Re: Darwin the 'dunce' 'founder?' of modern evolution

In message <192eb91e-9f9f-4f56-9e5a-3adef6ab3525@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Art Biele <Abiele7000@xxxxxxx> writes
On Feb 15, 9:12 pm, j...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (John S. Wilkins) wrote:
Art Biele <Abiele7...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Feb 14, 1:46 pm, Ernest Major <{$t...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > In message
> > <7a7e2f92-724b-48e0-ad16-5df1d92cd...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Art
> > Biele <Abiele7...@xxxxxxx> writes

[Deletions]

> > If you want to serve the Lord you should refrain from promulgating
> > falsehoods. By tarnishing Christianity by associating it with falsehoods
> > you promote atheism.

> > 1) Huxley was not one of Darwin's mentors. The reverse is nearer the
> > truth.

> You are correct, Huxley was not Darwins Mentor, Lyell definitely was
> and i believe it was Lyell who actually came up with has been called
> Charles Darwin's sole contribution to Evolution theory, his mechanism
> of the very gradual ongoing accumulative novel changes a species
> continually undergo, with Natural selection selecting the best ones.
> To date, science has falsified this alleged mechanism, it has never
> been observed, and the changes that Darwin and friends did observe was
> caused by a mechanism Darwin knew nothing about, Mendellian genetics..
> Darwin never really understod what causes variation in the species.

How many fallacies and falsities can you pack into a single paragraph? I
am guessing that you have no upper limit to either.

John Wilkins, you do me wrong to treat me so discourteously. And after
we have known each other for so many years.

Doesn't your hypocrisy prick you in the slightest? Any complaint you may have in respect to John observing that he achieved a dense packing of fallaces and falsities in the quoted paragraph, pales in comparison to the discourtesy you've displayed to others here.

Lyell publicised the doctrine of uniformity of causes - the same causes
in oepration now are those in oepration in the past. Darwin learned that
from reading his book en route on the Beagle. He applied it, among other
places, in his discussions of both adaptation and speciation. He did not
require gradual accrual of novel changes, although he thought many if
not most were indeed gradual.

Lyell lied through his teeth, but most of his lies are a lot more
sublte and not easily refutable in 1830. The blantant lie he told
about Niagra Falls erosion is also well documented.

Given your record in this thread of consistently making factually incorrect assertions I'm not willing to believe your claim here. And I note that you neglected to provide any documentation.

From: http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/charles-lyell/

"Charles Lyell was born in Kinnordy, Forfarshire, Scotland, the eldest
of ten children. Lyell's father, also named Charles, was a botanist of
minor repute and first exposed the younger Charles to the study of
nature. Having attended Exeter College, Oxford ending in 1816, Lyell
encountered geology as a serious profession under the wing of William
Buckland. Upon graduation he took a professional detour into the law,
but dabbled in geology. His first paper, "On a Recent Formation of
Freshwater Limestone in Forfarshire", was presented in 1822. By 1827
he had abandoned the law and embarked on a long geological career that
would result in the widespread acceptance of the ideas proposed by
James Hutton a few decades before."

At Exeter College, Charles Lyell was a Law major, but his interest in
geology and origins was spurred by the lectures of famed geologist Dr.
William Buckland at Exeter College in Oxford. Buckland wrote Reliquiae
Diluvianae (1823) in which he argued that the evidence of geology
alone demonstrated that a great flood had covered the entire globe.
This irked young Charles Lyell so much from that moment on so absorbed
him that Lyell would soon give up his initial goal of practicing law
and instead, dedicate his life to overthrowing the Noachic geology.
Lyell embraced the very gradualistic uniformitarian geology ideas of
James Hutton, the very same gradualistic uniformitarian concept that
would be used in Darwin’s' origin of life scenario. At the time,
Charles Lyell had a plan to overthrow the Noachic geology, which he
estimated that it would take 50 years to do.

