Let’s address of another of your forgeries, shall we?
You’re really on a roll. You’re forged cut and paste “quotes” are all familiar as I've called you out earlier for your dishonesty.
Quote Mine Project: Gould, Eldredge and Punctuated Equilibria Quotes
Quote #3.5
[There are no fossils showing transitions between species]
In the fossil record, missing links are the rule: the story of life is as disjointed as a silent newsreel, in which species succeed one another as abruptly as Balkan prime ministers. The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms between species, the more they have been frustrated.... Evidence from fossils now points overwhelmingly away from the classical Darwinism which most Americans learned in high school: that new species evolve out of existing ones by the gradual accumulation of small changes, each of which helps the organism survive and compete in the environment - Jerry Adler - Newsweek (1980, 96[18]:95).
Representative quote miners: Evolution Cruncher: No Transitions -- Only Gaps and Reason & Revelation: 15 Answers to John Rennie andScientific American’s Nonsense
For the complete article, see talk.origins post [email protected].
The only "surprise" here is that creationists have so little shame.
Once again, this is an article about the (then relatively new) proposal by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge of Punctuated Equilibria. It was apparently so new to these magazine writers that they (perhaps abetted by some of Gould's and Eldredge's scientific opponents) confused it with Richard Goldschmidt's "hopeful monsters" ideas, even though they note:
The paleontologists who have been in the forefront of the new theory don't necessarily believe in hopeful monsters. When they say that new species evolved rapidly, they are speaking in geologic terms. A single generation or 50,000 years is all the same to them. Either would be too short an interval for the intermediate organisms to appear in the fossil record.
In short, the article is nothing more than a report on the early arguments about Punctuated Equilibria. And the quote mine is just a snippet of the magazine writers' (not very clear) description of Gould and Eldredge's position, not a quote from any scientist.
In any case, the quote miners strangely fail to include the following:
While the scientists have been refining the theory of evolution in the past decade, some nonscientists have been spreading anew the gospel of creationism -- and the coincidence has confused many laymen . . . Having opposed Darwin for 120 years, fundamentalists tend to seize on any criticism of his theories as vindication . . . But the new theories are intended to explain how evolution came about -- not to supplant it as a principle. Says Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould, . . . "Evolution is a fact, like apples falling out of trees."
The irony of the miner's use of this article in the face of the above is obvious and demonstrates more about the miners' honesty than it does anything about evolution.
- J. (catshark) Pieret
