zeke
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- Jan 29, 2012
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What "large number" would that be? You've been mislead my friend. There is no large number. This is just one more fallacy presented under the flag-ship of Darwinian mythology. Mythology that you stepped in without looking?The large number of transitionals, many of which I showed you, clearly indicate common ancestry.
One of the most famous and widely circulated quotes was made a couple of decades ago by the late Dr Colin Patterson, who was at the time the senior paleontologist at the prestigious British Museum of Natural History.
So damning was the quote—about the scarcity of transitional forms (the ‘in-between kinds’ anticipated by evolution) in the fossil record—that one anticreationist took it upon himself to ‘right the creationists’ wrongs’. He wrote what was intended to be a major essay showing how we had ‘misquoted’ Dr Patterson. This accusation still appears occasionally in anticreationist circles, so it is worth revisiting in some detail.
Dr Patterson had written a book for the British Museum simply called Evolution. Creationist Luther Sunderland wrote to Dr Patterson inquiring why he had not shown one single photograph of a transitional fossil in his book. Patterson then wrote back with the following amazing confession which was reproduced, in its entirety, in Sunderland’s book Darwin’s Enigma:
What does the phrase, "there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument" mean to you?So damning was the quote—about the scarcity of transitional forms (the ‘in-between kinds’ anticipated by evolution) in the fossil record—that one anticreationist took it upon himself to ‘right the creationists’ wrongs’. He wrote what was intended to be a major essay showing how we had ‘misquoted’ Dr Patterson. This accusation still appears occasionally in anticreationist circles, so it is worth revisiting in some detail.
Dr Patterson had written a book for the British Museum simply called Evolution. Creationist Luther Sunderland wrote to Dr Patterson inquiring why he had not shown one single photograph of a transitional fossil in his book. Patterson then wrote back with the following amazing confession which was reproduced, in its entirety, in Sunderland’s book Darwin’s Enigma:
‘I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic licence, would that not mislead the reader?’
He went on to say:‘Yet Gould [Stephen J. Gould—the now deceased professor of paleontology from Harvard University] and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. … You say that I should at least “show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.†I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.’
~ Gary Bates "That quote!—about the missing transitional fossils"