THE ABSENCE OF TRANSITIONAL FORMS AND ITS EMBARRASSMENT FOR EVOLUTION

If macro-evolution is a fact, evidence of gradual change among the various species should be found in the fossil record. Evidence of transition should claim the spotlight. However, it is precisely this record that fails to reveal such evidence. Casey Luskin has written:

·       In the Origin of Species, Darwin explained that his theory led him to believe that “[t]he number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, [must] be truly enormous.” However, he understood that the fossil record did not document these “intermediate” forms of life, asking, “Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?” https://evolutionnews.org/2015/01/problem_5_abrup/

Instead of finding entire lines transitional forms (intermediate links), we find stasis – evidence that species have not changed – the very thing that creationists would have predicted.

Luskin adds:

·       Today, some 150 years later, out of thousands of species known from the fossil record, only a small fraction are claimed to be candidates for Darwin’s intermediate forms. Fossil evidence of evolutionary intermediates is generally lacking, as the late evolutionary paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould admitted: “The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.”

However, even these few “candidates” are hotly contested. Instead of representing intermediate forms, they might simply represent entirely different species without any ancestral connection. Meanwhile, the great preponderance of evidence shows the very opposite thing, as Luskin notes:

·       Dr. Colin Patterson had written a book for the British Museum called Evolution. Creationist Luther Sunderland wrote to Dr. Patterson inquiring why he had not shown one single photograph of a transitional fossil in his book. Patterson then wrote back with the following amazing confession which was reproduced, in its entirety, in Sunderland’s book Darwin’s Enigma:

·       ‘I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic licence, would that not mislead the reader?’

·       ‘Yet Gould [Stephen J. Gould—the now deceased professor of paleontology from Harvard University] and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. … You say that I should at least “show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.” I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. https://creation.com/that-quote-about-the-missing-transitional-fossils

One biology textbook explains:

·       Many species remain virtually unchanged for millions of years, then suddenly disappear to be replaced by a quite different, but related, form. Moreover, most major groups of animals appear abruptly in the fossil record, fully formed, and with no fossils yet discovered that form a transition from their parent group. (C.P. Hickman, L.S. Roberts, and F.M. Hickman, Integrated Principles of Zoology, p. 866 (Times Mirror/Moseby College Publishing, 1988, 8th ed))

An invertebrate biology textbook explains:

·       Most of the animal groups that are represented in the fossil record first appear, “fully formed” and identifiable as to their phylum, in the Cambrian, some 550 million years ago. These include such anatomically complex and distinctive types as trilobites, echinoderms, brachiopods, molluscs, and chordates. … The fossil record is therefore of no help with respect to the origin and early diversification of the various animal phyla…(R.S.K. Barnes, P. Calow and P.J.W. Olive, The Invertebrates: A New Synthesis, pp. 9-10 (3rd ed., Blackwell Sci. Publications, 2001))

Why is “fossil record is therefore of no help with respect to the origin and early diversification of the various animal phyla?” It simply fails to show any unambiguous records of transition, as it should show if macro-evolution has taken place.

However, some evolutionists have countered that it is just a matter of time until the transitional histories are laid bare, but this has not occurred. Instead, evolutionists are admitting that our knowledge of the fossil record has already reached maturity. Luskin reports:

·       Paleontologists today generally recognize that while the fossil record is imperfect, it is still adequate to assess questions about evolution. One study in Nature reported that “if scaled to the … taxonomic level of the family, the past 540 million years of the fossil record provide uniformly good documentation of the life of the past.

Evolutionary anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz summarizes the problem:

·       [W]e are still in the dark about the origin of most major groups of organisms. They appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus — full-blown and raring to go, in contradiction to Darwin’s depiction of evolution as resulting from the gradual accumulation of countless infinitesimally minute variations. . .(Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species, p. 3 (Wiley, 1999).

While some evolutionists argue that their darkness still castes some glimmers of light upon their theory, creationism is illuminated by the noonday sun.