Augray wrote:

On 21 Aug 2006 19:28:02 -0700, "david ford" <dford3@gl.umbc.edu> wrote
in <dford3-1156213682.542522.237940@i42g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> :

Augray wrote:

On 18 Aug 2006 18:32:21 -0700, "david ford" <dford3@gl.umbc.edu> wrote
in <dford3-1155951141.950076.182290@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com> :

Augray wrote in "Re: OT: Christ died for Adam's sin, not ours":

On 15 Aug 2006 07:12:44 -0700, "david ford" <dford3@gl.umbc.edu> wrote
in <dford3-1155651164.825148.288330@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com> :

I'll ask it again:
[Augray]"I use these terms in the same sense as Darwin."
Q: What was the sense in which Darwin used the word "Gradualism"?

Gradualism is the rate of change.

Huh. Was paleontologist Simpson a proponent of [Augray]"Gradualism"?

Was Simpson a proponent of [Augray]"the rate of change"?

What does Simpson say?

Do you agree with this 1983 Simpson?:
In the fossil record, there is evidence... that exceptionally rapid
rates of change have usually been involved when distinctly new
kinds or levels of organization and of ecological occupation have
arisen in evolving organisms.

What does this have to do with Natural Selection?

What is [Augray]"Natural Selection"?

Do you disagree with any of this Dawkins?:

Dawkins, Richard. "The necessity of Darwinism" _New Scientist_ (15
April 1982), 130-2. The opening paragraph + 1 sentence:
Biology is the study of the complex things in the Universe.
Physics is the study of the simple ones. It is the complexity of
life, coupled with the precision of its adaptation, that cries out
for a special kind of explanation, and a hunger for such
explanation has frequently driven people to believe in a
supernatural Creator. Complexity means statistical improbability.
The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less can we

believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially the
obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer. But
Charles Darwin showed how it is possible for blind physical forces
to mimic the effects of conscious design, and, by operating as a
cumulative filter of chance variations, to lead eventually to
organised and adaptive complexity, to mosquitoes and mammoths, to
humans and therefore, indirectly, to books and computers. Darwin's
theory is now supported by all the available relevant evidence, and
its truth is not doubted by any serious modern biologist.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Dawkins, Catley on the coming Kuhnian revolution, Collingridge & Earthy
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=Pine.SGI.3.96A.981113234219.18273B-100000%40umbc9.umbc.edu

omphalic YEC and blindwatchmakingist parallels
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=dford3-b1c67abe.0411270821.29ee3dd9%40posting.google.com

1944 Simpson: "some paleontologists...insist on taking the record at
this face value"
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=dford3-1156272811.786756.225290%40i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Simpson, George Gaylord. 1983. _Fossils and the History of Life_
(NY: Scientific American Library), 239pp. On 166-8, two paragraphs,
with bracketing by Simpson:
In the fossil record, there is evidence-- usually somewhat
indirect, but nonetheless convincing-- that exceptionally rapid
rates of change have usually been involved when distinctly new
kinds or levels of organization and of ecological occupation have
arisen in evolving organisms. Many examples are provided by the
records of almost all major groups of organisms known as fossils.
Among the most striking (but otherwise fairly typical) examples

of this sort of evidence is provided by the bats, which
constitute the order Chiroptera (from the Greek for "hand" and
"wing"). There are some dubious older fossils that may possibly
be bats, but the oldest bat surely identified as such is an
absolutely complete skeleton from the early Eocene of Wyoming,
about 50 million years old. (Other complete fossils of bats are
also known from beds in Germany that are somewhat younger, about
45 to 48 million years old.) This skeleton does have some
features more primitive than those of later bats, pointing back
to ancestry in nonflying, ecologically shrewlike earlier mammals.
Nevertheless, it was already fully bat-like in essentials shared

with all later and recent bats. Its anatomical adaptations to
flying were complete and were _sui generis_ for bats, radically
unlike those of either flying reptiles (the extinct pterosaurs)
or flying birds. The subsequent evolution of bats involved great
proliferation of species, genera, and families. In this, bats
compare with the rodents and exceed all other orders of mammals.
Among these almost innumerable diverging lineages, evolution was
far from static in other respects; but, if one takes adaptation
to flight as the basic point of their entry into a new broad
adaptive or ecological zone, it must be said that, since the
early Eocene, the rate of evolution of the determinants of this
vital adaptation has been extremely slow and has involved

only a few minor or secondary details. Bats' wings have not
progressed essentially over the last 50 million years or so, and
I here iterate a conclusion I reached about forty years ago with
respect to this point: "Extrapolation of this rate in an
endeavor to estimate the time of origin [of a bat's wing] from a
normal mammalian manus [front foot] might set that date before
the origin of the earth." In fact, present knowledge of
mammalian evolution in the late Cretaceous and Paleocene

indicates that transformation of the bats' forelimb structure and
function could hardly have begun earlier (and probably began
somewhat later) than about 70 million years ago. This must then
have been very much more rapid than any later evolution in the
resulting wing, and it is reasonable to infer that it involved
quantum evolution-- no matter which of the many somewhat varied
definitions of that term is applied.

Adaptive radiation (which will be discussed later from a
different point of view) usually involves quantum evolution.
This is not so well exemplified by the bats because their fossil
record, although fairly extensive in Europe, is still scanty
elsewhere. When there is a breakthrough or shift from one
adaptive or ecological zone to another, as in the origin of bats,

this is frequently followed by the expansion of the zone and
exploitation of its various subdivisions-- such as niches, in
ecological terms. This involves proliferations of separate
lineages, and it is clear that, in many instances, the origins of
the lineages are by quantum evolution.

What does this have to do with Natural Selection?

Gould & Eldredge. _Paleobiology_ 3: 147 (1977):
At the higher level of evolutionary transition between basic
morphological designs, gradualism has always been in trouble,
though it remains the "official" position of most Western
evolutionists. Smooth intermediates between _Bauplane_ [body
plans] are almost impossible to construct, even in thought
experiments; there is certainly no evidence for them in the fossil
record (curious mosaics like _Archaeopteryx_ do not count). Even
so convinced a gradualist as G. G. Simpson ([_Tempo and Mode in
Evolution_] 1944) invoked quantum evolution and inadaptive
phases to explain these transitions.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Simpson misled 1995 Cheetham
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=b1c67abe.0312080520.163bc617%40posting.google.com

Essay on Problems with Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=Pine.LNX.4.10A.B3.10005310900310.17702-100000%40jabba.gl.umbc.edu

Still useless.