After 5 or 6 years of fabricating evidence [i.e. more specifically:
imposing his unifromatarian anti Noachic views on the geology] and,
even more so, fabricating bold, clever and deceptive argument to
intimidate the public. Lyell’s well planned deception is revealed in a
private letter Lyell sent to personal friend, George Poulette Scrope,
as Scrope prepared a review of the newly published first volume of The
Principles of Geology for the Quarterly Review:

"If you don't triumph over them, but compliment the liberality and
candor of the present age, the bishops and enlightened saints will
join us in despising both the ancient and modern physico-theologians.
It is just the time to strike, so rejoice that, sinner as you are; the
Q.R. is open to you. If I have said more than some will like, yet I
give you my word that full half of my history and comments was cut
out, and even as many facts; because I, or Stokes, or Broderip, felt
that it was anticipating twenty or thirty years of the march of honest
feeling to declare it undisguisedly. … I conceived the idea more than
five or six years ago. That if ever the Mosaic geology could be set
down without giving offence, it would be a historical sketch. … Let
them feel it, and point to the moral."

The Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, (Mrs.) K.M. Lyell
(ed.). John Murray, London: 1881. Vol. 1. p.271.

So about 1824, Charles Lyell, while practicing Law and dabbling in
geology in his spare time, came up with a plan to overthrow the Mosaic
geology, and not through hard scientific facts, but by an historical
sketch. This is not a man coming to a conclusion thrust upon him based
upon the evidences of a long and thorough review of the geologic
record, for whatever personal reason he had, Charles Lyell had an anti-
biblical bug up his ass. And he was not alone in this personal quest
of his, he had co-conspirators consisting in the very least of
Poulette, Stokes, and Broderip. Charles Lyell was not a Christian, His
attendance at Church on Sundays were a mere coverup that helped him
appear to others as an unbiased

Stephen Jay Gould and his fellow paleontolgists, and modern
geologists, know that Lyell and his long time pupil, Charles Darwin
were both wrong about their uniformatarian approach to geology and
origins of the species. A fact that is well documented today.

“Charles Lyell was a lawyer by profession, and his book [Principles of
Geology, 1830-1833] is one of the most brilliant briefs ever published
by an advocate ... Lyell relied heavily upon two bits of cunning to
establish his uniformitarian views as the only true geology. First, he
set up a straw man to demolish. ... In fact, the catastrophists were
much more empirically minded than Lyell. The geologic record does seem
to require catastrophes; rocks are fractured and contorted; whole
faunas are wiped out. To circumvent this literal appearance, Lyell
imposed his imagination upon the evidence. The geologic record, he
argued, is extremely imperfect and we must interpolate into it what we
can reasonably infer but cannot see. The catastrophists were the hard-
nosed empiricists of their day, not the blinded theological
apologists.

Lyell's 'uniformity' is a hodgepodge of claims. One is a
methodological statement [see previous paragraph] that must be
accepted by any scientist, catastrophist and uniformitarian alike.
Other claims are substantive notions that have since been tested and
abandoned. Lyell gave them a common name and pulled a consummate fast
one: he tried to slip the substantive claim by with an argument that
the methodological proposition had to be accepted..."

Stephen Jay Gould, “Catastrophes and Steady-State Earth, in Natural
History, February, 1975, pp. 16, 17.

“Gradualism was never ‘proved from the rocks’ by Lyell and Darwin, but
was rather imposed as a bias upon nature. … Has had a profoundly
negative impact by stifling hypotheses and by closing the minds of a
profession toward reasonable empirical alternatives to the dogma of
gradualism. …Lyell won with rhetoric what he could not carry with
data.”

Gould, S. J., ‘Toward the Vindication of Punctuational Change’. In: W.
A. BERGGREN & J. A. VAN COUVERING (Eds.): Catastrophes and Earth
History: The New Uniformitarian, Princeton University Press, Princeton
(New Jersey), pp. 14-16, 1984.

