GREAT MYTHS OF EVOLUTION #6 

(THE FACT OF EVOLUTION IS SUPPORTED

BY A RATHER WELL FORMED SEQUENCE OF INTERMEDIATE STAGES IN THE FOSSIL

RECORD)

This comment by the famous Harvard evolutionist Steven J.

Gould when he testified before judge Overton in the Arkansas Creation-

evolution trial suggests that the countless intermediate stages in the

evolution of one organism into another, really are visible in the

fossil record - as indeed they should be IF evolution has occured.

This same Dr. Gould, however, in one of his regular columns in Natural

History magazine (May 1977) said:"The extreme rarity of transitional

forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of

paleontology (study of fossils) -- 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."

The paleontologist Dr. David

B. Kitts agrees: "Evolution requires intermediate forms between

species and paleontology does not provide them"(Evolution 28:476).

Dr. David Raup, a paleontologist at the Field Museum of Natural

History in Chicago, recently pointed out that Darwin himself was:

"embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn't look the way he

predicted it would -- different species usually appear and disappear

from the record without showing the transitions that Darwin postulated

-- 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

-- We

have fewer examples of evolutionary transiton than we had in Darwins

time. By this I mean that some some of the classic cases of Darwinian

changge 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"(Field Museum Natural History Bulletin

50:22-29).

The evolutionist Dr. Steven M. Stanley put it bluntly:

"The known fossil record fails to document a single example of

phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition -

"(Macroevolution: Pattern and Process 1979 p.39). No wonder G.K.

Chesterton quipped that folks "seem to know everything about the

missing link except that it IS MISSING."