The gaps are fundemental..here are some more quotes:

"Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series." (Ernst Mayr-Professor Emeritus, Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, What Evolution Is, 2001, p.14.)

"All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt. Gradualists usually extract themselves from this dilemma by invoking the extreme imperfection of the fossil record." (Gould, Stephen J. The Panda’s Thumb, 1980, p. 189.)

"What is missing are the many intermediate forms hypothesized by Darwin, and the continual divergence of major lineages into the morphospace between distinct adaptive types." (Carroll, Robert L., "Towards a new evolutionary synthesis," in Trends in Evolution and Ecology 15(1):27-32, 2000, p. 27.)

"Given that evolution, according to Darwin, was in a continual state of motion ...it followed logically that the fossil record should be rife with examples of transitional forms leading from the less to more evolved. ...Instead of filling the gaps in the fossil record with so-called missing links, most paleontologists found themselves facing a situation in which there were only gaps in the fossil record, with no evidence of transformational evolutionary intermediates between documented fossil species." (Schwartz, Jeffrey H., Sudden Origins, 1999, p. 89.)

"He [Darwin] prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search....It has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction was wrong." (Eldridge, Niles, The Myths of Human Evolution, 1984, pp.45-46.)

"There is no need to apologize any longer for the poverty of the fossil record. In some ways it has become almost unmanageably rich, and discovery is out-pacing integration...The fossil record nevertheless continues to be composed mainly of gaps." (George, T. Neville, "Fossils in Evolutionary Perspective," Science Progress, vol. 48 January 1960, pp. 1-3.)

"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." (Kitts, David B., "Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory," Evolution, vol. 28, 1974, p. 467.)

"It is interesting that all the cases of gradual evolution that we know about from the fossil record seem to involve smooth changes without the appearance of novel structures and functions." (Wills, C., Genetic Variability, 1989, p. 94-96.)

"So the creationist prediction of systematic gaps in the fossil record has no value in validating the creationist model, since the evolution theory makes precisely the same prediction." (Weinberg, S., Reviews of Thirty-one Creationist Books, 1984, p.

"We seem to have no choice but to invoke the rapid divergence of populations too small to leave legible fossil records." (Stanley, S.M., The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species, 1981, p. 99.)

"For over a hundred years paleontologists have recognized the large number of gaps in the fossil record. Creationists make it seem like gaps are a deep, dark secret of paleontology..." (Cracraft, in Awbrey & Thwaites, Evolutionists Confront Creationists", 1984.)

"Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin’s time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record. and it is not always clear, in fact it’s rarely clear, that the descendants were actually better adapted than their predecessors. In other words, biological improvement is hard to find." (Raup, David M., "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History, vol. 50, 1979, p. 23.)

Chicago Field Museum, Prof. of Geology, Univ. of Chicago, "A large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: low-level textbooks, semi-popular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been found yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks...One of the ironies of the creation evolution debate is that the creationists have accepted the mistaken notion that the fossil record shows a detailed and orderly progression and they have gone to great lengths to accommodate this 'fact' in their Flood (Raup, David, "Geology" New Scientist, Vol. 90, p.832, 1981.)

"As we shall see when we take up the creationist position, there are all sorts of gaps: absence of graduationally intermediate ‘transitional’ forms between species, but also between larger groups -- between say, families of carnivores, or the orders of mammals. In fact, the higher up the Linnaean hierarchy you look, the fewer transitional forms there seem to be." (Eldredge, Niles, The Monkey Business: A Scientist Looks at Creationism, 1982, p. 65-66.)

"Transitions between major groups of organisms . . . are difficult to establish in the fossil record." (Padian, K., The Origin of Turtles: One Fewer Problem for Creationists, 1991, p. 18.)

"A persistent problem in evolutionary biology has been the absence of intermediate forms in the fossil record. Long term gradual transformations of single lineages are rare and generally involve simple size increase or trivial phenotypic effects. Typically, the record consists of successive ancestor-descendant lineages, morphologically invariant through time and unconnected by intermediates." (Williamson, P.G., Palaeontological Documentation of Speciation in Cenozoic Molluscs from Turkana Basin, 1982, p. 163.)

"What one actually found was nothing but discontinuities: All species are separated from each other by bridgeless gaps; intermediates between species are not observed . . . The problem was even more serious at the level of the higher categories." (Mayr, E., Animal Species and Evolution, 1982, p. 524.)

"The known fossil record is not, and never has been, in accord with gradualism. What is remarkable is that, through a variety of historical circumstances, even the history of opposition has been obscured . . . ‘The majority of paleontologists felt their evidence simply contradicted Darwin’s stress on minute, slow, and cumulative changes leading to species transformation.’ . . . their story has been suppressed." (Stanley, S.M., The New Evolutionary Timetable, 1981, p. 71.)

"One must acknowledge that there are many, many gaps in the fossil record . . . There is no reason to think that all or most of these gaps will be bridged." (Ruse, "Is There a Limit to Our Knowledge of Evolution," 1984, p.101.)

"We are faced more with a great leap of faith . . . that gradual progressive adaptive change underlies the general pattern of evolutionary change we see in the rocks . . . than any hard evidence." (Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 57.)

"Gaps between families and taxa of even higher rank could not be so easily explained as the mere artifacts of a poor fossil record." (Eldredge, Niles, Macro-Evolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches, and Adaptive Peaks, 1989, p.22.)

