in Darwin's prophecy, evolutionary paleontologists have been
digging up fossils and searching for missing links all over
the world since the middle of the nineteenth century. Despite
their best efforts, no transitional forms have yet been uncovered.
All the fossils unearthed in excavations have shown that,
contrary to the beliefs of evolutionists, life appeared on
earth all of a sudden and fully-formed.
Robert Carroll, an expert on vertebrate paleontology
and a committed evolutionist, comes to admit that the Darwinist
hope has not been satisfied with fossil discoveries:
Despite more than a hundred
years of intense collecting efforts since the time of Darwin's
death, the fossil record still does not yield the picture
of infinitely numerous transitional links that he expected.41
Another evolutionary paleontologist, K. S. Thomson,
tells us that new groups of organisms appear very abruptly
in the fossil record:
When a major group of
organisms arises and first appears in the record, it seems
to come fully equipped with a suite of new characters not
seen in related, putatively ancestral groups. These radical
changes in morphology and function appear to arise very
Biologist Francis Hitching, in his book The Neck
of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong, states:
If we find fossils, and
if Darwin's theory was right, we can predict what the rock
should contain; finely graduated fossils leading from one
group of creatures to another group of creatures at a higher
level of complexity. The 'minor improvements' in successive
generations should be as readily preserved as the species
themselves. But this is hardly ever the case. In fact, the
opposite holds true, as Darwin himself complained; "innumerable
transitional forms must have existed, but why do we not
find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of
the earth?" Darwin felt though that the "extreme imperfection"
of the fossil record was simply a matter of digging up more
fossils. But as more and more fossils were dug up, it was
found that almost all of them, without exception, were very
close to current living animals.43
There is no gradual development
in the fossil record such as Darwin had predicted.
Different species emerged all at once, with their
own peculiar bodily structures.
The fossil record reveals that species emerged
suddenly, and with totally different structures, and remained
exactly the same over the longest geological periods. Stephen
Jay Gould, a Harvard University paleontologist and well-known
evolutionist, admitted this fact first in the late 70s:
The history of most fossil
species include two features particularly inconsistent with
gradualism: 1) Stasis - most species exhibit no directional
change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the
fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear;
morphological change is usually limited and directionless;
2) Sudden appearance - in any local area, a species does
not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its
ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'.44
only strengthened the facts of stasis and sudden appearance.
Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge write in 1993 that "most
species, during their geological history, either do not change
in any appreciable way, or else they fluctuate mildly in morphology,
with no apparent direction."45 Robert Carroll
is forced to agree in 1997 that "Most major groups appear
to originate and diversify over geologically very short durations,
and to persist for much longer periods without major morphological
or trophic change."46
At this point, it is necessary
to clarify just what the concept of "transitional form" means.
The intermediate forms predicted by the theory of evolution
are living things falling between two species, but which possess
deficient or semi-developed organs. But sometimes the concept
of intermediate form is misunderstood, and living structures
which do not possess the features of transitional forms are
seen as actually doing so. For instance, if one group of living
things possesses features which belong to another, this is
not an intermediate form feature. The platypus, a mammal living
in Australia, reproduces by laying eggs just like reptiles.
In addition, it has a bill similar to that of a duck. Scientists
describe such creatures as the platypus as "mosaic creatures."
That mosaic creatures do not count as intermediate forms is
also accepted by such foremost paleontologists as Stephen
Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge.47
41 Robert L.
Carroll, Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution, Cambridge
University Press, 1997, p. 25.
42 K. S. Thomson, Morphogenesis and
Evolution, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 98.
43 Francis Hitching, The Neck of the
Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong, Tichnor and Fields, New
Haven, 1982, p. 40.
44 S.J. Gould, "Evolution's Erratic
Pace", Natural History, vol. 86, May 1977. (emphasis added)
45 Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge,
"Punctuated Equilibria: The Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered",
Paleobiology, 3 (2), 1977, p. 115.
46 Robert L. Carroll, Patterns and
Processes of Vertebrate Evolution, Cambridge University Press,
1997, p. 146.
47 S. J. Gould & N. Eldredge, Paleobiology,
vol. 3, 1977, p. 147.