alwight
New member
Yes I seemed to remember this from at least one other thread and iirc your misconceptions about what exactly is meant by "gradual" and "sudden" in geological time scales anyway were all adequately rebutted at the time.Stephen Jay Gould
The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution. 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 and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. I wish in no way to impugn the potential validity of gradualism, I wish only to point out that it was never "seen" in the rocks. The history of most fossils species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:
Stasis: Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking pretty much the same as when they disappeared; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.
Sudden appearance: In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and "fully formed."
Dr. Niles Eldredge
If life had evolved into its wondrous profusion of creatures little by little, then one would expect to find fossils of transitional creatures which were a bit like what went before them and a bit like what came after. But no one has yet found any evidence of such transitional creatures. This oddity has been attributed to gaps in the fossil record which gradualists expected to fill when rock strata of the proper age had been found. In the last decade, however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them.
I just love posting this. Not saying that Gould or Eldredge believed that there was no evidence for evolution at all, it's clear from what they wrote there was a problem with gradualism. It is also clear that "Sudden appearance" and "Stasis" are what we creationists were predicting. How do you like my peer review?
--Dave
Maybe we should expect another cut and paste outing in the not too distant future? lain: