[ANDY-J2]

Originally posted by Fear_nam_Beanntan

But we don't see much gradation between the species; just jumps and starts between them.


Firstly it should be remembered that any material from a living organism will almost certainly decay rather than be fossilised and only in certain favourable conditions will bone etc. be preserved as fossils and only in exceptional circumstances will soft tissue be preserved.Therefore we cannot reasonably expect there to be a fossil record which is complete,nevertheless there is sufficient fossilised evidence available to make conclusions about the mechanisms involved in species evolution.Classical Darwinists would have a problem explaining the various "jumps and starts" in the evolutionary process through which some species have gone yet punctuated equilibrium is a theory which many Darwinists adhere to and it provides an explanation for the sometimes erratic nature of evolution.

The way we date fossils is, to a large degree, dependent upon how we interpret strata. If strata were deposited one at a time over millions of years, that would fit perfectly with evolutionary theory. However, if, say, 3 strata could be deposited at once in a flood, that would complicate matters.

I think your point would only be relevant to fossils which were found in one particular type of rock-sedimentary,i.e rock which is formed by successive layers of sediment which through time become compressed.I'm not a geologist but I am aware that the various types of rock such as igneous and metamorphic are formed during processes which stretch over hundreds of millions of years.A flood is a very short lived phenomena which cannot have any great bearing on the process of rock formation.

It is relevant to the topic of whether or not life could have arisen and developed without an intelligent designer behind the process. I find abiogenesis inadequately explained because, even after widdling down numbers produced by creationists a great deal, the scientists on CJ's favorite website were still left with the fact that it is incredibly improbable. Of course, if there were many universes, it would have to happen in some of them.

How life actually comes into existence was a mystery to Darwin-something which he freely admitted-and the little speculation that he did make on the subject was in fact completely wrong,but in any case it wasn't really relevant to his theory of evolutiuon by means of natural selection.I personally have no difficulty in accepting that given certain conditions simple lifeforms can evolve from amino acids,because there is ample scientific evidence to support this idea.

And evolutionary theory deals with very old fossils, which is why radiometric dating is not all that reliable with regards to the subject at hand.



Paleontologists and biologists are well aware of the limitations of radiometric dating of extremely old fossils,yet evolutionary change occurs within species even over relatively short time spans such as 30 000 years and therefore it is of some use.It is not always a necessity to establish the age of any given fossil,we are after all dealing with processes which can take place over eons of time.We can look at various strata of rock and,having an awareness of the geological processes which have formed that rock,we can make reasonable estimates of the time scale we are dealing with.We can look at fossils of the same species from different strata and compare any physiological differences which exist which can provide us with a wealth of evidence about the mechanisms involved in the evolutionary process.

Punctuated equilibrium is Darwinist apologetics. Darwin's theory would predict that changes would occur at a uniform rate. Punctuated equilibrium attempts to explain why they don't, without shedding the central tenets of Darwinism.



There are classical Darwinists such as Dawkins and there are those such as the the late Stephen Gould who held differing viewpoints on various aspects of natural selection however they all operate within the same framework of Darwin's original theory which has withstood everything which has been thrown at it for over 150 years.They debate about the whys and wherefores and the timescales involved but none of them dispute that natural selection is a fact.Punctuated equilibrium isn't apologetics-it is an attempt by scientists who have used proper scientific methods to explain what seemed to be an anomaly within Darwinist theory.These scientists have provided hypotheses which can be tested and which are based on a rigorous examination of the available evidence-that is sound scientific practice not apologetics.