Wesley R. Elsberry
Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002
|
Urggh... I made the mistake of reading some of Casey's text concerning fossils. Casey tried to quotemine Niles Eldredge so as to say that Prothero's book wasn't complete, therefore Prothero's examples must not be trustworthy. Bleccchhh.
Here's something else Niles Eldredge said of Prothero's text, stuff Casey didn't bother to pass along:
| Quote |
In the same way that visitors to the American Museum’s Dar-
win exhibition (now traveling the world in several iterations) have
tended to resonate deeply with the comparative osteology of ver-
tebrates (“I GET it!,” more than one visitor has announced when
confronted with a series of vertebrate arm skeletons), Prothero’s
clear, compelling and well-illustrated presentation of The Fish
With Legs (the Upper Devonian Tiktaalik) comes replete with a
reconstruction and a cladogram showing where it fits in phylo-
genetically. Other highlights include his discussion of that still-
and-increasingly-marvelous succession of “mammal-like” rep-
tiles from the Permo-Triassic (“Karroo”) of South Africa; early
whales, not only with legs, but also with tell-tale artiodactyl
“double-pulley” astragali pointing to their terrestrial origins; and
insectivorous bats without echolocation—a discovery so new that
that it did not even make it into Prothero’s text.
And of course, Prothero goes to town with that bane of
every creationist’s existence (because, of course, all they re-
ally care about is where we humans came from)—the spectac-
ularly rich, dense, and diverse stratigraphic record of hominids
over the past 4 million years. The hominid fossil record is a
tremendous boon in the unending battle against the anti-evolution
forces.
Simpson would, I think, have been gratified: his “quantum
evolution” explained why it would be unlikely to find such clear-
cut intermediates (living in transitional environments for short
times in highly localized places)—and not that such intermedi-
ates never existed. Finding them is the icing on the cake—not a
refutation of Quantum Evolution.
|
Do you suppose that was coincidence?
I don't think so.
--------------
"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
|
