Evolution Charts - Off Course

One of the modern evolutionists’ biggest problems is the lack of transitional forms found in the fossil records. The so-called “gaps” in the fossil records that were noted over one hundred years ago have not been filled. A transitional form is an animal that is obviously becoming another kind of animal; a horse becoming a giraffe, perhaps, or a coral becoming a crab. These kinds of fossils are not being found, although desperately sought worldwide. There are a few animals that have been proposed to be transitional by evolutionists that are yet in doubt. Up to this point in time, not one transitional form has been proven to actually be so by any scientist.

There will be scientists who claim that there are, indeed, transitional forms found in the fossil record and will lay out a list of mostly aquatic animals that are supposed to be partly fish, partly sharks or partly fish, partly amphibians. The part-fish, upon examination, have proven to be entirely fish. Fish have small pelvic bones that are embedded in muscle and not connected to the backbone unlike tetrapod amphibians, which have large pelvises that are firmly connected to the vertebral column. Without this anatomy, the amphibian could not walk. The morphological differences in this gap are obvious and profound. There may be fossil fish that resemble amphibians, but they do not exhibit the proper anatomy. It is also difficult to prove that the fossils resembling sharks and rays are not simply species of sharks and rays no longer in existence.

What are found in the fossil records are many varieties of animals and plants that appear for the first time as fully functioning trilobites or sponges or dragonflies or dinosaurs with no evidence of a previous transitional form. Many of these animals are extinct, but that does not imply it is because they developed into a different animal. What did the Dodo bird develop into, for instance? (Other than dinner!)

Careful studies of the sedimentary layers of the earth point to layering caused by flood. The fossil layers are generally distributed as one would expect in a flood, the bottom dwelling sea life at the bottom, the fish at another level, shore-dwellers at another layer and the largest land animals near the top. (Particularly the ones capable of recognizing danger and able to run to higher ground). Certainly the specific gravity of some of the remains comes into play in the deposits and there are fossils in which animals are “caught” in an onslaught while eating another animal or giving birth! The sedimentary layers often exhibit ripples or signs of “turbidity current deposits” or sediments resulting from flood conditions. The layers are usually quite defined, with no signs of wear between them. Although Uniformitarianism calls for gradual layering, in the real world there are consistently sharp and obvious contrasts between layers. This would be the expected result with layering that would result from a worldwide flood.

Perhaps you remember the famous “Horse Evolution” chart from school. There was a nice little transition from “Eohippus” (Hyracotherium) all the way up to Equus. The little horses became big horses over millions of years. The Horse Series was a shining example for Darwinists of transitional forms, as a small animal became a horse. The horse series was constructed from fossils found in India, South America, North America and Europe, in a series from the smallest to the largest. (Modern horses range from 17" to 80" in size) (Thanks to the Biology Textbook Fraud website.) We now know that the various forms of horses have been found in layers with other forms. Eohippus has often been found in the same strata with Equus! Beyond that, there was no progression shown between the different animals. In fact, the rib numbers first decrease, then increase suddenly, and then decrease again. Hyracotherium had 18 pairs of ribs, Orohippus had 15, Pliohippus had 19, and Equus has 18. The number of lumbar vertebrae also changes from six to eight and then back to six. Another problem is that while the “transitory types” are found in great numbers, there are no specimens in between them in size or character. Each of these animals seems to be a separate type and not part of an evolutionary chain at all. One could construct a series portraying the evolution of dogs from a Mexican Hairless up to a Great Dane and make it seem more likely than the horse series.

Carl Wieland, in "Fuzzy feathers and walking whales?" uncovers the paucity of evidence for so-called transitional forms.

“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.” Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University

“…Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils ... I will lay it on the line, there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.” Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist, British Museum of Natural History, London.

"...the lack of a case for evolution is clear from the fact that no one has ever seen it happen. If it were a real process, evolution should still be occurring, and there should be many "transitional" forms that we could observe. What we see instead, of course, is an array of distinct "kinds" of plants and animals with many varieties within each kind, but with very clear—and apparently—unbridgeable gaps between the kinds. That is, for example, there are many varieties of dogs and many varieties of cats, but no "dats" or "cogs." Such variation is often called microevolution, and these minor horizontal (or downward) changes occur fairly often, but such changes are not true "vertical" evolution. " Dr. Henry Morris.

Reminder link: Concerning the Ark.