Originally posted by: busmaster11
Originally posted by: conjur
Originally posted by: busmaster11
Originally posted by: conjur
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories...polls/main657083.shtml
(CBS) Americans do not believe that humans evolved, and the vast majority says that even if they evolved, God guided the process. Just 13 percent say that God was not involved. But most would not substitute the teaching of creationism for the teaching of evolution in public schools.
Support for evolution is more heavily concentrated among those with more education and among those who attend religious services rarely or not at all.
There are also differences between voters who supported Kerry and those who supported Bush: 47 percent of John Kerry?s voters think God created humans as they are now, compared with 67 percent of Bush voters.
More proof that ignorance is bliss.
I weep for this nation.
Let's get down to the nitty gritty.
How many career geneticists can you find that support the theory of punctuated equilibrium?
Next time I run into a career geneticist, I'll ask.
Well, being as how genetics is really the key to whether all this evolution stuff is possible or not, and that PE is the key component of evolution which tries to explain all the dramatic sequences in the history of evolution, I'd say avoiding this issue or not reading up on it leaves you with *quite* a roadblock.
In fact, I would say it takes more faith to believe what you believe than for me to believe in God.
Do you know how precisely tuned each of the dozens of physical constants in the universe has to be to support life? The charges of subatomic particles, the ratio of helium to deuterium, the gravitational constant, etc... If any of these things were off by a tiny fraction, fusion wouldn't be able to form in the sun, or particles wouldn't be able to come together to form matter, or planets would never be able to congeal.
So what do you believe? That we won some sort of grand lottery, or that there's an Intelligent Creator?
Punctuated Equilibrium, fide Eldredge and Gould 1972, was a paleontological approach to some provincial mechanistic manifestations of synthetic evolution, namely the (mostly) recent vertebrate fossil record (at that time it was rare for paleontologists to be trained in evolution).
The idea called punctuated equilibrium had two sources and one overriding purpose?to provide an exit from the "disabling rescue" of Darwin's argument on imperfection. First, a statement about mode of change: Most new species do not arise by transformation of entire ancestral populations but by the splitting (branching) of a lineage into two populations.
Second, a statement about rate of change. The simple claim that species arise by splitting, and not by transformation of entire ancestral populations, does not guarantee punctuated equilibrium. Punctuated equilibrium gains its rationale from the ideal also a standard component of the allopatric speciation theory, that most peripherally isolated populations are relatively small and undergo their characteristic changes at a rate that translates into geological time as an instant.
Basically, the hub-bub is all really this: Speciation events occur in a geological instant and in a region of limited extent at some distance from the parental population. In other words, punctuated equilibrium?and not gradualism?is the expected geological translation for the standard account of speciation in evolutionary theory.
Punctuated equilibrium provoked a minor controversy amongst the ill-informed, exactly because most people who cared only enough to read "INSTEAD" of gradualism--jumped on that faster than flies to scat. Unfortunately they failed to understand PE, before jumping. From Gould himself:
"...The Theory became an issue (quite coincidentally) just when creationism reached its acme of thankfully temporary influence. Creationists, with their usual skill in the art of phony rhetoric, cynically distorted punctuated equilibrium for their own ends, claiming that we had virtually thrown in the towel and admitted that the fossil record contains no intermediate forms. (Punctuated equilibrium, on the other hand, is a different theory of intermediacy for evolutionary trends?pushing a ball up an inclined plane for gradualism, climbing a staircase for punctuated equilibrium.)"
PE is not the foundation of Evolution in any way, shape or form. It is IMHO an observation by Niles Eldrege about the fossil record--in the context of evolutionary theory. Most evolutionary biologists are neither supporters nor detractors of PE, since they don't work with fossils. In any case, it is tangential at best to Evolutionary theory, sensu stricto.