views on evolution

From this and the last few pages, I conclude that leopold lacks the reading comprehension to infer what Dr. Ayala believes about evolution from a news report on a debate of gradualism versus punctuated equilibrium, let alone adaquately summarize the scientific arguments and evidence. We are left with a mediocre argument from the "authority" of a specious quote only found on creationist dishonest quote mines and sites responding to their dishonesty.

 

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I had not been following Leopold's arguments closely, have you?

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and what does ayala believe?
i offered what he said, i offered other stuff too.
i believe i have adequately supported my side.
as far as "enumerating" my evidence, what the hell does that mean?
the quote comes from "science" not from some "creationist dishonest quote mines".

 

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Then what was the paragraph that came before the purported Ayala quote?

 

"Certainly the record is poor," admitted Gould, "but the jerkiness you see is not the result of gaps, it is the consequence of the jerky mode of evolutionary change." To the evident frustration of many people at the meeting, a large proportion of the contributions were characterized more by description and assertion than by the presentation of data. ".

edit:
the record gould refers to is the fossil record.
page 884 has a graph that ayala based his quote on.

 

You said he was forced to print a retraction. That would be a conspiracy (multiple actors in a fraud).

I was merely driving to the truth of the matter. Is it true?

History speaks for itself. I was asking if you speak for history.

 

not quite.

http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2884389&postcount=766

 

whatever james.

no.

no.

no.

no.

no.

no.

 

Peer pressure to print a retraction for fear of losing one's job is what I meant by conspiracy. Under the Whistleblower Act, he could buy a Mediterranean island on their nickel for retaliating against him.

Why do you assume that such pressure is bearing down on this trifling aspect of science when there are so many bigger fish to fry?

That is what I was driving at. Do you feel there is a conspiratorial atmosphere surrounding the debate over creationism vs evolution?

 

leopold,

I just don't get the peer pressure angle:

I don't know how Roger Lewin could have gotten in his notes the quotation he attributes to me. I presented a paper/lecture and spoke at various times from the floor, but I could not possibly have said (at least as a complete sentence) what Lewin attributes to me. In fact, I don't know what it means. How could small changes NOT accumulate! In any case, virtually all my evolutionary research papers evidence that small (genetic) changes do accumulate.

The paper that I presented at the conference reported by Lewin is virtually the same that I presented in 1982 in Cambridge, at a conference commemorating the 200 [sic] anniversary of Darwin's death. It deals with the claims of "punctuated equilibrium" and how microevolutionary change relates to macroevolution. (I provide experimental results showing how one can obtain in the laboratory, as a result of the accumulation of small genetic changes, morphological changes of the magnitude observed by paleontologists and presented as evidence of punctuated equilibrium.) The paper was published as part of the conference proceedings:

Ayala, F.J. 1983. Microevolution and macroevolution. In: D.S. Bendall, ed., Evolution from Molecules to Men (Cambridge University Press), pp. 387-402.

More accessible are two papers dealing with the same topic, written with my colleague G.L. Stebbins: Stebbins, G.L. and F.J. Ayala. 1981. Is a new evolutionary synthesis necessary? Science 213:967-971. (I quote from the abstract of the paper:

"Macroevolutionary processes are underlain by microevolutionary phenomena and are compatible with the synthetic theory of evolution." But, please, read the whole paper to get the wealth of results and ideas that we are discussing; and read also the following paper:

"Stebbins, G.L. and F.J. Ayala. 1985. The Evolution of Darwinism. Sci. American 253:72-82."

You may quote from this letter so long as you don't quote out of context or incomplete sentences.

Sincerely yours,
Francisco J. Ayala​

citing http://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/another_creationist_out_of_context_quote.htm

you mean he retracted decades of his work in Science, then, under peer pressure, went back and reversed himself, reinstating his lifelong position?

It just doesn't fly.

Also: when you said:

This is like the voice of activism, a good thing sometimes.

What exactly is your complaint?

What are you saying needs to change?

 

did you do a stinky, or is something else going on:

citing http://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/another_creationist_out_of_context_quote.htm

which finds the quote, disclaimed by Dr. Ayala, at creationscience.com, where they are selling a book that rewrites natural history.

What the heck is going on here?

 

or Roger Lewin based his quote on?

 

you can bat that ball all you want.
this is why i want to see a retraction from "science".

"science" never retracted ANYTHING regarding the piece in discussion.

i'm quite positive it wasn't because ayala was unaware of the error.

 

It was 30 years ago
who would own up to it?

 

There was a retraction from the source, which is the only thing that matters. Doesn't it matter to you that you base your criticism of evolution on a misquote?

 

Of course not! He doesn't want evolution to be true (for whatever reason) so he has to grasp at something, regardless if it is false or not. He thinks facts, data and observations are simply annoying details that get in the way of what he wants to believe.

 

this is a flat out lie.
"science" was the source, "science" never issued a retraction in regards to this issue.

 

Geeze leopold, your arguments are getting even more transparent than usual and becoming rather pathetic.

 

But if we know they are wrong, that's the important thing, isn't it? Do you think you will win the debate on a technicality?