Quote:
Originally Posted by troutman
Thus the chain metaphor is wrong. It doesn’t accurately represent biology as we know it today, but as it was understood over four centuries ago. The myth persists because of convenience; it is easier to think of species as types, with discrete qualities, than as grades between one species and another. In school, we learn the specific characteristics of plants and animals; this alone is not a problem, except that we are not often exposed to the main ramification of evolution: that those characteristics will change through time. |
Good post, troutman--###.
It's a metaphor that's mostly convenient for critics of evolutionary theory--but it has never held a lot of water, even when it could be plausibly argued that a large part of the fossil record is missing. The fossil record is necessarily incomplete--but its incompleteness doesn't invalidate an attempt to explain the data that currently exist. Evolutionary theory explains those data--creation theory, including so-called "intelligent design," doesn't even try.