If you don’t take religion, or specifically, the religious texts literally, you probably can. Many have. It’s not meant to be taken so literally, surely not, that way be madness! Many Americans seem to have this problem, whilst I feel that in the UK this isn’t the case, even amongst the clergy.

The third argument is more direct: transitions are often found in the fossil record. Preserved transitions are not common—and should not be, according to our understanding of evolution (see next section) but they are not entirely wanting, as creationists often claim. The lower jaw of reptiles contains several bones, that of mammals only one. The non-mammalian jawbones are reduced, step by step, in mammalian ancestors until they become tiny nubbins located at the back of the jaw. The “hammer” and “anvil” bones of the mammalian ear are descendants of these nubbins. How could such a transition be accomplished? the creationists ask. Surely a bone is either entirely in the jaw or in the ear. Yet paleontologists have discovered two transitional lineages of therapsids (the so-called mammal-like reptiles) with a double jaw joint—one composed of the old quadrate and articular bones (soon to become the hammer and anvil), the other of the squamosal and dentary bones (as in modern mammals). For that matter, what better transitional form could we expect to find than the oldest human, Australopithecus afarensis, with its apelike palate, its human upright stance, and a cranial capacity larger than any ape’s of the same body size but a full 1,000 cubic centimeters below ours? If God made each of the half-dozen human species discovered in ancient rocks, why did he create in an unbroken temporal sequence of progressively more modern features—increasing cranial capacity, reduced face and teeth, larger body size? Did he create to mimic evolution and test our faith thereby?

Faced with these facts of evolution and the philosophical bankruptcy of their own position, creationists rely upon distortion and innuendo to buttress their rhetorical claim. If I sound sharp or bitter, indeed I am—for I have become a major target of these practices.

I count myself among the evolutionists who argue for a jerky, or episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change. In 1972 my colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil record—geologically “sudden” origin of new species and failure to change thereafter (stasis)—reflect the predictions of evolutionary theory, not the imperfections of the fossil record. In most theories, small isolated populations are the source of new species, and the process of speciation takes thousands or tens of thousands of years. This amount of time, so long when measured against our lives, is a geological microsecond. It represents much less than 1 per cent of the average life-span for a fossil invertebrate species—more than ten million years. Large, widespread, and well established species, on the other hand, are not expected to change very much. We believe that the inertia of large populations explains the stasis of most fossil species over millions of years.

We proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium largely to provide a different explanation for pervasive trends in the fossil record. Trends, we argued, cannot be attributed to gradual transformation within lineages, but must arise from the different success of certain kinds of species. A trend, we argued, is more like climbing a flight of stairs (punctuated and stasis) than rolling up an inclined plane.

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.

G Gorniak :

Let me pick up on the two points you mention. Concerning the fossil record Darwin wrote in ‘Origin of Species’, “Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of intermediate fossil links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be argued against the theory.” With so many millions of fossils around there should be even more millions of intermediate fossils. Darwin expected future generations to find these transitional fossils. One hundred and fifty years on the situation remains the same. The late Stephen Jay Gould had this to say: “the dearth of transitional fossils is the trade secret of the palaeontologists”. There are very few intermediate fossils and they are all hotly diputed.

Hello George, you deceitful, quote-mining, charlatan.

Here is that Darwin quote in context.

Darwin:

But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.

Good day sir.

Good to see you reprinting my old letter – albeit in retrospect a clunky attempt at satire. Historical or ‘origins’ science is a very different animal from operational or testable laboratory based science. It is impossible to know with any certainty what happened millions of years ago and this will always involve a lot of speculation. The Big Bang theory itself is full of speculative ideas such as dark energy and dark matter. As such there should be less dogmatic teaching in this whole area. In addition scientific theories by their nature are always changing. Cell biologists will point out the unbelievable complexity of biochemical processes being discovered at the cellular level and which are only touched upon by Michael Behe in his books.

