Barry: “Are you suggesting that the fossil record now reveals the “finely graduated organic chain” that in Origin Charles Darwin predicted would be ultimately revealed as the fossil record was explored further?”
Alan Fox: “As far as it reveals anything, yes.”
Leading Darwinist authorities disagree:
No one has found any such in-between creatures. This was long chalked up to ‘gaps’ in the fossil records, gaps that proponents of gradualism confidently expected to fill in someday when rock strata of the proper antiquity were eventually located. But all the fossil evidence to date has failed to turn up any such missing links . . . There is a growing conviction among many scientists that these transitional forms never existed.
Niles Eldredge, quoted in George Alexander, “Alternate Theory of Evolution Considered,” Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1978.
Gradualism, the idea that all change must be smooth, slow, and steady, was never read from the rocks.
Stephen Jay Gould, “An Early Start,” Natural History 87, February 1978): 24.
Gradualism is a concept I believe in, not just because of Darwin’s authority, but because my understanding of genetics seems to demand it. Yet Gould and the American Museum people [i.e., Eldredge] are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a paleontologist 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 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.
Colin Patteson to Luther Sunderland, April 10, 1979, quoted in quoted in Luther .D. Sunderland, Darwin’s Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems, 4th ed. (El Cajon, CA: Master Book Publishers, 1988), 89.
What is missing [in the record] are the many intermediate forms hypothesized by Darwin, and the continual divergence of major lineages into the morphospace between distinct adaptive types.
Robert L. Carroll, “Towards a New Evolutionary Synthesis,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 15 (2000): 27, 27-32.
Species [in the strata of the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming] that were once thought to have turned into others have been found to overlap in time with these alleged descendants. In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.
Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 95.
The fossil record itself provided no documentation of continuity – of gradual transition from one animal or plant to another of quite different form.
Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 40.
The lack of ancestral or intermediate forms between fossil species is not a bizarre peculiarity of early metazoan history. Gaps are general and prevalent throughout the fossil record.
R.A. Raff and T.C. Kaufman, Embryos, Genes, and Evolution: The Developmental-Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 34.
Alan Fox: “The current record is certainly not incompatible with gradual evolution over vast periods of time.”
Again, leading Darwinists disagree:
Darwin’s prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.
Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall, The Myth of Human Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 45-46.
Alan Fox: “It doesn’t fit with six days of creation. That’s for sure.”
That’s your argument? The fossil record does not demonstrate that the all life forms were created in six days 6,000 years ago; therefore Darwin must have been right? If I had to rely on an outrageous caricature of my opponents’ arguments in my efforts to refute them, it would bother me. Does it not bother you?