leopold:
everyone seems to think evolution proceeds as a series of "improvements".
Everyone thinks that, do they?
i believe there might be some kind of catalyzing action involved.
not only was the first life catalyzed into being, but the diversity of life is also the result of "catalyzing" action.
goulds concept of spandrels would be the basis of this stuff.
This is so vague as to be meaningless.
Just so I know that you understand what you're talking about, please explain Gould's "spandrels" for me in a couple of sentences. Because if you think they have something to do with catalysts, then you're all at sea.
that is what irks me the most about topics like this.
you throw out an anomly and everyone starts accusing you of being a creationist.
What anomaly have you thrown out?
when i first posted these quotes james refered to the group of scientists as being in a state of communal madness.
Where? Please quote the relevant post, with a link. Or retract your claim.
you know, if i was the author of NAIG, i would have been all in sciences face over this.
NAIG doesn't have just one author.
Your favorite article is unimportant when it comes to the truth of evolution.
the number of people that wrote to science and bitched about the article IS PROOF that it WAS NOT a small deal.
How many people wrote? Where can I see these letters?
everyone except ayala that is.
and yes, science could have lost a bunch of money over this.
That's an unsupported claim. But who cares? It has no bearing on evolution.
but hey, it was a "misunderstanding", right?
Of a clumsy explanation by Lewin. Or both.
heh, heh, yeah, go tell someone else cause i don't buy it.
Who cares what you think? You don't even understand what the arguments at the conference were about.
you will notice that NAIG makes no indication that they contacted science.
Probably they didn't.
and that is the very FIRST thing that should have been done.
Why? This isn't important to scientists. Get it?
no big deal, but it was big enough to get NAIG to contact ayala.
NAIG is an anti-creationist site. Among other things, it explicitly investigates creationist tactics and exposes them for what they are.
Science, on the other hand, is a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It publishes science, not creationist bullshit.
remember, this was/is the foremost evolutionist in the US saying this.
1. Ayala didn't say it.
2. Ayala wasn't/isn't "the foremost evolutionist in the US".
3. Why would the foremost evolutionist in the US say he doesn't believe in a fundamental point about evolution, anyway?
4. Why are there no other statements from Ayala anywhere in the literature saying that "small (genetic) changes don't accumulate"? Why just this one?
so, it's not just ayala, it's the record origin.
and it's not just a couple of gaps here and there.
these gaps are typical of the record, the norm.
Fossilisation is rare. The reasons for apparent "gaps" are well understood. The simplest among them is that many fossils remain to be found.
where does all of this leave us?
It leaves us with you falsely proposing that evolution is dead and buried because of a mistake made in an obscure article back in 1980. And it leaves you as ignorant of science as when you first started this, at least two years ago. Just think how you could have used that time usefully if only you wanted to learn something.
ayala said it, that's where.
and he said it in reference to the gaps, right where the transitional fossils should be.
He didn't say it. That's on the record. And even if he did, it would just be Ayala being wrong about something. Evolution doesn't stand or fall on anything Ayala said, ever.
if evolution proceeds by catalysis then maybe these spandrels are biomolecular in nature.
Gibberish.
