See http://www.america.net/~bible/lightbible/science/science12.html for a photo of the alleged man tracks. ******************************************************************************* They look like large elongated 5-digit footprints. By large, we're looking at about 50-70cm long. This is outside the range of human foot size. So what's the explanation? Non-human footprints (too big) -> non-humans? No! The Karl-O-Matic Post-Hoc-Rationalizer suggests big humans with funny feet! Obvious! (Not.) Here's an excerpt from a discussion by Glen Kuban (I hope he won't mind) from http://earth.ics.uci.edu:8080/faqs/paluxy/nbc.html: The photo [not the one referenced above] presented as evidence of a striding trail of human prints excavated by Baugh, is nothing of the sort. First, it is not a photo taken during one of Baugh's excavations, but shows the Taylor Trail on the Taylor Site, as photographed by Fredrick Beierle[4] in the late 1970's--over a decade before Baugh started working in the Paluxy. Second, the Taylor Trail is not a human trackway, but is one of many trackways of elongate, metatarsal dinosaur tracks that have been mistaken for giant human tracks in the Paluxy. Such tracks were made by dinosaurs which walked, at least at times, in a plantigrade-like manner, impressing their soles and heels as they walked (rather than in a more common digitigrade locomotion of most bipedal dinsosaurs). When the digits of such tracks are subdued by erosion, mud-collapse, infilling, or a combination of factors, they often resemble large human footprints. On the Taylor Site, infilling and mud-collapse were the major factors.[5,6] However, all of the trails on the Taylor Site show indications of dinosaurian digits when the substrate is well cleaned.[7] In Beierle's photo the track surface was not well cleaned, and the individual prints were selectively moistended with water to encourage human shapes. ======= Julius Rebek and his coworkers at MIT have produced RNA from basic materials in the lab. ======= __Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos__ by Roger Lewin (Macmillan; 1992) __At Home in the Universe__ by Stuart Kauffman (Oxford University Press; 1995) __Vital Dust: The Origin and Evolution of Life on Earth__ by Christian de Duve (BasicBooks; 1995) (BasicBooks; 1995) ====== Carroll, R.L., 1988. Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution. W.H. Freeman and Company: New York, 698pp. Nature on Mesozoic bird diversity. L.M.Chiappe, Nature 378, p.349 (1995)? ======== Allison, P. A., and D. E. G. Briggs (1991) Taphonomy. Releasing the Data Locked in the Fossil Record, Plenum, New York. Kidwell, S. K. and A. K. Behrensmeyer (1993) Taphonomic Approaches to Time Resolution in Fossil Assemblages. Paleontological Society Short Course in Paleontology no. 6, The Paleontological Society, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Knoxville, Tennessee. Weigelt, Johannes, 1989, Recent Vertebrate Carcasses and Their Paleobiologic Implications. University of Chicago Press. ========== ======== Eucalyptus trees from Australia now spreading into the rest of the world have undergone very radical change within human history, despite their relatively slow life cycle, and fruit flies, which have a blindingly fast life cycle, have developed new types that can no longer interbreed even in the very short time that scientists have been studying them. ======= How does the creationist model explain that tricky highly deformed and metamorphosed basement rock (the ones without the fishes) that are below the eroded unconformable contacts? You know the ones that have metamorphic mineral assemblages that represent temperatures and pressures conditions at 25 km depth in the crust. ====== A good example from the fossil record of evolution in action is the foraminifera Globigerinadae. In the Paleocene, after the extinction of the predominant globotrucanid foraminifera, the globigerine species radiated into a variety of species of forams (e.g. globigerinoid, turborotaid, globorotaid, conical, Hastigerine, etc.). All these species underwent extinction by the late Ogliocene except the original species globigerine. the species globigerine radiated a second time in the Miocene period, creating an almost identical variety of species (e.g. globigerinoid, turborotaid, globorotaid, conical, Hastigerine, etc.). This is to be expected as the species globigerine did not evolve any new information into its genetic code in the prior 40 million years, but rather the retention of its existing information in its genetic code was