Prof Anthony Flew is very much a product of England’s green and pleasant land. As professor of philosophy at Oxford he was the Richard Dawkins of his day and scorned any suggestions outside humanistic thinking. He always maintained that he would be led by the scientific evidence. In 2004 he overturned his earlier ideas on the basis of the new discoveries at the molecular level and is now an advocate for some form of intelligent design. An interesting book on this whole subject is the Cambridge University Press volume ‘Debating Design’ in which the leading scientists from both camps discuss the pros and cons of Intelligent Design.

Let me pick up on the two points you mention. Concerning the fossil record Darwin wrote in ‘Origin of Species’, “Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of intermediate fossil links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be argued against the theory.” With so many millions of fossils around there should be even more millions of intermediate fossils. Darwin expected future generations to find these transitional fossils. One hundred and fifty years on the situation remains the same. The late Stephen Jay Gould had this to say: “the dearth of transitional fossils is the trade secret of the palaeontologists”. There are very few intermediate fossils and they are all hotly diputed.

You also mention evolution at the microbiological level. Bacteria and viruses are changing all the time and these changes are often referred to as microevolution. However in most cases genetic information is transferred between cells. It is a mixing of existing information. Where mutations take place they are either information neutral or in most cases lead to a loss of information. There is no example of cells generating new genetic information – and this is what is required for Darwinian evolution. In addition no scientist is suggesting that these bacterial cells will change into anything else. In a million years they will still be bacterial cells.

Interestingly it has been Richard Dawkins pushing his theories so strongly that has brought this whole debate to the forefront and made eveyone think about origins. Whether we are here by design or by accident could hardly be more important – so the ongoing debate can only be a good thing. However as mentioned before this is historical science we are dealing with and therefore it will always be open to debate.

Hope this letter is more helpful

George

I like your solution better. I’ll do some testing this weekend and update the post appropriately.

Thanks,
Huw

And yeah, thank whichever deity you do or don’t believe in that Lifehacker exists.

Proposed fix:

create_xvfb () {
DISPLAYNO=1
while [ -z $xvfb_success ]
do
Xvfb :${DISPLAYNO} -screen 0 1024×1024x8 >& /dev/null &
XVFB_PID = $!
sleep 1
if ps –pid $XFVB_PID
then
echo “Started XVFB on display $DISPLAYNO process $XVFB_PID”
xvfb_success=1
else
echo “Failed to run Xvfb on display $DISPLAYNO”
DISPLAYNO=$(($DISPLAYNO + 1))
fi
fi
done
export XVFB_PID
export DISPLAY=:${DISPLAYNO}
}

kill_xvfb () {
kill $XVFB_PID
}

It simplifies your code, you are not firing grep upon grep upon grep and I think it is more robust too. E.g. what if I had a user named “Xvfb” that would show up in ps?

I upgraded from win 95, to 98 and then to XP. At each stage the process was less than smooth. I was like the guy who lost data because the upgraded OS could not read my backup sets with it’s “improved” feature set. This is despite shelling out for DLT tapedrives to protect hundreds, if not thousands of hours of the creative process. I had the ridiculous situation of having to run legacy machines to create dozens of uncompressed data CDs and laboriously restoring files manually until I learned how to network the machines. Add to this annoyance that after every upgrade of Word from Version 2.0 I have had issues reading data created in earlier formats. Same in Excel. Same in Publisher.

I concluded that the system of perpetual upgrade of software and hardware and the cost to my business was the absolute definition of irrationality.

In 2007 ~I commenced a changeover to “Free and Open” software. Now my main OS for business is Ubuntu Linux 9.04 as a desktop, server and Network aware storage.
I am still in the process of converting my workflow to an entirely Free and OPen environment. I have achieved 80% of this. Document preparation, shopping cart, website design and accounts are now all FOSS. The final 20% will be achieved through learning some more of the FOSS available or getting my CAD software to work under Wine.

I have one dual boot machine. XP is only used for CAD. I expect that this will change.

The corporate market is something I barely qualify to stand in, but I own a business, I own PC’s and I am thoroughly disillusioned with Microsoft’s marketing and cynical manipulation of me. Not even what I’ve seen of the Windows 7 Release candidate will tempt me back. My business is small beer to Microsoft, Adobe and the like, but there are millions of users like me, who together are probably bigger than the corporate market. Proprietary software is dead – it just doesn’t know it yet.