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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (279559)	7/23/2002 3:20:24 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

What is your view on the modern view of evolution? I'm not sure what you mean by the modern view. I am most convinced by the Stephen J. Gould & Niles Eldridge theory of Punctuated Equilibrium. It is a modification of Natural Selection and not a new theory. I'm quite familiar with Darwin and the reasons that his original writings on Natural Selection have been updated. There are other theories which could be called modern. Besides the general concept being absurd, the huge gaps in the fossil record make the theory completely untenable scientifically The general concept is what is usually referred to as the fact of evolution. This is to say that the general evidence implies that there used to be creatures on earth which are different from the creatures that are now on earth. The underlying assumption is that this fossil evidence and current living organisms are connected. The theory of Natural Selection was discovered by Darwin, but also by other scientists and naturalists, in particular Wallace. The essential idea came from a book "The Principal of Population" by a man named Malthus. It was an idea who's time had come. What really made Darwin important is that he showed how to turn the speculation on evolution into a hard science. To be simple, science is a systematic method of forming a hypothesis, conducting an experiment that will test the hypothesis, and analysing the results in a way that can be checked and repeated. It is an iterative path to knowledge. Darwin showed that experiments could be performed to test the ideas of Natural Selection. These included Artificial Selection (selective breeding), comparitive survey (anatomy and behavior inspections of related groups), and excavation of fossils. A typical experiment to test the dinosaur extinction would be to dig for rock layers expected to be at the extinction boundary and then test 1) is there a boundary, and 2) are all dinosaurs below it and none above. Thousands of fossil experiments have been performed with consistent results. Nobody expects to find fossil evidence of every creature that ever existed on earth. The experimentation comes from finding representative samples and noting their anatomical makeup their relationship to other creatures of the same era and the time-frame of the surrounding inorganic material. A currently fruitful area of research is in the series of creatures which changed form cow-like, to hippo-like, to whale-like, to whales. All in the expected time sequence and degree of modification. Just the expansion of the theory from the very small to the very large is untenable. That's not an expansion, right from the beginning Natural Seletion was used to explain the change from the very small to the current creatures of all sizes. If there is one thing that has expanded it is our understanding of the time-scales in which the process works. Blue green algae ruled the world for about 3 billion years. Differences between Wolf and Chihuahua took a few thousand years. It's just a matter of having enough time to build up variations for selection processes to work on. The more differences (bigger DNA content) the faster the process can work. TP