As you must know, species evolve quick enough that the changes may not be visible in an imperfect fossil record. The time between successive strata may be longer that the duration recorded by the strata themselves, and species may evolve elsewhere and then migrate to a new area (Eg for humans, we entered Europe on more than one occasion from Africa. Evolution is visible in East Africa, but in Europe what we see is sudden changes when new populations arrive)
Darwin himself wrote of the issue of the apparent jumps in species level evolution, and was clear that it is the families and genera and above that show the clear gradualism.
Your objections are not new and were thoroughly discussed in Darwin's day.
[SIZE=+1]X. On the Imperfection of the Geological Record[/SIZE] [SIZE=+1]On the Sudden Appearance of Whole Groups of Allied Species[/SIZE]
T[SIZE=-1]HE ABRUPT[/SIZE] manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several palæontologists—for instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and Sedgwick—as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection. For the development by this means of a group of forms, all of which are descended from some one progenitor, must have been an extremely slow process; and the progenitors must have lived long before their modified descendants. But we continually overrate the perfection of the geological record, and falsely infer, because certain genera or families have not been found beneath a certain stage, that they did not exist before that stage. In all cases positive palæontological evidence may be implicitly trusted; negative evidence is worthless, as experience has so often shown. We continually forget how large the world is, compared with the area over which our geological formations have been carefully examined; we forget that groups of species may elsewhere have long existed, and have slowly multiplied, before they invaded the ancient archipelagoes of Europe and the United States. We do not make due allowance for the intervals of time which have elapsed between our consecutive formations,—longer perhaps in many cases than the time required for the accumulation of each formation. These intervals will have given time for the multiplication of species from some one parent-form: and in the succeeding formation, such groups or species will appear as if suddenly created. |
On The Origin of Species
Let's look at the evolution of man. There's a history here, the evolution of the theory of the evolution of man.
The first fossil evidence for human evolution was a faulty construction of Neanderthal.
Marcellin Boule’s vision in 1909 of Stone Age Man.
August 3, 1908: On this date, a nearly complete, buried skeleton of a Neandertal was discovered in a cave at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France by two young clergymen, brothers Amédée and Jean Bouyssonie. It was examined by Marcellin Boule who overlooked its arthritic condition and as a result, his published description, which characterized the Neandertal as a shuffling, bent-kneed, and hairy creature capable of “rudimentary intellectual abilities,” became stereotypical. This mistake was corrected by research in the 1950s.
http://diogenesii.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/august-3-1908-a-monday/
The next fossil evidence for the evolution of man was the fraud Piltdown man.
The Piltdown Man was a paleoanthropological hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. These fragments consisted of parts of a skull and jawbone, said to have been collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, England. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn-man", after the collector Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen. The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan deliberately combined with the cranium of a fully developed modern human.--Wiki
Then there was a mistaken identity called Nebraska Man.
Nebraska Man was a name applied to Hesperopithecus haroldcookii, a putative species of ape. Hesperopithecus meant "ape of the western world," and it was heralded as the first higher primate of North America. Haroldcookii was given as the species name in reference to the original discoverer of the tooth, Harold Cook. It was originally described by Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1922, on the basis of a tooth that rancher and geologist Harold Cook found in Nebraska in 1917. The discovery was made around ten years after the finding of Piltdown Man, another possible human ancestor that turned out to be a hoax. Although Nebraska man was not a deliberate hoax, the original classification proved to be a mistake.--Wiki
Both Neanderthal and Piltdown man had a 40 year "undisputed" run. Nebraska man had a 10 year run with doubts by some from the outset.
The lesson learned form these examples is that a theory of what a presupposed evolution of man should look like is causing "bone pickers" to fabricate what they find to meet the theory.
--Dave