"To explain discontinuities, Simpson relied, in part, upon the classical argument of an imperfect fossil record, but concluded that such an outstanding regularity could not be entirely artificial." (Gould, Stephen J., "The Hardening of the Modern Synthesis," 1983, p. 81.)

"The record jumps, and all the evidence shows that the record is real: the gaps we see reflect real events in life’s history - not the artifact of a poor fossil record." (Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 59.)

"The fossil record flatly fails to substantiate this expectation of finely graded change." (Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 163.)

"Gaps in the fossil record - particularly those parts of it that are most needed for interpreting the course of evolution - are not surprising." (Stebbins, G. L., Darwin to DNA, Molecules to Humanity, 1982, p. 107.)

"The fossil record itself provided no documentation of continuity - of gradual transition from one animal or plant to another of quite different form." (Stanley, S.M., The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes and the Origin of Species, 1981, p. 40.)

"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." (Gould, Stephen J., "Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?," 1982, p. 140.)

"The lack of ancestral or intermediate forms between fossil species is not a bizarre peculiarity of early metazoan history. Gaps are general and prevalent throughout the fossil record." (Raff R.A, and Kaufman, T.C., Embryos, Genes, and Evolution: The Developmental-Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, 1991, p. 34.)

"Gaps between higher taxonomic levels are general and large." (Raff R.A, and Kaufman, T.C., Embryos, Genes, and Evolution: The Developmental-Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, 1991, p. 35.)

"We have so many gaps in the evolutionary history of life, gaps in such key areas as the origin of the multicellular organisms, the origin of the vertebrates, not to mention the origins of most invertebrate groups." (McGowan, C., In the Beginning . . . A Scientist Shows Why Creationists are Wrong, 1984, p. 95.)

"If life had evolved into its wondrous profusion of creatures little by little, Dr. Eldredge argues, then one would expect to find fossils of transitional creatures which were a bit like what went before them and a bit like what came after. But no one has yet found any evidence of such transitional creatures. This oddity has been attributed to gaps in the fossil record which gradualists expected to fill when rock strata of the proper age had been found. In the last decade, however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them. If it is not the fossil record which is incomplete then it must be the theory." (The Guardian Weekly, 26 Nov 1978, vol. 119, no 22, p. 1.)

“People and advertising copywriters tend to see human evolution as a line stretching from apes to man, into which one can fit new-found fossils as easily as links in a chain. Even modern anthropologists fall into this trap . . .[W]e tend to look at those few tips of the bush we know about, connect them with lines, and make them into a linear sequence of ancestors and descendants that never was. But it should now be quite plain that the very idea of the missing link, always shaky, is now completely untenable.” (Gee, Henry, "Face of Yesterday,” The Guardian, Thursday July 11, 2002.)

>> ^Drax:
Shiny, it's kind of like you're saying,
Ok, we have: . -> O
And you say, ah! But there's no transitional species that spans the gap of . and O
Then we find . -> o -> O
And you say, ah! But there's no transitional species that spans the gap of . and o
or o and O
Basically, the more evidence we find.. the stronger your argument gets! <IMG class=smiley src="http://cdn.videosift.com/cdm/emoticon/oh.gif">
ok, that last part's just a joke.. but seriously.. the other parts ARE your stance.
It's either that, or you're looking at o and e and expecting to find æ, which just doesn't happen.

So basically, you cannot provide a refutation to the information itself but instead try to discredit the source. I've got hundreds of these..it's not exactly a secret among palentologists that the evolutionary theory has more holes than swiss cheese. Another issue is just the dating itself..take these quotes out of context:

Curt Teichert of the Geological Society of America, "No coherent picture of the history of the earth could be built on the basis of radioactive datings".

Improved laboratory techniques and improved constants have not reduced the scatter in recent years. Instead, the uncertainty grows as more and more data is accumulated ... " (Waterhouse).

richard mauger phd associate professor of geology east carolina university In general, dates in the “correct ball park” are assumed to be correct and are published, but those in disagreement with other data are seldom published nor are the discrepancies fully explained

... it is usual to obtain a spectrum of discordant dates and to select the concentration of highest values as the correct age." (Armstrong and Besancon)

professor brew: If a C-14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it iscompletely out of date we just drop it. Few archaeologists who have concerned themselves with absolute chronology are innocent of having sometimes applied this method.

In the light of what is known about the radiocarbon method and the way it is used, it is truly astonishing that many authors will cite agreeable determinations as 'proof' for their beliefs. The radiocarbon method is still not capable of yielding accurate and reliable results. There are gross discrepancies, the chronology is uneven and relative, and the accepted dates are actually selected dates. "This whole blessed thing is nothing but 13th century alchemy, and it all depends upon which funny paper you read.” Written by Robert E. Lee in his article "Radiocarbon: Ages in Error" in Anthropological Journal Of Canada, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1981 p:9

Radiometric dating of fossil skull 1470 show that the various methods do not give accurate measurements of ages. The first tests gave an age of 221 million years. The second, 2.4 million years. Subsequent tests gave ages which ranged from 290,000 to 19.5 million years. Palaeomagnetic determinations gave an age of 3 million years. All these readings give a 762 fold error in the age calculations. Given that only errors less than 10% (0.1 fold) are acceptable in scientific calculations, these readings show that radiometric assessment should never ever be used. John Reader, "Missing Links", BCA/Collins: London, 1981 p:206-209

A. Hayatsu (Department of Geophysics, University of Western Ontario, Canada), "K-Ar isochron age of the North Mountain Basalt, Nova Scotia",-Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, vol. 16, 1979,-"In conventional interpretation of K-Ar (potassium/argon dating method) age data, it is common to discard ages which are substantially too high or too low compared with the rest of the group or with other available data such as the geological time scale. The discrepancies between the rejected and the accepted are arbitrarily-attributed to excess or loss of argon." In other words the potassium/argon (K/Ar) method doesn't support the uranium/lead (U/Pb) method.

