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Last week I posted a review of the Darwin chapters of Coulter's new book. One of the most telling points Ann makes, is that Darwin as a mechanism for the origin of species, appears to be disproved by the fossil record. If new species arise via Darwinian evolution, there should be a massive amount of fossil records of species mutating into new species. But there is not.
The comment thread for that post was started by several knowledgeable readers, who favored Darwin. In that thread, I asked:
How do you explain the absence in the fossil record of the massive amount of fossil evidence of random mutation of one species into another, which would appear to be required if Darwinian evolution is the mechanism for the origin of species?
So far, none of the pro-Darwin commenters have responded.
I just did a search of Google Groups for "evolution coulter." There are lots of discussions in many groups -- but no discussions yet in the scientific groups, at least in the first 7 pages of results. It appears that the scientific community may be trying to avoid discussing the questions Coulter is raising.
I really want to get a serious response from the scientific community on this important question.
#1
#2Olah, thanks for this great post. I feel the same way - religion and science surely co-exist. Everywhere science looks, they find the most intricate, aesthetically beautiful principles. Ann points out that scientists have historically felt that they are discovering the work of God:
Contrary to the cult members’ description of science as requiring the exclusion of God, until the last few decades the only reason to do science was to understand God. All the real scientists believed their work was discovering God in the universe—Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, William Thomson Kelvin, George Gabriel Stokes, James Clerk Maxwell, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli. I guess they weren’t doing real “science."
It's great to hear about another scientist who supports Ann's views of evolution.
#3Vik, it's not even about that. It's not just another scientist, but it's actual SCIENCE that proves that Darwinian loyalists are just plain wrong. What Dr Schroeder does is use science, not just the fossil records to show the sheer veracity of what it would take for pure Darwinian theories of evolution to occur. He uses various math equations to prove how, as Ann also put, much perfection and how many years it would take for evoltution to work the way the Darwinianists say so. It just doesn't add up. Of course, the math is a bit difficult to understand if you're not a math whiz, but he explains in it a way that you see what he's saying. In fact, after reading his books, it seems to be that you would have to have to have a lot of FAITH in order to believe in Darwinian evolution!!! Talk about separating church and state, eh?
-OC
#4Whoa. I'm checking out Dr. Schroeder's book, The Science of God, over at Amazon, via its search inside the book feature. I just found this on page 31:
The magnificent Natural History Museum in London devotes an entire wing to demonstrating the fact of evolution. They show how pink daisies can evolve into blue daisies, how gray moths change into black moths, how over a mere few thousand years, a wide variety of cichlid fish species evolved in Lake Victoria. It is all impressive.
Impressive, until you walk out and reflect upon that which they were able to document. Daisies remained daisies, moths remained moths, and cichlid fish remained cichlid fish. These changes are referred to as micro-evolution. In this exhibit, the museum's staff did not demonstrate a single unequivocal case in which life underwent a major gradual morphological change.
This reiterates what Ann says, that the fossil record doesn't support Darwinism as a mechanism for the origin of species. And it makes it hard to deny that the fossil record is so weak on this, that this leading museum can't provide any fossil evidence for it.
#5The discussion continues in this thread.
#6http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC200.html
The Talk.Origins Archive: Exploring the Creation/Evolution Controversy
Index to Creationist Claims, edited by Mark Isaak, Copyright © 2004
Previous Claim: CC150 | List of Claims | Next Claim: CC200.1
Claim CC200:
There are no transitional fossils. Evolution predicts a continuum between each fossil organism and its ancestors. Instead, we see systematic gaps in the fossil record.
Source:
Morris, Henry M., 1974. Scientific Creationism, Green Forest, AR: Master Books, pp. 78-90.
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, 1985. Life--How Did It Get Here? Brooklyn, NY, pp. 57-59.
Response:
1. There are many transitional fossils. The only way that the claim of their absence may be remotely justified, aside from ignoring the evidence completely, is to redefine "transitional" as referring to a fossil that is a direct ancestor of one organism and a direct descendant of another. However, direct lineages are not required; they could not be verified even if found. What a transitional fossil is, in keeping with what the theory of evolution predicts, is a fossil that shows a mosaic of features from an older and more recent organism.
2. Transitional fossils may coexist with gaps. We do not expect to find finely detailed sequences of fossils lasting for millions of years. Nevertheless, we do find several fine gradations of fossils between species and genera, and we find many other sequences between higher taxa that are still very well filled out.
The following are fossil transitions between species and genera:
1. Human ancestry. There are many fossils of human ancestors, and the differences between species are so gradual that it is not always clear where to draw the lines between them.
