CHAPTER 9. CONFESSIONS REGARDING THE LACK OF INTERMEDIATE-FORM F
CHAPTER 9.
CONFESSIONS REGARDING THE LACK
OF INTERMEDIATE-FORM FOSSILS
According to the theory of evolution, life forms are descended from one another. One species supposedly gradually developed into another, and each new species emerged in that same way. According to the theory, this transition took place over a very long period of time, hundreds of millions of years, and proceeded stage by stage. That implies that countless intermediate life forms must have emerged and lived during the course of such a lengthy transition.
For example, semi-fish, semi-amphibian creatures that, despite having fish-like features, had also acquired some amphibious ones must once have existed. And since these were in a process of transition, their limbs must have been rudimentary flawed and awkward, if not handicapped. Evolutionists refer to these fictitious entities, which they believe existed at one time, as “intermediate forms.” If such life forms had really existed, then there must have been untold billions of them. Traces of them should still be visible in the fossil record. Yet not one single fossil belonging to an intermediate form has ever been discovered!
In other words, no traces of half-fish, half-amphibian, or half-reptile, half-bird—much less any half-ape, half-human creature—have ever been encountered in any of the Earth’s strata. All the fossils discovered have been identical to their present-day counterparts, or else belong to species that subsequently became extinct.
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What follows is a selection of evolutionist admissions on this, one of the most serious dilemmas confronting the theory of evolution:
Charles Darwin:
But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the Earth? 149
But in the intermediate region, having intermediate conditions of life, why do we not now find closely-linking intermediate varieties? This difficulty for a long time quite confounded me. 150
First, why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined? 151
But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly 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 my theory. 152
From these several considerations, it cannot be doubted that the geological record. . . becomes much more difficult to understand why we do not therein find closely graduated varieties between the allied species which lived at its commencement and at its close. 153
But I do not pretend that I should ever have suspected how poor was the record in the best preserved geological sections, had not the absence of innumerable transitional links between the species which lived at the commencement and close of each formation, pressed so hardly on my theory. 154
 A fictitious Tree of Life |
On this doctrine of the extermination of an infinitude of connecting links, between the living and extinct inhabitants of the world, and at each successive period between theextinct and still older species, why is not every geological formation charged with such links? Why does not every collection of fossil remains afford plain evidence of the gradation and mutation of the forms of life? 155
Derek W. Ager is a famous English paleontologist and head of the department of geology and oceanography at University College of Swansea:
The point emerges that if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find–over and over again–not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another. 156
W. R. Thompson is an entomologist and Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control:
Modern Darwinian paleontologists are obliged, just like their predecessors and like Darwin, to water down the facts with subsidiary hypotheses. . . . 157
Mark Czarnecki is an evolutionist paleontologist:
A major problem in proving the theory [of evolution] has been the fossil record, the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth's geological formations. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin’s hypothetical intermediate variants—instead, species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God. 158
Carlton E. Brett is Professor of Geology at the University of Cincinnati:
Did life on Earth change steadily and gradually through time? The fossil record emphatically says “no.”159
Dr. David Raup is a paleontologist at University of Chicago:
. . . most people assume that fossils provide a very important part of the general argument in favour of Darwinian interpretations of the history of life. Unfortunately, this is not strictly true. 160
Edmund J. Ambrose is Professor Emeritus at the University of London and head department of Cell Biology at the Chester Beatty Research Institute University of London:
We have to admit that there is nothing in the geological records that runs contrary to the views of conservative creationists.161
Gareth Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History:
It is a mistake to believe that even one fossil species or fossil “group” can be demonstrated to have been ancestral to another. The ancestor-descendant relationship may only be assumed to have existed in the absence of evidence indicating otherwise. . . . The history of comparative biology teaches us that the search for ancestors is doomed to ultimate failure, thus, with respect to its principal objective, this search is an exercise in futility. Increased knowledge of suggested “ancestors” usually shows them to be too specialized to have been direct ancestors of anything else. 162
Dr. Colin Patterson is an evolutionist paleontologist and curator of London’s Natural History Museum:
In a letter of reply to Luther D. Sutherland, who asked why he never referred to intermediate forms in his book Evolution, he says:
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. 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. 163
David B. Kitts is Professor of the History of Science at Oklahoma University:
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. 164
John Adler and John Carey are journalists:
The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms that lie between species, the more they have been frustrated. 165
The Separate Reconstructions Produced on the Basis of the Same Skull 1 N. Parker's reconstruction, National Geographic, September 1960 |
Mark Ridley is a zoologist at the University of Oxford:
In any case, no real evolutionist . . . uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation. . . . 166
Steven M. Stanley is Professor of Paleontology at The University of Hawaii at Manoa:
The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution [the evolution of a species’ entire population into a new species] accomplishing a major morphologic[structural] transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid. 167
Hoimar Von Ditfurth is a German Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry and a well-known evolutionist science writer:
When we look back, we see there is no need to have been surprised at our failure to find those transitional forms searched for almost painfully. Because the great likelihood is that such transitional stages never existed. 168
The most ancient fossils discovered to date are objects fossilized inside minerals, such as non-nucleic algae. No matter how primitive these may be, they still represent relatively complex and expertly organized forms of life. The story of the development between these first fossil organisms and molecules emerging by way of chemical combinations, biopolymers in other words is a gap that we have been as yet unable to fill. . . . On the other hand, this “temporary” gap that has been unable to be filled is quite attractive to some people, for understandable reasons. Someone who sees that it is impossible for life to begin in the absence of any supernatural effect can see the signs of a miracle in such a gap, intervention by a supernatural force. 169