re-expressed. The minor differences between the two radiations may be attributed to the way the information was expressed and/or minor mutations. ====== Ambulocetus natans, (50 mya, found in 1994) is a _nearly complete_ skeleton of an early whale that was clearly a transition between land and sea mammals. It had four stubby legs well adapted for swimming, a long tail and no blowhole. ======== the DNA relatedness is from Jared Diamond's _The Third Chimpanzee_. Descriptions of the fossil finds in _Lucy_ by Johanson and Edey and references therein. ======= very early "amphibians" like Acanthostega. Those _are_ rhipidistian fish [some of them are; the pandericthyiids have been considered osteolepiform rhipidistians] There has been lots of discussion about the interrelationships of the different main groups of sarcopterygian fish and about which ones are the closest to the ancestors of the tetrapods. There is a quite a bit of recent literature on this. The different groups in question are all related to one another and to the tetrapods, and the early ones of each group are very similar in important ways. They all are good examples of intermediates. ======== what could completely invalidate an evolutionary concept of the diversification of life [mediated by Darwinian natural selection or not]? If you allow us to suppose that the world were very different than it is, the answer would be [IMO] a lot of different possible things, such as if: -- geologists prove the earth is only a few thousand years old; [not enough time for evolution to take place] -- DNA replication is shown to be perfect; heritable mutations are impossible; and no species shows any genetic variation [obvious implications]; -- Organisms show no clear patterns of groups nested within groups within groups -- perhaps no clear groups at all or all organisms show "relationships" in many directions at once. [only common descent explains why there should be any recognizable higher groups at all; in their absence probably no one would ever have proposed an evolutionary concept] --- Groups worked out using one data set [say, cladistic analysis of anatomy and morphology] are never compatible at all with those derived from independent data sets [e.g., analyses of DNA base sequences]. ---There is a very rich fossil record extending down to the oldest sedimentary rocks, and all the fossils are exactly the same as living species. ========= Family Leporidae Author........ : G. Fischer, 1817. Citation...... : MÈm. Soc. Imp. Nat. Moscow, 5:372. Common Name... : Hares and rabbits. Distribution.. :Originally all continents except S South America and Australasia; now worldwide through introduction. Comments...... : Often divided into subfamilies Paleolaginae (Pentalagus, Pronolagus, Romerolagus) and Leporinae (remaining genera) (Dice, 1929ref; Simpson, 1945ref), but no subfamilies were recognized by Ellerman and Morrison-Scott (1951 ref). For basis of genera recognized here, see Corbet (1983ref). I guess that covers hares and rabbits. They do not chew their cud. ============ Hyaenas are a whole separate family, the Hyaenidae. ========== in New Zealand there are nearly 200 species of native earthworm, over 300 land snails, and many thousands of insects, a high proportion of them flightless. ======== Transitionals Paleontologic evidence and organic evolution, which can be found in Montagu's "Science and Creationism" or the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 24(4). ========== Dicynodonts are in the group known as the mammal-like reptiles but as Peter states, they were not in the ancestral lineage of mammals. That point was not included in my post and it should have been. Gillian King's book _The Dicynodonts_ which I quoted from makes that clear. > In the Linnean classification found at the back of Carroll's > 1988 text, _Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution," Dicynodontia > is a suborder of Therapsida distinct from the suborder > Cynodontia, which is believed to be in a direct line to mammals. >>"Dicynodonts are also intermediate in a somewhat unexpected way, in that >>some forms (e.g. _Dicynodon trigonecephalus; King, 1981a) the fore limb >>retains its sprawling posture but the hindlimb is turned in more towards >>the body during parts of the stride. In _Kingoria_ (King, 1985) as we >>shall see later, the hind limb has become very mammallike, indeed. > A clear case of convergent evolution. I dislike seeing the > word "intermediate" used in this way. King, Gillian. 1990. _The Dicynodonts_. _A Study in Palaeobiology_. 