Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

John Harshman wrote:

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:


That isn't in dispute, his reference is the geological record, not a
stop watch. The point is that it was, by all accounts I've seen so far,
sudden. Hense the term "explosion", which was contrary to the traditional
view of evolution.

Clearly there was something sudden going on, if your definition of
"sudden" includes periods of 5 million years.

It does geologically speaking. It would not be sudden if we were
talking about tax rebates.

Right. I'm asking you to keep this in mind. That definition of "sudden"
is not a big problem for standard Darwinian theory.

Exactly what was sudden is
a matter of contention. The traditional view of evolution you refer to
is not necessarily Darwin's, since he said that evolution was probably
not constant in rate but proceeded in bursts interspersed with long
periods of stasis. Again, these bursts could take 100,000 years or more.
Some of this "traditional" view is Gould's strawman, as he needed to
make his theory of PE appear revolutionary. Some of it was due to the
mistaken impression of many paleontologists about what the consequences
of natural selection ought to be in the fossil record, which was
essentially a misunderstanding of time scales. In order to see a gradual
trend, sustained over a million years or more, natural selection by
itself won't do it. Any strength of selection capable of moving a
population's characteristics would operate much too quickly. What you
would need is an environment changing at just the right rate so that the
population optimum, the target of selection, would move smoothly over
that time. Natural selection would just be keeping up. Also, it was only
comparatively recently that the highly episodic nature of deposition was
fully appreciated.

I can understand something like the environment favoring birds with
bigger beaks to dominate the breed. I don't think we need to see
such a transition in the fossil record to know it happens. The kinds of
macro-transformations of limbs changing from flippers to legs wouldn't
be so quick that it would leave no trace. I've seen nothing that suggests
a natural transformation like that would happen in 100,000 years.

Indeed it wouldn't. It would probably happen in many steps over millions
of years. And in fact we have transitional fossils for those
intermediate steps in whales, for example. We have good evidence from
both the fossil record and the genetics of living species for the
transformation. Whether it was natural is not something we can test.

STEPHEN J. GOULD, HARVARD, "The Cambrian Explosion occurred
in a geological moment, and we have reason to think that all major
anatomical designs may have made their evolutionary appearance at
that time. ...not only the phylum Chordata itself, but also all its major
divisions, arose within the Cambrian Explosion. So much for chordate
uniqueness... Contrary to Darwin's expectation that new data would
reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major
discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness
and geological abruptness of this formative event..." Nature, Vol.377,
26 10/95, p.682

Gould had an axe to grind. You are right about one thing, that people
tend to interpret data to fit their theories. That's why science is a
social effort and can't depend on one person. Others have shown how
Gould misinterpreted some of what he saw. The Cambrian explosion may
have spawned most phyla, though we can't tell this from the fossil
record,

You know, you are constantly telling me to believe you and not my
lying eyes. You want to discount comments if they are quoted on
creationist sites then argue with them even if they aren't. You believe
that you know more about the fossil records than Gould did, that's fine
with me but don't expect me to come aboard that easily.

I do know more than Gould did at the time he wrote that. There are new
discoveries every day, and ten years can make a lot of difference. But
you are picking out little fragments of Gould that distort his meaning,
and lots of paleontologists disagree with even his real meaning.

And what did I distort? And no one suggested that evolutionists were
harmonious, in fact my point has been just the opposite.

I'm not sure you have a point at all.

Apparently I do because you are saying one thing and some
prominant evolutionists are saying another.

My point is that you don't actually know what they are saying. You have
never read their work, just those heavily massaged snippets.

You are of course not the
distorter; whoever mined the quote did that, and you are just passing on
the misunderstanding.

There's no misunderstanding if everyone else understands it.
Calling something a misunderstanding doesn't make it one. I've
challenged you to show how their words are being misrepresented.

For some of these I cannot easily find the original articles. For Gould,
I have a direct quote stating how annoyed he is at being misrepresented
by creationists. Why isn't that good enough?

I have
difficulties with his theory of how things happened but not with his
observations on what did happen. I've seen no evidence that his research
was sloppy.

So you pick what you like and throw away what you don't.

I thought that's what you were doing? I never took issue with what he
found, only his theory of why it was. Those are two separate things.

You have no clear idea what he found, because you have never read
anything he wrote except these little snippets. You have no basis to
accept or reject anything he said.

To the contrary, you are the one dismissing his words as a
misrepresentation. I'm calling your bluff.

One more time:

" [T]ransitions are often found in the fossil record. Preserved
transitions are not common -- and should not be, according to our
understanding of evolution (see next section) but they are not entirely
wanting, as creationists often claim. [He then discusses two examples:
therapsid intermediaries between reptiles and mammals, and the
half-dozen human species - found as of 1981 - that appear in an unbroken
temporal sequence of progressively more modern features.]

Faced with these facts of evolution and the philosophical bankruptcy
of their own position, creationists rely upon distortion and innuendo to
buttress their rhetorical claim. If I sound sharp or bitter, indeed I am
-- for I have become a major target of these practices.

I count myself among the evolutionists who argue for a jerky, or
episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change. In 1972 my
colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory of punctuated
equilibrium. We argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil record
-- geologically "sudden" origin of new species and failure to change
thereafter (stasis) -- reflect the predictions of evolutionary theory,
not the imperfections of the fossil record. In most theories, small
isolated populations are the source of new species, and the process of
speciation takes thousands or tens of thousands of years. This amount of
time, so long when measured against our lives, is a geological
microsecond . . .

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is
infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists -- whether
through design or stupidity, I do not know -- as admitting that the
fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are
generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between
larger groups."

- Gould, Stephen Jay 1983. "Evolution as Fact and Theory" in Hens
Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History. New
York: W. W. Norton & Co., p. 258-260.


And Gould
actually did no research on the Cambrian explosion. He wrote a popular
book, and in his early years he did some simulations that bear on the
question, but that's it.

No research?

No research *on the Cambrian explosion*.

That's hard to believe. surely he must have realized
it would be read by his peers. Not that I didn't believe you but I
looked into it and you are downplaying his research and role within
the scientific community.

Not at all. He was an important paleontologist and evolutionary
theorist. But he did no research on the Cambrian explosion.

I understand that's your belief but he wrote a book on the Burgess
Shale, among others so it's difficult to believe that he did no research
on the Cambrian. I'm skeptical on that claim too.

Are we confused about what "research" means? I'm talking about original
scientific research here. Gould read the primary literature when writing
his book, but he never wrote any of the primary literature on the
subject. Believe what you will, but Gould never published any research
on the Cambrian explosion. He relied entirely on the research of others
when writing his book. There's nothing wrong with that; it's just true.

http://www.arn.org/docs2/news/gouldobituary052702.htmn

Noting that in graduate school Dr. Gould dodged bullets and drug runners
to collect specimens of Cerion and their fossils, Dr. Sally Walker, who studies
Cerion at the University of Georgia, once said, "That guy can drive down the left
side of the road," which is required in the Bahamas, "then jump out the door and
find Cerion when we can't even see it."

Note: Cerion is a genus of land snails. Gould was working with
Quaternary (very recent) fossils here. Nothing to do with the Cambrian.

I think it was the Bahamas where most of his research on those were,
but the point is that he was familiar with fossils, wrote books and
was well known for his theory of the Cambrian Explosion so I can't buy
that he did no research on it.

I don't know how I could possibly demonstrate that he didn't do any such
research. You could, however, easily show that he did do such research
by citing a scientific publication in which he details this research.
Yes, he had a theory, expressed often. But theories are not research.
Gould did no such research.

March, Harvard University Press published what Dr. Gould described as his magnum
opus, "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory." The book, on which he toiled for decades,
lays out his vision for synthesizing Darwin's original ideas and his own major contributions
to macroevolutionary theory.
"It is a heavyweight work," wrote Dr. Mark Ridley, an evolutionary biologist at University
of Oxford in England. And despite sometimes "almost pathological logorrhea" at 1,433
pages, Dr. Ridley went on, "it is still a magnificent summary of a quarter-century of influential
thinking and a major publishing event in evolutionary biology."

Agreed. And irrelevant to the point. The book does cover the Cambrian
explosion. Nobody ever said Gould didn't think and write about the
research that others had done on the subject. But he did none of his own.

He spent decades on it but did no research? Sure.

Science is a cooperative venture. He made use of the research of others.

Usually when you quote someone you quote the relevant material. Disliking
where they came from doesn't make them go away. His quotes are entirely
consistent with what I've read of him and is consistent with his reasoning
for coming up with Punctuated Equalibrium.

I doubt you understand or know his
reasoning, since all you have ever read was these trimmed snippets.

That's another wiild ass assertion designed to fit your mindset.

Do you claim that the snippets were not trimmed, or that you have read
something other than those snippets, or that the trimmed snippets do so
accurately represent what he meant?

Have you ever read any full article,
paper, or book that Gould wrote? I have. Don't all the ellipses make you
just the least bit suspicious?

I'm most suspicious of your failure to show how he was misrepresented.

I've done it multiple times, most recently above in this same post, in
Gould's own words. Why is this not sufficient?

Preston Cloud & Martin F. Glaessner, "Ever since Darwin, the geologically
abrupt appearance and rapid diversification of early animal life have fascinated
biologist and students of Earth history alike....This interval, plus Early Cambrian,
was the time during which metazoan life diversified into nearly all of the major
phyla and most of the invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."
Science, Aug.27, 1982

What do you think Cloud and Glaessner meant by "this interval"? They
clearly aren't talking about the Cambrian explosion, because they say
"plus Early Cambrian".

It's clear to me that they are talking about the abrupt timespan of
appearance and diversification of life, which includes the early Cambrian
period.

The Early Cambrian alone is about 25 million years long. Add some other
unspecified period to that and how abrupt is it?

Yes, according to everyone else that I've read. The words Cambrian Explosion
comes to mind.

You are being highly flexible about time here.

Not at all. I use and understand the term in context, like the authors
I quoted.

Which authors? We were talking about Cloud & Glaessner. The term
"Cambrian explosion" appears nowhere in that quote, which also says
nothing about what time interval they are discussing.

The Cambrian explosion is
a short period. But Cloud and Glaessner obviously were not talking about
that, but about some unspecified longer period.

That's not true, they mentioned the early Cambrian specifically.

"plus Early Cambrian".

They also mentioned a time period prior to that but refer to them
as rendering an abrupt appearance of life, consistent with the
'explosion' term used so often by those who make it their profession
to study such things.

Actually, the quote says nothing about the time period they mention
being either before or after the Early Cambrian. I still have no idea
what they were talking about, and you certainly don't either. I need to
get to a library and look that article up.

If you want to encompass
most of the first clear appearances of phyla with good fossil records,
that short period is good enough. If you want to encompass all the
phyla, it's not. If you want to encompass most classes, you need longer
still, and if you want to encompass most orders, you will need to
enlarge that to the entire Paleozoic.

That means the explosion of life didn't occur? If that's what you mean
why should we believe you over them?

No, there was an explosion. It just doesn't encompass what you say it
does. During the last part of the Early Cambrian, approximiately the
Atdabanian and Bottomian stages, all but a few of the readily
preservable invertebrate phyla: arthropods, mollusks, echinoderms.
Brachiopods appeared a bit before that, and bryozoans considerably
later. This also marks the first appearance of well-preserved and
identifiable members of a number of soft-bodied phyla in various
lagerstatten. There are however various clues to the existence of
several of these groups as much as 40 million years earlier.

There are many theories on what this explosion actually was. My opinion
is that it marks a great period of innovation after the evolution of
macrophagy, i.e. animals eating other animals. Many new means of attack
and defense had to co-evolve within a few million years, and the entire
world ecosystem was affected. There are publications supporting this
view if you are interested.

I don't know what they mean, but most classes
don't come along until the Ordovician or later, and most orders not
until the late Paleozoic. Also note that they are talking here about
just those phyla with good fossil records.

That's your belief but that isn't what they said. There's no mention
of fossil record quality, but "all of the major phyla and most of the
invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."

We don't know what they're talking about because the quote doesn't tell
us.

Yes it does.

"Ever since Darwin, the geologically abrupt appearance and rapid
diversification of early animal life have fascinated biologist and students
of Earth history alike..."


Yes, that's clear up to a point. I'm trying to figure out what "this
period" means, and I can't.

The words abrupt and rapid work for me.

They may, but they don't tell you what "this period" means.

But I do know when, according to the fossil record, most
invertebrate classes and orders arose. And it's not in the Cambrian. I
can't find a single source on the web for this (though there are clues
for individual groups here and there). You might want to check out this
book: M. J. Benton (ed). 1993. The Fossil Record 2. Chapman & Hall, London.

1993? Ten year old stuff is too old but a 12 year old book will do? I'm
not buying into it since it contradicts everything I've read and I don't have the
time or opportunity to excavate fossils for myself.

The reason you think it contradicts what you have read is that you don't
understand what you have read. The creationist sites you frequent do a
good job of obscuring the meanings of the stuff they quote, so not all
the blame belongs to you. And I'm not sure you have any clear idea of
the difference between a phylum and an order anyway.

He
www.encyclopediaofgeology.com/samples/026-2.pdf

This pdf has a diagram showing the stratigraphic ranges of the 26
traditional orders of brachiopods. If you will look, you will see that
13 of them, or just half, originate some time in the Cambrian. Now, the
Cambrian is 53 million years long, and the explosion is just a small
part of that. A couple of those orders originated before the explosion,
and several after it. But never mind, take the whole Cambrian. You will
see that the other half arose at various times through the rest of the
Paleozoic, and one even in the Triassic. And that's about the best case
you're going to get, because most brachiopods became extinct at the end
of the Permian, giving them little opportunity to give rise to new
orders. I don't think you could find another phylum with anywhere near
so large a proportion of ordinal first appearances during the Cambrian.

But this stuff isn't so easy to find on the web, and I was lucky to get
that one.

And it contradicts the quotes how? The chart shows an explosion of
life in a brief time period, the few later branches have question marks
so they are uncertain of that late a date. They may well be moved
back.

You mistake the nature of the question marks. They refer to
relationships among the orders, not to the dates assigned. The chart
does indeed show an explosion of life. But you were claiming that most
orders originated during the Cambrian explosion. If "most" does indeed
mean "less than half", then you are right.

By the way, you have consistently dodged this question: What is a
phylum, or a class, or an order to you? If you think all species are
separately created, higher taxonomic groups must merely be arbitrary
assemblages of species. Why even talk about them?

I'm not defining the terms, my point is that I've seen no evidence that
one animal, like your dolphin example, becomes a sea lion or visa
versa. I would consider those separate species and in all of these posts
you've shown nothing to demonstrate how it took place or even if it could.

We know much less about how it too place than about whether it took
place. I'm also assuming that if it did happen, this is a good clue that
it could happen. Since dolphins and cows (not to mention other mammals,
etc.) are clearly related, as shown by DNA and fossil evidence (would
you care for references?) then the events in question clearly must have
happened.

A fossil fight would be an interesting read but the general consensus is
as that alot happened in a geologically short time span and it defies
the traditional evolution model.

How do you know what the general consensus is? You have never read
anything except what some creationist web sites tell you. You think they
don't have an agenda here?

All you ever do is back up assertions with more assertions.

You can live in your little insulated world if you like. But don't you
ever feel like a mushroom?