"The age of our globe is presently thought to be some 4.5 billion years old, based on radio-decay rates of uranium and thorium. Such `confirmation' may be shortlived, as nature is not to be discovered quite so easily. There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radio-decay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences. And this could mean that the atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and events which brought the Mesozoic to a close may not be 65 million years ago, but rather, within the age and memory of man." (“Secular Catastrophism”, Industrial Research and Development, June 1982, p. 21)

“The procession of life was never witnessed, it is inferred. The vertical sequence of fossils is thought to represent a process because the enclosing rocks are interpreted as a process. The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning, if it insists on using only temporal concepts, because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales.” (O’Rourke, J.E., “Pragmatism Versus Materialism in Stratigraphy,” American Journal of Science, vol. 276, 1976, p. 53) (emphasis mine)

"The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning . . because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of science, January 1976.

Dr. Donald Fisher, the state paleontologist for New York, Luther Sunderland, asked him: "How do you date fossils?" His reply: "By the Cambrian rocks in which they were found." Sunderland then asked him if this were not circular reasoning, and *Fisher replied, "Of course, how else are you going to do it?" (Bible Science Newsletter, December 1986, p. 6.)

It is a problem not easily solved by the classic methods of stratigraphical paleontology, as obviously we will land ourselves immediately in an impossible circular argument if we say, firstly that a particular lithology [theory of rock strata] is synchronous on the evidence of its fossils, and secondly that the fossils are synchronous on the evidence of the lithology."—*Derek V. Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphic Record (1973), p. 62.

"The intelligent layman has long suspected circular reasoning in the use of rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks. The geologist has never bothered to think of a good reply, feeling the explanations are not worth the trouble as long as the work brings results. This is supposed to be hard-headed pragmatism."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1976, p. 48.

"Material bodies are finite, and no rock unit is global in extent, yet stratigraphy aims at a global classification. The particulars have to be stretched into universals somehow. Here ordinary materialism leaves off building up a system of units recognized by physical properties, to follow dialectical materialism, which starts with time units and regards the material bodies as their incomplete representatives. This is where the suspicion of circular reasoning crept in, because it seemed to the layman that the time units were abstracted from the geological column, which has been put together from rock units."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1979, p. 49.

"The prime difficulty with the use of presumed ancestral-descendant sequences to express phylogeny is that biostratigraphic data are often used in conjunction with morphology in the initial evaluation of relationships, which leads to obvious circularity."—*B. Schaeffer, *M.K. Hecht and *N. Eldredge, "Phylogeny and Paleontology," in *Dobzhansky, *Hecht and *Steere (Ed.), Evolutionary Biology, Vol. 6 (1972), p. 39

"The paleontologist's wheel of authority turned full circle when he put this process into reverse and used his fossils to determine tops and bottoms for himself. In the course of time he came to rule upon stratigraphic order, and gaps within it, on a worldwide basis."—*F.K. North, "the Geological Time Scale," in Royal Society of Canada Special Publication, 8:5 (1964). [The order of fossils is determined by the rock strata they are in, and the strata they are in are decided by their tops and bottoms—which are deduced by the fossils in them.]"The geologic ages are identified and dated by the fossils contained in the sedimentary rocks. The fossil record also provides the chief evidence for the theory of evolution, which in turn is the basic philosophy upon which the sequence of geologic ages has been erected. The evolution-fossil-geologic age system is thus a closed circle which comprises one interlocking package. Each goes with the other."—Henry M. Morris, The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth (1972), pp. 76-77

"It cannot be denied that, from a strictly philosophical standpoint, geologists are here arguing in a circle. The succession of organism as has been determined by a study of theory remains buried in the rocks, and the relative ages of the rocks are determined by the remains of organisms that they contain."—*R.H. Rastall, article "Geology," Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 10 (14th ed.; 1956), p. 168.

"The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning, if it insists on using only temporal concepts, because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1976, p. 53.

>> ^MaxWilder:
Let us begin with this definition of "quote mining" from Wikipedia: The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as "contextomy" or "quote mining", is a logical fallacy and a type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning.
Thank you, shinyblurry, for your cut&paste, thought-free, research-absent, quote mining wall of nonsense. The only part you got right is that you should google each and every one of these quotes to find out the context, something you actually didn't do.
>> ^shinyblurry:
Even the late Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University and the leading spokesman for evolutionary theory prior to his recent death, confessed "the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology..."

This Steven J. Gould quote is discussed in talk.origin's Quote Mine Project. Gould was a proponent of Punctuated Equilibria, which proposes a "jerky, or episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change" in evolution. The quotes that are taken out of context are arguing that the fossil record does not indicate a gradual change over time as Darwin suggested. The specifc quote above is discussed in section #3.2 of Part 3. Far from an argument against evolution, Gould was arguing for a specific refinement of the theory.
More to the point, your own quote says "extreme rarity", contradicting your primary claim that transitional fossils do not exist.
>> ^shinyblurry:
Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum and editor of a prestigious scientific journal... ...I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book... ...there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.