Dr. Kenneth Hsu, geologist at the Geological Institute of Zurich,
('Darwin's Three Mistakes' Geology, Vol. 14 1986) Shows that the lack
of transitional forms in the fossil record cannot be blamed on the
inadequacy of the Fossil record:

"We know that Lyell and Darwin were wrong on their insistence on the
imperfection of the geologic record. ... The Cretaceous/Tertiary
boundary falls within magnetostratigraphic Chron C29R, which was less
than .5 m.y. in duration (Kent, 1977). The boundary is recorded by
precision stratigraphy, which has a resolution power to recognize
events in thousands, if not hundreds, of years duration."

You're wrong again. Where Darwin has been shown to be wrong is explaining mass extinctions as an artefact of an incomplete fossil record.

Calculating how many transitional forms (which are not lacking) should be found in the fossil record is difficult, but back of the envelope calculations suggest that the number of observed interspecies transitions in the record is roughly as expected.


Natural selection clearly was not Darwin's creation, but the use of it
to generate novel populations clearly was. Mathew, Blyth and the other
contenders did not make that leap.

Novel populations like that the radiation of the Finches in the
Galapagos are indeed due to natural selection, but the natural
selection process can only select genes (i.e. latent physical traits)
that already exist, natural selection plays no role whatsoever in
creating new genetic traits. The only possible source are random
mutations of existing genes, and that is a totally different
discussion. In either case Darwin and Lyell had no clue of the real
causes of variation and radiations. Darwin Got it wrong.

I trust that you do reallse that none of this casts any doubt on the factuality of common descent with modification through the agency of natural selection and other processes.

Paleontologist Steven Stanley, speaking of these radiations, stated
that they may at first look like Darwinian Biological evolution at
first as one sees more diversity and variation of these species
overtime, But that in reality, this is not evolution in action.
Professor Stanley points out as an example Globoriginadae, those small
shell making organisms in the sea. Stanley points out that early in
the fossil record is species A. Then, as time goes by, Globeriginadae
A radiates ancestors ,1 2, 3, 4, etc. which are simlar to A, but
clearly different.

Then there occurs an extinction event for these creatures. All the
Globeriginadae are wiped out except one, the original Globeriginadae
A. After the extinction event as long past, one can see the same exact
radiation as the first one. It is clear that the information of all
subsequent varied Globeriginadae genetic is contained in the original
Globeriginadae A and that A was and is also the most fit of the bunch.
Just as the wolf was the most fit to survive of the dog family. It
also shows the original is more fit than the offspring, but Darwinism
calims the opposite. It also shows that loss of genetic information
was the source for the observed variations, and not tany new genetic
information as is required for any form of Darwinistic evolution.

These findings, and a host of others, support Genesis claim that
states God made the plants, the sea creatures, the land animals, each
according to their Kind. It is noteworthy that Genesis did not say
that God made the This dog and that dog, This feline and that feline,
This cow and that cow, etc, each according to their kind. Rather it
says He made the Cattle Kind, and each beast after their Kind. Genesis
also higlights that the information for each Kind was in their seeds.

Now, not to misrepresent Professor Stanley, He is an Evolutionary
Paleontologist. As least when he wrote this in a University Textbook,
He was an Atheist. So Philosopically, to Stanley, Evolution has to be
a fact. However, he had totally rejected Darwinism as the explanation
for materialistic Biological Evolution. Stanley embraced and supported
Gould and Eldredge in their Theory of Puntuated Equilibrium which
basically claimed that evolution occurred too fast over too short of
time to be observed in the fossil record. The Puntuationists,
consisting mostly of paleontologists who were well aware that for over
a hundred years, that the fossil record did not support Darwinian
Evolution. The evidence for PE is that since common ancestry by purely
materialistic processes is a fact, (Since God did not exist or was
irrelevant) then PE must be true.

