23. Fossil Gaps
If evolution happened, the fossil record should show continuous and gradual changes from the bottom to the top layers. Actually, many gaps or discontinuities appear throughout the fossil record.a At the most fundamental level, a big gap exists between forms of life whose cells have nuclei (eukaryotes, such as plants, animals, and fungi) and those that don’t (prokaryotes such as bacteria and blue-green algae).b Fossil links are also missing between numerous plants,c between single-celled forms of life and invertebrates (animals without backbones), among insects,d between invertebrates and vertebrates (animals with backbones),e between fish and amphibians,f between amphibians and reptiles,g between reptiles and mammals,h between reptiles and birds,i between primates and other mammals,j and between apes and other primates.k In fact, chains are missing, not links. The fossil record has been studied so thoroughly it is safe to conclude these gaps are real; they will never be filled.l
References:
a. “But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them imbedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?” Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 163.
“... the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed [must] truly be enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory [of evolution].” Ibid., p. 323.
Darwin then explained that he thought these gaps existed because of the “imperfection of the geologic record.” Early Darwinians expected the gaps would be filled as fossil exploration continued. Most paleontologists now agree this expectation has not been fulfilled.
The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has one of the largest collections of fossils in the world. Consequently, its former dean, Dr. David Raup, was highly qualified to summarize the situation regarding transitions that should be observed in the fossil record.
“Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information—what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic. So Darwin’s problem has not been alleviated in the last 120 years and we still have a record which does show change but one that can hardly be looked upon as the most reasonable consequence of natural selection.” David M. Raup, “Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology,” Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Vol. 50, No. 1, January 1979, p. 25.
“In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.” Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1981), p. 95.
“But fossil species remain unchanged throughout most of their history and the record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition.” David S. Woodruff, “Evolution: The Paleobiological View,” Science, Vol. 208, 16 May 1980, p. 716.
Dr. Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum (Natural History), was asked by Luther D. Sunderland why no evolutionary transitions were included in Dr. Patterson’s recent book, Evolution. In a personal letter, Patterson said:
“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 asked 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 and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say that there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least “show a photo of the fossil from which each type organism was derived.” I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.” Copy of letter, dated 10 April 1979, from Patterson to Sunderland.
“But the curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps: the fossils go missing in all the important places. When you look for links between major groups of animals, they simply aren’t there; at least, not in enough numbers to put their status beyond doubt. Either they don’t exist at all, or they are so rare that endless argument goes on about whether a particular fossil is, or isn’t, or might be, transitional between this group or that.” [emphasis in original] Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong (New Haven, Connecticut: Ticknor and Fields, 1982), p. 19.
“There is no more conclusive refutation of Darwinism than that furnished by palaeontology. Simple probability indicates that fossil hoards can only be test samples. Each sample, then, should represent a different stage of evolution, and there ought to be merely ‘transitional’ types, no definition and no species. Instead of this we find perfectly stable and unaltered forms persevering through long ages, forms that have not developed themselves on the fitness principle, but appear suddenly and at once in their definitive shape; that do not thereafter evolve towards better adaptation, but become rarer and finally disappear, while quite different forms crop up again. What unfolds itself, in ever-increasing richness of form, is the great classes and kinds of living beings which exist aboriginally and exist still, without transition types, in the grouping of today.” [emphasis in original] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 2 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 32.
“This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists. It is true of almost all orders of all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate. A fortiori, it is also true of the classes, themselves, and of the major animal phyla, and it is apparently also true of analogous categories of plants.” George Gaylord Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 107.
“... the geologic record did not then and still does not yield a finely graduated chain of slow and progressive evolution. In other words, there are not enough intermediates. There are very few cases where one can find a gradual transition from one species to another and very few cases where one can look at a part of the fossil record and actually see that organisms were improving in the sense of becoming better adapted.” Ibid., p. 23.
“Surely the lack of gradualism—the lack of intermediates—is a major problem.” Dr. David Raup, as taken from page 16 of an approved and verified transcript of a taped interview conducted by Luther D. Sunderland on 27 July 1979.
