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→Out-of-date quotes: Arguments of being out of date fail.
:::Regarding PJR's comment, "Storr's letter would only be out of date if he had retracted it": that's incorrect. Science can (and very often does) go out-of-date even if the author of a hypothesis doesn't retract it. Or indeed, isn't alive to retract it. Lamarck, for one, whose theory of evolution was entirely reasonable based on the state of scientific knowledge at the time he lived but was, of course, entirely superseded by the Darwin-Wallace model of evolution by natural selection and by developments in genetics in the 20th century. Or Aristotle, whose theory of logic is arguably the basis of Western scientific thought but some of whose biological theories have, to put it mildly, not stood the test of time. Or many, many others, alive and dead, whose hypotheses have been disproved by new discoveries. [[User:JimBob61|JimBob61]] 17:07, 9 May 2008 (EDT)
:::Regarding PJR's comment, "Storr's letter would only be out of date if he had retracted it": that's incorrect. Science can (and very often does) go out-of-date even if the author of a hypothesis doesn't retract it. Or indeed, isn't alive to retract it. Lamarck, for one, whose theory of evolution was entirely reasonable based on the state of scientific knowledge at the time he lived but was, of course, entirely superseded by the Darwin-Wallace model of evolution by natural selection and by developments in genetics in the 20th century. Or Aristotle, whose theory of logic is arguably the basis of Western scientific thought but some of whose biological theories have, to put it mildly, not stood the test of time. Or many, many others, alive and dead, whose hypotheses have been disproved by new discoveries. [[User:JimBob61|JimBob61]] 17:07, 9 May 2008 (EDT)
:::And regarding PJR's comment that "nobody has produced a finely-graded sequence of fossils going from dinosaurs to birds": sorry, not true either. The series of links between non-bird theropods and birds is now very good. It has even been possible to map the evolution of five stages of feather evolution onto points of divergence among theropod lineages (inc. birds). [[User:JimBob61|JimBob61]] 17:07, 9 May 2008 (EDT)
:::And regarding PJR's comment that "nobody has produced a finely-graded sequence of fossils going from dinosaurs to birds": sorry, not true either. The series of links between non-bird theropods and birds is now very good. It has even been possible to map the evolution of five stages of feather evolution onto points of divergence among theropod lineages (inc. birds). [[User:JimBob61|JimBob61]] 17:07, 9 May 2008 (EDT)
:::: First of all, Humblpi's attempted refutation of my argument against JibBob61's reason for claiming that the Mayr quote was out of date does not actually refute my argument at all, but introduces a ''different'' reason for claiming that it's out of date.
:::: Second, he hasn't made his case. That is, he claims that Mayr's quote is out of date simply because ''today'' most evolutionists don't have that problem. But he hasn't shown that most evolutionists had that problem when Mayr said that. That is, perhaps Mayr was simply pointing out a problem that most evolutionists ignored, and that they are still ignoring today. If that is the case, the quote is just as relevant today as when he said it. Further, he hasn't actually shown that evolutionary biologists don't still have that problem. Although it's not talking about exactly the same thing, the much more recent quote from Scientific American would tend to suggest that the problem remains.
:::: Third, by restricting it to ''evolutionary'' biologists he is biasing the sample. There are many biologists that still agree with Mayr; they simply aren't ''evolutionary'' biologists. True, Mayr was an evolutionist, but he wasn't claiming that this was something that all evolutionists and only evolutionists believed, so the claim that current-day evolutionists collectively and only evolutionists believe that, is irrelevant.
:::: Storr's letter was talking about methodology, not evidence. True, methodology can change, and you are right that letters can go out of date without being retracted, but there's no evidence offered that it ''has'' gone out of date.
:::: Please point me to the finely-graded sequence of fossils from dinosaurs to birds. I suspect that it's really a case that rather than being no sequence at all, there is now a ''very'' coarse sequence, which to evolutionists struggling to find ''any'' evidence of a sequence is a major improvement, but still does not constitute a "finely-graded" sequence.
:::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 02:35, 10 May 2008 (EDT)