Dr. Patterson is discussed on a page dedicated to this quote in the Quote Mine Project. This page touches on the nature of scientific skepticism. As Dr. Patterson goes on to say, "... Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else." This is the nature of pure science. We can say that a piece of evidence "indicates" or "suggests" something, but there is nothing that may be held up as "proof" unless it is testable. As a man of principle, Dr. Patterson would not indicate one species evolving into another simply because there is no way to be absolutely sure that one fossil is the direct descendant of another. We can describe the similarities and differences, showing how one might have traits of an earlier fossil and different traits similar to a later fossil, but that is not absolute proof.
Incidentally, this is probably where the main thrust of the creationist argument eventually lands. At this level of specificity, there is no known way of proving one fossil's relation to another. DNA does not survive the fossilization process, so we can only make generalizations about how fossils are related through physical appearance. This will be where the creationist claims "faith" is required. Of course, you might also say that if I had a picture of a potted plant on a shelf, and another picture of the potted plant broken on the floor, it would require "faith" to claim that the plant fell off the shelf, because I did not have video proof. The creationist argument would be that the plant broken on the ground was created that way by God.
>> ^shinyblurry:
David B. Kitts. PhD (Zoology) ... 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...

This quote is from 1974. Think maybe some of those gaps might have gotten smaller since then? Doesn't really matter, because the scientist in question goes on to explicitly state that this does not disprove evolution. He then discusses hypotheses which might explain his perceived gaps, such as Punctuated Equilibrium. A brief mention of this quote is found in the Quote Mine Project at Quote #54.
>> ^shinyblurry:
N. Heribert Nilsson, a famous botanist, evolutionist and professor at Lund University in Sweden, continues:
My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed… The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.

First of all, Nilsson is only famous to creationists. To scientists, he's a bit of a wack-job. But that neither proves nor disproves his findings, it only goes to show that creationsists will frequently embellish a scientist's reputation if it will increase the size of the straw man argument. His writings would naturally include his opinions on the weaknesses of what was evolutionary theory at the time (1953!) in order to make his own hypothesis more appealing. He came up with Emication, which is panned as fantasy by the scientific critics. Perfect fodder for the creationists.
>> ^shinyblurry:
Even the popular press is catching on. This is from an article in Newsweek magazine:
The missing link between man and apes, whose absence has comforted religious fundamentalists since the days of Darwin, is merely the most glamorous of a whole hierarchy of phantom creatures … The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms that lie between species, the more they have been frustrated.
The popular press. Newsweek Magazine. 1980!!! What year are you living in, shiny???
>> ^shinyblurry:
Wake up people..your belief in evolution is purely metaphysical and requires faith. I suppose if you don't think about it too hard it makes sense. It's the same thing with abiogenesis..pure metaphysics.
Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are filled with over 100 million fossils of 250,000 different species.
The availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What is the picture which the fossils have given us?… The gaps between major groups of organisms have been growing even wider and more undeniable. They can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection of the fossil record. 2

Well, now you're just quoting some anonymous creationist. Any evidence whatsoever that the gaps between major groups are growing wider? No? Can't find anything to cut and paste in reply to that question?
>> ^shinyblurry:
You've been had..be intellectually honest enough to admit it and seek out the truth. Science does not support evolution.

I wonder, shiny, if in your "intellectually honest search for the truth" if you ever left the creationist circle jerk? Your quotes are nothing but out of context and out of date.

Let us begin with this definition of "quote mining" from Wikipedia: The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as "contextomy" or "quote mining", is a logical fallacy and a type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning.

Thank you, shinyblurry, for your cut&paste, thought-free, research-absent, quote mining wall of nonsense. The only part you got right is that you should google each and every one of these quotes to find out the context, something you actually didn't do.

>> ^shinyblurry:

Even the late Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University and the leading spokesman for evolutionary theory prior to his recent death, confessed "the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology..."


This Steven J. Gould quote is discussed in talk.origin's Quote Mine Project. Gould was a proponent of Punctuated Equilibria, which proposes a "jerky, or episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change" in evolution. The quotes that are taken out of context are arguing that the fossil record does not indicate a gradual change over time as Darwin suggested. The specifc quote above is discussed in section #3.2 of Part 3. Far from an argument against evolution, Gould was arguing for a specific refinement of the theory.

More to the point, your own quote says "extreme rarity", contradicting your primary claim that transitional fossils do not exist.

>> ^shinyblurry:

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum and editor of a prestigious scientific journal... ...I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book... ...there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.


Dr. Patterson is discussed on a page dedicated to this quote in the Quote Mine Project. This page touches on the nature of scientific skepticism. As Dr. Patterson goes on to say, "... Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else." This is the nature of pure science. We can say that a piece of evidence "indicates" or "suggests" something, but there is nothing that may be held up as "proof" unless it is testable. As a man of principle, Dr. Patterson would not indicate one species evolving into another simply because there is no way to be absolutely sure that one fossil is the direct descendant of another. We can describe the similarities and differences, showing how one might have traits of an earlier fossil and different traits similar to a later fossil, but that is not absolute proof.

