And thus, Gould and Eldridge denied an essential element in Darwinism.
No, that's wrong. There are four essential elements in classic Darwinian theory. Gradualism is not one of them. My experience is that most people who think they hate Darwinian theory, don't know what it is. Why don't you list the four essential elements of Darwinian theory, so we know you know what they are?
Even in Darwin's time, there were saltationists who did not think gradualism was always the case. And example was Darwin's friend and follower, Thomas Huxley. As you learned, Gould remained a Darwinian, and said so.
I really don't care how evolutionists spin it, that is the case. What else was he going to say?
That's all he could say; he had just demonstrated the four points of Darwinian theory.
Intelligent design is much more difficult to dismiss.
Gould dismissed it quite easily. Paley's use of a watch to make the case, merely shows a difference between designed objects made by humans and natural objects which are not designed.
(Yehren offers to show some cases of PE)
I probably wouldn't accept them as such but sure--bring them on.
Sure. Some forams were very constant in their phenotypes for millions of years, with small, gradual changes. Then as the Earth cooled at the end of the Miocene, there was a short (less than a few million years) period of rapid change, accommodating the new conditions, and then further stasis.
Because foraminiferans are so plentiful in the fossil record, we can follow even the very rapid evolution of them during the punctuated phase. If that were not the case, it would look like the new forams just popped up out of nowhere.
(Yehren shows that the origin of life is not part of evolutionary theory)
A favorite dodge for evolutionists.
Sorry, you're wrong about that, too. Darwin, for example, just thought that God created the first living things:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Charles Darwin, last sentence of
On The Origin of Species, 1872
Origins MUST be a part of evolutionary dogma if it is to be believed.
Nope. As you now realize, just about any orgin will do. The earth bringing forth life, God merely poofing them into existence, or microbes planted here by aliens all work the same way for evolution.
It's a common dodge by creationists, but it always fails.
Yehren notes that even most creationists now admit evolution of new taxa:
Reproductive isolation. Typically, this happens by a small population of a species becoming separated from the rest. Over time, mutations in each population can make it so that they can no longer interbreed. Even organizations like the ICR and Answers in Genesis now admit the fact of speciation.
No one with any knowledge of the field of biology denies that organisms can and do change over time.
Yes, your creationist leaders now admit evolution, (remember what "evolution" means) but they don't want their followers to realize it.
But one could easily see that an organism can devolve and go extinct under that rubric.
There is no "devolution", but almost every species that has lived on this Earth is now extinct. Occasionally a new species appears, and so it goes.
If interested, perhaps you could speak to the issue of genetic entropy in another thread?
You have to walk before you can run. What do you think "entropy" means in context of genetics?