Reflectorites
Check out the latest NATURE which has a letter from Benton, et. al.,
arguing that the fossil record at the level of family for the past 540 million
years, provides "uniformly good documentation of the life of the past".
This looks like another nail in Darwinism's coffin as it has always had to
argue that the fossil record was *very* incomplete in order to hide the
myriads of transitional forms that the `blind watchmaker' would leave in his
wake:
"But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted
on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties,
which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not
every geological formation and every stratum full of such
intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such
finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most
obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the
theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme
imperfection of the geological record. (Darwin C.R., "The Origin of
Species by Means of Natural Selection", [1872], Everyman's
Library, 6th Edition, 1928, reprint, pp292-293).
If the fossil record is substantially complete at the level of families, then this
a very low level of taxonomic classification (one up from genus) in the
basic seven part hierarchy of: kingdom, phylum, class, order, *family*,
genus, species.
Of course Darwinists will no doubt argue that evolution must always have
happened so rapidly in the past and/or in such small groups, that the fossil
record didn't preserve the evidence of it.
That's OK, but then that would be an unfalsifiable position. Also, that
scenario would be a *prediction* of creationist theory but an *unexpected
difficulty to be explained away* by Darwinian evolutionary theory!
Steve
PS: I sent this from work via webmail but it seems to have got lost in the
ether. Apologies if you get it twice.
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http://www.nature.com/server-java/Propub/nature/403534A0.abs_frameset
3 February 2000
Nature 403, 534 - 537 (2000) (c) Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
Quality of the fossil record through time
M. J. BENTON, M. A. WILLS & R. HITCHIN
Does the fossil record present a true picture of the history of life, or should
it be viewed with caution? Raup argued that plots of the diversification of
life were an illustration of bias: the older the rocks, the less we know. The
debate was partially resolved by the observation that different data sets
gave similar patterns of rising diversity through time. Here we show that
new assessment methods, in which the order of fossils in the rocks
(stratigraphy) is compared with the order inherent in evolutionary trees
(phylogeny), provide a more convincing analytical tool: stratigraphy and
phylogeny offer independent data on history. Assessments of congruence
between stratigraphy and phylogeny for a sample of 1,000 published
phylogenies show no evidence of diminution of quality backwards in time.
Ancient rocks clearly preserve less information, on average, than more
recent rocks. However, if scaled to the stratigraphic level of the stage and
the taxonomic level of the family, the past 540 million years of the fossil
record provide uniformly good documentation of the life of the past.
[..]
Nature (c) Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2000 Registered No. 785998
England.
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"Then the mathematical properties of the complex model will be investigated
up to the end of Chapter 5. Thereafter, in Chapter 6, we shall be in a
position to discuss the extent to which the neo-Darwinian theory can be
considered to work and the extent to which it cannot. To anticipate the
eventual outcome it will be found that, subject to the choice of a highly
sophisticated reproductive model, the theory works at the level of varieties
and species, just as it was found empirically to do by biologists from the
mid-nineteenth century onward. But the theory does not work at broader
taxonomic levels; it cannot explain the major steps in evolution. For them,
something not considered in the Darwinian theory is essential." (Hoyle F.,
"Mathematics of Evolution", [1987], Acorn Enterprises: Memphis TN,
1999, p10).
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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