Citaat:
Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Eliyahu
(Bericht 7084858)
Bs'd
Omdat ik geen bioloog of fossielendeskundige ben, verzin ik niks zelf, maar laat ik zien wat evolutionistische experts van de materie zeggen.
En die zingen allemaal in koor dat het fossielenverslag het tegenovergestelde van evolutie laat zien, namelijk STASIS, onveranderlijkheid, en plotseling verschijnen van nieuwe soorten, zonder enige link met veronderstelde voorouders:
“En we vinden velen van hen [fossielen uit het cambrium] reeds in een verregaande staat van evolutie, de allereerste keer dat ze verschijnen. Het is alsof ze daar geplant zijn, zonder enige evolutionaire voorgeschiedenis.
Het is onnodig te zeggen dat deze verschijning van plotselinge planting de creationisten zeer verheugd heeft.”
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987, p. 229.
Richard Dawkins is een zeer bekende evolutionist en schrijver, en professor zoologie aan de Oxford universiteit.
Ja, dit verheugt mij zeer. Hoeveel meer bewijs wil men hebben tegen de evolutie-hypothese en voor het scheppingsverhaal in Genesis?
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Je citeert Dawkins maar had je het boek gelezen, dan had je gezien dat pagine 229 net je standpunt weerlegt. IS dat niet zielig?
Lees en LEER!!!
The starting point for discussing these matters is the apparent existence of 'gaps' in the fossil record, and it is to these gaps that we now turn.
From Darwin onwards evolutionists have realized that, if we arrange all our available fossils in chronological order, they do not form a smooth sequence of scarcely perceptible change. We can, to be sure, discern long-term trends of change - legs get progressively longer, skulls get progressively more bulbous, and so on - but
the trends as seen in the fossil record are usually jerky, not smooth. Darwin, and most others following him, have assumed that this is mainly because the fossil record is imperfect. Darwin's view was that a complete fossil record, if only we had one, would show gentle rather than jerky change. But since fossilization is such a chancy business, and finding such fossils as there, are is scarcely less chancy, it is as though we had a cine film with most of the frames missing. We can, to be sure, see movement of a kind when we project our film of fossils, but it is more jerky than Charlie Chaplin, for even the oldest and scratchiest Charlie Chaplin film hasn't completely lost nine-tenths of its frames.
The American palaeontologists
Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, when they first proposed their theory of punctuated equilibria in 1972, made what has since been represented as a very different suggestion. They suggested that, actually,
the fossil record may not be
as imperfect as we thought. Maybe the 'gaps' are a true reflection of what really happened, rather than being the annoying but inevitable consequences of an imperfect fossil record. Maybe, they suggested, evolution really did in some sense go in sudden bursts, punctuating
long periods of 'stasis', when no evolutionary change took place in a given lineage.
Before we come to the sort of sudden bursts that they had in mind, there are some conceivable meanings of 'sudden bursts' that they most definitely did not have in.mind. These must be cleared out of the way because they have been the subject of serious misunderstandings.
Eldredge and Gould certainly would agree that some very important gaps really are due to imperfections in the fossil record. Very big gaps, too. For example the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years, are the oldest ones in which we find most of the major
invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.
Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. Evolutionists of all stripes believe, however, that this really does represent
a very large gap in the fossil record, a gap that is simply due to the fact that, for some reason, very few fossils have lasted from periods before about 600 million years ago. One good reason might be that many of these animals had only soft parts to their bodies: no shells or bones to fossilize. If you are a creationist you may think that this is special pleading. My point here is that, when we are talking about gaps of this magnitude, there is no difference whatever in the interpretations
of 'punctuationists' and 'gradualists'. Both schools of thought despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. Both schools of thought agree that the only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types
in the Cambrian era is divine creation, and both would reject this
alternative.
There is another conceivable sense in which evolution might be said to go in sudden jerks, but which is also not the sense being proposed by Eldredge and Gould, at least in most of their writings. It is conceivable that some of the apparent 'gaps' in the fossil record really do reflect
sudden change in a single generation. It is conceivable that there really never were any intermediates; conceivable that large evolutionary changes took place in a single generation. A son might be born so different from his father that he properly belongs in a different species
from his father. He would be a mutant individual, and the mutation would be such a large one that we should refer to it as a macromutation. Theories of evolution that depend upon macromutation are called 'saltation' theories, from saltus, the Latin for 'jump'. Since the theory of punctuated equilibria frequently is confused with true saltation, it is important here to discuss saltation, and show why it cannot be a significant factor in evolution.
