re: #191 EdDantes

Most recently, ” Your inner fish, by Neil Shubin. many others and do not come to mind at the moment.

Found a video by that author, by the same title,
Neil Shubin - Finding Your Inner Fish
At about 4 min in, Shubin identifies himself as a paleantologist. The video (and presumably the book) is about his goal of finding “intermediate forms” of fossils as evidence of a transition between large ancient fish-like water creatures and large ancient lizard-like land creatures. As if finding or not finding a progression of “transitional forms” would be compelling evidence for or against evolution, perhaps.

I can’t even tell (from the few minutes I watched) whether the guy believes in evolution or not. He may be fooling himself with his expectation of actually finding his expected transitional forms.

Altho evolution involves change, it’s not necessarily anything close to a steady progression. In other words, transitional forms of creatures may have existed over relatively brief intervals, and therefore could be very hard to discover. So not finding them in all the situations you might expect to isn’t conclusive proof of anything.

Darwin’s idea wasn’t just about the wide variety of living things, and the remarkable similarities in many cases. His main new idea, natural selection, was able to explain in a reasonable way the why and how of that, for what he observed in the present, and in the past (fossils).

In my opinion, Darwin’s book would be far more insightful and instructive, even without pictures.