Barbarian chuckles:
You gave us a few edited "quotes", which apparently aren't representative of Gee's actual thoughts on the issue.
Gee's quote is his exact words
Edited to make it appear he meant something else.
Barbarian observes:
And yet Ron didn't know about all the transitional hominins in Africa and elsewhere.
I think Ron speaks the truth – the missing links in the sequences were a main worry for Darwin and they are still missing today.
He didn't know, because he was a "social anthropologist." No idea, pretty much like you.
This is why you can't find your missing in action fossil intermediates
I've shown you several, and asked you why we find so many that were predicted by evolutionary theory, and why we never find any where the theory says they shouldn't be. You keep dodging the question, for reasons everyone understands.
Barbarian observes:
You posted a statement that you attributed to Patterson, saying that Gould denied the existence of transitionals. I showed you, from a checkable source, that Gould did not say it, he affirmed that transitionals are "abundant", and expressed anger at those who misrepresented him.
You are so uninformed but that is to be expected.
Well, let's look again, then...
Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.
Stephen J. Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory," Hens Teeth and Horse's
Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1983, pp. 258-260.]
Let me show you what Gould said.
I just showed you what he said. Notice he says it directly and plainly. In this passage:
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches … in any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the gradual transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and fully formed. ~ Stephen Gould
He is commenting on speciation, the nodes where we find transitionals, and tips of branches where we find the ends of a lineage. It is extremely rare to find every species in a lineage. But, as Gould admits, horses, ammonites, and forams are among those for which we do have such data.
Gould says "abundant."
Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.
and Patterson's words speak for themselves as he correctly noted that Gould “and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils.”
And Gould actually says:
Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.
So Patterson, if you accuarately quoted him (which is highly unlikely, given your history here) is dead wrong. Gould says transitionals are abundant.
Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from one ancestral form to the descendants. But this is not what the*paleontologist*finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series. New types often appear quite suddenly, and their immediate ancestors are absent in the*geological*strata. The discovery of unbroken series of species changing gradually into descending species is very rare.
Again, notice that Mayr is saying that an unbroken series of species changing gradually" is very rare. Of course, if your belief was true, there wouldn't be any. But even where fossilization is less common, we have (in Gould's words) abundant transitionals. And you've been constantly dodging the question:
Why do we find so many transitionals which are predicted by evolutionary theory, but none at all where the theory says there should be none? When do you think you'll be willing to answer the question?
I've actually read that book. And if you would read it, instead of borrowing carefully edited passages, you'd find that Mayr has an answer for you. Farther down the page (15) and on the next page, he writes:
A few fossil lineages are remarkably complete. This is true, for instance, for the lineage that leads from the therapsid reptiles to the mammals. Some of these fossils appear to be so intermediate between reptiles and mammals that it is almost arbitrary whether to call them reptiles or mammals. A remarkably complete set of transitions was also found between the land-living ancestors of the whales and their aquatic descendants. These fossils document that whales are derived from ungulates (mesonychid condylartha) that increasingly became adapted to life in the water. The australopithecine ancestors of man also form a rather impressive transition from a chimpanzeelike anthropoid stage to that of modern man. The most complete transition between an early primitive type and its modern descendant that has been described is that between Eohippus, the ancestral horse, and Equus, the modern horse.
Ernst Mayr
What Evolution Is
Rare" vs. "no transitional fossils" take your choice
I'll use the word Gould did. "Abundant."
Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.
Why not just admit you were fooled again by people you should not have trusted? To continue to deny what is before you and everyone else here, is self-defeating. Learn from it and go on.
