By whose diagnosis. (Rhtorical)
You have neither the knowledge or authority to make such claims about me.
(Subject ToE)
If ToE does not include or reference God, how can it glorify Him (Again rhetorical)
Neatly side stepped, but
That is your opinion.(it is by no means obvious or even universally rational)
Qualifications are human. I wonder how many of your scientific tutors taught from faith?
From what Ii have seen here, you do not seem to value personal faith
Richard
Why did Gould say the extreme rarity of transitional fossils is the “trade secret” of paleontology?
Science progresses by evidence, not by pronouncements of popes or prominent scientists; by data, not by proof texts. Creationists quote mine, because past writings is what they rely on when dealing with doctrines, and rhetoric is what they are comfortable with. Anyways, that Gould was speaking of closely related species has already been explained, and as well the catalog of transitional fossils has expanded enormously since Gould’s writing in 1977.
I suggest that the history of life on earth is considerably more statistically complex than polling voters during an election. The uncertainties associated with that history are endless … many of which would escape human imagination.
My quotes from Scripture were tongue-in-cheek. Sorry.
You’re probably right. But didn’t Charlie Darwin propose that natural selection could account for the fossil record? Is that not a theory?
Would Darwin have proposed in Origin of Species that the diversity of life arose by common descent thru a branching pattern of evolution if the fossil record didn’t exist?
We will have to take your word for that.
I wonder, how any “transitional” fossils are needed to prop up ToE?
Besides, you still do not have a mechanism to do what is claimed, nor do you have any proof that the fossils in questionare in any sort of ancestral chain.
Your famous feathered Dinosaur? A few fronds near the tail. With no linkage to modern birds whatsoever. Ever heard of parallel evolution?
Refreshing.
Richard
Without knowing the true history of life on earth, the fossil record is a very limited source of information.
You wrote “You do not do anything or expeirment.”
Digging in rock formations is doing something. It is also usually done based on predictions, which you claim don’t exist.
As for your quibble about the accepted sense of ‘experiment’, you’ll have to explain why your definition, whatever it is, should take precedence over that on Wikipedia (a procedure carried out to support or refute a hypothesis).
Yes.
Complete lack of any substantial response noted.
ToE provides predictions about the relative ages of lava flows based on what fossils are found in the rocks they intrude into and have been overlain by.
If you knew what the ToE included, you’d have known that.
And again, ToE provides predictions about the relative ages of rocks.
You don’t know what the ToE is, do you?
No, I’m making a prediction about what will be found as a result of performing an experiment - in a lab, by mixing chemicals! - and comparing the result with the prediction.
Exactly the type of activity you claimed is never done for the theory of evolution, but was actually done to confirm a prediction about human and chimpanzee chromosomes based on their evolution from a common ancestor.
Accused?
“That should be obvious to anyone except, apparently, scientists, who know better.”
“The problem is that scientists have extrapolated beyond the basic evidence.”
“Scientist are so (vulnerable or arrogant or defensive, or over confident) that they defend the theory with every innuendo, or guilt trip or justification they can muster.”
You are belittling scientists. If you don’t want that pointed out, then stop doing it.
That is not ToE and you know it…
So branches of science overlap? Geology is still geology not ToE.
You really are a (insult not written)
How can you predict that human came from a chimp? it has already happened (one way or the other) There is Zero proof that Chimps are evolving further now. WHy should they then? (And still continue as chimps). You can’t even see the logical fallacies that you promote.
And as for your “experiments”. I think yo know that you are stretching a point or two but are too proud to admit it.
No I am not. I a belittling people like you who venerate them.
You are happy to criticise but not to be criticised.
Science does not need the defence you (et al) on this forum are desperate to give it.
Richard
You can imagine that if you like, but it’s not what Gould said, isn’t what happens, and is a slur against honest researchers.
You’re still promoting an out-of-context quote (and now misrepresenting its contents as well), you haven’t said where you got it from, and you haven’t acknowledged Gould’s later clarification of his position.
You are not being honest.
We do know that the history of life on Earth is very different from that shown in the fossil record, because we know that the majority of organisms on Earth don’t have hard body-parts, making them much less likely to fossilise than organisms that do.
I don’t think you answered my question. Why did Gould say the extreme rarity of transitional fossils is the “trade secret” of paleontology?
No one knows what percentage of the “hard” organisms that have ever existed are recorded in the fossil record, either.
And that is the crux of much of the discourse on this forum. The sensitivity and pride of scientists, as if one criticism or even suggested error, is taken as an affront .You are happy to dish it out, but reluctant to allow it back.
That is against forum policy, and a slur on the recipient.
Richard
Your comment reminds of the atheist online forums I used to participate in. Those atheists all did the same thing … their first line of attack was always, “You are dishonest.”
It was as if they all shared the same brain. 
That would require people who work to reconstruct paleoenvironments to be incompetant, since what they are doing is using the data available to reconstruct what isn’t directly known.
For an example, stalkless crinoids and soft corals are very difficult to preserve in a fossil deposit. However, if we find a member of a group of obligate parasites or obligate carnivores on them, we can have high confidence that they were present.
The issue is that the fossil record greatly constrains what the true history of life could have been and shows that it included many things.
Wrong, and I gave examples of it above.
Taken out of context like that, those both sound like straight-up lies.
Even if it needs a lot of work on error-checking.
It depends so heavily on the question being asked that any generalization like this is wrong here.
Dozens of feathered dinosaurs by now; the second and third statements are just wrong; the last is plausible in this instance.
Quote-mining is dishonest. Pretending to be quoting the original work rather than your actual source is dishonest. Stringing together sentences that were separated by more than 80 pages into a single paragraph is dishonest.
Quote-mining is dishonest. Pretending to be quoting the original work rather than your actual source is dishonest. Taking words out of context is dishonest. Quoting a passage about two specific fossils as if was about all fossils is dishonest.
From this point on, any ‘quote’ you post will be considered to have come from a creationist web-site and not from the work you cited, and the only necessary response will be to point out that you may be ‘quoting’ a source that you haven’t read, which may not contain the text you have posted.
You just trashed your own credibility.
Gould said “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the
trade secret of paleontology.” [Evolution’s Erratic Pace - “Natural History,” May, 1977]
Why did he describe the extreme rarity of transitional fossils as “the trade secret” of paleontology?
Then Gould said (in the same article as above) evolutionary trees displayed in textbooks include inferred branches - aka “ghost branches” - that are not based on the evidence of fossils, which means they’re imaginary and have been added by somone.
That begs the question: Why are ghost branches added if they’re imaginary and not the evidence of fossils? How would you answer that?
Furthermore, sometimes the textbooks in question declare the ghost branches and sometimes they don’t . Why aren’t the ghost branches declared if they’re imaginary? Doesn’t that amount to tampering with the evidence?
"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our text- books have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record:
‘The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps, He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory.’
Darwin’s argument still persists as the favored escape of most paleontologists from the embarrassment of a record that seems to show so little of evolution. In exposing its cultural and methodological roots, I wish in no way to impugn the potential validity of gradualism (for all general views have similar roots). I wish only to point out that it was never -seen- in the rocks.
Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin’s argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.
[S.J. Gould, Evolution’s Erratic Pace - “Natural History,” May, 1977]
Did I say Henry Gee doesn’t accept evolution?
Even if I believed that, you’d still be criticising others for not being able to provide something that you can’t provide either.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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