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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Harry" data-source="post: 892580" data-attributes="member: 5468">Derived vs. Ancestral, yes; some species are more dissimilar from their ancestral species of X years ago than other species, but I wanted to clarify a common misunderstanding than evolution is a progressing chain of development, a "what's right?" instead of a "what's right now?".  I do not think that you made this error, but I wanted to clarify this point to anyone who might not have considered this point.It is interesting that our differences might hinge on a finer point than I first thought.  What you are describing as "very glaring and very hard to explain" - or what I read as you describing this - seems to me a point that may be important in the light of determining descent and relationships among species but not a problem when viewed in a larger sense.  I do not understand your choice of the word "very".The measurable rate of evolutionary change in a species is much greater than that required to explain the rate of change in natural history.  This difference seems to be due to the observations that (1) mutations do not tend to take hold if their is no strong environmental selection pressure and (2) mutations do not tend to take hold in large, communicating populations.  This indicates that most evolutionary change should be expected in isolated populations undergoing enviromental change; even here, the most common historical result has been extinction.  The idea of punctuated equilibrium I do not consider a cop-out, or even all that revolutionary.  It seems to explain the "rapid" rate of evolutionary change well, and it is testable and measureable.Here I must continue to disagree.  For me to admit that Newtonian physics was "replaced" would be to say that Newton was wrong and he wasn't, in the areas he could test.  In one sentence you say that Newton was replaced, in a later one, merely "refined".  If that is the sense you are using here for evolutionary biology, or any aspect of science, I wholeheartedly agree with you.We seem to disagree over the size of the holes, the nature of the conjecture and speculation (see links in my earlier post for the testability of evolution) and whether the road is drivable for our vehicle, but our difference may be illustrated by the previous paragraph.</blockquote>

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