Evolution..and dam that missing evidence

As far as I know, the quotations below originate in the pro-evolution camp, except for the very few labeled "Creationist". . .

"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing' evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them . . . "

David B. Kitts, PhD (Zoology)
Head Curator, Dept of Geology, Stoval Museum
Evolution, vol 28, Sep 1974, p 467

"The curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps; the fossils are missing in all the important places. "

Francis Hitching
The Neck of the Giraffe or Where Darwin Went Wrong
Penguin Books, 1982, p. 19

"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. "

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
"Is a new general theory of evolution emerging?"
Paleobiology, vol 6, January 1980, p. 127

". . . Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils . . . I will lay it on the line, there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. "

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist,
British Museum of Natural History, London
As quoted by: L. D. Sunderland
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 89

"We do not have any available fossil group which can categorically be claimed to be the ancestor of any other group. We do not have in the fossil record any specific point of divergence of one life form for another, and generally each of the major life groups has retained its fundamental structural and physiological characteristics throughout its life history and has been conservative in habitat. "

G. S. Carter, Professor & author
Fellow of Corpus Christi College
Cambridge, England
Structure and Habit in Vertebrate Evolution
University of Washington Press, 1967

"The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear . . . 2. Sudden Appearance. 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'. "

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
Natural History, 86(5):13, 1977

"But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?" (p. 206)

"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 gravest objection which can be urged against my theory (of evolution). " (p. 292)

Charles Darwin
The Origin of Species, 1st edition reprint
Avenel Books, 1979

"Darwin. . . was embarrassed by the fossil record. . . we are now about 120-years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, . . . some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information. "

David M. Raup, Curator of Geology
Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago
"Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology"
Field Museum of Natural History
Vol. 50, No. 1, (Jan, 1979), p. 25

"Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are filled with over 100-million fossils of 250,000 different species. The availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What is the picture which the fossils have given us? . . . The gaps between major groups of organisms have been growing even wide and more undeniable. They can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection of the fossil record. "

Luther D. Sunderland, Creationist
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems,
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 9

"My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed. . . . The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to the scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled. "

Prof N. Heribert Nilsson
Lund University, Sweden
Famous botanist and evolutionist
As quoted in: The Earth Before Man, p. 51

"The family trees which adorn our text books are based on inference, however, reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. "

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
"Evolution's Erratic Pace"
Natural History, May, 1977, p. 13

". . . if man evolved from an apelike creature he did so without leaving a trace of that evolution in the fossil record. "

Lord Solly Zuckerman, MA, MD, DSc (Anatomy)
Prof. of anatomy, University of Birmingham
Chief scientific advisor, United Kingdom
Beyond the Ivory Tower
Taplinger Publishing Company, 1970, p 64

"The entire hominid (a so-called 'ape-man' fossil) collection know today would barely cover a billiard table. . . Ever since Darwin. . . preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man. "

John Reader
"Whatever Happened to Zinjanthropus?
New Scientist, March 26, 1981, pp. 802-805

"The fossils that decorate our family tree are so scarce that there are still more scientists than specimens. The remarkable fact is that all the physical evidence we have for human evolution can still be placed, with room to spare, inside a single coffin. "

"Modern apes, for instance, seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans -- of upright, naked, tool-making, big-brained beings -- is, to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter. "

Dr. Lyall Watson
"The Water People"
Science Digest, May 1982, p 44.

"The fossil record pertaining to man is still so sparsely known that those who insist on positive declarations can do nothing more than jump from one hazardous surmise to another and hope that the next dramatic discovery does not make them utter fools. . . As we have seen, there are numerous scientists and popularizers today who have the temerity to tell us that there is 'no doubt' how man originated. If only they had the evidence. . . "

William R. Fix
The Bone Peddlers (Macmillan, 1984), pp. 150

"A five million year old piece of bone that was thought to be a collarbone of a humanlike creature is actually part of a dolphin rib. . . The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone. "

Dr. Tim White
Evolutionary anthropologist
University of California at Berkeley
New Scientist, April 28, 1983, p. 199

". . . not being a paleontologist, I don't want to pour too much scorn on paleontologists, but if you were to spend your life picking up bones and finding little fragments of head and little fragments of jaw, there's a very strong desire to exaggerate the importance of those fragments. . . "

Greg Kerby
From an address to the Biology Teachers
Association of South Australia, 1976

"Echoing the criticism made of his father's Homo habilis skulls, he (Richard Leakey) added that Lucy's skull was so incomplete that most of it was 'imagination, made of plaster of paris,' thus making it impossible to draw any firm conclusion about what species she belonged to. "

Richard Leakey (Son of Louis Leakey)
Director of National Museums of Kenya, Africa
The Weekend Australian, May 7-8, 1983, p. 3

"The evidence given above makes it overwhelmingly likely that Lucy was no more than a variety of pygmy chimpanzee, and walked the same way (awkwardly upright on occasions, but mostly quadrupedal). The 'evidence' for the alleged transformation from ape to man is extremely unconvincing. "

Albert W. Mehlert, Creationist and Former
Evolutionist & paleoanthropology researcher
"Lucy - Evolution's Solitary Claim for Ape/Man"
Creation Research Society Quarterly,
Vol 22, No. 3, (Dec 1985), p. 145

"In recent years several authors have written popular books on human origins which are based more on fantasy and subjectivity than on fact and objectivity. . . by and large, written by authors with a formal academic background. . . Prominent among them were On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz, The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris. . . " (p. 283)

"Yet the tendency for individual paleontologists to trace human history directly back to their own fossil finds has persisted to the present day. " (p. 285)

"So one is forced to conclude that there is no clear cut scientific picture of human evolution. " (p. 285)

Dr. R. Martin, Senior Research Fellow
Zoological Society of London
"Man is Not an Onion"
New Scien...

