pictures themselves. [/quote]Quotes can be (and frequently are) misused by people that don't understand science in general and evolution in particular. Will we get the usual misquotes of Stephen Jay Gould and the like?
http://www.harunyahya.com/refuted7.php In order to explain these two facts within the theory of evolution, Gould and Eldredge proposed that living species came about not through a series of small changes, as Darwin had maintained, but by sudden, large ones.
This is a falsehood. Neither Gould nor Eldridge said any such thing. The main criticism that Dawkin's has of "punkeek" is that it happens so slowely and so gradually in the "punk" sections that it is not really significantly different from the "stasis" sections.
This is exactly the kind of thing that makes sites like this questionable -- or should I be less polite and say full of gross errors and misrepresentations? Certainly it is easy to ascertain the truth of his claim by actually
reading Gould and Eldridge, and seeing that they say no such thing. It is fairly easy to find information on what they actually proposed. I have so tested it and found him wanting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium Gould summarized the theory, and its consequences for punctuated equilibrium, in a 1977 essay for Natural History magazine:[8]
"A new species can arise when a small segment of the ancestral population is isolated at the periphery of the ancestral range. Large, stable central populations exert a strong homogenizing influence. New and favorable mutations are diluted by the sheer bulk of the population through which they must spread. They may build slowly in frequency, but changing environments usually cancel their selective value long before they reach fixation. Thus, phyletic transformation in large populations should be very rare—as the fossil record proclaims. But small, peripherally isolated groups are cut off from their parental stock. They live as tiny populations in geographic corners of the ancestral range. Selective pressures are usually intense because peripheries mark the edge of ecological tolerance for ancestral forms. Favorable variations spread quickly. Small peripheral isolates are a laboratory of evolutionary Change.
"What should the fossil record include if most evolution occurs by speciation in peripheral isolates? Species should be static through their range because our fossils are the remains of large central populations. In any local area inhabited by ancestors, a descendant species should appear suddenly by migration from the peripheral region in which it evolved. In the peripheral region itself, we might find direct evidence of speciation, but such good fortune would be rare indeed because the event occurs so rapidly in such a small population. Thus, the fossil record is a faithful rendering of what evolutionary theory predicts, not a pitiful vestige of a once bountiful tale."[9]
Richard Dawkins dedicated a chapter in The Blind Watchmaker to correcting, in his view, the wide confusion surrounding the theory of punctuated equilibrium. His first, and main point, is to argue that phyletic gradualism in the sense of uniformity of rates—what he refers to as "constant speedism"—is a "caricature of Darwinism"[12] and "does not really exist."[13] His second argument, which follows from the first, is that once this caricature is dismissed, we are left with only one logical alternative, which Dawkins calls "variable speedism."
Another pervasive misunderstanding of punctuated equilibrium was that it invoked large-scale mutations, the sort invoked by Richard Goldschmidt in The Material Basis of Evolution.[17] According to Dawkins, punctuated equilibrium "has no connection with macromutation and true saltation,[18] but rather "followed from long accepted conventional Darwinism," namely Mayrian allopatric speciation.[19] But unlike Eldredge and Gould, Dawkins believes that the apparent gaps represented in the fossil record document migrational events, not evolutionary events. According to Dawkins evolution certainly occurred, though "probably gradually" elsewhere.[20].
Reference [8] is :
[8] ^ S. J. Gould, 1977. "Evolution's erratic pace." Natural History 86 (May): 12-16
So the above quote is from one of the early papers on punkeek. It is also clear from the rest of the wiki article that large scale change is not involved. Speciation is not large scale change, and that is the most that punkeek claims. We in fact see speciation events like this. We also (see foraminifera) see speciation events without this mechanism of small population isolates.
That does not mean I agree with all his content either, I too have my own beliefs.
I agree with your statements however, but where does that leave the layperson RAZD? How do any of us know exactly what is being presented is factual or bias? On either side?
The best one can do is adopt a position of skepticism of all claims, for if you are not skeptical of one side of the issue you are, by definition, biased. You also need to be open to the idea that what you know could be wrong.
But if you regard every concept as tentatively valid until proven otherwise, and treat each idea with skepticism, then you end up in a position of believing everything and nothing. We make choices, all of us, based on our personal history, experience, knowledge and education on what is most likely to be true and what is most likely to be false. It comes down to basic beliefs about the nature of reality.
The issue of validation comes down to finding external means to validate what you think is true. If I see a tree in front of me, and I ask my friend if he sees the tree, and we compare notes on what the tree looks like, we will see a large degree of agreement on what the tree looks like. If I see a ghost in front of me and ask my friend if he sees the ghost and he replies "what ghost?" then we have two instances with entirely different external validation.
However, in the footprints that showed to be no different from human prints, they instead painted a creature resembling something along the lines of a baboon and human mix. Yet having nothing more to go on other than footprints. I cannot really equate that as being honest science can you?
I don't equate it with being science, but with being journalistic, heavy on artistic license. No one can know what they actually looked like, but we can make educated guesses, and those educated guesses would include the body types of fossils from the same geological age as the footprints. Interestingly an ancestor that is intermediate in development from an ape ancestry to the complete bipedal human we are familiar with would likely have traits "along the lines of a baboon and human mix" -- why would you expect anything different in an artistic rendition? The artist can only base their drawing on what they know.
How do you know it was? I don't wave away somebody simply because they're a creationist. But I am well aware the evolutionist does......We've had fallacies in science textbooks, yet nobody would have suspected they were at the time. Do any of us really know what is being presented to us is factual and unbias?
I showed above one good reason to treat the site with extreme skepticism, as it is demonstrated to present a false picture on punkeek: if it does so when the truth is relatively easy to determine, then what other things are questionable where there is less ability to test it against the truth?
I don't trust textbooks either, they are too often assembled by scientifically ignorant editors, not checked by actual scientists for accuracy, and increasingly driven to please ignorant parent groups who have even less knowledge of reality than the editors, whose goal is not to present truth but to make money. Even the university textbook that my dad (taught biology at the U of Mich) helped write contains errors, but textbooks don't define science or truth: they are aids to learning and understanding.
There is no endeavor known to man that is immune to fraud and deception: this does not make knowledge that we have gleaned over the centuries necessarily invalid. What makes concepts invalid, including all the frauds and deceptions that have been perpetuated on the gullible, is testing against the evidence of objective reality.
How does one ultimately test for truth?
The only way I know of to test for the validity of concepts is to test it against the evidence of objective reality. If the concept is contradicted or falsified by evidence then it is invalid. If it is not contradicted then, tentatively, it can be regarded as valid (rather than "true") and subject to further testing.
When we get beyond the realms of concepts that can be tested against evidence - does god exist? - then the best we can do is base our opinion(s) on solid logical analysis, starting from the knowledge we can validate and building hypothesis. When we run into concepts that are not supported by logic or evidence we can be justified in being extremely skeptical of it's validity, and include the friend\tree\ghost method to see how others see things.
Obviously these end conclusions can only be regarded as tentative in the extreme, while those at the core, validated by evidence of objective reality, can be regarded with a fair degree of confidence in their validity.
But when it comes to observations of our world? Our origins and trying to prove the past by the fossils and interpretations of the present? that is another story.
Why is that any different than anything else you believe?
Enjoy.
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Note: my time is limited, so I only choose threads of particular interest to me and I cannot guarantee a reply to all responses (particularly if they do not discuss the issue/s),
and I expect other people to do the same. Thank you for your consideration.[/color]