225 pages. Since dicynodonts were not ancestral to mammals 'intermediate' is not meant to imply that they were. 'Intermediate' in this case is that King is describing changes of posture and stance in the dicynodont lineage itself. That seems a reasonable opportunity to use the term and there is no point in nitpicking the matter to death. > I couldn't find an illustration in Carroll's text, but it does > mention that _Lystrosaurus_ was "thought to have been semi-aquatic". > [p. 376]. What's more, it is believed to be a "derivative" > of Dicynodon, which was already two-toothed as the name implies, > according to Nicholas Hotton III on p. 628 of: I suggest you read the chapter "The daily life of a dicynodont" in Gillian King's book. The impression I get is a terrestrial animal living along water courses and streams. > _Origins of the Higher Groups of Tetrapods: Controversy and Consensus_, > ed. by Hans-Peter Schultze and Linda Trueb, co. 1991, Cornell > University Press. ======== A recent SCIENCE article focused on the development of sea squirts, sessile organisms that grow from tailed larva that look a bit like tadpoles and possess a notochord. It turns out that a single gene controls the development/nondevelopment of the tail. It very much looks as if the vertebrates developed from something like a sea squirt that kept its tail.... === >Now, I'm not a geologist so I will ask the more qualified persons here, >does mainstream geology have a source for the carbon and calcium required >to deposit the amounts of precipitated limestone found around us? If so, >what is it? It is called the carbon cycle which started after plate tectonics began to occur about 1.7 Gya Before this the chemical weathering and alteration of pyroxene and plagioclase feldspar release large amounts of Ca and CO2 and as well the early atmosphere and hydrosphere contained a lot more CO2 than it has today. I am sure that Dr. Brown argues that the rates today are not high enough to produce all of the carbonate rocks that have formed . What he forgets or ignores is that the conditions under which Ca is released into the exogenic system (hydrosphere/atmosphere/sediment system) have changed over geologic time, a reflection of major changes in atmospheric, hydrosperic and crustal mineral compositions. The rate of chemical weathering of crustal rocks (and they were not a 10 km thick layer of granite) were much greater in the past (3.8 to 2.1 Gya) than that of today. Thick sequences of carbonate rock do not surprise me at all. I wonder what Dr. Brown¼s explanation is for them. Tell Dr. Brown that there is a lot of literature on this subject. He can learn more by reading such in-depth texts as: Morse, J. W. and Mackenzie, F.T. 1990 Developments in Sedimentology 48: Geochemistry of Sedimentary Carbonates. Elsevier, New York, 707 pp. ========== Predatory Dinosaurs of the World_ by Greg Paul. ======= "Today, living things are divided into two groups. One, the eukaryotes, has nuclei within which the chromosomes ... are sequestered; the second group, the prokaryotes, comprises the single-celled bacteria that lack a nuclei and contain their chromosome(s) in the cytoplasm." Singer, M. and Berg, P. GENES & GENOMES(1991) p.2 "All the genetic information considered necessary for the life of prokaryotic cells is usually assembled into a unique molecule, rendering these organisms monochromosomic, although an exception has recently been revealed. The structural organization of these DNA molecules inside the cell is much simpler than that of eukaryotic chromosomes, which explains why the name 'chromosome' applied to these structures has sometimes been questioned. However, it will be used throughout this book." Joset, F. and Guespin-Michel, J. PROKARYOTIC GENETICS, GENOME ORGANIZATION, TRANSFER AND PLASTICITY, Blackwell Scientific, Oxford UK, (1993) p.11 "As far as is known, all bacteria have their essential genetic material arranged as a single, naked molecule of DNA, called a CHROMOSOME (by analogy with the more complex structure in higher [sic] cells)." Neidhardt, F.C., Ingram, J.L. and Schaechter, M. PHYSIOLOGY OF THE BACTERIAL CELL, A MOLECULAR APPROACH, Sinauer Associates Inc., Sunderland MA. (1990) p.14 For a thorough description of bacterial CHROMSOMES see the textbook following reviews, Hinnebusch, J. and Tilly, K. (1993) Linear plasmids and chromosomes in bacteria. Molec. Microbiol. 10, 917-922. Fonstein, M. and Haselkorn, R. (1995) Physical Mapping of Bacterial Genomes, J. Bacteriol. 