2. The horns of titanotheres (extinct Cenozoic mammals) appear in progressively larger sizes, from nothing to prominence. Other head and neck features also evolved. These features are adaptations for head-on ramming analogous to sheep behavior (Stanley 1974).
3. A gradual transitional fossil sequence connects the foraminifera Globigerinoides trilobus and Orbulina universa (Pearson et al. 1997). O. universa, the later fossil, features a spherical test surrounding a "Globigerinoides-like" shell, showing that a feature was added, not lost. The evidence is seen in all major tropical ocean basins. Several intermediate morphospecies connect the two species, as may be seen in the figure included in Lindsay (1997).
4. The fossil record shows transitions between species of Phacops (a trilobite; Phacops rana is the Pennsylvania state fossil; Eldredge 1972; 1974; Strapple 1978).
5. Planktonic forminifera (Malmgren et al. 1984). This is an example of punctuated gradualism. A ten-million-year foraminifera fossil record shows long periods of stasis and other periods of relatively rapid but still gradual morphologic change.
6. Fossils of the diatom Rhizosolenia are very common (they are mined as diatomaceous earth), and they show a continuous record of almost two million years which includes a record of a speciation event (Miller 1999, 44-45).
7. Lake Turkana mollusc species (Lewin 1981).
8. Cenozoic marine ostracodes (Cronin 1985).
9. The Eocene primate genus Cantius (Gingerich 1976, 1980, 1983).
10. Scallops of the genus Chesapecten show gradual change in one "ear" of their hinge over about 13 million years. The ribs also change (Pojeta and Springer 2001; Ward and Blackwelder 1975).
11. Gryphaea (coiled oysters) become larger and broader but thinner and flatter during the Early Jurassic (Hallam 1968).
The following are fossil transitionals between families, orders, and classes:
1. Human ancestry. Australopithecus, though its leg and pelvis bones show it walked upright, had a bony ridge on the forearm, probably vestigial, indicative of knuckle walking (Richmond and Strait 2000).
2. Dinosaur-bird transitions.
3. Haasiophis terrasanctus is a primitive marine snake with well-developed hind limbs. Although other limbless snakes might be more ancestral, this fossil shows a relationship of snakes with limbed ancestors (Tchernov et al. 2000). Pachyrhachis is another snake with legs that is related to Haasiophis (Caldwell and Lee 1997).
4. The jaws of mososaurs are also intermediate between snakes and lizards. Like the snake's stretchable jaws, they have highly flexible lower jaws, but unlike snakes, they do not have highly flexible upper jaws. Some other skull features of mososaurs are intermediate between snakes and primitive lizards (Caldwell and Lee 1997; Lee et al. 1999; Tchernov et al. 2000).
5. Transitions between mesonychids and whales.
6. Transitions between fish and tetrapods.
etc etc
#7Shane, thanks for this link. I have seen this article, and it's one of the things I want to look into further.
If the evidence described in this article is as good as the article claims, why do you think it's not referenced in the wing of the Natural History Museum in London, that is devoted to providing the evidence for Darwin?
#8A new post on this subject is up: Follow-Up on Ann Coulter and Darwin: Scientists Admit There is No Proof of Darwin.
#9Help!!!
We would appreciate any help with responding on a creation/evolution debate at http://www.123forum.com/777
I'm getting too bogged down with responding and need to gear up for our next round of billboards.
Julie
WhoIsYourCreator.com
Have you ever been to the Natural History Museum in London?
I was there a few months ago. Schroeder's claim is ridiculously false. Go up the stairs past Richard Owen's statue, and turn right. There's a whole hall on human evolution that demonstrates the fact of evolutionary change in our lineage.
That museum also has a large annex called the Darwin Centre -- it's the research arm of the museum. To claim that the NHM does not back up evolution with evidence is ludicrous.
#11This argument that every single change should be proven by the existence of a fossil that portrays that change is nonsensical. The vast majority of organisms when they die are consumed by other organisms, of the remains much is destroyed by weathering and other environmental effects.
If an organism (or any part of it) is to become fossilised then it must be rapidly covered by sediment (or in some cases tar or resin from a tree) for fossilisation to occur.
To be honest the complete absence of the fossil remains of every organism that has died in the past could in effect be used as evidence against the occurrence of the global flood described in the Bible.
#12As a Christian, it sickens me to see other Christians hold fast to false claims, and even worse I wonder at the character of those who write books to "falsely witness" regarding the "falsehood" of evolution when the evidence is clearly there. These are the same people who continue to forward the "Paluxy River" articles as "proof" that man and dinosaur coexisted.
