And you are not realizing, or not wanting to admit that the implications as to what they are saying, is that the evidence that supposedly supports universal common descent, or Darwinian evolution is just not in existence.
Of course he does. I accept common descent. When it is applied to the limits to what is observed. Not what is imagined.
Within each of the different kinds there are various species of the same kind. These all share the same common ancestors that belong to the kinds of organisms in question. This is what is known among the evolutionists as micro evolution. And again, this is ancestors of one kind, passing along DNA information of that same kind to descendant that belong to that same kind.
This is what is observed. Not the unobserved crossing the kind boarders where more than one kind of lifeforms supposedly share a common ancestor. This would also be known as macro evolution.
But, the evolutionists love to offer as evidence what is supporting their micro evolution, which is nothing more than natural selection, and infer it as evidence to support their macro evolution, because they have never been able to demonstrate where any two kinds of lifeforms today, are sharing a common ancestor.
And your attempt to support Darwin’s lack of a scientific degree, shows you are missing the point.
You are the one who made the sad claim that YOU NEED TO BE AN EVOLUTIONARY BELIEVER TO UNDERSTAND EVOLUTION.
But, Darwin had nothing of the science that scientists of today have.
And so, your claims are baseless.
You don’t have to be accept evolution to know whether evolution is scientifically sound or not.
You can, for yourself, look at the data and know that it is not scientifically sound.
As can be shown by your lack of evidence to support your claims.
“150 Years Later, Fossils Still Don’t Help Darwin”
Source: 150 Years Later, Fossils Still Don't Help Darwin | The Institute for Creation Research
" Why would Eldredge and Gould propose such a model? Because they knew the data showed that potential transitional fossils are an extreme rarity. Gould and Eldredge said this many times over the years. Here are a few notorious quotes:
- “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. … In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed.’” (Gould, 1977)
- “The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.” (Gould, 1980)
- “All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.” (Gould, 1982, p. 189)
- “No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It never seemed to happen. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields … a rate too slow to account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history. When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the fossils did not evolve elsewhere!” (Eldredge, 1995, p. 95)
Gould and Eldredge readily admitted the commonality of abrupt appearances of new species and the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record. And they admitted this pattern with respect to the fossil record as a whole — not simply when discussing “preservational bias” for or against certain groups or something like that. They recognized the problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution across the board. Their model therefore sought to explain why abrupt change was the dominant pattern in the fossil record. The logic goes like this: We have a problem (abrupt appearance and stasis), and punc eq, in their telling, provides a solution. This alone tells us a major reason they proposed their theory was to explain the lack of transitional forms.
But was their exact motive for proposing punctuated equilibrium ever stated explicitly?
Explicitly Stated Motives Behind Punc Eq
While writing this, I searched for a nice passage from Gould explaining the basics of punc eq, and so I turned to his book Punctuated Equilibrium, published posthumously in 2007. Here I found a discussion by Gould of his thinking “in proposing punctuated equilibrium”:
I recount this story at some length, as an introduction to punctuated equilibrium, both because Falconer and Darwin presage in such a striking manner, the main positions of supporters and opponents (respectively) of punctuated equilibrium in our generation, and because the tale itself illustrates the central fact of the fossil record so well — geologically abrupt origin and subsequent extended stasis of most species. Falconer, especially, illustrates the transition from too easy a false resolution under creationist premises, to recognizing a puzzle (and proposing some interesting solutions) within the new world of evolutionary explanation. Most importantly, this tale exemplifies what may be called the cardinal and dominant fact of the fossil record, something that professional paleontologists learned as soon as they developed tools for an adequate stratigraphic tracing of fossils through time: the great majority of species appear with geological abruptness in the fossil record and then persist in stasis until their extinction. Anatomy may fluctuate through time, but the last remnants of a species usually look pretty much like the first representatives. In proposing punctuated equilibrium, Eldredge and I did not discover, or even rediscover, this fundamental fact of the fossil record. Paleontologists have always recognized the longterm stability of most species, but we had become more than a bit ashamed by this strong and literal signal, for the dominant theory of our scientific culture told us to look for the opposite result of gradualism as the primary empirical expression of every biologist’s favorite subject — evolution itself.
Testimonials to Common Knowledge
The common knowledge of a profession often goes unrecorded in technical literature for two reasons: one need not preach commonplaces to the initiated; and one should not attempt to inform the uninitiated in publications they do not read. The longterm stasis, following a geologically abrupt origin, of most fossil morphospecies, has always been recognized by professional paleontologists.
GOULD, 2007, PP. 19-20, EMPHASES ADDED
As you can see, a main point that Gould cites as animating his theory is the “geologically abrupt origin” of species, followed by their stasis (i.e., lack of evolution).
But a much more direct statement of the motive for proposing punctuated equilibrium came in a 1977 paper by Gould and Eldredge in Paleobiology.