Incidentally, this is probably where the main thrust of the creationist argument eventually lands. At this level of specificity, there is no known way of proving one fossil's relation to another. DNA does not survive the fossilization process, so we can only make generalizations about how fossils are related through physical appearance. This will be where the creationist claims "faith" is required. Of course, you might also say that if I had a picture of a potted plant on a shelf, and another picture of the potted plant broken on the floor, it would require "faith" to claim that the plant fell off the shelf, because I did not have video proof. The creationist argument would be that the plant broken on the ground was created that way by God.



>> ^shinyblurry:
David B. Kitts. PhD (Zoology) ... 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...


This quote is from 1974. Think maybe some of those gaps might have gotten smaller since then? Doesn't really matter, because the scientist in question goes on to explicitly state that this does not disprove evolution. He then discusses hypotheses which might explain his perceived gaps, such as Punctuated Equilibrium. A brief mention of this quote is found in the Quote Mine Project at Quote #54.


>> ^shinyblurry:

N. Heribert Nilsson, a famous botanist, evolutionist and professor at Lund University in Sweden, continues:
My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed… The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.


First of all, Nilsson is only famous to creationists. To scientists, he's a bit of a wack-job. But that neither proves nor disproves his findings, it only goes to show that creationsists will frequently embellish a scientist's reputation if it will increase the size of the straw man argument. His writings would naturally include his opinions on the weaknesses of what was evolutionary theory at the time (1953!) in order to make his own hypothesis more appealing. He came up with Emication, which is panned as fantasy by the scientific critics. Perfect fodder for the creationists.


>> ^shinyblurry:

Even the popular press is catching on. This is from an article in Newsweek magazine:
The missing link between man and apes, whose absence has comforted religious fundamentalists since the days of Darwin, is merely the most glamorous of a whole hierarchy of phantom creatures … The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms that lie between species, the more they have been frustrated.

The popular press. Newsweek Magazine. 1980!!! What year are you living in, shiny???


>> ^shinyblurry:
Wake up people..your belief in evolution is purely metaphysical and requires faith. I suppose if you don't think about it too hard it makes sense. It's the same thing with abiogenesis..pure metaphysics.
Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are filled with over 100 million fossils of 250,000 different species.
The availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What is the picture which the fossils have given us?… The gaps between major groups of organisms have been growing even wider and more undeniable. They can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection of the fossil record. 2


Well, now you're just quoting some anonymous creationist. Any evidence whatsoever that the gaps between major groups are growing wider? No? Can't find anything to cut and paste in reply to that question?

>> ^shinyblurry:
You've been had..be intellectually honest enough to admit it and seek out the truth. Science does not support evolution.


I wonder, shiny, if in your "intellectually honest search for the truth" if you ever left the creationist circle jerk? Your quotes are nothing but out of context and out of date.

Ah, the classic case of correlation versus causation.

In the U.S., between 1974 and 2004, 52.2% of all homicides were committed by those who listed their race as black, despite blacks accounting for 12.6% of the population (according to the 2010 census).

This of course will lead most racists to conclude that black people are inherently violent or cold-blooded, etc. Nevermind the socio-economic status of the majority of black Americans (almost a quarter of them live on wages below the poverty line, much higher rates of unemployment, etc.) which is a much more likely to be a reason for the crime statistics. Nevermind the justice system that has a much higher conviction rate for black offenders (probably also tied to the socio-economic status since if you can't afford a private lawyer you're going to get stuck with an over-worked and underpaid public defender).

It seems to me much more likely that these attacks are the result of immigrants who are coming from countries (Iraq, Somalia, and Pakistan seem to be where most of the rapists have come from) where they were likely already successful predators due to a lack of law enforcement and crumbling social structures. Old habits die hard. They move to Oslo and continue their predatory ways.

But could Islam really be the cause of this? Let's look at another statistic:

In Oslo, there are approximately 163,000 Muslims. Let's be generous and assume that only a quarter of these are adult males (40705) and the rest are women and children. Let's also be generous and assume that for every rape reported in Oslo, 10 rapes go unreported due to fear or shame (86 reported rapes x 10 unreported = 860 rapes). Let's further be completely unrealistic and assume each rape is the result of an individual offender (no repeat offenders or serial rapists). So now we have...

860 rapists / 40705 adult male population = 2.1% of the population

I've been hugely generous with these numbers, but I think you can see that this particular statistic does not really implicate Islam as a cause of the rapes. Wouldn't we expect to see a much higher percentage of the male population rampaging through Oslo if Islam was truly the cause of this behavior?

I'm not implying Islamic attitudes towards women don't contribute to the behavior of those who commit these crimes. But it seems hard to believe Islam is somehow responsible for these crimes any more than Christianity is responsible for pedophile priests (though the Catholic Church is certainly responsible for covering the abuses up).

I've been saying since 1974 that men need to have their Liberation Movement. Why the heck he has to frame it in relation to the Women's Movement, if this summary of his point of view is correct "Warren argues that society has been mislead by the feminist movement into perceiving women as victims of male oppression. He believes that the reverse is true; women have most of the rights and privileges whilst men are treated like 2nd-class citizens."

It does none of us any good to turn real issues into a pity party as to who is "oppressed" more.

.....Ah!!! I've just listened to the first 4 minutes and the summary is pure crap!

