Re: Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

To work a little bit from Don's argument, it is true that
we can use homology and morophological information to help
develop an evolutionary theory without any fossils. However,
I am concerned that without the fossil record, we are left
with a free parameter on the topic of time. Almost certainly,
there would be several apparently self-consistent models
that could lead to somewhat different conclusions about
what is or has been happening.

What fossils do is provide an independent reference
that helps pin down without dispute (except for those
who refuse to be satisfied by anything short of a voice
from heaven with full echo and burning bush) that evolution
is a process of change through time.

At the time that Galileo argued with the clergy, it was
a real act of faith to think the earth should move
around the sun because we didn't have a sensable model for
gravitional forces on planets. I'm not sure that the fossil
record is the "gravity" for evolution, but almost certainly,
alternative (_and_ reasonable) views would abound without it.

Anyway, Dawkin's basic point is essentially correct, but
we are generally thinking from the viewpoint of having
the fossil information as a guide. One would have to
think deeply about what that missing independent parameter
could do to the data.
Received on Wed Jan 5 08:06:21 2005