News you won't see in controlled mainstream media.

Dawkin's once said (in a book review in New York Times in 1989):

He expanded on this assertion in an on-line article, Ignorance Is No Crime, where he states that ignorance can be cured:

He concludes:

To my mind, the word that best describes this added category is deluded, which covers a spectrum from simply being mislead (being told false information by someone you trust), to the level of clinical delusion (which gets into his category of insane). Like ignorance, being mislead can also be cured by presenting one so deluded with the real information.

It would be a good idea for any creationist to read this article, and try to suppress any emotional response that they feel, to read what is actually said, and to ask themselves if the information that they have been taught about evolution - no matter the source (yes public schools can be a poor source of information) - is true.

My purpose on these threads is to reach those that are ignorant of the truth about evolution or who have been mislead by false information about evolution. The main point for this thread is that any discussion using a definition that differs from the scientific usage is not discussing biological evolution, but something else, a definition that, perhaps, is ignorant, stupid, deluded, insane, or wicked.

Evolution is discussed on several threads, but one that presents definitions as used in science is Evolution and the BIG LIE, where I concluded:

Eventually, and by using relatively neutral language a consensus of sorts was reached that:

It was also noted that these processes hold true whether creationism were true or not.

If you want to discuss this further please respond on the Evolution and the BIG LIE thread.

In another thread, Evolution Theory Explains Diversity, I expanded on this discussion to show that the diversity of life could be explained by these two biological processes:

And in that thread I suggested a simple metric for judging the amount of change in hereditary traits that could be contained in a single species:

Curiously, no creationist took up the challenge to look at the diversity of life on this basis.

In a recent discussion with CTD he stated:

Which is another common misrepresentation or misunderstanding of what evolution, the theory of evolution and the science of evolution talk about.

Because the other thread was getting cluttered with other issues, I have decided to shift part of my answer here and to focus a single thread on the concept of transitionals, building on the scientific usage of terms as summarized above. A more common cut and paste version of this commonly repeated creationist lie (in this case from Creation Evidence - The Great Debate of Origins) is:

Notice that Darwin said "intermediate varieties" rather than the commonly used "transitionals" term. In other words there should be fossils intermediate in time and form between those that came before and those that came after the "transitional" fossil. Transitions can and do span many generations, with many intermediates in between.

According to a proper definition of evolution, the process of change in hereditary traits in populations from generation to generation, evolution is constantly occurring, and this means that every fossil is part of the transition from one life form to another, and every fossil thus is a "transitional" fossil. Every fossil lineage shows such change over time occurring, with intermediate age fossils being intermediate in form from previous ages and forms to later ages and forms. This is what the theory of evolution predicts we should find in the fossil record: intermediate forms at intermediated ages in the lineages. This is what we do find.

Again, this betrays a false understanding of evolution and what evolution proposes for the diversity of life. This is a standard creationist straw man misrepresentation, one that is easily dispelled by any real fact checking with evolutionary biologists, studies, books, etc etc etc.

Creationists keep trying to compress generations of accumulated evolution into single generation events and to propose obviously ridiculous scenarios (a dog giving birth to a cat), and this just is not the way evolution occurs.

There are intermediates between dinosaurs and birds, of which Archaeopteryx is but one, just as there are intermediates between fish and amphibian, of which Tiktaalik rosea is but one ... ignoring the reality does not make it go away, and nature and reality are both curiously unaffected by such ignorance.

This picture shows several intermediate forms between australopithicus and Homo sapiens

Each one of these skulls is a transitional fossil because it is intermediate between the one before and the one after. Furthermore, each of the species represented by a skull has numerous fossils associated with that species, and these fossils also show change in hereditary traits from generation to generation, with the early ones being similar to the previous species and the later ones being similar to later species. Many times there are controversies over which species some of the fossils found belong to because they lie between the existing (arbitrary) species classifications.

In addition, evolution predicts that IF the theory is true, that THEN intermediate forms will be found between any two closely related species separated by time: that every hereditary lineage that is known will be filled in by more intermediates. This is what they did with Tiktaalik rosea, where they predicted that an intermediate form of organism in the transition from fish to tetrapod would be found in the area that had the right age sedimentary deposits and the right environment for such an intermediate.

This image from Transitions: the Evolution of life, "Tiktaalik roseae[/i] and the Origins of Tetrapods" shows the intermediate form of Tiktaalik as part of the transition from fish to tetrapod:


This image from Transitions: the Evolution of life, "Dinosaurs Among Us" shows the intermediate form of [i]Archaeopteryx as part of the transition from dinosaur to bird:

Wikipedia also discusses the various feathered Dromaeosaurids that show development of feathers before flight, and from egg laying dinosaurs.

Curiously more transitional forms are found every year, from amphibians in Iowa and Pennsylvania and "Frogamanders" in Texas to feathered non-flying dinosaurs in China and elsewhere.

Anyone who claims there are few transitionals either does not understand what a transitional is, or, perhaps, is ignorant, stupid, deluded, insane, or wicked.

Creationists are not allowed to cherry pick some comments about some transitions and then ignore ones about transitions in the fossil record, particularly when made by the same evolutionist, as that is not confronting all the evidence. Such selection of evidence is just one more example of the logical fallacy of hasty generalization. It's also called a lie of omission.

Gould for one, specifically states that there are transitional forms, for example, but you wouldn't know that from reading creationist sites that quote his evidence for "Punctuated Equilibrium" speciations as if it was a universal condition.

There are many other transitions that are known from the fossil record, all of them involving several intermediate forms from beginning to end, none of them occurring in a single generation. All the intermediates show the same degree of change in hereditary traits in populations from generation to generation that we see in the example of dogs as descendants of wolves, none of them show sudden or grotesque (half fish half bird) transformations. If you are expecting something else, you have been mislead.

Enjoy.