The paleontologists felt that the evolutionary biologists, having a
stranglehold on the evolutionay science publications and periodicals,
had been controlling the what gets taught in Academia and in school
textbooks, and through their stronghold on the media as well, and they
had long been suppressing what the fossil record clearly did not at
all support: Darwinism. There is no signs of progessive, or any other
type of, evolution in the fossil record. It got so bad prior to Gould -
Eldredge that paleontolgists commonly gave new names to the same
fossil that was found at different levels in the fossil record and in
different regions of the world to hide Stasis in the fossil record.

Here are few cites from Scientists who are experts on the fossil
record.

Researcher Luther Sunderland, on behalf of the New York State Board of
Regents, Interviewed top paleontology experts from five of the world's
greatest fossil museums. They were Dr. Raup of the Chicago Field
Museum; Dr. Niles Eldredge of the New York City Museum of Natural
History; Dr. David Pilbeam of, Curator of the Peabody Museum of
Natural History at Yale; Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist of
the British Museum of Natural History in London, England; and Dr.
Fisher of the New York State Museum of Natural History. The Result:

"No museum official offered any real fossil evidence that any one of
the various invertebrates evolved into vertebrate fish" P. 63

"None of the museum officials could produce any fossil evidence of an
intermediate ancestor connecting the amphibians with with fishes." p
64

"None of the five museum officials could offer a single example of a
transitional series of fossilized organisms that would document the
transformation of one basically different type to another." p. 88
Luther Sunderland, 'Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and other Problems',
Master Books, 1988.

"All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious
little in the way of intermediate forms; Transitions between major
groups are characteristically abrupt." Stephen J. Gould, `Return of
the Hopeful Monster' Natural History, Vol. 86, 1977, p. 22)


"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persist
as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn
our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches,
the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of
fossils." Stephen J. Gould, `Evolutions Erratic Pace'
Natural History.


"The known fossil record fails to document a single example of
phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition."
Steven
Stanley, `Macro-evolution: Pattern and Process' p. 39, W.M. Freeman
and Company, 1979.


"As is now well known, most fossil species appear instantaneously in
the fossil record" Tom Kemp, Curator of the University Museum at
Oxford University, `A Fresh Look at the Fossil Record', New Scientist,
Vol 108, No: 1485, Dec. 5, 1985, p. 66)

"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides us 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." Evolutionary
paleontologist David Kitts, Ph.D. Zoology, Head Curator of the
Department of Geology of the Stoval Museum, `Paleontology and
Evolutionary Theory', Evolution, Vol. 28, Sept. 1974, p 467.


Evolutionist Gordon Rattray Taylor, in his book "The Great Evolution
Mystery" (1982) sarcastically quips "sure the fossil record is
imperfect, but you'd think they'd find at least 1 or 2 phylogenies."

Natural selection is far from being unobserved. Over ten years ago, a
large book of empirical examples was published - ghods know how many
have been published since.

Bell, Graham. Selection: The Mechanism of Evolution. New York: Chapman
and Hall, 1996.

Darwin did not need to know what caused variation. He said that it was a
fact that could be observed, and it is. He also said that he expected
there to be be an explanation one day of each, and there is.


We are talking about the evolution of the species, not about the
radiation of existing traits from an extremely large quantity of
latent traits existing within the genome. The onus is on the
evolutionists to demonstrate evolution of all species that ever
existed from some initial progenote. Darwin believed the cause for
variation was pangenes, which we know today to be false. Darwin was
dead wrong. Today Mendellian Genetics hold sway in biology, not
Darwin's pangenes. The Wolf radiation, The Goberigindae radiation, the
Finch radiation, the Cichlid radiations all occur as per Mendellian
Genetics, and not at all from Darwins Theory of Origins of the
Species. Admit is, Darwin and Lyell were flat out wrong about their
key suppositions. Not a surprising fact coming from the 19th Century
and their very limited knowledge of inheritance and genetics.

> > 2) Huxley famously argued that Darwin should not exclude saltationism.