George Gaylord Simpson is Professor of Zoology at Columbia University:
It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of families, appear in the [fossil] record suddenly, and are not led up to by gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences. 170
In the early days of evolutionary paleontology it was assumed that the major gaps would be filled in by further discoveries, and even, falsely, that some discoveries had already filled them. As it became more and more evident that the great gaps remained… The failure of paleontology to produce such evidence was so keenly felt that a few disillusioned naturalists even decided that the theory of organic evolution, or of general organic continuity of descent, was wrong, after all. 171
Tom Kemp is a Curator of the Zoological Collections at the University of Oxford:
As is now well known, most fossil species appear instantaneously in the record, persist for some millions of years virtually unchanged, only to disappear abruptly. . . .172
In no single adequately documented case is it possible to trace a transition, species by species, from one genus to another. 173
Prof. Fred Hoyle is a British astronomer and a mathematician at Cambridge University:
Over ten thousand fossil species of insects have been identified, over thirty thousand species of spiders, and similar numbers for many sea-living creatures. Yet so far the evidence for step-by-step changes leading to major evolutionary transitions looks extremely thin. 174
Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in “Punctuated Equilibria: The Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered” published in Paleobiology:
From such scrappy data it is hard to see how anyone could derive with confidence the gradualistic interpretation … unless one were predisposed to gradualism from the start.. 175
Stephen Jay Gould is Professor of Geology and Paleoanthropology at Harvard University:
The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches. . . .176
I regard the failure to find a clear “vector of progress” in life’s history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record. . . . we have sought to impose a pattern that we hoped to find on a world that does not really display it. 177
. . . one feature stands out as most puzzling—the lack of clear order and progress through time among marine invertebrate faunas. We can tell tales of improvement for some groups, but in honest moments, we must admit that the history of complex life is more a story of multifarious variation about a set of basic designs than a saga of accumulating excellence. 178
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. 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. 179
The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:
1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on Earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they `disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.
2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and fully formed. 180
Dr. Colin Patterson is an evolutionist paleontologist and curator of London’s Natural History Museum:
[Stephen Jay] Gould [of Harvard] and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. 181
Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall, a (paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History):
That individual kinds of fossils remain recognizably the same throughout the length of their occurrence in the fossil record had been known to paleontologists long before Darwin published his Origin. Darwin himself . . . prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search. . . . One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin’s predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong.
The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor’s new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin’s predicted pattern, simply looked the other way. 182
Lewis L. Carroll is an evolutionist paleontologist and author of Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution:
Unfortunately, not a single specimen of an appropriate reptilian ancestor is known prior to the appearance of true reptiles. The absence of such ancestral forms leaves many problems of the amphibian-reptilian transition unanswered. 183
Edwin H. Colbert is an authority on paleontology and curator at the American Museum of Natural History and M. Morales is the author of Evolution of the Vertebrates:
The ichthyosaurs, in many respects the most highly specialized of the marine reptiles, appeared in early Triassic times. Their advent into the geologic history of the reptiles was sudden and dramatic; there are no clues in pre-Triassic sediments as to the possible ancestors of the ichthyosaurs. . . . The basic problem of ichthyosaur relationships is that no conclusive evidence can be found for linking these reptiles with any other reptilian order. 184
Confessions That Evolutionists Interpret Fossils in a Biased Manner
Dr. Tim White is an evolution anthropologist at the University of California in Berkeley:
A five million-year-old piece of bone that was thought to be a collarbone of a humanlike creature is actually part of a dolphin rib. The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone. 185
Earnst A. Hooten of Harvard University:
To attempt to restore the soft parts is an even more hazardous undertaking. The lips, the eyes, the ears, and the nasal tip leave no clues on the underlying bony parts. You can with equal facility model on a Neanderthaloid skull the features of a chimpanzee or the lineaments of a philosopher. These alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little if any scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public. . . . So put not your trust in reconstructions. 186
Confessions That the Fossil Record Is Abundant Enough
As always, some evolutionists resort to demagoguery and sleight of hand in order to explain away their failure to find any intermediate-form fossils. They say that the fossil record is “not sufficiently rich” and that the long-sought intermediate forms will eventually be discovered. However, a very large part of the fossil record has actually been unearthed. And as will be apparent from the statements below, there is general agreement that it is seems ever more unlikely that fossilized remains of intermediate forms will ever appear:
David M. Raup is a paleontologist at University of Chicago:
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. 187
Prof. Nils Heribert-Nilsson is a Swedish geneticist and Professor of Botany at the University of Lund in Sweden:
My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed. 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 being due to the scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled. 188
D. Dwight Davis of the Chicago Natural History Museum:
The sudden emergence of major adaptive types as seen in the abrupt appearance in the fossil record of families and orders, continues to give trouble. The phenomenon lay in the genetical no-man’s land beyond the limits of experimentation. A few paleontologists even today cling to the idea that these gaps will be closed by further collecting . . . but most regard the observed discontinuities as real and have sought an explanation. 189
Prof. T. Neville George is a paleontologist at Glasgow University:
There is no need to apologize any longer for the poverty of the fossil record. In some ways it has become almost unmanageably rich and discovery is outpacing integration . . . . The fossil record nevertheless continues to be composed mainly of gaps. 190
