evolution

I ask my opponent to show where I disagreed with the definition presented. My opponent brings some actual proof, "the fossil records". To my chagrin he does not bring any specific examples or sources. Regarding the accuracy of using the fossil records I present the following points: First, regarding the accuracy of depth to age connection I present the following quote :( I give credit to shmuel waldman for the following.) "It is, indeed, a well-established fact that the (physical-stratigraphical) rock units and their boundaries often transgress geologic time planes in most irregular fashion even within the shortest distances."—*J.A. Jeletzsky, "Paleontology, Basis of Practical Geochronology," in Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, April 1956, p. 685. Next it seems to me curious that dinosaurs were around millions of years ago they seem extremely complex and advanced. The problem with the fossil records is known as the missing link, long periods of time with no change followed by seeming rapid change. My opponent ans. this by stating that fossils are rare occurrences. The following is a partial list of quotes from experts on this topic, the full list can be found at www.genesispark .com: "Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series." (Ernst Mayr-Professor Emeritus, Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, What Evolution Is, 2001, p.14.) "He [Darwin] prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search....It has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction was wrong." (Eldridge, Niles, The Myths of Human Evolution, 1984, pp.45-46.) "Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin's time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record. and it is not always clear, in fact it's rarely clear, that the descendants were actually better adapted than their predecessors. In other words, biological improvement is hard to find." (Raup, David M., "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History, vol. 50, 1979, p. 23.) Chicago Field Museum, Prof. of Geology, Univ. of Chicago, "A large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: low-level textbooks, semi-popular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been found yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks...One of the ironies of the creation evolution debate is that the creationists have accepted the mistaken notion that the fossil record shows a detailed and orderly progression and they have gone to great lengths to accommodate this 'fact' in their Flood (Raup, David, "Geology" New Scientist, Vol. 90, p.832, 1981.) "We are faced more with a great leap of faith . . . that gradual progressive adaptive change underlies the general pattern of evolutionary change we see in the rocks . . . than any hard evidence." (Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 57.) "Gaps between families and taxa of even higher rank could not be so easily explained as the mere artifacts of a poor fossil record." (Eldredge, Niles, Macro-Evolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches, and Adaptive Peaks, 1989, p.22.) "To explain discontinuities, Simpson relied, in part, upon the classical argument of an imperfect fossil record, but concluded that such an outstanding regularity could not be entirely artificial." (Gould, Stephen J., "The Hardening of the Modern Synthesis," 1983, p. 81.) "The record jumps, and all the evidence shows that the record is real: the gaps we see reflect real events in life's history - not the artifact of a poor fossil record." (Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 59.) "The fossil record flatly fails to substantiate this expectation of finely graded change." (Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 163.) "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, Stephen J., "Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?," 1982, p. 140.) "People and advertising copywriters tend to see human evolution as a line stretching from apes to man, into which one can fit new-found fossils as easily as links in a chain. Even modern anthropologists fall into this trap . . .[W]e tend to look at those few tips of the bush we know about, connect them with lines, and make them into a linear sequence of ancestors and descendants that never was. But it should now be quite plain that the very idea of the missing link, always shaky, is now completely untenable." (Gee, Henry, "Face of Yesterday," The Guardian, Thursday July 11, 2002.) Next my opponent mentions a fascinating study in which birds grew rudimentary teeth by activating genes. 1st I find it quite perturbing and unscientific that the web site didn't bother posting any pictures, nor peer review. Next point is that the article states that today birds don't have teeth, a quick web search came up with 10 birds with some sort of teeth.(and they even had the sense to put up pictures instead of expecting people to believe them.) ( Next I question why the birds would have lost these teeth, as teeth are generally helpful not harmful). Next point is that rudimentary teeth are a relatively small thing compared to the diff. between birds and dinosaurs. Lastly, and most importantly as the article itself states birds at one point in time, (and some still do), did have teeth this would make the loss of teeth micro evolution not macro. Regarding the dinosaur bird link: (I give Dovid Gottlieb credit for the following) Larry Martin [one of the world's foremost experts on the birds of the Mesozoic era], The Sciences, March/April 1988: "I began to grow disenchanted with the bird-dinosaur link when I compared the eighty-five or so anatomical features seriously proposed as being shared by birds and dinosaurs. To my shock, virtually none of the comparisons held up....the moral of the story is that such poor attention to detail has been repeated with almost every feature cited to support a bird-dinosaur relation. No wonder that [the book criticizing the link] has an undercurrent of righteous outrage, or that it has been so bitterly attacked by the practitioners of the faulty logic it exposes." Regarding "macro is just a bunch of micro", It's not as simple as people think to quote S.J. Gould "the small does not always aggregate smoothly into the large". To quote an analogy from Professor David Gottlieb, "just bec. you see ants working together in groups of hundreds to build an ant hill doesn't give one the right to say trillions of ants working together built the pyramids. With regard to the fruit flies my opponent offers no source. My opponent mentions Darwin's finches; this is irrelevant as this is micro evolution. I've run out of space. Regarding BoP see R1 and comments.