177, 3361-3369. =========== As George Gaylord Simpson* put it in THIS VIEW OF LIFE: "The fact--not the theory--that evolution has occurred and the Darwinian theory as to how it has occurred have become so confused in popular opinion that the distinction must be stressed. ...The greatest impact no doubt has come from the fact of evolu- tion...That is, however, a single step, essentially taken a hundred years ago and now a matter of simple rational acceptance or superstitious rejection... ...Evolution is, then, a completely general principle of life...a fully natural process, inherent in the physical properties of the universe, by which life arose in the first place and by which all living things, past or present, have since developed, divergently and progressively." (p. 10-12) =========== Archaeopteryx has at most two features, feathers and an opposable big toe, which are 'unique' to birds - and the recent discovery of Sinosaurpteryx will knock out the uniqueness of the feathers. Archae lacks three bird features (bill, fused vertebrae, and pneumatic bones) and has twelve features found in dinosaurs but not in birds. ======= "fossil material of apes, ape-men, and men have been gathered from a wide variety of sources, and both the cumulative evidence and recent finds unequivocally support the theory of human origins from the higher apes." Jay M. Savage, Professor of Biology, the University of Southern California, Evolution (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Modern Biology Series, 1965), p.110. ========= Transition from primitive bony fish to amphibians: Paleoniscoids again (e.g. _Cheirolepis_) _Osteolepis_ -- one of the earliest crossopterygian lobe-finned fishes, still sharing some characters with the lungfish (the other group of lobe-finned fish). Had paired fins with a leg-like arrangement of bones, and had an early-amphibian-like skull and teeth. _Eusthenopteron_ (and other rhipidistian crossopterygian fish) -- intermediate between early crossopterygian fish and the earliest amphibians. Skull very amphibian-like. Strong amphibian-like backbone. Fins very like early amphibian feet. Icthyostegids (such as _Icthyostega_ and _Icthyostegopsis_) -- Terrestrial amphibians with many of _Eusthenopteron_'s fish features (e.g., the fin rays of the tail were retained). Some debate about whether _Icthyostega_ should be considered a fish or an amphibian; it is an excellent transitional fossil. Labyrinthodonts (e.g., _Pholidogaster_, _Pteroplax_) -- still have some icthyostegid features, but have lost many of the fish features (e.g., the fin rays are gone, vertebrae are stronger and interlocking, the nasal passage for air intake is well defined.) ---- Lets take a look at what is considered by some to be a 'great transitional fossil', the Icythyostegids, descending from the Rhipidistian crossopterygian fish. The Ichthyostega has been proposed as a fish/amphibian transition from the late Devonian period. This is problematic for a variety of reasons. 1. The inter temporal bone is missing from Ichthyostega's skull, but the inter temporal bone is presumably primitive in amphibians. It is retained in later labyrinthodonts, but absent in more advance amphibians. 2. Some carboniferous amphibians have a flexibly articulated cheek region, but it is fairly consolidated in Ichthyostega. Movability of this basal articulation is considered a primitive amphibian feature. 3. Ichthyostega has arch vertebra, in common with all modern higher vertebrate classes, but many paleozoic and all modern amphibians have husk vertebra. 4. There is no evidence of a transition between a crossopterygian fin and Icythyostega's foot. The Ichthyostega had well developed fore and hind limbs of normal tetra pod type which were fully capable of supporting terrestrial motion. They were fully adapted for terrestrial life. BTW, who is it that is arguing that Icythyostega is a fish? 5. As per your post, the rhipidistian fish is the specified ancestor to the Ichthyostega, but it is clearly a fish. Thought to be extinct for over 70,000,000 years, the coelacanth, a close relation to the Rhipidistians and one time intermediate candidate, was caught by fishermen in 1938. To the evolutionist's disappointment, it showed no evolutionary change in it's bone structure, and more importantly, it showed no evolutionary changes in it's soft bodied tissue. Evolutionists had speculated that much evolution takes place in soft bodied tissue which does not fossilize well and therefore is not observed. As evolutionist Dr. Jacques Millot reported in Scientific American (Vol. 193, 1955, p. 37) There is a complete