Does the Fossil Record Prove that Evolution is True? – Part 1

Contents

False Assumption 4—Part One: The fossil record offers genuine scientific evidence that evolution is true.

What about all the alleged evidences for evolution? It is generally admitted that the fossil record contains the most cogent evidence for the evolutionary hypothesis. So, if we discover this evidence to be non-existent, then perhaps the other alleged evidences don’t exist either. (In fact, they don’t.^[1])

Regardless, the fossil record is continually heralded as “proof” of evolution and conceded to offer the only or primary scientific evidence that evolution has really occurred. As the eminent French biologist and zoologist Pierre Grasse correctly points out:

Zoologists and botanists are nearly unanimous in considering evolution as a fact and not a hypothesis. I agree with this position and base it primarily on documents provided by paleontology, i.e., the [fossil] history of the living world….

Naturalists must remember that the process of evolution is revealed only through fossil forms. A knowledge of paleontology is, therefore, a prerequisite; only paleontology can provide them with the evidence of evolution and reveal its course or mechanisms. Neither the examination of present beings, nor imagination, nor theories can serve as a substitute for paleontological documents. If they ignore them, biologists, the philosophers of nature, indulge in numerous commentaries and can only come up with hypotheses. This is why we constantly have recourse to paleontology, the only true science of evolution….The true course of evolution is and can only be revealed by paleontology.^[2]

Thomas Huxley also realized the importance of this issue when he wrote, “If it could be shown that this fact [gaps between widely distinct groups] had always existed, the fact would be fatal to the doctrine of evolution.”^[3]

The problem here is how evolutionary theory can ever be demonstrated when it neces­sarily postulates immense periods of time. It can’t. Here, eminent biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky criticizes creationists for asking evolutionists to do the impossible, i.e., provide real evidence for the occurrence of evolution. But to our way of thinking, he only points out why the theory of evolution should not be accepted as a proven scientific fact, as no scien­tist has ever lived long enough to observe the evolution of major life forms.

These evolutionary happenings are unique, unrepeatable, and irreversible. It is as impossible to turn a land vertebrate into a fish as it is to effect the reverse transformation. The applicability of the experimental method to the study of such unique historical processes is severely restricted before all else by the time intervals involved, which far exceed the lifetime of any human experimenter. And yet, it is just such impossibility that is demanded by anti-evolutionists when they ask for “proofs” of evolution which they would magnanimously accept as satisfactory.^[4]

To the contrary, if scientists cannot observe evolution as ever having taken place, how can they categorically state evolution is a fact of science? They attempt to do so by point­ing to the fossil record. They believe it provides the critical evidence for evolution by pre­serving the record of the past that demonstrates gradual evolutionary change has occurred between the lower and higher life forms.

But even Darwin was concerned here. In thinking the geologic record incomplete, Darwin himself confessed the following: “…[Since] innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them imbedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? [and] Why 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 gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.”^[5]

Again, Darwin asked, “…why, if species have descended from other species by insen­sibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?” And, “…the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species must have been inconceivably great.”^[6]

But one hundred and forty years later, it has become clear that the fossil record does not confirm Darwin’s hope that future research would fill in the unexpected and extensive gaps in the fossil record. Noted paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard points out, “The fossil record with its abrupt transitions offers no support for gradual change, …All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.”^[7]

With an estimated 250 million or 1/4 billion catalogued fossils of some 250,000 fossil species, the problem does certainly not appear to be one of an imperfect record. Many scientists have conceded that the fossil data are sufficiently complete to provide an accu­rate portrait of the geologic record.^[8] University of Chicago professor of geology David Raup also points out the following: “Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil records 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 and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transi­tion than we had in Darwin’s time….”^[9]

Again, the truth is that the fossil record is composed entirely of gaps, not evidence of evolutionary transitions. There isn’t even a single proven evolutionary transition that exists anywhere in the fossil record. Evolutionary scientists themselves agree that the fossil record is comprised almost entirely of gaps. How, then can it logically offer scientific evi­dence of evolution? Prior to Dr. Gould’s time, Dr. George Gaylord Simpson was one of the world’s best-known evolutionists. He was professor of vertebrate paleontology, also at Harvard University, until his retirement. In his book, The Major Features of Evolution, he admitted, “…it remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families and that nearly all new categories above the level of families appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transition­al sequences.^[10]

Perhaps this explains why Dr. Austin Clark, once curator of paleontology at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., wrote in 1928, “Thus so far as concerns the major groups of animals, the creationists seem to have the better of the argument.”^[11] But this remains true today. In his Biology, Zoology and Genetics, Thompson agrees when he writes, “Rather than supporting evolution, the breaks in the known fossil record support the creation of major groups with the possibility of some limited variation within each group.”^[12]

NOTES

1. ↑ Good resources are The Christian Research Society and The Institute for Creation Re­search in Santee, CA. Also, W. R. Bird is a summa cum laude graduate of Vanderbilt University and the Yale Law School who argued the major case on the origin’s issue before the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a member of the most prestigious legal organiza­tion, the American Law Institute, and has published articles on the origin’s topic in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and the Yale Law Journal. He is also listed in the most selective directory, Who’s Who in the World, plus listings in several others. In The Origin of Species Revisited, 2 vol., NY Philosophical Library, 1993, he documents how evolutionary scientists are increasingly questioning the validity of standard evolu­tionary theory. This book was prepared utilizing the research amassed for the 1981 Supreme Court case over the issue of origins. (Aguillard, et. al., v. Edwards, et. al., civil action No. 81-4787, Section H, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, Brief of the State in Opposition to ACLU Motion for Summary Judgment, c., 1984, W. R. Bird.) Attorneys for the defendant gathered thousands of pages of information from hundreds of evolutionary scientists who, collectively, had expressed reservations from most scientific fields, in most areas of evolutionary thinking.
2. ↑ Pierre-P. Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms (New York: Academic Press, 1977), pp. 3-4, 204.
3. ↑ Thomas Huxley in Three Lectures on Evolution (1882), 619 from Bird, I, p. 59.
4. ↑ Theodosius Dobzhansky, American Scientist, 45, 388, 1957, as cited in Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), p. 3, second emphasis added.
5. ↑ Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, J. W. Burrow, ed. (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1974), pp. 206, 292; cf., pp. 313-316, emphasis added.
6. ↑ In Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1991), p. 46, who gives original refs on p. 166, emphasis added.
7. ↑ Stephen Jay Gould, “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,” Natural History, June-July, 1977, pp. 22, 24, emphasis added.
8. ↑ See e.g., Bird, I, pp. 48, 59 citing Stanley, Gould, Eldredge, Kitts and Tattersall. See Steven M. Stanley, Macroevolution: Pattern and Process (San Francisco: W. H. Free­man, 1979), pp. 1, 4-9, 23, 74, 84, 88-98.
9. ↑ David Raup, “Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology,” Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, January 1979 at 22, 25 from Bird, I, p. 48.
10. ↑ George Gaylord Simpson, The Major Features of Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 360, emphasis in original. Simpson went on to state that these discontinuities did not require a belief in special creation.
11. ↑ Austin Clark, “Animal Evolution,” 3 Quarterly Review of Biology, 539 from Bird, I, p. 50.
12. ↑ A. Thompson, Biology, Zoology and Genetics: Evolution Model vs. Creation Model, 2 (1983), p. 76, emphasis added, from Bird, I, p. 49.

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