Evolution is a fact? It is admittedly unobservable, lacking fossil evidence, dependent upon scientific consensus, and essentially a belief system about past life on Earth. The following quotes are from leading and well known scientists and researchers.
It is observable just fine, in the present, and in traces of the past; in the lab and in the field. There is heaps of fossil evidence. This evidence is patchy, in various ways. Fossilisation rates are not uniform, either in time, or in location, or in sampling of the organisms; but there is still a heap of evidence which shouts evolution and for which there is no other explanation on the table.
(Classic creationism is refuted by fossil evidence quite definitely. The so-called "Intelligent Design" alternative is vague to the point of being totally useless. In fact, there is one stream of intelligent design that sees God setting up initial conditions, and leaving the rest to evolution; there is another that sees evolution itself as a designed consequence of a universe finely tuned for complexity.)
Your quotes are an example of what is called a "quote mine". It is a series of quotes misunderstood or misrepresented in some way so as to obscure the real views of the person quoted.
I'll focus on the first, because I know it well.
You start off with an classic misrepresentation of SJ Gould. The quote is accurate, but it is not saying anything remotely in support of your first paragraph if you read the article. Here is the quote as you present it.
"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."
Stephen Jay Gould (Professor of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University), "Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?" Paleobiology, vol. 6(1), January 1980, p. 127
Gould is a major evolutionary biologist (recently deceased). This article is early in the debate about punctuated equilibrium. He is refering to "gradualistic" accounts, by which he means in this context a roughly uniform rate of change over time. Gould proposes a more episodic model of change. There's a lot more we could say about this, but it is another topic entirely. Your inference that Gould would support the views you express in the first paragraph is wrong, and a misunderstanding of what Gould says in this quote and what Gould is meaning by gradualism in this context.
But here is another more directly relevant quote, which explains what Gould means by gradualism, what he thinks is refuted, and his anger at creationists who distort this to misrepresent the actual state of evidence for evolution.
From "Evolution as Fact and Theory" by SJ Gould writes:
I count myself among the evolutionists who argue for a jerky, or episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change. In 1972 my colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil recordgeologically "sudden" origin of new species and failure to change thereafter (stasis)reflect the predictions of evolutionary theory, not the imperfections of the fossil record. In most theories, small isolated populations are the source of new species, and the process of speciation takes thousands or tens of thousands of years. This amount of time, so long when measured against our lives, is a geological microsecond. It represents much less than 1 per cent of the average life-span for a fossil invertebrate speciesmore than ten million years. Large, widespread, and well established species, on the other hand, are not expected to change very much. We believe that the inertia of large populations explains the stasis of most fossil species over millions of years.
We proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium largely to provide a different explanation for pervasive trends in the fossil record. Trends, we argued, cannot be attributed to gradual transformation within lineages, but must arise from the different success of certain kinds of species. A trend, we argued, is more like climbing a flight of stairs (punctuated and stasis) than rolling up an inclined plane.
Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends,
it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationistswhether through design or stupidity, I do not knowas 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. ...
(Quote from
Evolution as Fact and Theory May 1981; in print in
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, (W. W. Norton & Co, 1994, pp. 253-262). Caution. The link seems not to be working at present.
Your second quote is forty years old, from Ronald West. Never heard of him before this. I don't know if the quote is out of context, or if Ronald is simply wrong. More to the point; I bet you don't either. If you are cutting and pasting material from another website, you are required to acknowledge it. Even when quoting a quote mine.
Cheers -- Sylas
This message has been edited by Sylas, 03-29-2005 04:21 AM
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