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Originally Posted by JonClarke
The history of discovery shows clearly that the fossils succession was recognised well before the theory of evolution.
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But the scientific explanation, including through the theory of evolution, followed the data mining.
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Actually we don't see Permian forms in the Jurassic because they were extinct by then.
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Extinction is part of evolution.
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There was a lot more to pre-Darwinian palaeontology than simple data collection. There was a great deal of what might be called foresenic palaeontology, working out fossil behaviour, functional anatomy, taphonomy, and palaeoecology. As to explaining the fossil succession, while there was no one explanation there were a number of possibilities, organic evolution being but of one them.
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Apologies if my previous comments do not give early paleontology its due, but the fact remains that evolution won out among the possible answers and has the scientific distinction of providing a theoretical model able to explain the observed correlations.
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What has Lyell got to do with it? Which unscientific theories was Lyell trying to rebut? You are aware that Lyell was deeply hostile to the idea of evolution for most of his life?
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Lyell’s uniformitarian view on geology combated the catastrophist model advanced by believers in the deluge and laid the groundwork for Darwin.
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No it does not, at least in the way you see to imply. Evolution does not rule out Permian fossils in the Jurassic, extinction does. Because of evolution we do not expect to find Jurassic fossils in Permian strata, but that is a different story.
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Thank you for the clarification, as above I was using evolution as a broad catch-all for the change in earth’s biology, including extinction.
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Furthermore it is observation, not theory, which plays the key role in saying what does, and does not occur in particular strata.
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I don’t agree. Observation basically means collection of data. The ordering of data is a function of theory, which uncovers the natural rules governing observation. The argument about the
Wired article turns on its assertion that observation alone, without scientific theory, can produce progress in knowledge when aggregated to large scale.
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Of course we might well find Jurassic fossils in the Permian and Permian fossils in the Jurassic, in some specific instances. The reasons we can find (and recognise them) is rarely anything to do with evolution. In these few cases where it might be it would be evolutionary theory that would have to be modified. Jon
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Apologies again if my earlier phrasing was imprecise. An underlying point I was making, in defence of the quoted Einstein comment that theory decides if things are possible, was that Permian and Jurassic fossils originated respectively in the Permian and Jurassic ages, and our knowledge of their age of origin is not derived just from observation but by setting those observations within a detailed scientific theoretical framework.