Originally posted by vishvahetu
As far as I know, the quotations below originate in the pro-evolution camp, except for the very few labeled "Creationist". . .

"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing' evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolu ...[text shortened]... w Scien...

Originally posted by vishvahetu
As far as I know, the quotations below originate in the pro-evolution camp, except for the very few labeled "Creationist". . .

This has already been covered:

The creationists' love affair with 'gaps' in the fossil record symbolizes their whole gap theology. I once introduced a chapter on the so-called Cambrian Explosion with the sentence, 'It is as though the fossils were planted there without any evolutionary history.' Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to wet the reader's appetite for the full explanation that was to follow. Sad hindsight tells me now how predictable it was that my patient explanation would be excised and my overture itself gleefully quoted out of context. Creationists adore 'gaps' in the fossil record, just as they adore gaps generally.
Many evolutionary transitions are elegantly documented by more or less continuous series of gradually changing intermediate fossils. Some are not, and these are the famous 'gaps'. Michael Shermer has wittily pointed out that if a new fossil discovery neatly bisects a 'gap', the creationist will declare there are now twice as many gaps! But in any case, note yet again the unwarranted use of a default. If there are no fossils to document a postulated evolutionary transition, therefore God must have intervened.


Professor Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion

Although, of course, you would call him a liar.

Originally posted by twhitehead
But since you label all scientists and creationists a 'lying', 'cheating' amongst others, how can you quote their words to try and back up your argument?
Why not simply make the point you want to in your own words then listen to the counter arguments. Oh yes, I almost forgot, you cant handle criticism especially from us atheists.

So why do you post here?

http://img2.moonbuggy.org/imgstore/prove-it-with-religion.jpg

Originally posted by Proper Knob
Firstly, it's dam[b]n, not dam.

Secondly, all your quotes, bar one, are 30+ years old. That's prehistoric in terms of evolutionary science.

Thirdly, if even there wasn't single fossil, evolution would still be true as it's written in our, and every other living animals, DNA.[/b]

vishvahetu

The flaws in you post have already been pointed out in this thread but what I want to know is what exactly motivates you to hate evolution theory SO much as to waste huge amounts of your time surfing the net to cherry-pick extracts and quotes made by various people that vaguely sound critical of the theory? -I mean. it must have taken you ages to make that post! -and for what? You have demonstrated nothing and convinced us of nothing.

Why can you not understand that if you are to convince us of something then you must demonstrate it to be so? -and you are not demonstrating anything just merely by quoting what other people are saying for you must either produce an actual argument or show actual evidence for that.

Originally posted by Andrew Hamilton
vishvahetu

The flaws in you post have already been pointed out in this thread but what I want to know is what exactly motivates you to hate evolution theory SO much as to waste huge amounts of your time surfing the net to cherry-pick extracts and quotes made by various people that vaguely sound critical of the theory? -I mean. it must have taken y ...[text shortened]... ople are saying for you must either produce an actual argument or show actual evidence for that.

Originally posted by vishvahetu
I dont know why I bother to answer you Andrew, because you are a dishonest man, but....one more time.

The evolution therory has been proven to be false and fabricated, by "Forbidden Archeology"..... and the negative responce to that book, by the dishonest critics, has been sqashed, in another book called "Forbidden Archeology the Impact"

Thousands o ...[text shortened]... our buddys, labelled as dishonest men.

Now you know, so we wont have this talk again, OK.

Originally posted by vishvahetu
I dont know why I bother to answer you Andrew, because you are a dishonest man, but....one more time.

The evolution therory has been proven to be false and fabricated, by "Forbidden Archeology"..... and the negative responce to that book, by the dishonest critics, has been sqashed, in another book called "Forbidden Archeology the Impact"

Thousands o ...[text shortened]... our buddys, labelled as dishonest men.

Now you know, so we wont have this talk again, OK.

Originally posted by Agerg
[b]Thousands of honest scientists are rejecting the evolution therory, and in time it will be pulled from being taught in schools.

Ha! Given your definitions of "honesty" and "science" I'm sure we won't be needing to worry any time soon 😵[/b]

The creationists' love affair with 'gaps' in the fossil record symbolizes their whole gap theology. I once introduced a chapter on the so-called Cambrian Explosion with the sentence, 'It is as though the fossils were planted there without any evolutionary history.' Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to wet the ichard Dawkins - The God Delusion

Although, of course, you would call him a liar.[/b]

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
perhaps if you guys addressed Vishys concerns rather than the now obligatory ad hominen attacks your statements would have more credibility, simply to state that he is dishonest, rude, unapologetic, crazy, talks nonsense, etc etc is not helping your case much!

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
perhaps if you guys addressed Vishys concerns rather than the now obligatory ad hominen attacks your statements would have more credibility, simply to state that he is dishonest, rude, unapologetic, crazy, talks nonsense, etc etc is not helping your case much!