absence of any fossils between Rhipidistians and Amphibians ========== "man began when populations of apes....started the bipedal, tool-using way of life that gave rise to the man-apes of the genus Australopithecus." "Tools and Human Evolution," Scientific American, 203:3:63, Spet. 1960,p.68. ======= After killing an estimated 100 million people in recorded history, the last case of smallpox was reported in Somalia in 1977. ========= Donald C. Johanson and Maitland A. Edey, _Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind_, 1981, Simon and Schuster, New York; ISBN: 0-671-25036-1. Donald Johanson book . My book (Lucy's Child) i ======== Neanderthal occupied Europe for over 100,000 years. And died out around 27,000 BC. He was short, stocky, massive brow ridge over his eyes, had a primitive technology, ie fire, spears, stones but no projectiles such as arrows. He buried his dead, sometimes with flowers. He had music (as we found his flute) He had a larger brain than modern man. He had art. There are a number of infant Neandertal skulls. Ivanhoe referred to about 4 or 5 of them in Nature 227:577-578, 1970. I don't think they have huge brow ridges though; that is something that develops as the individual matures. N'tal and sapiens look more similar as children than they do as adults. ======= Raymond Dart, discoverer of the Australopithecines, Adventures With the Missing Link (Harper and Brothers, 1959) ======= Ralph Linton, anthropologist of the Univesity of Pennsylvania, The Tree of Culture (Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), p.4 ======== THE MAKING OF MANKIND by Leakey ========== "Dicynodonts are also intermediate in a somewhat unexpected way, in that some forms (e.g. _Dicynodon trigonecephalus; King, 1981a) the fore limb retains its sprawling posture but the hindlimb is turned in more towards the body during parts of the stride. In _Kingoria_ (King, 1985) as we shall see later, the hind limb has become very mammallike, indeed. So here we have a sort of spatial intermediateness: one part of the body is rather reptilian, the other mammalian...." (page 44) King, Gillian. 1990. _The Dicynodonts_. _A Study in Palaeobiology_. 225 pages. he discusses the 'intermediate' status of dicynodonts of which one of the most familiar in biology texts is _Lystrosaurus_ of the early Triassic. King's book also discusses how anatomists and paleontologists figure muscle attachments had to be realigned to make these changes emphasizing that these anatomical reconstructions were not single processes. So, in a number of ways, dicynodonts are intermediates as well. But as Mike Noreen pointed out in some statements on intermediates, we encounter the intermediate question because we draw taxon boundaries around clusters of organisms and then wonder what could fit in between. Mike pointed out that there are no such boundaries along a continuum of evolution. All the species along that evolutionary trajectory are real, functional organisms with their own populations and behaviors. So dicynodonts are maybe not fully reptiles and not fully mammals but it is really not precise to call them intermediates -- they just fall between our current definitions of reptiles and mammals. ========== "That man has been derived from a form which - without any strain on commonly recognized definitions -can be properly called an 'anthropoid ape' is a statement which no longer admits doubt." Wilfred Le Gros Clark, famous evolutionist of the Univesity of Oxford, quoted by William Straus Jr. in "The Riddle of MAn's Ancestry," Quarterly Review of Biology, 23:3:200, Sept. 1949, p. 208 ======= _Merychippus_ gave rise to about 19 new three-toed grazing horse species, ======== ======== We've got reptiles with nearly-mammalian 4 chambered hearts (and the differences between these hearts and adult mammalian hearts are very similar to the kind of changes that a feotal mammalian heart undergoes during conversion to the adult form). We've got egg laying mammals. We've got reptiles with intermediate middle ear and jaw structures between classical reptilian and classical mammalian. We've even got an intermediate between monotremes (egg laying mammals) and placental mammals: Marsupials, which are live birthers which produce embryonic offspring which mature in a pouch. ====== Pseudogenes are found at the same locations in chimp, gorilla, gibbon and man but not on other species. DNA hybridization indicates that bonobos (so-called pygmy chimpanzees, although they're neither) diverged from chimpanzees about 2.5 million years ago. Lucy flourished