Transitional Fossil Evidence Challenge : Dispatches from the Culture Wars

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Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of Michigan Citizens for Science and co-founder of The Panda's Thumb. He has written for such publications as The Bard, Skeptic and Reports of the National Center for Science Education, spoken in front of many organizations and conferences, and appeared on nationally syndicated radio shows and on C-SPAN. Ed is also a Fellow with the Center for Independent Media and the host of Declaring Independence, a one hour weekly political talk show on WPRR in Grand Rapids, Michigan.(static)

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Transitional Fossil Evidence Challenge

Category: Evolution
Posted on: February 24, 2005 12:59 PM, by Ed Brayton

My friend Wesley Elsberry has updated the Transitional Fossil Evidence Challenge (TFEC) and posted it on his blog. The TFEC has a long history in online discussions of evolution and creationism, particularly in the talk.origins newsgroup, but as far as I know this is the first time it has been extended to the blogosphere. It was developed many years ago in response to the constant claim that there are no transitional fossil sequences in the world. This claim is mindlessly repeated by creationists, virtually none of whom have ever examined a fossil in their lives. In order to credibly make such a claim, of course, one would have had to examine all of the published instances where a fossil was advanced as transitional in the scientific literature and found that the conclusion was unwarranted. So what Wesley did was dig into that literature and find a hundred or so journal articles where a particular find was advanced as transitional. The challenge, for those who deny the existence of transitional sequences, is to show why the examples do not, in fact, show transition. In a decade of issuing this challenge, no one making the initial claim has ever managed to do so.

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