Entomologist surprised his name is included in a retracted anti-Darwin paper

LOL! What these bright, creative, and mischievous students will stoop to! When I was a student on a field trip to Death Valley, a friend of mine and I circled ahead of the class and planted two bright yellow plastic daffodils on the top of a hill in the direction the group was moving, and then circled back. Then the two professors got close enough to see them, "Holy cow," said one of the professors and both of them raced up to the top of the hill with us behind them scarcely able to keep from laughing. "Dr.----," we said, "You should know there are no daffodils in Death Valley." Why professors come to hate some students . . . ;-) -Q Querius

"Expect a rush of YEC papers co-authored by well-entrenched Darwinist professors who gave poor grades to vengeful but 'enterprising' students." Funny, Querius! That beats my story about a student who spoofed the email address of the most attractive student in a class I was teaching and sent me a suggestive message purportedly from her. RalphDavidWestfall

A less generous interpretation is that someone is trying to stick a metaphorical shiv into Dr. Charles Michener's reputation. Gosh, what an interesting, Machiavellian method for getting rid of your competition! ;-) Yikes! Expect a rush of YEC papers co-authored by well-entrenched Darwinist professors who gave poor grades to vengeful but "enterprising" students. -Q Querius

Here are a few legitimate papers in peer review (by no means a comprehensive list) that readily admit to the 'problems' in the fossil record for Darwinists: "The record of the first appearance of living phyla, classes, and orders can best be described in Wright's (1) term as 'from the top down'." (James W. Valentine, "Late Precambrian bilaterians: Grades and clades," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 91: 6751-6757 (July 1994).) MicroRNAs and metazoan macroevolution: insights into canalization, complexity, and the Cambrian explosion - 2009 Kevin J Peterson, Michael R Dietrich, Mark A McPeek Excerpt: Beginning some 555 million years ago the Earth's biota changed in profound and fundamental ways, going from an essentially static system billions of years in existence to the one we find today, a dynamic and awesomely complex system whose origin seems to defy explanation. Part of the intrigue with the Cambrian explosion is that numerous animal phyla with very distinct body plans arrive on the scene in a geological blink of the eye, with little or no warning of what is to come in rocks that predate this interval of time. The abruptness of the transition between the ''Precambrian'' and the Cambrian was apparent right at the outset of our science with the publication of Murchison's The Silurian System, a treatise that paradoxically set forth the research agenda for numerous paleontologists -- in addition to serving as perennial fodder for creationists. The reasoning is simple -- as explained on an intelligent-design t-shirt. Fact: Forty phyla of complex animals suddenly appear in the fossil record, no forerunners, no transitional forms leading to them; ''a major mystery,'' a ''challenge.'' The Theory of Evolution -- exploded again (idofcourse.com). Although we would dispute the numbers, and aside from the last line, there is not much here that we would disagree with. Indeed, many of Darwin's contemporaries shared these sentiments, and we assume -- if Victorian fashion dictated -- that they would have worn this same t-shirt with pride. http://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=S3p39KsAAAAJ&citation_for_view=S3p39KsAAAAJ:u5HHmVD_uO8C The Cambrian's Many Forms Excerpt: "It appears that organisms displayed “rampant” within-species variation “in the ‘warm afterglow’ of the Cambrian explosion,” Hughes said, but not later. “No one has shown this convincingly before, and that’s why this is so important.""From an evolutionary perspective, the more variable a species is, the more raw material natural selection has to operate on,"....(Yet Surprisingly)...."There's hardly any variation in the post-Cambrian," he said. "Even the presence or absence or the kind of ornamentation on the head shield varies within these Cambrian trilobites and doesn't vary in the post-Cambrian trilobites." University of Chicago paleontologist Mark Webster; article on the "surprising and unexplained" loss of variation and diversity for trilobites over the 270 million year time span that trilobites were found in the fossil record, prior to their total extinction from the fossil record about 250 million years ago. http://www.terradaily.com/reports/The_Cambrian_Many_Forms_999.html Scientific study turns understanding about evolution on its head - July 30, 2013 Excerpt: evolutionary biologists,,, looked at nearly one hundred fossil groups to test the notion that it takes groups of animals many millions of years to reach their maximum diversity of form. Contrary to popular belief, not all animal groups continued to evolve fundamentally new morphologies through time. The majority actually achieved their greatest diversity of form (disparity) relatively early in their histories. ,,,Dr Matthew Wills said: "This pattern, known as 'early high disparity', turns the traditional V-shaped cone model of evolution on its head. What is equally surprising in our findings is that groups of animals are likely to show early-high disparity regardless of when they originated over the last half a billion years. This isn't a phenomenon particularly associated with the first radiation of animals (in the Cambrian Explosion), or periods in the immediate wake of mass extinctions.",,, Author Martin Hughes, continued: "Our work implies that there must be constraints on the range of forms within animal groups, and that these limits are often hit relatively early on. Co-author Dr Sylvain Gerber, added: "A key question now is what prevents groups from generating fundamentally new forms later on in their evolution.,,, http://phys.org/news/2013-07-scientific-evolution.html Dollo's law and the death and resurrection of genes: Excerpt: "As the history of animal life was traced in the fossil record during the 19th century, it was observed that once an anatomical feature was lost in the course of evolution it never staged a return. This observation became canonized as Dollo's law, after its propounder, and is taken as a general statement that evolution is irreversible." http://www.pnas.org/content/91/25/12283.full.pdf+html Here is a paper, though thoroughly honest to the fossil evidence, Darwinists tried to bury (along with the editor who allowed its heretical publication) Intelligent Design: The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories By: Stephen C. Meyer - 2004 http://www.discovery.org/a/2177 I'm sure many more papers such as these could be found in the appendix of Darwin's Doubt. But along this line, here are many quotes by leading paleontologists on the 'problematic' fossil record: leading paleontologists on the true state of the fossil record: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15dxL40Ff6kI2o6hs8SAbfNiGj1hEOE1QHhf1hQmT2Yg/edit bornagain77

I have been waiting with bated breath for my favorite Darwin catchphrase, sheds new light on evolution, to reappear. It is Darwin-speak for "WTF?!" Sadly, it has not reared its silly head for some time. sagebrush gardener

It seems an awful long time since I last read the excited cry going up: 'How about that! Isn't Evolution wonderful? It never ceases to surprise us. That wasn't something we had really expected/anticipated/countenanced/allowed for/envisaged, envisioned (see Thesaurus); it came right out of left-field....' Howmsomever, I haven't read an article by Cornelius Hunter lately, even one in which I can only recognise a few Anglo-Saxon joining words. He usually keeps us abreast of the latest causes of wonderment to evolutionists. Axel