> Yes he did, it was based on Huxley's honest observation of the fossil
> record of his day where none observed any gradual evolution evolution.
> Just like today, the fossil record is one of the abrupt appearance of
> species in the fossil record followed by stasis. As Gould pointed out,
> Darwin and Lyell were both wrong in their claims of gradualism, in
> geology and as a legitimate mode of the predicted single phylogenic
> Tree.

No Gould did not. In fact he and Eldredge mention an *example* of
gradual evolution in the fossil record in their 1977 paper. The trick
here is that "sudden" and "gradual" means something different in geology
than in biology. We know now that rather rapid populational events can
occur, but they are not saltative in the sense Huxley understood. Even
rapid changes involve small scale mutations and rearrangements, but
these may be in things like copy number or regulatory elements, which
can have large scale phenotypic effects.



> > 3) Darwin did not convince Lyell of the factuality of evolution until
> > long after the time-period during which Lyell could be considered one of
> > Darwin's mentors. (And why did you neglect to mention Darwin's mentors
> > during his time at Cambridge - the Rev. Sedgwick and the Rev. Henslow?)

> Because it was Charles Lyell whom Darwin said that he never gave Lyell
> enough credit for his theory of evolution, that half ot it came from
> Lyell's mind. Darwin claimed that he came to see evolution through
> Lyell's eyes. By 1837, a mere year or so after meeting Charles Lyell,
> Darwin already had formulated his mechanism on how evolution can occur
> without any need for God's help. That was the ultimate Goal of Lyell
> and friends.

You are either lying for effect, or you never read a damned thing by or
about Lyell of any worth. The guy was a devout Christian who objected to
the unguidedness of natural selection to his death.

He was a deceiver, willing to lie about the facts in order to
undermine the Biblical account, in 1830 he was capable to get away
with it, now his deceptions are clear, despite your blanket statement
to the contray. It is you who are in denial of the truth. I have
presented info that completely supports my analsysis. See Above. You
have become so obsessed with defending evolution that you can not
distiinguish fact from fiction. I suppose the next step in undermining
my presentation is to get a flurry of your friends here on Talk
Origins to agree with you. And this type of reaction is common to many
types of ideological based groups. This strange, peculiar reaction I
also get from fellow Christian who, when presented with the obvious
plain reading in context Scriptures on biblical topic, reject the
obvious because they wear the filtering glasses that the church they
belong to imposes upon them.

Do you accept that the earth is flat or that it is the centre of universe, or do you also reject the "obvious plain reading" of the Bible?

And doesn't your hypocrisy - "so obsessed with defending evolution that you can not distiinguish fact from fiction" - prick you in the slightest? And are not concerned with how closely you are flirting with blasphemy and idolatry?


Charles Lyell rejected the Biblical accounts of Geology and its
Creation by God accounts of the origins of the species, and he used
his skills as a lawyer, and Darwin, to impose filtering glasses on an
unsuspecting public of whom many bought what Lyell was selling
primarily because he feigned being one of them and pretending to be a
creationists while fully aware and strongly backing Darwin's (which
was really Lyell's) Origin of the Species. Even Darwin was shocked
that his closest friend, his mentor, the very guy, Darwin wrote, out
of whose brain came half of Darwins' ideas on evolution, and through
whose eyes Darwin actually saw evolution. Be honest John, Lyell was
not at all a Christian, he only pretended to be to facile his efforts
to undermine the Bible, the rock on which Christianity rest.

One would expect that a Christian would believe that God created the world, and would take the works of God (the world) as a higher authority than the words of men (the Bible, exegesis of the Bible).

I read your comments on species, though my mind is a bit hazy now, I
believe that I find your comments on the meaning of 'species' to be
agreeable.

Nice to meet ou agains John, disagreements on this topic aside, of
course my best wishes to you and yours, always.

Thats all for today folks. Hey, if you disagree with what I write, so
be it, I'm merely presenting how I see it and why I see it as so.


--
Alias Ernest Major

.

Relevant Pages

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