Transitional Forms

If evolution were true, and humans and chimps did have a common ancestor, we would expect to find something that is half-monkey/half-man. These intermediate stages where one species supposedly evolves into another species are called “transitional forms.”

Because evolution is said to have happened in the past, we have to look to paleontology, the science of the study of fossils, to find evidence on the history of life. Well-known French paleontologist Pierre-Paul Grassé said, “Naturalists must remember that the process of evolution is revealed only through fossil forms…Only paleontology can provide them with the evidence of evolution and reveal its course or mechanisms.”

If life gradually evolved from one species to another, then the fossil record should reveal millions of transitional forms. Darwin understood that evolutionary theory was dependent on these “missing links.” He wrote in Origin of Species:

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? . . . 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?

Darwin acknowledged that the absence of intermediates put his theory in doubt, but he attributed their lack to the scarcity of fossils at that time. However, nearly 150 years later, the situation hasn’t changed. After scientists have searched diligently for a century and a half for evidence, we now have over 100 million fossils catalogued in the world’s museums, with 250,000 different species. Surely this should be enough to give us an accurate picture of our past. Remember, paleontology holds the key to whether this theory is true. So do we see the gradual progression from simple life forms to more complex? Did we find the millions of transitional forms that would be expected if evolution were true?

“If evolution were true, and humans and chimps did have a common ancestor, we would expect to find something that is half-monkey/half-man.”

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Excited evolutionists believed that they found one back in 1999. Archaeoraptor, supposedly a transitional form between dinosaurs and birds, was quickly exposed as a fraud. Storrs L. Olson, Curator of Birds at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution, stated that the feathered dinosaur that was pictured is “simply imaginary and has no place outside of science fiction,” and added, “The idea of feathered dinosaurs . . . is now fast becoming one of the grander scientifichoaxes of our age.”

Aside from “feathered dinosaurs,” many other proposed “missing links” have been debunked. For example, Pakicetus, a supposed transition between land mammals and whales, is one that fails to live up to its claims. As for man’s evolutionary history, in a PBS documentary, Richard Leakey, the world’s foremost paleoanthropologist, admitted:

If pressed about man’s ancestry, I would have to unequivocally say that all we have is a huge question mark. To date, there has been nothing found to truthfully purport as a transitional species to man, including Lucy. . . If further pressed, I would have to state that there is more evidence to suggest an abrupt arrival of man rather than a gradual process of evolving.

Even the classic example of horse evolution is fictionalized. Evolutionist Boyce Rensberger addressed a symposium attended by 150 scientists at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, which considered problems facing the theory of evolution. He describes what the fossil evidence reveals for horses:

The popularly told example of horse evolution, suggesting a gradual sequence of changes from four-toed, fox-sized creatures, living nearly 50 million years ago, to today’s much larger one-toed horse, has long been known to be wrong. Instead of gradual change, fossils of each intermediate species appear fully distinct, persist unchanged, and then become extinct. Transitional forms are unknown.

This is the case not just for horses, but throughout the entire animal kingdom. Rather than the millions of transitional forms evolutionists would expect to find, all we have at best are a handful of disputable examples. Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould writes,

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils…All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.

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