On Wed, 28 Jun 1995 23:24:12 -0400 you wrote:
>Stephen Jones wrote:
SJ>Darwin and Neo-Darwinists believed the fossil record was extremely
>imperfect. Gould came along...and said it wasn't as
>imperfect as all that - the fossil record was a "faithful" record of
>jerkiness..This shows that there isn't much hard data. It is all
>theory-driven.
GM>No there is lots of data, Twenhofel and Shrock wrote in 1935,
"About 150 species of living cephalopods are known, and fully 10,000
fossil species have been described." William H. Twenhofel and R. R.
Shrock, "Invertebrate Paleontology, p. 394.
There are now known to be about 650 living species. I can not find
the modern count of extinct species, but in any event, the dead
outnumber the living. There is plenty of hard data and it is not all
theory driven.
Agreed. My point was not so much about the data but about the
theory-driven interpretation of the data. How can Neo-Darwinists say
the record is extremely imperfect and the Punctuated Equilibrists say
the record is not so imperfect:
"The absence of transitional forms between established species has
traditionally been explained as a fault of an imperfect record, an
argument first advanced by Charles Darwin. The accumulation of
sediments and the entrapment and fossilization of animal bones is, at
best, a capricious process: as a result, geologists are familiar with
the difficulties of reconstructing past events. According to the
traditional position, therefore, if sedimentation and fossilization
did indeed encapsulate a complete record of prehistory, then it would
reveal the postulated transitional organisms. But it isn't and it
doesn't. This ancient lament was intoned by some at the Chicago
meeting: "I take a dim view of the fossil record as a source of
data," observed Everett Olso..."The record is not so woefully
incomplete," offered Steven Stanley of Johns Hopkins
University...Gould's suggestion that the gaps in the record are more
real than apparent. "Certainly the record is poor," admitted Gould,
"but the jerkiness you see is not the result of gaps, it is the
consequence of the jerky mode of evolutionary change." (Lewin R.,
"Evolutionary-Theory Under Fire: An historic conference in Chicago
challenges the four-decade long dominance of the Modern Synthesis",
SCIENCE, Vol. 210, 21 November 1980, p883)
PC>But this does raise a question for the PC guys. Why did God create
so many animals doomed to extinction? Why wouldn't He create the
modern forms?
Surely this is a problem for TE as well. After all, according to
Christianity, every living thing, apart from humans, is "doomed to
extinction". If survival forever is the criteria, then one could ask
why God created anything at all?
PC does not attempt to describe *why* God created. It is simply a
model to try to describe *how* He created, from the perspective of
Biblical theism and taking into account all the relevant scientific
evidence.