From the second part: He began to "speak on behalf of both sexes rather than just on behalf of women."

I love this man. The summary is crap, but Warren is top drawer.

I was deliberately vague in my Sift Talk opening, because I didn't want to get into an argument about specifics. I wanted to convey an idea, not argue back and forth. (By the way, my actual questions were never answered, not that I really expected them to be.)

There has been a lot of speculation on what pushed me over the edge into starting a Sift Talk, after 5 years of reading comments here. I know the culture. I have grown calloused, burlapped undie'd up, to quote dag. I even, after some initial horror, have grown to understand the nature of "sexist" comments, a little bit. They don't bother me as much as they used to. I see them, I sigh, I move on, sometimes I even enjoy them. So why now? What happened that pushed me over the edge?

I couldn't have answered coherently a couple of days ago. I think I can now.

It actually started two months ago. @Morganth posted a great video, part of a series.

http://videosift.com/video/Killing-Us-Softly-vertising-s-Image-of-Women

There were some great, thoughtful responses to this video. There were also some increasingly ugly, misogynist, hateful, ignorant comments. Each new ugly comment spawned another. I kept hoping it would drop into the archives, but instead, it sifted to the Top 15, with over 100 votes -- clearly not because of the content of the video, but because of the feeding frenzy of ugly comments, specifically targeted towards women. That video's comment thread could be used as a case study of unconscious -- and perhaps conscious -- male anger and hatred towards women. It could also be used to show the deep ignorance of men about what it means to be a woman. (Before you jump on me, believe me I know that most women are ignorant of the pressures put on men. But this isn't a contest about who has been hurt worst by cultural stereotypes and expectations, who is the bigger victim. I have been saying since 1974 that men need to fight against their oppression just as women had begun to.)

I also thought -- man, the Sift is being to change, who are all these people, this isn't the Sift I know and love. This is qualitatively different than the normal razzing that goes on here.

I didn't say anything. I just gritted my teeth and waited for it to go away. It eventually did.

Then a couple of days ago, eric -- who is one of my favorite people on the Sift, kind, observant, generous, a true feminist/humanist -- posted a link to what would become the C Punch vid in the sift lounge and said -- hey, somebody post this, this cracks me up. (He does that all the time -- shares links to vids. I have gotten several Top 15 vids and I think even one #1 -- eric is generous, remember?)

I watched it. I saw -- as I have said elsewhere -- what everyone else saw -- a woman trying to fit into an existing clique, wanting to belong, who allowed herself to be hit in accordance with the "rules" of the group. I have opinions about the idiocy of a pack of males and what their senses of humor devolve to, but I didn't think she was any more pressured than any man would have felt in the same group.

I also knew -- suspected -- feared -- that the troll crowd that showed up for the advertising vid would come out in force. That something really ugly would be unleashed. I didn't think that men who clearly have a problem with women (the new crowd from the advertising vid) would understand what was happening in the vid. That all they would see was a woman being hit in the genitals, and the feeding frenzy would begin.

I tried to stop the posting of the vid. Out of fear of what might happen.

And then it didn't. Because spoco2 spoke up quickly, became the human sacrifice, and the conversation got heated, intricate and wordy. It didn't devolve -- well, it devolved, but it devolved as most heated discussions do here. I was fine with that.

What I wasn't fine with, was the title. The title did not match the video. The title reflected (sorry gwiz, I know the word has different connotations in Denmark) my worst misogynist nightmare. I am not going to explain the nuances of why that is so -- I tried in the sift lounge after the fact, and I realized that if you aren't a woman, it is too complicated to communicate in this medium.

But the description of the vid was worse -- REALLY had nothing to do with the video, only had to do with the systemic, cultural violence towards women (sorry, gwiz, I know for you it was a joke. It wasn't for me.)

There are also generational differences, and experience differences, and not every woman would react the same way I did. So I didn't take any positive action to fix my distress -- it isn't up to me to enforce my views onto others.

But then it got promoted. By eric, who I adore, who I knew liked the vid (because it showed a woman acting as stupid as a man, which is funny theoretically). To the front page. With THAT title. And then it got promoted again, by someone who linked to a vid that was clearly domestic violence and was exactly the kind of comment that I feared beforehand (sorry Lasurus, I have no idea of you personally, but guy, please know -- that was Not. Cool.)

Now I am really beginning to feel uncomfortable. Promoted to the front page. Having to look at that title every time I came to the Sift (which is too much, but that is my particular brand of OCD.) But still I don't do anything, because hey, it is just my opinion. I'll wait for it to slide down into the archives.

But it couldn't be left to die away. A vid that reduced a woman to her naked torso in the thumbnail was promoted twice and qualitied. To the front page. Where I can't avoid it. It felt like there was an (unconscious) assault against women would never end, and that what I felt during the advertising comment stream was now spilling out onto the front page of the Sift. And yes, I know it was all meant as a joke, but it was increasingly not funny, it was increasingly uncomfortable to be a woman here.

Someone helped me find a solution to that problem -- I sent the vid to discuss and asked that the thumbnail be changed. Having a blatant bewb shot stuck at the top of the page wasn't good for the Sift, with its millions of visitors. That was clear to me and I knew that changing the thumbnail was a reasonable action, not just my personal queasiness.

