Ebook Controversy Catastrophism and Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, by Trevor Palmer
Be the very first to get this publication now as well as obtain all reasons you require to read this Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer The e-book Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer is not only for your tasks or need in your life. E-books will certainly always be a buddy in every single time you review. Now, allow the others learn about this page. You could take the benefits and also discuss it additionally for your buddies and also individuals around you. By through this, you could truly get the significance of this publication Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer beneficially. Just what do you think of our suggestion here?
Controversy Catastrophism and Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, by Trevor Palmer
Ebook Controversy Catastrophism and Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, by Trevor Palmer
Exactly what do you do to start reviewing Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer Searching guide that you love to read first or locate an appealing book Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer that will make you want to read? Everybody has difference with their reason of reading a book Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer Actuary, reading routine needs to be from earlier. Several individuals may be love to check out, however not an e-book. It's not mistake. An individual will be burnt out to open up the thick book with small words to check out. In more, this is the actual problem. So do take place probably with this Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer
As known, book Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer is well known as the home window to open the world, the life, and extra thing. This is what individuals now need so much. Even there are many people who don't such as reading; it can be a choice as recommendation. When you actually need the methods to create the following motivations, book Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer will truly lead you to the way. Furthermore this Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer, you will certainly have no regret to obtain it.
To obtain this book Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer, you may not be so baffled. This is online book Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer that can be taken its soft documents. It is various with the online book Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer where you can get a book and after that the seller will send out the printed book for you. This is the place where you can get this Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer by online and also after having manage buying, you can download and install Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer alone.
So, when you require fast that book Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer, it doesn't should await some days to get guide Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer You can straight obtain the book to save in your tool. Also you enjoy reading this Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer everywhere you have time, you can appreciate it to read Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer It is surely practical for you who wish to get the a lot more precious time for reading. Why do not you invest 5 minutes and spend little money to obtain the book Controversy Catastrophism And Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, By Trevor Palmer here? Never let the new thing goes away from you.
In Controversy, Trevor Palmer fully documents how traditional gradualistic views of biological and geographic evolution are giving way to a catastrophism that credits cataclysmic events, such as meteorite impacts, for the rapid bursts and abrupt transitions observed in the fossil record.
According to the catastrophists, new species do not evolve gradually; they proliferate following sudden mass extinctions. Placing this major change of perspective within the context of a range of ancient debates, Palmer discusses such topics as the history of the solar system, present-day extraterrestrial threats to earth, hominid evolution, and the fossil record.
- Sales Rank: #5937331 in Books
- Published on: 1999-02-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.21" h x 1.06" w x 6.14" l, 1.81 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 452 pages
Review
From the reviews:
"Trevor Palmer … provides in this volume a chronicle of the emergence of catastrophe evidence and thought. He explores planetary science, paleontology, geology, and evolution, with emphasis on human evolution from about 1970 to 1999, but with substantial expeditions into the history of astronomy and evolutionary theory … . it is … a major contribution to understanding the growth of the present position. … Palmer thoroughly documents the K-T extinction dispute." (Hiram Caton, Reports of the National Center for Science Education, Vol. 25 (3-4), 2005)
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Steps toward a new theory of evolution
By Hiram Caton
As I prepared a review of this book for a science journal, I checked amazon to sample what others readers say. To my surprise, no readers have recorded their views. So I shall scribble a few words in the hope of drawing attention to this worthy study.
Palmer's controlling idea is that discoveries and conceptual innovation in the four fields covered point to a new theory of evolution in which natural selection will be reinterpreted or replaced by self-organization theory. The vacant space that the new theory will occupy is the gaping hole currently separating population genetics and molecular biology. He suggests that self-organization theory, a.k.a. non-linear dynamics, a.k.a. chaos theory, is the candidate for linking physico-chemical processes with molecular biology and organism behaviour. (The author, an enzyme biologist, is well positioned to sense this vacant space). The four fields covered are planetary science, geology, paleontology, and evolution theory. The uniting empirical theme is catastrophes of climatic and extra-terrestrial origin. The unifying conceptual theme is provided by the capacity of non-linear dynamics to combine equilibrium behaviour with many kinds of sudden shifts in system dynamics. These shifts are `catastrophes', be they microscopic or galactic.
