I've read Dawkins and Gould too, and what they say makes more sense to me than Locke's arguments. He's basically repeating every argument made by "creation scientists", but denying any religious motivation. It's still psuedoscience.

It takes particularly narrow tunnel vision to say that there's no evidence for punctuated equilibrium. There's plenty of evidence in the geological and fossil records for episodic environmental change, and that's the primary driver of evolution. It doesn't seem like a big stretch to me, either, to see how periods of catastrophic change can affect the creation of fossils. Riddle me this, Batman: If few organisms except those at the top of the food chain have the privilege of dying of old age, why don't most fossils show tooth marks and broken bones indicative of death by eating? So many pristine fossils tells me that fossils are most likely when organisms are caught unawares by catastrophe such as flooding or earthquake, which buries the carcass where it can fossilize, and not erode or oxidize on the surface as it would if left behind by a predator. Catastrophe is the exception, by definition, ergo if somebody hadn't thought up punctuated equilibrium, Nature would've had to invent it anyway.

But wait, there's more: consider the odds--so we have a few million fossils out of however many [number with a huge amount of zeros] of organisms that have ever lived. I wouldn't call that a statistically significant sample, and so pointing to gaps in the fossil record seems particularly meaningless. The stats further support the idea that fossilization is a rare occurrence depending on unusual (catastrophic) circumstances, otherwise we'd be up to our asses in fossils after four billion years.

Then there's the old chestnut about the "necessary perfection" of forms like a bird's wing and the eye. Dawkins shows quite logically how an eye can evolve from photoreceptors on the flat outer surface of an organism, into a dimple for directivity, then a pinhole camera, and finally a collagen-based lens as fluid covers the pinhole and dries in a meniscus shape. There is a continuous spectrum of intermediate forms between blindness and camera vision. Same with a bird's wing, including intermediate gliding forms like the flying squirrel.

Same old creationism, repackaged minus the religion. I'd give it about an 8 on your bogosity meter.

--Robert