Re: Lung Fossils Suggest Dinos Breathed in Cold Blood

Brian D Harper (bharper@postbox.acs.ohio-state.edu)
Sat, 03 Jan 1998 23:00:55 -0500

At 06:20 PM 1/3/98 -0600, Glenn wrote:
>At 05:34 AM 1/4/98 +0800, Stephen Jones wrote:
>
>>Agreed. Eldredge candidly admits that the fossil record actually
>>shows "truly instantaneous, overnight evolutionary leaps", but the
>>the Neo- Darwinist can always maintain his gradualism by claiming
>>that the gap occurs when the evolution did.
>
>Eldredge admits no such thing according to your own quotation. Notice the
>word 'not' at the end of the first line.
>

Sorry to do a hit and run, but I thought I would mention
that Eldredge (in <Reinventing Darwin>) states that the
resolution of the fossil record is typically on the order
of 10's of thousands of years at best. It's good to
keep this in mind when talking about instantaneous jumps.
Nighttime is long and lonely for those poor paleontologists :).

Brian Harper
Associate Professor
Applied Mechanics
The Ohio State University

"... we have learned from much experience that all
philosophical intuitions about what nature is going
to do fail." -- Richard Feynman