Well done Adrain. Good to see that reductio ad absurdum is alive and well!

I am aware of Stephen J Gould's essays on the subject. I'm not sure
about your inference though! I'm not looking for a complete record of
every creature that ever existed as you disingenuously put it, but if
there are holes in the record I would expect them to be randomly
distributed, or if not randomly then al least explicably.  To have
just about every trans-species record missing smells a bit like a
fish, or perhaps a semi-evolved mammal just crawling out of the
primeval swamp - oh no, no fossil evidence for those.

I have no problem with the useless 1% of an eye, and I can stretch my
imagination round that one developing to a 100% eye. What I can't
quite grasp is how an animal could develop a totally destructive
chemical reaction and then evolve the bony container to handle it! A
little beyond credibility in my mind!

And I didn't refer to wings, I referred to genetic development. Deep
down micro-complex structures where identicallness means something! If
you don't believe in that then presumably DNA evidence in court is
shot out of the water.

More rigour please Midge, otherwise I shall believe that you are a
hook, line and sinker recipient!

On 02/02/07, Adrian Midgley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> John Clegg wrote:
> > 1) There is little evidence in the fossil record for evolution from
> > one species to another, less than would be required to support the theory
> Stephen J Gould's essays are worth reading if you regard that as
> surprising.
> A complete record of every creature that ever lived would not convince
> some people, but I don't see a need for more specimens to support the
> theory.
>
> > 2) There are complex structures that could not have evolved in stages
> > because each earlier stage would be destructive of the owner of that
> > structure. A perfect example is the bombardier beetle that fires a
> > chemical flare out of its rear end and would have incinerated itself
> > at each stage until the full system was evolved.
> That is a perfect example of a wrong argument.  You'll find the argument
> has been dealt with in more than one place, if you look.  In summary, no
> it wouldn't.
> (It is a subclass of the "what good is 1% of an eye?" argument.)
>
> > 3) There are identical genetic developments in bird communities found
> > in Canada and an isolated island off Australia. The chances of these
> > evolving separately but identically are virtually nil, as are the
> > chances of migration, so what happened?
> I've no idea what identical genetic developments would be, but I note
> that birds have wings, and people don't and there are people in both
> Canada and Australia, so I don't accept that the chances of migration
> are small.
> > 4) There are identical fossils found in different parts of the world
> > in radically different dated strata.
> >
> I expect whoever displays them in a reputable museum has considered how
> they got there.  If they were coelocanths, or cockroaches, there would
> be no element of surprise at all, given the range of species and strata
> available it is hard to be more precise in a response.
>
> --
> Midgley
>