Reddit reviews Fossils And Evolution

> Egnor is decades out of date and shows no sign of knowing anything at all about evolutionary biology in the 21st century.

Of course Coyne is going to say that :P. Egnor is an ID proponent and Coyne is one of the most rabid anti-IDers there is. He can't even address the subject without using the term IDiots and conflating ID with creationism (while there's much overlap, there are more similarities between Christianity and Islam than the two).

> "it has been suggested" ... Do you have a link

I sourced it from here. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find more recent versions of gray's anatomy online.

> when you take a step back, and look at the evidence for evolution as a whole, it is very very hard to argue against. ... there are observed evolutions (moths, fruit flies, finches, etc.), ... The gymnastics that must be done to explain these things without evolution is ridiculous.

I certainly believe in evolution (as do even the most conservative YEC groups), but doubt that it's capable of creating the vast complexity we observe in life. I go into more detail on this point elsewhere on this thread. Nobody's responded yet, if you want to have a go at it.

> There are many more cases of "bad design"

Nearly every case I've studied (such as the vertebrate retina) has ended up like the vagus nerve. Any engineer will tell you that every design has tradeoffs, especially when you factor in all of the requirements for embryonic development and self-sustaining repair.

> the fossil record

It shows sudden explosions of new life at various times in history, followed by long periods of stasis and then extinction. Creationists can't find a devonian bunny, and it doesn't provide the gradualism needed for Darwinism--it's the enemy of everyone's view.

1. "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. The gaps must therefore be a contingent feature of the record." Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory, Evolution, 1974
   
2. "Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin, and knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded.... Ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time. By this I mean that 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—what appeared to be a nice, simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic", Paleontologist David Raup, Conflicts between Darwin and Paleontology, Filed Museum of Natural History, 1979
   
3. "The fossil record, like the stratigraphical record, is thought to be episodic with long periods of quiescence separated by short periods of explosive evolution, expropriations and extinctions ... The point emerges that if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find' over and over again' not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another.", Derek V. Ager, The Nature of the Fossil Record, Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, 1976
   
4. "No real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation. This does not mean that the theory of evolution is unproven. ... There have traditionally been three kinds of evidence, and it is these, not the "fossil evidence", that the critics should be thinking about. The three arguments are from the observed evolution of species, from biogeography, and from the hierarchical structure of taxonomy.", Oxford zoologist Mark Ridley, Who Doubts Evolution?, New Scientist, 1981
   
5. "There is a striking lack of correspondence between genetic and evolutionary change. Neo-Darwinian theory predicts a steady, slow continuous, accumulation of mutations that produces a progressive change in morphology leading to new species, genera, and so on. But macroevolution now appears to be full of discontinuities, so we have a mismatch of some importance. That is, the fossil record shows mostly stasis, or lack of change, in a species for many millions of years; there is no evidence there for gradual change even though, in theory, there must be a gradual accumulation of mutations
   at the micro level." The coming Kuhnian revolution in biology, Nature Biotechnology, 1997
   
6. "In virtually all cases a new taxon appears for the first time in the fossil record with most definitive features already present, and practically no known stem-group forms." Fossils and Evolution, Kemp, Oxford University Press, 1999, p246
   
7. "Microevolution provides no satisfactory explanation for the extraordinary burst of novelty during the late Neoproterozic-Cambrian radiation, nor the rapid production of novel plant architectures associated with the origin of land plants during the Devonian, followed by the origination of most major insect groups. Each burst was followed by relative quiescence, as the pace of morphological innovation fell. Non-random appearance of major groups continues at lower taxonomic levels as well.". Macroevolution is more than repeated rounds of microevolution, Evolution and Development, 2000
   
8. "The cases in point include the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla. In each of these pivotal nexuses in life's history, the principal "types" seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate "grades" or intermediate forms between different types are detectable. ... The Cambrian explosion in animal evolution during which all the diverse body plans appear to have emerged almost in a geological instant is a highly publicized enigma. Although molecular clock analysis has been invoked to propose that the Cambrian explosion is an artifact of the fossil record whereas the actual divergence occurred much earlier, the reliability of these estimates appears to be questionable.", Koonin, The Biological Big Bang model for the major transitions in evolution, Biology Direct, 2007
   
   I also thought Coyne unwittingly made an excellent point about the fossil record in the post I linked above:
   
   
9. "Artificial selection clearly has created forms that, if found in the fossil record, or if you saw them and didn’t know they were products of artificial selection, would clearly be regarded as different species. ... All seven descendant vegetables have the same common ancestor, and were bred for various traits (the odious Brussels sprout, for example, for small unopened heads). Does anybody doubt that if we found fossil impressions of these, or saw them growing as wild plants in nature, they’d be regarded as different species, or even different genera? ... there is much more variation among living breeds of dogs--artificially selected within the past 10,000 years at most--than there is among the wild species of canids in nature. If dog breeds like the two above were found in the fossil record, they’d be regarded at least as different species, or even different genera (remember that Australopithecus and Homo are different genera).
   
   I've addressed most of the other common evidences for darwinism (tree of life, junk DNA, embryology, ERV's) elsewhere on this thread, if you ctrl+f JoeCoder.
   
   > Can I turn this around and ask you why you do not believe in evolution?
   
   I go into more detail as to why I believe in ID in my response to mg_irl1 elsewhere on this thread, scroll to "Why do you believe in intelligent design?"