Darwin was right and Gould knew it : THE DATA DOES NOT SUPPORT BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION .

Darwin was right and Gould knew it : THE DATA DOES NOT SUPPORT BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION .
Today the world's collections of millions of fossils display no intermediate forms . This has been admitted by Stephen J Gould , who was so concerned with this weakness of evolution theory , that Darwin himself had highlighted ................
Charles Darwin said :
"Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain , and thus , perhaps , is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory ."
Charles Darwin , Origin of Species :

Stephen J Gould together with Niles Eldridge proposed that evolution was not gradual but sudden , leaving no intermediate forms .... ( OH HOW CONVENIENT ) .They called their new evolutionary theory PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM . They claimed that long periods of stasis during which no evolutionary changes occurred were punctuated by rapid and significant developments . Since these would have required a large number of big genetic mutations , critics argued that creatures could not have survived such extreme change and be viable .
However , Goulds honesty did bring the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record to the publics attention .

"Gradualism was never proved from the rocks by Lyell and Darwin , but was rather imposed as a bias upon nature... has had a profoundly negative impact by stifling hypotheses and by closing the minds of a profession towards reasonable empirical alternatives to the DOGMA OF GRADUALISM . Lyell won with rhetoric what he could not carry with data ."
S J GOULD , Princeton University Press , 1984 pages 14-16

Gene Hunt, from the department of paleobiology at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, published a peer-reviewed paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Hunt’s team conducted a comprehensive study of the fossil record and determined that the fossil record fails to support gradualistic, directional models of evolution such as neo-Darwinism.

“Directional evolution,” Hunt noted, “is rarely observed within lineages traced through the fossil record . . . very few sequences provide unequivocal support for this model. . . . The rarity in the fossil record of lineages with this degree of directionality is therefore meaningful, and it requires explanation.” Hunt’s team concluded that the sudden appearance and lack of directional evolution documented in the fossil record, from an evolutionary perspective, was more supportive of saltationist models such as punctuated equilibrium. (It is worth noting here that a fossil record consisting of sudden appearance and stasis would also corroborate creationist models of existence.)

~ Gene Hunt, “The Relative Importance of Directional Change, Random Walks, and Stasis in the Evolution of Fossil Lineages,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (November 20, 2007): 18404–18408,www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0704088104.

Wednesday 18 January 2012

Darwin was right and Gould knew it : THE DATA DOES NOT SUPPORT BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION .

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