When evolutionary theory took shape, its advocates had no inking of the mathematics of chaos theory. But they were aware of evidence for geophysical and biotic catastrophes, viz, apparent mass extinctions revealed by drastic discontinuities in biota between contiguous geological strata. The evidence was explained away as mere appearance and was replaced by the twin doctrines of Uniformitarianism and Gradualism. Uniformitarianism interpreted the vast changes in the elevation and subsidence as due to very slow processes, like erosion, acting over very long periods. Admittedly catastrophic events (volcanoes and earthquakes) were trivialized as local events with no geophysical implications. Similarly, the hundreds of meteors that illuminate the skies annually were dismissed as inconsequential (when they were acknowledged at all). The planetary system was taken to be the paradigm of orderly uniform process governed by natural laws. This was an erroneous interpretation of Newton's theory. Kepler's discovery of the elliptical orbit of the planets, and the gravitational explanation of their position and orbits implied the possibility of cometary impacts on Earth and other planets. Indeed Newton believed that such impacts had occurred. The first asteroid was discovered in 1801; a century later, about 500 had been discovered and it was known that tons of cosmic dust settle on Earth each year. In 1908 an asteroid explosion over Siberia visited ruin on an area the size of Belgium. This wake-up call was ignored. The Uniformitarian creed began to unravel only in 1980 when Nobel physicist Luis Alvarez proposed that 65 million years ago a ten kilometre diameter asteroid impact caused the K-T boundary mass extinction. Today, many heated words later, we know that there are billions, perhaps trillions, of asteroids and comets in the asteroid belt, the Kuiper Belt, and the Oort Cloud. They constitute the solar system as a cosmic shooting gallery. Not only have they bombarded all the planets and their satellites, but they also bombard one another. Hundreds of meteorites reach the Earth annually. Strikes large enough to produce effects on a global scale occur about every million years. The lunar surface is exemplary of the density of impacts that the Earth has received. They number in the thousands; some craters are 3200 kilometers diameter. So much for the irenic Newtonian universe. But there is more. Life on Earth is also subject to the effects of coroneal mass ejections, solar flares, tectonic movements, flood basalt volcanoes, super nova explosions, polar reversals, and the Earth's variable declination on its rotational axis, any of which may have catastrophic effects, and some of which have very likely had such effects.
The planetary science here adumbrated is largely the product of new data gathering technologies associated with satellite probes and telescopes. It's a whole new world, significantly discontinuous with pre-1970 astronomy. The Uniformitarian conception assumed by Nineteenth Century evolution theory wasn't consistent even with the astronomy of that time, as I have mentioned. Today it is merely quaint, except that it is also a monument to the power and persistence of well-intentioned scientific error. The error meant is not, of course, the failure of earlier generations to know only what posterity would discover, but the claim of dogmatic certainty for theory that was heavily compromised by discordant facts and inconsistency.
The locus of this controversy is the `Darwin wars' that erupted when some paleontologists (S.J. Gould, Niles Eldredge, Steven Stanley, David Raup, David Jablonki) blew the whistle on Gradualism, substituting a Punctuated Equilibrium pattern instead. The neo-Darwinian orthodoxy initially opposed the alternative hypothesis as gross error. But then, when mass extinctions were accepted (repugnant to orthodoxy because they imply catastrophic causation), and the sudden origin of many new phyla in short times was confirmed, neo-Darwinians changed their tune: the heretics are now denounced for perpetrating the calumny that Gradualist theory ever denied the punctuation pattern! Protest as they might, nothing in standard theory explains highly variable evolutionary rates, the variation being, at one end, stasis over hundreds of millions of years, and at the other, a profusion of new phyla in short bursts (the Cambrian `big bang' is the classic example). Gradualist theory was formulated in the absence of knowledge of variation and only some glimmerings about what made orthogenesis work. It would thus be a stroke of extraordinary good luck if the proposed mechanism of change, natural selection, turned out to be right. When the Nineteen Century closed, Darwinians were in a frantic chase-fruitless as it turned out-for a slam dunk proof of the evolution of a single species. When the Twentieth Century closed, neo-Darwinians were in damage control to salvage the one and only slam dunk proof of evolution, industrial melanism, from dismissal on the grounds of tampered evidence. The use-by date of natural selection is long over due. Palmer's study assists recognizing that fact, and points the way to new theory.