But that is when I broke. When I got pushed over the edge. The advertising video making Top 15 with its horrendous comment stream, C Punch as the (inaccurate) title on a promoted vid, and then the trolling of pushing a thumbnail to the front page -- it was a combination of events that proved too much for me.

I needed to speak up. I did not want to stay silent anymore. I needed to break the polite silence.

But even then -- all I said was I didn't like it. And that I don't understand this need to be provoking and shocking -- one of my first interactions with blankfist was to send him a PM, asking him to explain to me what the thrill of trolling is. (He never answered me. But it was an honest question.)

You would have thought that I took an axe to the genitals of every man on the sift. For saying I didn't like it.

I find that amusing in the extreme. Netrunner figured it out. There is the most vicious trolling and personal attacks on the Sift ALL THE TIME. But a reasonable person speaks up and says "I don't like that?" WTF!

Look at the number of comments here. Just who are the sensitive, thin-skinned ones? And if you have the courage to ask yourself -- just how much of your anger is rooted in the cultural pressures you have been subjected to your whole life? (That is a college course or five years of therapy -- I'm not going to unpack that sentence for you.)

Women have been told to shut up and be nice for centuries. I have stayed silent for years here (not perfectly silent, I'm sure you can find examples proving that statement wrong -- but believe me, I have been silent far far far FAR more than I have said things.)

And now I spoke up. Said my piece. Learned some things about myself, and how I might use different tactics in the future to deal with things that disturb me, met some really cool new folks, and I have fallen in love with the Sift all over again.

>> ^kronosposeidon:

I still don't see any value in having user pages on our wiki in the first place, even if user pages can be edited solely by the user. Members can post as much or as little as they want on their profile page. To have a separate entry on the wiki is useless duplication, IMHO.
As far as topic pages about users, you may believe that only 10-15 members warrant them, but I'm sure it wouldn't take long for a lot more than that to show up. If Wikipedia includes shit like an entry about a song that hit #39 on the Billboard adult contemporary chart in 1974, then a wiki page here about a bronze star member who wrote two funny comments will show up sooner or later. Then the wiki becomes a massive repository for trivia and gossip. And maybe that's what some members want, but not me.

I agree that user pages on the wiki are (mostly) redundant. If it's some very simple config setting that won't disrupt any other function on the wiki, sure, turn off user pages. But if it's not, I don't see how it's worth Lucky's time and energy just to make things tidy, especially when there are so many other things to fix and improve.

I just don't believe that there is going to be some rash of topic pages about users suddenly springing up. Who's going to waste their time writing them? And what other pages are going to link to them if they're not particularly relevant? Even then, it can be policed just as wikipedia does - if the community doesn't think a particular page has relevance, then take it down. If a page is getting vandalized, block the vandals.

Trying to come up with a priori rules about editing the wiki that are essentially unenforceable seems like a waste of time. Why aren't the community guidelines that apply at VideoSift good enough for the wiki as well? Read the quote at the top of this Wikipedia adminstrator's page, and consider that in the context of VideoSift's wiki. The VideoSift wiki is never going to be a heavy traffic site, and does not need the kind of editing rules for pages about people that Wikipedia does.

I still don't see any value in having user pages on our wiki in the first place, even if user pages can be edited solely by the user. Members can post as much or as little as they want on their profile page. To have a separate entry on the wiki is useless duplication, IMHO.

As far as topic pages about users, you may believe that only 10-15 members warrant them, but I'm sure it wouldn't take long for a lot more than that to show up. If Wikipedia includes shit like an entry about a song that hit #39 on the Billboard adult contemporary chart in 1974, then a wiki page here about a bronze star member who wrote two funny comments will show up sooner or later. Then the wiki becomes a massive repository for trivia and gossip. And maybe that's what some members want, but not me. >> ^jonny:

Editing user pages should probably be restricted to the user in question. But just so every one is clear on this, there is a difference between a user page (http://wiki.videosift.com/index.php/User:jonny), and a page about a user (http://wiki.videosift.com/index.php/jonny). The former is very much like a personal profile page here, complete with it it's own Talk page (wiki.videosift.com/index.php/User_talk:jonny) where others can leave messages. The latter is a topic page about a particular user written by the community at large.
I understand the concerns about topic pages on users, but I honestly think it's a very small issue. There are probably no more than 10-15 people in the history of VideoSift that have ever been prominent enough to warrant such a page. Of those, I can think of only one or two that might be bound for an edit war.
Just like VideoSift itself, the entire content of the wiki will be community driven, and one butt hurt user can use that freedom to personally attack others. The answer isn't to restrict editing freedom for the sake of rare cases, but to treat the rase cases as they arise (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blocking_policy), just as they are on VideoSift itself. Concerns about hurtful content on Wiki.videosift.com being more "permanent" are misguided. It's not like the wiki is going to draw large amounts of traffic.

A "Unique American artform"? COME ON... fricken American's and their bloody blinkered view of the world and history such that they think that they invented everything.

The Cars that Ate Paris: A 1974 Australian film by Peter Weir

Austrian Erwin Wurm creates Fat Cars

And I'm sure there are many others... fricken bloody Americans.

Gah.

Strange, I'll have to look at the local properties -- it sounds like you guys flood the same way our areas flood here, specifically. Last major flood in Salt Lake City was in 82'-83' after monsoon rains and a heavy winter melt (this is 15-35 minute drive, but on one of two major highways going downtown.