“... there are about 25 major living subdivisions (phyla) of the animal kingdom alone, all with gaps between them that are not bridged by known intermediates.” Francisco J. Ayala and James W. Valentine, Evolving, The Theory and Processes of Organic Evolution (Menlo Park, California: The Benjamin Cummings Publishing Co., 1979), p. 258.
“Most orders, classes, and phyla appear abruptly, and commonly have already acquired all the characters that distinguish them.” Ibid., p. 266.
“All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.” Stephen Jay Gould, “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,” Natural History, Vol. 86, June–July 1977,” p. 23.
“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. ... We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.” Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution’s Erratic Pace,” Natural History, Vol. 5, May 1977, p. 14.
“New species almost always appeared suddenly in the fossil record with no intermediate links to ancestors in older rocks of the same region.” Ibid., p. 12.
“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.” Stephen Jay Gould, “Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?” Paleobiology, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1980, p. 127.
In a published interview, Dr. Niles Eldredge, an invertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, stated:
But the smooth transition from one form of life to another which is implied in the theory is ... not borne out by the facts. The search for “missing links” between various living creatures, like humans and apes, is probably fruitless ... because they probably never existed as distinct transitional types ... But no one has yet found any evidence of such transitional creatures. This oddity has been attributed to gaps in the fossil record which gradualists expected to fill when rock strata of the proper age had been found. In the last decade, however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them. If it is not the fossil record which is incomplete then it must be the theory. “Missing, Believed Nonexistent,” Manchester Guardian (The Washington Post Weekly), Vol. 119, No. 22, 26 November 1978, p. 1.
Gould and Eldredge claimed transitional fossils are missing because relatively rapid evolutionary jumps (which they called “punctuated equilibria”) occurred over these gaps. They did not explain how this could happen.
Many geneticists are shocked by the proposal of Gould and Eldredge. Why would they propose something so contradictory to genetics? Gould and Eldredge were forced to say that evolution must proceed in jumps. Never explained, in genetic and mathematical terms, is how such large jumps could occur. To some, this desperation is justified.
“... the gradual morphological transitions between presumed ancestors and descendants, anticipated by most biologists, are missing.” David E. Schindel (Curator of Invertebrate Fossils, Peabody Museum of Natural History), “The Gaps in the Fossil Record,” Nature, Vol. 297, 27 May 1982, p. 282.
“Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of ‘seeing’ evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists the most notorious of which is the presence of ‘gaps’ in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them.” David B. Kitts (School of Geology and Geophysics, University of Oklahoma), “Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory,” Evolution, Vol. 28, September 1974, p. 467.
“In spite of the immense amount of the paleontological material and the existence of long series of intact stratigraphic sequences with perfect records for the lower categories, transitions between the higher categories are missing.” Richard B. Goldschmidt, “Evolution, As Viewed by One Geneticist,” American Scientist, Vol. 40, January 1952, p. 98.
“When a new phylum, class, or order appears, there follows a quick, explosive (in terms of geological time) diversification so that practically all orders or families known appear suddenly and without any apparent transitions.” Ibid., p. 97.
“There is no fossil record establishing historical continuity of structure for most characters that might be used to assess relationships among phyla.” Katherine G. Field et al., “Molecular Phylogeny of the Animal Kingdom,” Science, Vol. 239, 12 February 1988, p. 748.
b. “The prokaryotes came first; eukaryotes (all plants, animals, fungi and protists) evolved from them, and to this day biologists hotly debate how this transition took place, with about 20 different theories on the go. ... [What was thought to be an intermediate between prokaryotes and eukaryotes] is no longer tenable.” Katrin Henze and William Martin, “Essence of Mitochondria,” Nature, Vol. 426, 13 November 2003, p. 127.
c. If evolution happened, nonvascular plants should have preceded vascular plants. However, fossils of nonvascular plants are not found in strata evolutionists believe were deposited before the earliest vascular plants appeared.
The bryophytes [nonvascular plants] are presumed to have evolved before the appearance and stabilization of vascular tissue—that is, before the appearance of these tracheophytes [vascular plants]—although there is no early bryophyte [nonvascular plant] fossil record. Lynn Margulis and Karlene V. Schwartz, p. 250.
