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From: amigo2@ihuxq.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.misc
Subject: Re: Quote from a contributor to science
Message-ID: <529@ihuxq.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 23-Jan-84 18:20:05 EST
Article-I.D.: ihuxq.529
Posted: Mon Jan 23 18:20:05 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 27-Jan-84 06:23:21 EST
References: <792@qubix.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Naperville, IL
Lines: 35

I'm pretty sure that Larry Bickford's quotations are from Steven J.
Gould.  This also seems to me to be a perfect example of what I find
wrong with creationists, for example the quotes:

	"The fossil record with its abrupt transitions offers no support
	for gradual change..."
	"All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains
	precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions
	between major groups are characteristically abrupt."

while appearing to be a denial of evolutionary theory (certainly as
concieved by many creationists, to whom gradualism is a cornerstone
of evolution as they understand it) is actually a major piece of
evidence for Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibria", which states
that evolutionary changes occur in fits and starts punctuating
relatively long, stable periods of evolutionary stasis.  Henry
Morris (The Troubled Waters of Evolution, p. 20) states that, as
Darwin, who favored the gradualist theory, pointed out "There
ought ... to be a continuous intergrading series [of fossils]", but
quickly converts this argument into something that Darwin never said
(and is patently false) that the fossil world has revealed no
intermediates between "basic kinds" such as "sharks and whales"
(ibid.).  This is a false test of evolution, similar to Luther
Sunderland's widely publicised humourous slide of a modern cow
"evolving" into a modern whale.  Evolution does not demand that the
series connecting any two extant organisms follow the shortest
possible morphological line between them; it demands that they share
a commaon ancestor--which in the case of the shark and the whale was
a primitive fish.

				John Hobson
				AT&T Bell Labs
				Naperville, IL
				(312) 979-7293
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