OJ: are you mistakenly conflating Archaeoraptor and Archaeopteryx in your comments, or did you just not read far enough down in your link to the Archaeopteryx article to see that it has been conclusively proven NOT to be a fake?



Piltdown Man and Archaeoraptor were both artificially cobbled together, and quickly proven to be so--by the very scientific community you so consistently deride (believe it or not, science has a vested interest in detecting and exposing this kind of fakery). But hundreds of other perfectly legitimate fossils strongly indicative of transitional species survive. We have entire sequences to support the evolution of horses and whales, birds, and yes, even humans.



Even other non-transitional fossils support the concept of evolution. Or at least, to explain them without evolution, you have to be willing to believe that someone or something has intervened millions of times over the last four billion years to create a new species, only to capriciously wipe it out a few million years later. That idea, which I now dub the "Cosmic Etch-a-Sketch Operator Theory of Species Origination and Elimination" seems a bit overwrought, don't you think?

Hi Orrin-

Harry beat me to it. Archaeoraptor was indeed a hoax. Archaeopteryx is still considered genuine.



Noel Erinjeri

The review in the Guardian refers to doubts about previous Archaeopteryx finds.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/scienceandnature/0,6121,804087,00.html

Read paragraph 5 of the review to which you refer.

No respectable opinion doubts Archeopteryx.

There has been plenty of debate about just

what it said about evolution, and there was

room for debate as long as only a few fossils

were known. More and older are now known

and A. is not so important any more.



It was the same with hominid fossils. When

there were only a handful, it was easy to

construct scenarios and not easy to decide

among them. As more evidence accumulated,

various hyotheses had to be discarded.



There still remain more than one, but that fact

does not discredit darwinism. Rather, it

adds to its firmness.



If someone came up with a genuine fossil

that contradicted darwinism, that would be a

sensation. But the nominees, like Paluxy, are

never more than hoaxes, and they are

adopted one after another by antidarwinists

only to explode in their hands. Who's gullible?

Harrys:



Yes, I know the biologists insist their case is proven, but I'll stick with the physicists.

OJ: "I'll stick with the physicists. "



Um, what physicists, nowadays?



"... even as late as the 1970s
some scientists, notably Chandra Wickramasinghe and the late Sir Fred Hoyle, two physicists renowned for their wacky understanding of evolution, were inclined to think the same."

The whackos