Daniel Smith
Posts: 970
Joined: Sep. 2007
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| Quote (George @ Oct. 01 2007,07:22) | You misunderstand me. I'm not saying he was lying. I'm questioning how he knew what Tertiary environmental conditions were like and how good were the data he based his conclusions on. As I said before, it is difficult enough for today's paleoecologists to reconstruct past vegetation. It would have been much more difficult and imprecise for the ecologists of a century ago. Palynology, one of the more powerful tools, was only in its infancy.
To summarise: he may have based his theories on the understanding of the day, but if that understanding is wrong, his ideas crumble. |
Schindewolf's book was published (originally - in German) in 1950. While technically that was in the last century, (so was 1999), it wasn't "a century ago".
This is what he said:
| Quote | Since in the later Tertiary, an expansion of plains at the expense of forests has been observed, this change in environmental conditions and the consequent change in the mode of life has been represented as the cause of linear, progressive selection leading up to the modern horse.
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(emphasis mine)
I assume "has been observed" means that it was well accepted. Perhaps newer data has proved him wrong, I don't know.
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"If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance." Orville Wright
"The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question." Richard Dawkins
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