Now we’re getting somewhere…
Icons of Evolution’s Dr. Wells, after becoming involved in the Evolution debate, obtained a second doctorate, in Biology, I believe that’s the one from Berkeley. (His first was in Religion from one of the Ivies)
Dr. Wells is “a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Renewal of Science and Culture,” which has as its agenda “to challenge materialism on specifically scientific grounds.” Wells has openly and honestly stated that it was with that mission in mind that he went for his Biology degree; he is a committed advocate of the “Intelligent Design” theory of the development of life. sub[/sub] Hence his emphasis on how statistically unlikely X, Y or Z event may have been – which has been addressed already as not constituting “proof” of anything after-the-fact.
(1)[sub](This is the latest – and very interesting, may I say – flavor-of-the-month for those who reject that life may have developed entirely through natural, physical processes of the Natural Selection mechanism.) [/sub]
Wells’ analysis also fails in that he tends to extrapolate bad or inappropriate representations of the science into a weakness of the science itself. The “Cambrian Explosion” has already been discussed. Another Example: The March of Progress diagrams in which you see in single file an ever-more-upright ape, australopithecine, h.erectus, neanderthaloid and Cro-Magnon; or ever-bigger and toothier 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1- toed equines from eohippus to the horse; moving in the direction of “progress.” Sure, these ARE oversimplified presentations that will seem to imply to a grade or high school pupil a uni-directional and direct-successional evolution, if it’s not explained properly by the teacher. But in the world of real science it is well understood that these diagrams merely show a temporal distribution of the appearance of each species, that many of them coexisted for millions or hundreds of thousands of years, that which one ended up surviving was a contingent event, that species do not “turn into” others, etc.
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So, to touch again on the OP:
Is evolution being taught badly? Knowing our schools, probably.
Is it because of some fundamental fatal discordance between the fossil evidence and Darwinian Theory? No.
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