by David N. Menton
(C) copyright 1991 Missouri Association for Creation, Inc.
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 occurred.
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 transitions than we had in Darwins' time. By this I mean that some 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" (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."