Tedd Hadley wrote:
> What I would conclude from this is that the majority of transitional
> forms that are missing are between families, thus agreeing that
> the fossil record is certainly incomplete, and agreeing with
> Benton that it is pretty good at the resolution of families.
We talk of the 'incompleteness' of the fossil record, yet when we do
so we have a preconception of what is being recorded, of what the fossils
are a record of.
What can be said without bias is that the fossils are a record of the
history of life. As such, what is the proportion that is represented to us
by the fossils? How many fossil animals versus how many living animals,
throughout the whole history of Earthly life? Among fair-sized metazoans,
the proportion might conservatively be one to a quadrillion.
If you turned in a doctoral thesis, the text of which consisted of one period
(.),
it would be a droll professor indeed who complained that the paper was
'incomplete', or even 'pathetically fragmentary'.
--Cliff Lundberg ~ San Francisco ~ cliff@noe.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 24 2000 - 16:28:57 EST