God created evolution. He created the "rules" of evolution just as surely as he created the rules of physics. He didn't just do a "poof" to create Adam and Eve, he did the ultimate bank-shot off the bleachers, around the Jumbotron, nothing-but-net by leveraging His own rules of evolution to bring Mankind to this earth.
#13BigB, I certainly believe that there is micro-evolution, i.e. Darwinian evolution within a species. I love your analogy about the ultimate bank-shot.
#14Glad to see the comment on how science does NOT conflict with religion, and that they actually coincide perfectly. You might be intersted in the book The Bible, the Qur'an and Science
#15Honestly, I'm often amazed how many "Christians" seek to disprove Evolution largely due to the fact they feel it will disprove their own beliefs if Evolution eventually is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
I once was a Christian, now I'm an atheist, however the lack of faith I see Christians exhibiting in their own beliefs astounds me. The two can co-exist quite peacefully together, in the understanding that a Christian (one with faith greater than a mustard seed, according to their own god) is under the belief that their god is all powerful. It seems "Christians" tend to forget that within the realm of unlimited power, their own god would theoretically have the ability to make evident any result, be it the earth being 5 billion years old, the universe being 13.7 billion years old, etc. Their own beliefs (theortically, if they had them enough) dictate undeniable proof of evolution should be no threat to their own belief in God.
A Christian attempting to argue on a scientific level evolution vs creationism is a fool. They themselves lack the level of faith required of them by their own religion. The argument of Creation is not a scientific one, but held within faith. If the Christian lacks faith, they will of course seek "earthly" explanations for their lack of it.
I of course am far beyond the belief that there is a personal God as claimed by the Christians, and view our culture and every other's use of gods as a means of explaining the world around them, be it why the Sun and Moon rise and set, why seasons exist, why crops go bad, why bad things happen to good people. The New Testiment version of God is a group of people attempting to understand the emotion of love that drives us to so many illogical ends.
So again, if you're a Christian attempting to argue creationism in a scientific setting against evolution, you need to stop, take a deep breath, and go and attempt to have more faith in your own beliefs.
#16The creation/evolution debate is a scientific debate, not one of religion.
Using the Scientific Method AND the criteria established by evolutionists, the theory of evolution needs to be reclassified as 'supernatural' instead of 'naturalistic.' Refer to:
http://www.whoisyourcreator.com/scientific_criteria.html
If you wish to counter the above, please use our forum to participate in a serious debate, otherwise your posting is nothing but just another opinion. Go to our forum @:
http://pub17.bravenet.com/forum/1424646898
Thank you!
#17I consider that the Boskops fossils and the pelvis fossils of Gona do prove wrong Darwin´s Theory of Evolution. Dawinists are looking for small headed halfway monkey halfway human fossils. What do they find? Completly human big headed fossils and a "woman" fossil capable of giving it birth. Please read my commentaries in http://www.cicatrices.com.mx
Felix Rocha Martinez
alot of research has been done over the years to prove darwin wrong. The point is, none has been able to gather concrete proof. the deal is simple, if you really want to prove darwin wrong, get some proof and propose an alternative theory. It's that simple. No i am no darwin supporter either but have been working on setting up an alternate theory.
regards
<a href="http://www.bobscycle.com">motocross boots</a>
#19I think you should post this to a forum about the meaning of life (follow my nick)! A lot of people would be interested.
#20(18)Larry:An alternative theory is exactly what I have proposed in www.cicatrices.com.mx
There I transcribed Richard Dawkins`s article "The Angry Evolutionist" and my response to it in a long article of 3 parts.
Felix Rocha Martinez
You make a very good point that Darwinian loyalists don't want to confront and would rather sweep under the rug. I am currently reading several books by Dr Gerald Schroeder, a MIT scientist, who used to work for NASA. Oh yeah, and he's also a religious Jew. His books put into layman's terms, ish, how science does NOT conflict with religion, and that they actually coincide perfectly. His titles include "Science and God" and "Genesis and the Big Bang". In "Science and God", he devotes numerous chapters to theories of evolution. One of the points he confronts is the fossil record. As you pointed out, he also noted that the fossil record does NOT coincide with Darwinian belief of evolution. There are no fossil records that show the slow evolution and mutation of species. In fact, the fossil records show explosions of new life and species as chronicled within Genesis. Oops... But, don't tell that to Darwinian loyalists. They'll most likely lynch you.
One final point of interest that Darwinian atheists like to forget or ignore is that Darwin never took God out of the equation. He actually mentions the Creator several times in his works. It was actually his later followers who removed all mention of God from his works and just conveniently forgot or ignored that little tidbit of information. Ooops again!
-OC