A commenter made a good point regarding something I said in one of my follow-up comments in the thread after my rant on intermediate fossils that I thought I would move up here to respond to.
Oldfart: While you are at it, explain “primitive” and “advanced” traits. Since it is also often said that later is more advanced than earlier assuming some kind of “direction”.
You’re right I should clarify this.
This is too, too funny.
P. Z. Myers of Pharyngula tried to attend a free showing of the intelligent design creationist film Expelled today (a film in which he appears btw) but was apparently recognized by the producers of the film who had security ask him to leave under threat of arrest! The irony of creationists expelling a scientist from a film that claims that ID creationists are treated unfairly by mainstream science is delicious enough but it is hardly the best part. I won’t spoil the punch line, go to Pharyngula and read all about it.
Update: P. Z. has some additional information about what happened in the Expulsion from Expelled incident.
As you might imagine I enjoy watching science programing on TV, Nova, Nature etc. on PBS, and the commercial channels like the Discovery Channel and the History Channel. But you really have to take this stuff with a rather sizable grain of salt, especially the commercial channels which seem to have absolutely no quality control at all. The following are a few of examples that managed to aggravate me to the point of blogging on the subject.
Last Monday evening (3-3-08) I had the great pleasure of meeting one of my colleagues in the battle with antievolutionists, Dr. Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University. She is the co-author of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The wedge of Intelligent Design (2004), and more recently an expert witness in the Intelligent Design trial; Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District (2005).
Dr. Forrest was giving a talk at Cal State Fullerton titled “Evil, Evil Woman” about what it was like being the only female witness in Kitzmiller trial and the sort of (mis)treatment she has been subjected to at the hands of the Intelligent Design crowd before, during and after the trial.
All over the net I see people trying to defend evolution from the attacks of antievolutionists which is good. However when they do so using false or inaccurate arguments that is not so good. For example one of my pet peeves is a particular argument that I’ve seen commonly used to rebut antievolutionist claims that there is a lack of “transitional” forms in the fossil record which often goes something like this:
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, all fossils are transitional.”
Unfortunately this is simply not true. Not all individuals reproduce; nor do all species give rise to new species. In fact many (if not most) lineages in the history of life have led to dead ends. Think about it, if a fossil represents a species which did not give rise to new species, what is it transitioning to?
Of course part of the problem is the use of term “transitional fossil” since the word transitional implies that there is some certainty about specific lineages which is actually rarely the case in paleontology.
It is better to talk about “intermediate fossils” since this refers to morphological characters (facts) rather than hypothetical lineages.
For example Archaeopteryx is undeniably intermediate in form between dinosaurs and birds being a mixture of both dinosaurian and avian (and some in between) characters, this is a fact. The question as to whether or not the genus Archaeopteryx is itself ancestral to later birds would be a hypothesis which is 1) very difficult to test and 2) not one that all paleontologists who work on dinosaurs/birds necessarily agree upon.
So please, for the sake of my sanity (and for scientific accuracy), spread the word to stop claiming that all fossils are “transitional” and maybe encourage the use of the term “intermediate” instead.
End rant.
Playing Chess with Pigeons 