Two other classes of information were explained away or simply ignored: 1) morphological gaps in stratigraphic sequences — which might have suggested a punctuational view of evolution were attributed to imperfections of the fossil record; 2) evolutionary stasis, though recognized by all and used by stratigraphers in the practical work of our profession, was ignored by evolutionists as “no data.” Thus, Trueman rejoiced in Gryphaea(1922) but never mentioned the hundreds of Liassic species that show no temporal change. Rowe (1899) monographed Micraster but spoke not a word about its legion of static colleagues in the English chalk. In fact, the situation in paleontology is far worse than that confronting genetics a decade ago. At least the geneticists were frustrated by an absent technology: they knew what data they needed. Paleontologists allowed a potent, historical bias to direct their inquiry along a single path, though they could have accumulated other data at any time. What’s more, paleontologists accumulated hardly any good examples: the gradualistic idols that were established had feet of clay and rarely survived an intensive restudy. The tale of Gryphaea is dead in Trueman’s formulation (Hallam 1968; Gould 1972). Micraster will soon follow. (Rowe’s data identified three successive species, but he had no stratigraphic control for samples within taxa. Even if his gradualistic tale were true — which it is not — his own limited data could not have established it.) The collapse of classic after classic should have brought these gradualistic biases into question. The alienation of practical stratigraphy from an evolutionary science that required gradualism should have suggested trouble (see Eldredge and Gould, in press): always trust the practitioners.
This sorry situation led us to postulate our alternative model of punctuated equilibria (Eldredge 1971; Eldredge and Gould 1972). We wanted to expand the scope of relevant data by arguing that morphological breaks in the stratigraphic record may be real, and that stasis is data-that each case of stasis has as much meaning for evolutionary theory as each example of change.
GOULD AND ELDREDGE, 1977, EMPHASES ADDED
At the beginning of the second paragraph they say there is a “sorry situation” that “led” them to postulate punc eq. The “sorry situation” is described in their first paragraph: there were two facts about the fossil record that were “ignored by evolutionists”: (1) “morphological gaps” and (2) “stasis.” “What’s more,” they write, “paleontologists accumulated hardly any good examples” of gradual change in the fossil record. They call these rare instances “gradualistic idols.” In other words, the lack of fossil evidence for transitional forms “led” them to postulate punc eq."
Source: Punctuated Equilibrium and Lack of Transitions | Science and Culture Today
And so you see, those transitional fossils are myths.
A fact recognized and confessed by Patterson.
" > ‘I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic licence, would that not mislead the reader?’
He went on to say:
‘Yet Gould [Stephen J. Gould—the now deceased professor of paleontology from Harvard University] and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. … You say that I should at least “show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.” I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.’3 [Emphasis added]…" During a public lecture presented at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History on 5 November 1981, he dropped a bombshell among his peers that evening, who became very angry and emotional. Here are some extracts from what he said:
‘ … I’m speaking on two subjects, evolutionism and creationism, and I believe it’s true to say that I know nothing whatever about either … One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, well, let’s call it non-evolutionary, was last year I had a sudden realisation.
‘One morning I woke up … and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff [evolution] for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it.’—the late Dr Colin Patterson, formerly senior paleontologist, British Museum of Natural History
‘… One morning I woke up … and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff [evolution] for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it.’ He added:
‘That was quite a shock that one could be misled for so long …"
Source: https://creation.com/that-quote-about-the-missing-transitional-fossils
And you have been mislead just as much.
Now, as far as Todd Wood is concerned, he is far from being the prime example for a scientist or a Bible believing Christian.
I can provide many more quotes from evolutionists and those who used to be evolutionists who have stated their concerns for the errors found in universal common descent.
Now I read the article and some about his article.
And I can’t find where he listed any evidence to support his claims in his blog.
And according to those articles about his articles, there is very little that he offers for evidence also.
And look here. You keep forgetting, YOU HAVE NO EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT COMMON DESCENT EVOLUTION.
All you have are what has been claimed. There is no empirical evidence demonstrating that any two kinds of organisms ever shared a common ancestor.
You can make the claim that since an ape and humans have similar features this must mean they had a common ancestor, but, I will point out that apes and humans have had similar features for thousands of years.
And you can find apes and humans with similar features in the fossil record.
But, what you don’t find, is any of the descendants of any of the different kinds of animals, slowly becoming less like one kind of animal and more like a human or an ape.
What has always been observed is all apes give birth to apes. This means there were at least a male and female ape that had the first ever ape baby, ies.
And we have only observed humans giving birth to human babies.
And since all of the other kinds of lifeforms have been known to only reproduce those of their own kind, then exactly where are you going to get a contestant for your mythical common ancestor.
Your sarcasm notwithstanding, you fail to supply any evidence other than unsubstantiated claims that evolution is scientifically sound.