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Steps toward a new theory of evolution
By Hiram Caton
As I prepared a review of this book for a science journal, I checked amazon to sample what others readers say. To my surprise, no readers have recorded their views. So I shall scribble a few words in the hope of drawing attention to this worthy study.
Palmer's controlling idea is that discoveries and conceptual innovation in the four fields covered point to a new theory of evolution in which natural selection will be reinterpreted or replaced by self-organization theory. The vacant space that the new theory will occupy is the gaping hole currently separating population genetics and molecular biology. He suggests that self-organization theory, a.k.a. non-linear dynamics, a.k.a. chaos theory, is the candidate for linking physico-chemical processes with molecular biology and organism behaviour. (The author, an enzyme biologist, is well positioned to sense this vacant space). The four fields covered are planetary science, geology, paleontology, and evolution theory. The uniting empirical theme is catastrophes of climatic and extra-terrestrial origin. The unifying conceptual theme is provided by the capacity of non-linear dynamics to combine equilibrium behaviour with many kinds of sudden shifts in system dynamics. These shifts are 'catastrophies', be they microscopic or galactic.
When evolutionary theory took shape, its advocates had no inking of the mathematics of chaos theory. But they were aware of evidence for geophysical and biotic catastrophes, viz, apparent mass extinctions revealed by drastic discontinuities in biota between contiguous geological strata. The evidence was explained away as mere appearance and was replaced by the twin doctrines of Uniformitarianism and Gradualism. Uniformitarianism interpreted the vast changes in the elevation and subsidence as due to very slow processes, like erosion, acting over very long periods. Admittedly catastrophic events (volcanoes and earthquakes) were trivialized as local events with no geophysical implications. Similarly, the hundreds of meteors that illuminate the skies annually were dismissed as inconsequential (when they were acknowledged at all). The planetary system was taken to be the paradigm of orderly uniform process governed by natural laws. This was an erroneous interpretation of Newton's theory. Kepler's discovery of the elliptical orbit of the planets, and the gravitational explanation of their position and orbits implied the possibility of cometary impacts on Earth and other planets. Indeed Newton believed that such impacts had occurred. The first asteroid was discovered in 1801; a century later, about 500 had been discovered and it was known that tons of cosmic dust settle on Earth each year. In 1908 an asteroid explosion over Siberia visited ruin on an area the size of Belgium. This wake-up call was ignored. The Uniformitarian creed began to unravel only in 1980 when Nobel physicist Luis Alvarez proposed that 65 million years ago a ten kilometre diameter asteroid impact caused the K-T boundary mass extinction. Today, many heated words later, we know that there are billions, perhaps trillions, of asteroids and comets in the asteroid belt, the Kuiper Belt, and the Oort Cloud. They constitute the solar system as a cosmic shooting gallery. Not only have they bombarded all the planets and their satellites, but they also bombard one another. Hundreds of meteorites reach the Earth annually. Strikes large enough to produce effects on a global scale occur about every million years. The lunar surface is exemplary of the density of impacts that the Earth has received. They number in the thousands; some craters are 3200 kilometers diameter. So much for the irenic Newtonian universe. But there is more. Life on Earth is also subject to the effects of coroneal mass ejections, solar flares, tectonic movements, flood basalt volcanoes, super nova explosions, polar reversals, and the Earth's variable declination on its rotational axis, any of which may have catastrophic effects, and some of which have very likely had such effects.
The planetary science here adumbrated is largely the product of new data gathering technologies associated with satellite probes and telescopes. It's a whole new world, significantly discontinuous with pre-1970 astronomy. The Uniformitarian conception assumed by Nineteenth Century evolution theory wasn't consistent even with the astronomy of that time, as I have mentioned. Today it is merely quaint, except that it is also a monument to the power and persistence of well-intentioned scientific error. The error meant is not, of course, the failure of earlier generations to know only what posterity would discover, but the claim of dogmatic certainty for theory that was heavily compromised by discordant facts and inconsistency.