“The actual steps that led to the origin of seeds and fruits are not known ... .” Ibid.
“It has long been hoped that extinct plants will ultimately reveal some of the stages through which existing groups have passed during the course of their development, but it must be freely admitted that this aspiration has been fulfilled to a very slight extent, even though paleobotanical research has been in progress for more than one hundred years. As yet we have not been able to trace the phylogenetic history of a single group of modern plants from its beginning to the present.” Chester A. Arnold, An Introduction to Paleobotany (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947), p. 7.
“... to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favour of special creation. If, however, another explanation could be found for this hierarchy of classification, it would be the knell [the death signal] of the theory of evolution. Can you imagine how an orchid, a duckweed, and a palm have come from the same ancestry, and have we any evidence for this assumption? The evolutionist must be prepared with an answer, but I think that most would break down before an inquisition. Textbooks hoodwink.” E. J. H. Corner, “Evolution,” Contemporary Botanical Thought, editors Anna M. MacLeod and L. S. Cobley (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), p. 97.
“The absence of any known series of such intermediates imposes severe restrictions on morphologists interested in the ancestral source of angiosperms [flowering plants] and leads to speculation and interpretation of homologies and relationships on the basis of the most meager circumstantial evidence.” Charles B. Beck, Origin and Early Evolution of Angiosperms (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 5.
“The origin of angiosperms, an ‘abominable mystery’ to Charles Darwin, remained so 100 years later and is little better today.” Colin Patterson et al., “Congruence between Molecular and Morphological Phylogenies,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Vol. 24, 1993, p. 170.
d. “The insect fossil record has many gaps.” “Insects: Insect Fossil Record,” Britannica CD, Version 97 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1997).
e. Speaking of the lack of transitional fossils between the invertebrates and vertebrates, Smith admits:
As our present information stands, however, the gap remains unbridged, and the best place to start the evolution of the vertebrates is in the imagination. Homer W. Smith, From Fish to Philosopher (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1953), p. 26.
“How this earliest chordate stock evolved, what stages of development it went through to eventually give rise to truly fishlike creatures we do not know. Between the Cambrian when it probably originated, and the Ordovician when the first fossils of animals with really fishlike characteristics appeared, there is a gap of perhaps 100 million years which we will probably never be able to fill.” Francis Downes Ommanney, The Fishes, Life Nature Library (New York: Time Incorporated, 1963), p. 60.
“Origin of the vertebrates is obscure—there is no fossil record preceding the occurrence of fishes in the late Ordovician time.” Arthur N. Strahler, Science and Earth History: The Evolution/Creation Controversy (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1987), p. 316.
f. “... there are no intermediate forms between finned and limbed creatures in the fossil collections of the world.” Taylor, p. 60.
g. Evolutionists believe amphibians evolved into reptiles, with either Diadectes or Seymouria as the transition. Actually, by the evolutionists’ own time scale, this “transition” occurs 35 million years (m.y.) after the earliest reptile, Hylonomus (a cotylosaur). A parent cannot appear 35 million years after its child! The scattered locations of these fossils also present problems for the evolutionist.
Table 2. Reptile Transition?
What ----------------------- Who--------- When----------------------------------Where
Earliest Reptile....Hylonomus..lower Pennsylvanian 315 m.y...Nova Scotia
Transition? ..........Diadectes....lower Permian 280 m.y............Texas
Transition?..........Seymouria...lower Permian 280 m.y............Texas
[See Steven M. Stanley, Earth and Life Through Time (New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1986), pp. 411–415. See also Robert H. Dott Jr. and Roger L. Batten, Evolution of the Earth, 3rd edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), p. 356.]