about a million years earlier. I think you'll find it's about 99.5% in the bonobo or pygmy chimp. About 99% with common chimps and about 97% with baboons. Of our immediate evolutionary ancestors: Homo sapiens neanderthalensis Homo erectus Australopithecus africanus Australopithecus robustus Australopithecus boisei Homo habilis Australopithecus afarensis Australopithecus aethiopicus Australopithecus ramidus ========= Similarity of genetic code Chimp Bonobo 99.3% Human Chimp or bonobo 98.4% Gorilla Human, chimp, or bonobo 97.7% Orang utan Gorilla, human, chimp, or bonobo 96.4% Gibbon or siamang Great apes 95% Old World monkeys Apes 93% ======== Human and chimp hemoglobin are identical in all 287 units. Ayala, F.J. "Beyond Darwinism? The Challenge of Macroevolution to the Synthetic Theory of evolution." in PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY, M. Ruse ed. Macmillan Publishing Co., New York 1989 Gould, S.J. (1982) "Darwinism and the Expansion of Evolutionary Theory." Science 216, 380-387. ============= Michael Ruse's _The Darwinian Revolution_ (1989?). ====== ===== A company engineered a yeast that eats carcinogenic hydrocarbon solvents by repeatedly decimating a population with it every few generations. They now farm tons of them and they are totally dependent on the nasty stuff and are unable to survive without it, where they originally had almost no tolerance. ======= "Thus the fossil record provides a wonderfully detailed sequence of intermediate anatomical forms between the primitive condition and the derived, evolutionarily advanced state. It is a sequence that is progressive through the rock layers, and agrees perfectly with the sequence of events that occur in the development of the mammalian jaw through embryological history. It is striking cases such as these that abundantly confirm the strength and clarity of Darwin's original vision of the evolutionary history of life." Niles Eldredge; "Life Pulse"; 1987; ISBN 0-8160-2065-5; pages 152-153. ======= We only have catalogued (according to paleontologist David Raup) about 250,000 fossil species, and his estimate of the number of species that have ever lived is from 5 to 50 billion species. The basis of evolution as it is commonly defined, change in allele frequency with time has been tested. ========= Certain theories which explain the rates and results of these changes are less tested to be certain. For example, Punctuated Equilibrium or Gradualistic selection are theories used to attempt to explain the observations of change over time. Other deductions based on our knowledge and observations, such as common descent, can be considered factual in the scientific sense: They are so well supported by the evidence that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent. (The provisional in this case would take into account the possibility that there exist sulfer metabolising lifeforms which may have arisen separately in deep ocean vents....or something else just as exotic) Gould-Eldredge |1993 paper reviewing the status of Punctuated Equilibria |(Punctuated Equilibrium Comes of Age, Nature, 366:223) ============== In a survey, national survey, in 1981, 76 percent of the American people said teach both creation and evolution in the public schools. (Steven Jay Gould's View of Life: Shit Happens", |Chapter 5, "The End of Science", John Horgan, 1996). ====== Stephen Jay Gould points out in his article 'Darwinism and the Expansion of the Evolution Theory' (Science, 216, April 13, 1982, page 380): ========= ========= An alleged plesiosaur (prehistoric marine reptile)was dredged up off the coast of Japan. The program suggested only "skeptics" suggested the carcase was that of a shark. Actually most mainstream scientists have concluded this, based on results of tissue samples taken from the specimen before it was thrown overboard, and from the known tendency of basking sharks to decay into "pseudo-plesiosaur" carcasses. ==== "Mutation describes any change in the sequence of genomic DNA" (1). In the human population there are enough mutations to make everyones DNA sequence different (apart from identical twins; even then there may be differences due to mutation). This is the basis of genetic fingerprinting. The *rate* of mutation, which is what you seem to be alluding to, is low and varies with the locus and type of mutation. Single base pair substitutions are thought to occur <1 x 10^9 per generation. Changes in dinucleotide repeats occur <1 X 10^-4 per generation. Remember that human mutations are difficult to observe unless there is an effect on the individual; most have no effect. There are thousands of heritable defects, some of which are fatal, many are not (4,5). As I said these are the easier ones to observe. Lots of mutations have been observed that have no detrimental effect on the individual. (e.g. (3). More if you want). Observing beneficial mutations in humans may well be difficult; our human-made environment may well reduce any reproductive advantage one would have. (Lots of potential debate there :-)). Martin Smith, Cardiff, Wales 1. B. Lewin. Genes IV. Oxford University Press 1990, p 814. 