That "flood" (City Creek flood) was something to behold as the community was driven into overdrive and created a man-made river going down Salt Lake Valley's state street (if you run google earth state street goes right into the middle of downtown, with LOTS of businesses. The flood river was pretty long from memory, like 6-10 miles. They built man-made river and then built bridges every block to get across (that is community power!). I remember standing on a bridge, amazed that humans could triumph over nature that well, sometimes.

The flood was bigger than what it says as there was flooding down all major canyon rivers and creeks (everything I-15, which goes into L.A., & east needed to be worried -- again google earth will show you the roads, rivers and creeks --, same with the Jordan River and next to the Great Salt Lake (which had been flooding over and over again for years -- they made a giant drain at one end of the lake and created an evaporation pond to dump excess into. No more floods for the lakes anymore and many flood rivers and creeks areas are cut-off and gone now (put underground).

Good luck to you guys. Hopefully, it lets up.

edit-Damn I was looking and some of the setups are the same except you get tropical (we almost never get tropical monsoons unless a hurricane hits off of California and moves in; otherwise, we get little garbage thunderstorms that cause "local" problems). No cyclones/hurricanes to ever worry about as the mountains would rip a tropical depression to shreds. Snowpack is our "cyclone".

>> ^dag:

The last massive flood in the Brisbane area was in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_Brisbane_flood">1974. This is the monsoon season- but most years it just means thunderstorms.
Still raining heavily this morning. Animals are pairing up.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

The last massive flood in the Brisbane area was in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_Brisbane_flood">1974. This is the monsoon season- but most years it just means thunderstorms.

Still raining heavily this morning. Animals are pairing up.

>> ^kceaton1:

>> ^dag:
promote because it's still raining hard

Is that area prone to flooding every so often. I just thought it was interesting that the clay was so red, as that is what I've noticed in Red Rock (central-southern Utah here and some of the outlying "badlands")areas and gullies in canyons.
Is this more of a monsoon type event or tropical? We get monsoons (some big hail or "lots" of hail, sometimes a few inches worth and torrential rain), but not tropical ones that engorge everything with water just squalls of tiny thunderstorms (like the tornado that hit downtown Salt Lake years ago...)

Oh that's possible. I don't know when my sensei trained with Steven, but know for sure he trained under Ueshiba (my sensei, not Steven).

Honestly, I think Steven's contributions to martial arts has more to do with his outsized ego than his ability. Many of the practitioners in my dojo are probably just as skilled, if not more so, than Steven, but they simply don't have his charisma.

I don't think his size is really at cause for his power, however. In aikido, size can serve as a detriment if it is not embodied within the hara -- the center -- and moves with the hips, as in any athletic endeavor.

And as someone who has experienced the kind of qi he references here, the energy is in no way mystical. It is a real phenomenon with actual effects on the mat.

>> ^TheFreak:

>> ^Trancecoach:
My Aikido sensei, an 8th Dan, trained under the founder of Aikido with Steven. when you learn to embody the principles, the art is quite beautiful
His demo starts around 1:15 in this video.

Morehei Ueshiba died in 1969. Steven Seagal went to Japan in 1974. So Seagal never learned Aikido from the founder.
His accomplishments in Aikido are still impressive though. Undoubtedly the biggest influence in popularizing the martial art in the US.
And to elevate one of Westy's points, I suspect he gets more power from being 6'4" than he gets from any form of mystical, universal energy.

>> ^Trancecoach:
My Aikido sensei, an 8th Dan, trained under the founder of Aikido with Steven. when you learn to embody the principles, the art is quite beautiful
His demo starts around 1:15 in this video.


Morehei Ueshiba died in 1969. Steven Seagal went to Japan in 1974. So Seagal never learned Aikido from the founder.

His accomplishments in Aikido are still impressive though. Undoubtedly the biggest influence in popularizing the martial art in the US.

And to elevate one of Westy's points, I suspect he gets more power from being 6'4" than he gets from any form of mystical, universal energy.

24 year old (if you are referring to Manning). And I would say to you that courage without conscience is simple barbarity.

When the democratic revolution happened here in Portugal, 25 of April of 1974, the soldiers under the command of the regime all disobeyed orders. Things could have gotten very ugly if they had disregarded their conscience and followed orders like good soldiers. There was special concern over a battleship stationed near Lisbon, since the Navy was more loyalist. They could have leveled half the city. But they did nothing.

The only people who fired on the crowd were the secret services, trying to gain time so they could burn all the evidence of their abuses of the population.

So you tell me that Manning doesn't know his ass from his head, but maybe it's the other way around. Because US soldiers are very good soldiers. They always obey orders.

Sorry, but...

"(...)In the movie Animals Are Beautiful People by Jamie Uys, released in 1974, some scenes portray elephants, warthogs and monkeys becoming intoxicated from eating fermented marula fruit. Later research showed that these scenes were improbable and, in all probability, staged. Elephants would need a huge amount of fermented marulas to have any effect on them, and other animals prefer the ripe fruit. The amount of water drunk by elephants each day would also dilute the effect of the fruit to such an extent that they would not be affected by it."

Source: Morris, Steve; David Humphreys and Dan Reynolds (2006). "Myth, marula, and elephant: an assessment of voluntary ethanol intoxication of the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) following feeding on the fruit of the marula tree (Sclerocarya birrea)". Physiological and Biochemical Zoology
- via wikipedia