The locus of this controversy is the 'Darwin wars' that erupted when some paleontologists (S.J. Gould, Niles Eldredge, Steven Stanley, David Raup, David Jablonki) blew the whistle on Gradualism, substituting a Punctuated Equilibrium pattern instead. The neo-Darwinian orthodoxy initially opposed the alternative hypothesis as gross error. But then, when mass extinctions were accepted (repugnant to orthodoxy because they imply catastrophic causation), and the sudden origin of many new phyla in short times was confirmed, neo-Darwinians changed their tune: the heretics are now denounced for perpetrating the calumny that Gradualist theory ever denied the punctuation pattern! Protest as they might, nothing in standard theory explains highly variable evolutionary rates, the variation being, at one end, stasis over hundreds of millions of years, and at the other, a profusion of new phyla in short bursts (the Cambrian 'big bang' is the classic example). Gradualist theory was formulated in the absence of knowledge of variation and only some glimmerings about what made orthogenesis work. It would thus be a stroke of extraordinary good luck if the proposed mechanism of change, natural selection, turned out to be right. When the Nineteen Century closed, Darwinians were in a frantic chase-fruitless as it turned out-for a slam dunk proof of the evolution of a single species. When the Twentieth Century closed, neo-Darwinians were in damage control to salvage the one and only slam dunk proof of evolution, industrial melanism, from dismissal on the grounds of tampered evidence. The use-by date of natural selection is long past. Palmer's study assists recognizing that fact, and points the way to new theory.
9 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
. . . and he's NOT a creationist!
By Frank Sherwin
It's hard to know where to begin when confronted with this outstanding tome. Trevor Palmer has no theological axe to grind ("Then, as now, there were religious fundamentalists whose minds were closed to scientific argument . . . " p. 82), but I find he's saying exactly what creation scientists are saying - albeit indirectly. Indeed, he states on p. xi, ". . . the Modern Synthesis, if not actually wrong, is far from complete" and a few lines later admits that natural selection is mainly a stabilizing factor, not involved in "driving evolution forward" - this from a man who was an undergrad at the same Cambridge College (Christ's) as Charles Darwin! Palmer realizes he may be giving us non-Darwinists too much ammo, so he places his faith in 'self-organization' - although he admits it's "still lacking an experimental basis" p. 283.
The crux of Palmer's book is that Earth's history is indeed a record of massive catastrophic events (e.g. Table 4.1). He takes the reader through the history of scientific thought prior to Darwin where most naturalists believed in the Flood - on through the Dark Ages of uniformitarianism (and all its hybrids), to the present age of neo-catastrophism, being careful to distance this movement from Bible-believing scientists, ". . . 20th century catastrophism is no longer handicapped (or at least, not to anything like the same extent as once was the case) by supposed associations with unscientific [sic] dogmatism" p. 342.
Palmer bashes other critics of macroevolution, fellow Britishers Francis Hitching and Richard Milton, and then pretty much goes on to say what they have been saying in their books.
His section on "human evolution" (The Erratic Descent of Man) and origin of life review are themselves worth the price of the book, and his reference section is incredible.
Here's what I find so refreshing with what atheist Palmer is saying- he has reviewed neo-Darwinism (gradualism) and uniformitarianism and found them lacking. The reasons and scientific evidences he gives are exactly what creation scientists have been saying for many decades. Palmer and others state there was a series of mass extinctions (section 4.5). This was secular heresy 3 decades ago - you didn't dare tell a geologist this! Meanwhile creationists have been saying there was one massive Extinction Event (Genesis 6 - 9). Slowly but surely geologists are coming - screaming and kicking - to a biblical view of earth history, and they are doing so because of the scientific evidence, not in spite of it. Palmer's book is an expensive must for the creation activist.
Controversy Catastrophism and Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, by Trevor Palmer PDF
Controversy Catastrophism and Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, by Trevor Palmer EPub
Controversy Catastrophism and Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, by Trevor Palmer Doc
Controversy Catastrophism and Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, by Trevor Palmer iBooks
Controversy Catastrophism and Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, by Trevor Palmer rtf
Controversy Catastrophism and Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, by Trevor Palmer Mobipocket
Controversy Catastrophism and Evolution: The Ongoing Debate, by Trevor Palmer Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar