Some of us would have thought that quantum mechanics killed all that off but in any event:
As Stephen Jay Gould put it: “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.”1 Because of this difficulty, in the 1970s, Gould and his colleague Niles Eldredge developed punctuated equilibrium as a model where evolution takes place in small populations over relatively short geological time periods that are too rapid for transitional forms to become fossilized.2 But this model has many problems.3
Punctuated equilibrium compresses the vast majority of evolutionary change into small populations that lived during shorter segments of time, allowing too few opportunities for novel, beneficial traits to arise. Punctuated equilibrium is also unconvincing in that it predicts that with respect to the fossil record, evidence confirming Darwinian theory will not be found. Would you believe someone who claimed that fairies and leprechauns exist and were caught on video, but when asked to produce the film, declares, “Well, they are on camera, but they are too small or too fast to be seen”? That doesn’t make for a compelling theory.
Analogous problems plague attempts to account for the life-friendly fine-tuning of physical laws by appealing to a multiverse.
Casey Luskin, “Can Materialistic Models Accommodate the Scientific Data?” at Evolution News and Science Today (May 7, 2022)
As Luskin implies, appealing to a multiverse is like appealing to fairies.
Here’s Casey Luskin’s whole series on the topic.
You may also wish to read: Rescuing the multiverse as a science concept… ? Luke Barnes on the multiverse: In the cycle of the scientific method, the multiverse is in an exploratory phase. We’ve got an idea that might explain a few things, if it was true. That makes it worthy of our attention, but it’s not quite science yet. We need to find evidence that is more direct, more decisive.