2. _Ibid_, p73. 3. J.L. Weber and C. Wong. Mutation of human short tandem repeats. Human Molecular Gnetics, 1993, Vol 2, pp 1123-1128. 4. V.A. McKusick. Mendelian Inheritance in Man. Catalogs of Human Genes and Genetic Disorders. John Hopkins University Press, 1994. 5. Also McKusick is online at http://www3.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/omim/ (A frequently updated database of human genetic disorders with links to many related sites and databases.) ======== >> Postscript: >> Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist of the British Museum of >> Natural History wrote in his book 'Evolution' (British Museum, 1978): >> "If we accept Popper's distinction between science and non-science, we >> must first ask whether the theory of evolution by natural selection is >> scientific or pseudo scientific (metaphysical). ... Taking the first >> part of the theory, that evolution has occurred, it says that the >> history of life is a single process of species splitting and >> progression. This process must be unique and unrepeatable, like the >> history of England. This part of the theory is therefore an historical >> theory about unique events, and unique events are, by definition, not >> part of science, for they are unrepeatable and not part of science." Well, now you are arguing, by way of this quote, that evolution is not science. We are not obliged to accept Popper's distinction between science and non-science, and it is worth pointing out that Popper didn't accept it either, eventually changing his mind. Popper's view was overly restrictive, and failed to realize the process-oriented nature of science. If Patterson is actually saying that evolution is pseudo-science, than he is wrong. Patterson did say that, but at that time, he subscribed to a particular school of systematic thought known as "pattern cladism" which, among other things,took Popperian repeatability to its logical extreme. Pattern cladists later retracted their statements on this matter. Contrary to what some creationists say ("they were forced to recant by the Powers That Be [tm]"), they did this because they realized that repeatability lies at the level of the observation, not the level of the process. The actual pattern of metazoan phylogeny is not repeatable, but the observations that support it are. ======== Hominid fossils http://earth.ics.uci.edu:8080/faqs/homs/sts5.jpg http://earth.ics.uci.edu:8080/faqs/homs/oh24.gif http://earth.ics.uci.edu:8080/faqs/homs/1813.gif http://earth.ics.uci.edu:8080/faqs/homs/java.gif http://earth.ics.uci.edu:8080/faqs/homs/1470.gif http://earth.ics.uci.edu:8080/faqs/homs/3733.gif ======= Tourancheau, 1995 Genetic code deviations in the ciliates: evidence for multiple and independent events. EMBO J 14, 3262-3267 (1995) http://earth.ics.uci.edu:8080/faqs/homs/15000_side.gif -------------- Mary Leakey discovered the skull of Proconsul africanus, an apelike ancestor of both apes and early humans that lived about 25 million years ago. In 1959, her discovery of a well-preserved skull of a hominid, a member of the extended human ancestral family, brought fame and substantial financial backing to the Leakeys. A few years later, the two Leakeys uncovered the fossils of the first known member of the genus Homo habilis, or "able man," in recognition of the many stone tools found among the bones.With the discovery of a species called Australopithecus afarensis, based on the famous Lucy skeleton, the most likely identity of these prehistoric strollers was established. The species lived between 3.9 million and 3 million years ago, and from the fossils paleontologists have determined that they were as capable of walking upright as modern humans. The 1959 discovery turned out to be a 1.8-million-year-old fossil known as the "nutcracker man" because of its huge jaws and molar teeth. It was later designated Australopithecus boisei. END**************************************************************************