149 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition, p. 179
150 Ibid.
151 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, New York: The Modern Library, pp. 124-25.
152 Ibid.
153
Darwin, C.R., The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, [1872], Everyman's Library, London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 6th Edition, 1928, reprint, pp. 303-04.
154 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man (New York: The Modern Library, Random House) p. 249
155 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Chapter XV, “Recapitulation and Conclusion.”
156 Derek A. Ager, “The Nature of the Fossil Record,” Proceedings of the British Geological Association, Vol. 87, 1976, p. 133.
157 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, “Introduction,” Everyman's Library, 1965.
158 Mark Czarnecki, “The Revival of the Creationist Crusade,” MacLean's, 19 January 1981, p. 56.
159 Carlton E. Brett, “Stasis: Life in the Balance.” Geotimes, Vol. 40, Mar. 1995, p. 18.
160 Dr. David Raup, Curator of Geology, Field Museum of Natural
History, Chicago,
http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/SBS777/vital/evolutio.html
161 Evolutionist Edmund Ambrose, http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/SBS777/vital/evolutio.html
162 Gareth V. Nelson, “Origin and Diversification of Teleostean Fishes,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1971, pp. 22-23.
163 From a letter dated 10 April, 1979, quoted in L. D. Sunderland’s Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems, 4th edition, Master Books, 1988.
164 David B]. Kitts, “Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory,” Evolution , Vol. 28, September 1974, p. 487.
165 Jerry Adler and John Carey, “Is Man a Subtle Accident?,” Newsweek, November 3, 1980, p. 95.
166 Mark Ridley, “Who Doubts Evolution?,” New Scientist, Vol. 90; June 25, 1981, p. 831.
167 Stanley, Stephen M., Macroevolution--Pattern and Process, San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1979, p. 39.
168 Hoimar Von Ditfurth, Dinozorların Sessiz Gecesi 2, [“The Silent Night of the Dinosaurs 2”] p. 22.
169 Ibid., p. 199.
170 George Gaylord Simpson, The Major Features of Evolution ,New York: Columbia University Press, 1953, p. 360.
171 G.G. Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution, New York: Columbia University Press, 1949, Third Printing p. 115.
172 Thomas S. Kemp, “A Fresh Look At The Fossil Record,” New Scientist, Vol. 108 (5 December 1985), p. 66
173 Thomas S. Kemp, Mammal-Like Reptiles and the Origin of Mammals, New York: Academic Press, 1982, p. 319.
174 Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe: A New View of Creation and Evolution, p. 43.
175 Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, “Punctuated Equilibria: The Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered,” Paleobiology, Vol.3 (Spring 1977), p. 125.
176 Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution's Erratic Pace,” Natural History, May 1977, p. 13.
177 Stephen Jay Gould, “"The Ediacaran Experiment,” Natural History, Vol. 93; February 1984, p. 23.
178 Ibid., p. 22.
179 S. J. Gould, Natural History , May, 1977, p. 14.
180 Gould, Stephen J. “Evolution's Erratic Pace,” Natural History, , May 1977, p. 14.
181 Colin Patterson, letter to Luther Sunderland dated April 10, 1979, quoted in L.D. Sunderland Darwin’s Enigma, p. 89.
182 N. Eldredge, and I. Tattersall, The Myths of Human Evolution, Columbia University Press, 1982, pp. 45-46.
183 Carroll, Lewis L., “Problems of the Origin of Reptiles,” Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Vol. 44 (1969), p. 393.
184 E. H. Colbert, M. Morales, Evolution of the Vertebrates, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1991, p. 193.
185 Dr. Tim White, New Scientist, 28 April 1983, p. 199.
186 Earnest A. Hooton, Up From The Ape, New York: McMillan, 1931, p. 332.
187 David M. Raup, “Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology,” Field Museum of Natural History, Vol. 50, No. 1, Jan, 1979, p. 25.
188 Arthur C. Custance, The Earth Before Man, Part II, Doorway Publications, p. 51.
189 D. Dwight Davis, “Comparative Anatomy and the Evolution of Vertebrates” in Genetics, Paleontology and Evolution, ed. by Jepsen, Mayr and Simpson, Princeton, N. J., Princeton University Press, 1949, p. 74.
190 T. Neville George, “Fossils in Evolutionary Perspective,” Science Progress, Vol. 48, January 1960, pp. 1, 3.