It is true that skeletal features of some amphibians and some reptiles are similar. However, huge differences exist in their soft internal organs, such as their circulatory and reproductive systems. For example, no evolutionary scheme has ever been given for the development of the many unique innovations of the reptile’s egg. [See Denton, pp. 218–219 and Pitman, pp. 199–200.]
h. “Gaps at a lower taxonomic level, species and genera, are practically universal in the fossil record of the mammal-like reptiles. In no single adequately documented case is it possible to trace a transition, species by species, from one genus to another.” Thomas S. Kemp, Mammal-Like Reptiles and the Origin of Mammals (New York: Academic Press, 1982), p. 319.
i. “The [evolutionary] origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved.” W. E. Swinton, “The Origin of Birds,” Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds, editor A. J. Marshall (New York: Academic Press, 1960), Vol. 1, Chapter 1, p. 1.
Some have claimed birds evolved from a two-legged dinosaur known as a theropod. However, several problems exist.
A theropod dinosaur fossil found in China showed a lung mechanism completely incompatible with that of birds. [See John A. Ruben et al., “Lung Structure and Ventilation in Theropod Dinosaurs and Early Birds, Science, Vol. 278, 14 November 1997, pp. 1267–1270.] In that report, “Ruben argues that a transition from a crocodilian to a bird lung would be impossible, because the transitional animal would have a life-threatening hernia or hole in its diaphragm.” [Ann Gibbons, “Lung Fossils Suggest Dinos Breathed in Cold Blood,” Science, Vol. 278, 14 November 1997, p. 1230.]
Bird and theropod “hands” differ. Theropods have “fingers” I, II, and III (having lost the “ring finger” and little finger), while birds have fingers II, III, and IV. “The developmental evidence of homology is problematic for the hypothesized theropod origin of birds.” [Ann C. Burke and Alan Feduccia, “Developmental Patterns and the Identification of Homologies in the Avian Hand,” Science, Vol. 278, 24 October 1997, pp. 666–668.] “... this important developmental evidence that birds have a II-III-IV digital formula, unlike the dinosaur I-II-III, is the most important barrier to belief in the dinosaur origin [for birds] orthodoxy.” [Richard Hinchliffe, “The Forward March of the Bird-Dinosaurs Halted?” Science, Vol. 278, 24 October 1997, p. 597.]
Theropod “arms” (relative to body size) are tiny, compared with the wings of supposedly early birds.
“... most theropod dinosaurs and in particular the birdlike dromaeosaurs are all very much later in the fossil record than Archaeopteryx [the supposed first bird].” Hinchliffe, p. 597.
See “What Was Archaeopteryx?” on pages 281–284.
Birds have many unique features difficult to explain from any evolutionary perspective, such as: feathers, tongues, and egg shell designs.
j. “When and where the first Primates made their appearance is also conjectural. ... It is clear, therefore, that the earliest Primates are not yet known ...” William Charles Osman Hill, Primates (New York: Interscience Publishers, Inc., 1953), Vol. 1, pp. 25–26.
“The transition from insectivore to primate is not clearly documented in the fossil record.” A. J. Kelso, Physical Anthropology, 2nd edition (New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1974), p. 141.
“Modern apes, for instance, seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans—of upright, naked, toolmaking, big-brained beings—is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter.” Lyall Watson, “The Water People,” Science Digest, May 1982, p. 44.
k. “At any rate, modern gorillas, orangs and chimpanzees spring out of nowhere, as it were. They are here today; they have no yesterday, unless one is able to find faint foreshadowings of it in the dryopithecids.” Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981; reprint, New York: Warner Books, 1982), p. 363.
l. “It may, therefore, be firmly maintained that it is not even possible to make a caricature of an evolution out of palaeobiological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as due to the scarcity of the material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.” Nilsson, p. 1212.
“... experience shows that the gaps which separate the highest categories may never be bridged in the fossil record. Many of the discontinuities tend to be more and more emphasized with increased collecting.” Norman D. Newell (former Curator of Historical Geology at the American Museum of Natural History), “The Nature of the Fossil Record,” Adventures in Earth History, editor Preston Cloud (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1970), pp. 644–645.
“A person may choose any group of animals or plants, large or small, or pick one at random. He may then go to a library and with some patience he will be able to find a qualified author who says that the evolutionary origin of that form is not known.” Bolton Davidheiser, Evolution and Christian Faith (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1969), p. 302.
Davidheiser, a Ph.D. zoologist and a creationist, lists 75 additional examples that are not already mentioned in this book.
If evolution happened, the fossil record should show continuous and gradual changes from the bottom to the top layers. Actually, many gaps or discontinuities appear throughout the fossil record.a At the most fundamental level, a big gap exists between forms of life whose cells have nuclei (eukaryotes, such as plants, animals, and fungi) and those that don’t (prokaryotes such as bacteria and blue-green algae).b Fossil links are also missing between numerous plants,c between single-celled forms of life and invertebrates (animals without backbones), among insects,d between invertebrates and vertebrates (animals with backbones),e between fish and amphibians,f between amphibians and reptiles,g between reptiles and mammals,h between reptiles and birds,i between primates and other mammals,j and between apes and other primates.k In fact, chains are missing, not links. The fossil record has been studied so thoroughly it is safe to conclude these gaps are real; they will never be filled.l
References:
a. “But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them imbedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?” Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 163.
“... the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed [must] truly be enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory [of evolution].” Ibid., p. 323.
Darwin then explained that he thought these gaps existed because of the “imperfection of the geologic record.” Early Darwinians expected the gaps would be filled as fossil exploration continued. Most paleontologists now agree this expectation has not been fulfilled.
The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has one of the largest collections of fossils in the world. Consequently, its former dean, Dr. David Raup, was highly qualified to summarize the situation regarding transitions that should be observed in the fossil record.
“Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information—what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic. So Darwin’s problem has not been alleviated in the last 120 years and we still have a record which does show change but one that can hardly be looked upon as the most reasonable consequence of natural selection.” David M. Raup, “Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology,” Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Vol. 50, No. 1, January 1979, p. 25.
“In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.” Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1981), p. 95.
“But fossil species remain unchanged throughout most of their history and the record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition.” David S. Woodruff, “Evolution: The Paleobiological View,” Science, Vol. 208, 16 May 1980, p. 716.
Dr. Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum (Natural History), was asked by Luther D. Sunderland why no evolutionary transitions were included in Dr. Patterson’s recent book, Evolution. In a personal letter, Patterson said:
“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 asked 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 and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say that there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least “show a photo of the fossil from which each type organism was derived.” I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.” Copy of letter, dated 10 April 1979, from Patterson to Sunderland.
“But the curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps: the fossils go missing in all the important places. When you look for links between major groups of animals, they simply aren’t there; at least, not in enough numbers to put their status beyond doubt. Either they don’t exist at all, or they are so rare that endless argument goes on about whether a particular fossil is, or isn’t, or might be, transitional between this group or that.” [emphasis in original] Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong (New Haven, Connecticut: Ticknor and Fields, 1982), p. 19.
“There is no more conclusive refutation of Darwinism than that furnished by palaeontology. Simple probability indicates that fossil hoards can only be test samples. Each sample, then, should represent a different stage of evolution, and there ought to be merely ‘transitional’ types, no definition and no species. Instead of this we find perfectly stable and unaltered forms persevering through long ages, forms that have not developed themselves on the fitness principle, but appear suddenly and at once in their definitive shape; that do not thereafter evolve towards better adaptation, but become rarer and finally disappear, while quite different forms crop up again. What unfolds itself, in ever-increasing richness of form, is the great classes and kinds of living beings which exist aboriginally and exist still, without transition types, in the grouping of today.” [emphasis in original] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 2 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 32.
“This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists. It is true of almost all orders of all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate. A fortiori, it is also true of the classes, themselves, and of the major animal phyla, and it is apparently also true of analogous categories of plants.” George Gaylord Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 107.
“... the geologic record did not then and still does not yield a finely graduated chain of slow and progressive evolution. In other words, there are not enough intermediates. There are very few cases where one can find a gradual transition from one species to another and very few cases where one can look at a part of the fossil record and actually see that organisms were improving in the sense of becoming better adapted.” Ibid., p. 23.
“Surely the lack of gradualism—the lack of intermediates—is a major problem.” Dr. David Raup, as taken from page 16 of an approved and verified transcript of a taped interview conducted by Luther D. Sunderland on 27 July 1979.
“... there are about 25 major living subdivisions (phyla) of the animal kingdom alone, all with gaps between them that are not bridged by known intermediates.” Francisco J. Ayala and James W. Valentine, Evolving, The Theory and Processes of Organic Evolution (Menlo Park, California: The Benjamin Cummings Publishing Co., 1979), p. 258.
“Most orders, classes, and phyla appear abruptly, and commonly have already acquired all the characters that distinguish them.” Ibid., p. 266.
“All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.” Stephen Jay Gould, “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,” Natural History, Vol. 86, June–July 1977,” p. 23.
“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. ... We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.” Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution’s Erratic Pace,” Natural History, Vol. 5, May 1977, p. 14.
“New species almost always appeared suddenly in the fossil record with no intermediate links to ancestors in older rocks of the same region.” Ibid., p. 12.
“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.” Stephen Jay Gould, “Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?” Paleobiology, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1980, p. 127.
In a published interview, Dr. Niles Eldredge, an invertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, stated:
But the smooth transition from one form of life to another which is implied in the theory is ... not borne out by the facts. The search for “missing links” between various living creatures, like humans and apes, is probably fruitless ... because they probably never existed as distinct transitional types ... But no one has yet found any evidence of such transitional creatures. This oddity has been attributed to gaps in the fossil record which gradualists expected to fill when rock strata of the proper age had been found. In the last decade, however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them. If it is not the fossil record which is incomplete then it must be the theory. “Missing, Believed Nonexistent,” Manchester Guardian (The Washington Post Weekly), Vol. 119, No. 22, 26 November 1978, p. 1.
Gould and Eldredge claimed transitional fossils are missing because relatively rapid evolutionary jumps (which they called “punctuated equilibria”) occurred over these gaps. They did not explain how this could happen.
Many geneticists are shocked by the proposal of Gould and Eldredge. Why would they propose something so contradictory to genetics? Gould and Eldredge were forced to say that evolution must proceed in jumps. Never explained, in genetic and mathematical terms, is how such large jumps could occur. To some, this desperation is justified.
“... the gradual morphological transitions between presumed ancestors and descendants, anticipated by most biologists, are missing.” David E. Schindel (Curator of Invertebrate Fossils, Peabody Museum of Natural History), “The Gaps in the Fossil Record,” Nature, Vol. 297, 27 May 1982, p. 282.
“Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of ‘seeing’ evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists the most notorious of which is the presence of ‘gaps’ in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them.” David B. Kitts (School of Geology and Geophysics, University of Oklahoma), “Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory,” Evolution, Vol. 28, September 1974, p. 467.
“In spite of the immense amount of the paleontological material and the existence of long series of intact stratigraphic sequences with perfect records for the lower categories, transitions between the higher categories are missing.” Richard B. Goldschmidt, “Evolution, As Viewed by One Geneticist,” American Scientist, Vol. 40, January 1952, p. 98.
“When a new phylum, class, or order appears, there follows a quick, explosive (in terms of geological time) diversification so that practically all orders or families known appear suddenly and without any apparent transitions.” Ibid., p. 97.
“There is no fossil record establishing historical continuity of structure for most characters that might be used to assess relationships among phyla.” Katherine G. Field et al., “Molecular Phylogeny of the Animal Kingdom,” Science, Vol. 239, 12 February 1988, p. 748.
b. “The prokaryotes came first; eukaryotes (all plants, animals, fungi and protists) evolved from them, and to this day biologists hotly debate how this transition took place, with about 20 different theories on the go. ... [What was thought to be an intermediate between prokaryotes and eukaryotes] is no longer tenable.” Katrin Henze and William Martin, “Essence of Mitochondria,” Nature, Vol. 426, 13 November 2003, p. 127.
c. If evolution happened, nonvascular plants should have preceded vascular plants. However, fossils of nonvascular plants are not found in strata evolutionists believe were deposited before the earliest vascular plants appeared.
The bryophytes [nonvascular plants] are presumed to have evolved before the appearance and stabilization of vascular tissue—that is, before the appearance of these tracheophytes [vascular plants]—although there is no early bryophyte [nonvascular plant] fossil record. Lynn Margulis and Karlene V. Schwartz, p. 250.
“The actual steps that led to the origin of seeds and fruits are not known ... .” Ibid.
“It has long been hoped that extinct plants will ultimately reveal some of the stages through which existing groups have passed during the course of their development, but it must be freely admitted that this aspiration has been fulfilled to a very slight extent, even though paleobotanical research has been in progress for more than one hundred years. As yet we have not been able to trace the phylogenetic history of a single group of modern plants from its beginning to the present.” Chester A. Arnold, An Introduction to Paleobotany (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947), p. 7.
“... to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favour of special creation. If, however, another explanation could be found for this hierarchy of classification, it would be the knell [the death signal] of the theory of evolution. Can you imagine how an orchid, a duckweed, and a palm have come from the same ancestry, and have we any evidence for this assumption? The evolutionist must be prepared with an answer, but I think that most would break down before an inquisition. Textbooks hoodwink.” E. J. H. Corner, “Evolution,” Contemporary Botanical Thought, editors Anna M. MacLeod and L. S. Cobley (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), p. 97.
“The absence of any known series of such intermediates imposes severe restrictions on morphologists interested in the ancestral source of angiosperms [flowering plants] and leads to speculation and interpretation of homologies and relationships on the basis of the most meager circumstantial evidence.” Charles B. Beck, Origin and Early Evolution of Angiosperms (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 5.
“The origin of angiosperms, an ‘abominable mystery’ to Charles Darwin, remained so 100 years later and is little better today.” Colin Patterson et al., “Congruence between Molecular and Morphological Phylogenies,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Vol. 24, 1993, p. 170.
d. “The insect fossil record has many gaps.” “Insects: Insect Fossil Record,” Britannica CD, Version 97 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1997).
e. Speaking of the lack of transitional fossils between the invertebrates and vertebrates, Smith admits:
As our present information stands, however, the gap remains unbridged, and the best place to start the evolution of the vertebrates is in the imagination. Homer W. Smith, From Fish to Philosopher (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1953), p. 26.
“How this earliest chordate stock evolved, what stages of development it went through to eventually give rise to truly fishlike creatures we do not know. Between the Cambrian when it probably originated, and the Ordovician when the first fossils of animals with really fishlike characteristics appeared, there is a gap of perhaps 100 million years which we will probably never be able to fill.” Francis Downes Ommanney, The Fishes, Life Nature Library (New York: Time Incorporated, 1963), p. 60.
“Origin of the vertebrates is obscure—there is no fossil record preceding the occurrence of fishes in the late Ordovician time.” Arthur N. Strahler, Science and Earth History: The Evolution/Creation Controversy (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1987), p. 316.
f. “... there are no intermediate forms between finned and limbed creatures in the fossil collections of the world.” Taylor, p. 60.
g. Evolutionists believe amphibians evolved into reptiles, with either Diadectes or Seymouria as the transition. Actually, by the evolutionists’ own time scale, this “transition” occurs 35 million years (m.y.) after the earliest reptile, Hylonomus (a cotylosaur). A parent cannot appear 35 million years after its child! The scattered locations of these fossils also present problems for the evolutionist.
Table 2. Reptile Transition?
What ----------------------- Who--------- When----------------------------------Where
Earliest Reptile....Hylonomus..lower Pennsylvanian 315 m.y...Nova Scotia
Transition? ..........Diadectes....lower Permian 280 m.y............Texas
Transition?..........Seymouria...lower Permian 280 m.y............Texas
[See Steven M. Stanley, Earth and Life Through Time (New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1986), pp. 411–415. See also Robert H. Dott Jr. and Roger L. Batten, Evolution of the Earth, 3rd edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), p. 356.]
