin Jan. 1979, Vol. 50 No. 1 p. 25:
>Well, we are now about 120 years after
>Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been
>greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million
>fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much.
>The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky
>and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of
>evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin's time.
>By this I mean that some of the classic cases of
>darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the
>evolution of the horse in North America, have had to
>be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed
>information—what appeared to be a nice simple
>progression when relatively few data were available
>now appear to be much more complex and much less
>gradualistic. So Darwin's problem has not been
>alleviated in the last 120 years and we still have a
>record which does show change but one that can
>hardly be looked upon as the most reasonable
>consequence of natural selection. So the
>gaps are very real, and rapid evolution probably is
>the best way to go for macroevolution, but Darwin
>apparently did not anticipate it.
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