It is true that skeletal features of some amphibians and some reptiles are similar. However, huge differences exist in their soft internal organs, such as their circulatory and reproductive systems. For example, no evolutionary scheme has ever been given for the development of the many unique innovations of the reptile’s egg. [See Denton, pp. 218–219 and Pitman, pp. 199–200.]
h. “Gaps at a lower taxonomic level, species and genera, are practically universal in the fossil record of the mammal-like reptiles. In no single adequately documented case is it possible to trace a transition, species by species, from one genus to another.” Thomas S. Kemp, Mammal-Like Reptiles and the Origin of Mammals (New York: Academic Press, 1982), p. 319.
i. “The [evolutionary] origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved.” W. E. Swinton, “The Origin of Birds,” Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds, editor A. J. Marshall (New York: Academic Press, 1960), Vol. 1, Chapter 1, p. 1.
Some have claimed birds evolved from a two-legged dinosaur known as a theropod. However, several problems exist.
A theropod dinosaur fossil found in China showed a lung mechanism completely incompatible with that of birds. [See John A. Ruben et al., “Lung Structure and Ventilation in Theropod Dinosaurs and Early Birds, Science, Vol. 278, 14 November 1997, pp. 1267–1270.] In that report, “Ruben argues that a transition from a crocodilian to a bird lung would be impossible, because the transitional animal would have a life-threatening hernia or hole in its diaphragm.” [Ann Gibbons, “Lung Fossils Suggest Dinos Breathed in Cold Blood,” Science, Vol. 278, 14 November 1997, p. 1230.]
Bird and theropod “hands” differ. Theropods have “fingers” I, II, and III (having lost the “ring finger” and little finger), while birds have fingers II, III, and IV. “The developmental evidence of homology is problematic for the hypothesized theropod origin of birds.” [Ann C. Burke and Alan Feduccia, “Developmental Patterns and the Identification of Homologies in the Avian Hand,” Science, Vol. 278, 24 October 1997, pp. 666–668.] “... this important developmental evidence that birds have a II-III-IV digital formula, unlike the dinosaur I-II-III, is the most important barrier to belief in the dinosaur origin [for birds] orthodoxy.” [Richard Hinchliffe, “The Forward March of the Bird-Dinosaurs Halted?” Science, Vol. 278, 24 October 1997, p. 597.]
Theropod “arms” (relative to body size) are tiny, compared with the wings of supposedly early birds.
“... most theropod dinosaurs and in particular the birdlike dromaeosaurs are all very much later in the fossil record than Archaeopteryx [the supposed first bird].” Hinchliffe, p. 597.
See “What Was Archaeopteryx?” on pages 281–284.
Birds have many unique features difficult to explain from any evolutionary perspective, such as: feathers, tongues, and egg shell designs.
j. “When and where the first Primates made their appearance is also conjectural. ... It is clear, therefore, that the earliest Primates are not yet known ...” William Charles Osman Hill, Primates (New York: Interscience Publishers, Inc., 1953), Vol. 1, pp. 25–26.
“The transition from insectivore to primate is not clearly documented in the fossil record.” A. J. Kelso, Physical Anthropology, 2nd edition (New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1974), p. 141.
“Modern apes, for instance, seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans—of upright, naked, toolmaking, big-brained beings—is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter.” Lyall Watson, “The Water People,” Science Digest, May 1982, p. 44.
k. “At any rate, modern gorillas, orangs and chimpanzees spring out of nowhere, as it were. They are here today; they have no yesterday, unless one is able to find faint foreshadowings of it in the dryopithecids.” Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981; reprint, New York: Warner Books, 1982), p. 363.
l. “It may, therefore, be firmly maintained that it is not even possible to make a caricature of an evolution out of palaeobiological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as due to the scarcity of the material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.” Nilsson, p. 1212.
“... experience shows that the gaps which separate the highest categories may never be bridged in the fossil record. Many of the discontinuities tend to be more and more emphasized with increased collecting.” Norman D. Newell (former Curator of Historical Geology at the American Museum of Natural History), “The Nature of the Fossil Record,” Adventures in Earth History, editor Preston Cloud (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1970), pp. 644–645.
“A person may choose any group of animals or plants, large or small, or pick one at random. He may then go to a library and with some patience he will be able to find a qualified author who says that the evolutionary origin of that form is not known.” Bolton Davidheiser, Evolution and Christian Faith (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1969), p. 302.
Davidheiser, a Ph.D. zoologist and a creationist, lists 75 additional examples that are not already mentioned in this book.
