b)  Actual data (characteristic features of fossil record)

          5.  Gaps

D.  Supposed transitional forms

"if the fossil record is to provide any grounds for believing that the great divisions of nature are not the unbridgeable discontinuities postulated by Cuvier, it is not sufficient that two groups merely approach one another closely in terms of their skeletal morphology.  The very least required would be an unambiguous continuum of transitional species exhibiting a perfect gradation of skeletal form leading unarguably from one type to another."
         M. Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis  pg 182.
 
 

Things to keep in mind about claims of “transitional forms”

 
1.  Not testing the theory of macroevolution, but assume it to be true and search for evidence which fits

2.  Should consider fossil record as a whole (total number of alleged transitional forms is very, very small)

3.  Most examples come from land vertebrates where record is poorest (lot of room for subjectivity)

4.  Mosaics of fully functional structures (many, such as the platypus) versus truly intermediate structures

5.  Many important differences are in “soft” tissue, not skeletal structures

6.  You can’t trust the accuracy of what you read in newspapers or National Geographic

7.  The term “transitional form” itself is very subjective

 

Two types:
 

A).  stratomorphic intermediates:

    mammal-like reptiles
    mammal-to-whale transition
 
 
 

 Macro-24                   Macro-25

 
 

B). fossil series:

horse
camel
elephant
etc.

 
 

Examples:
 

 Dinosaur-to-Bird
 

 Horse series

 

"The modern version [of evolution]......is more like turning a ratchet than casting water on a broad and uniform slope.  It [evolution] proceeds in a kind of lock step; each stage raises the process one step up , and each is a necessary prelude to the next....But if evolution proceeded as a lock step, then the fossil record should display a pattern of gradual and sequential advance in organization.  It does not, and I regard this failure as the most telling argument against an evolutionary ratchet."
         S. Gould, The Panda's Thumb, pg 139.
 

"No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long.   It never seemed to happen.  Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulations of change - over millions of years, at a rate too slow to account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history.  When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the fossils did not evolve elsewhere!  Evolution cannot forever be going on somewhere else.  Yet that's how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution.
         N. Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin, 1995.
 

"With the benefit of hindsight, it is amazing that paleontologists could have accepted gradual evolution as a univeral pattern on the basis of a handful of supposedly well-documented lineages ... none of which actually withstands close scrutiny."
         C.R.C. Paul, "Patterns of Evolution and Extinction in Invertebrates", Evolution and the Fossil
          Record, pg 105, 1989.
 

"The known fossil record is not, and has never been, in accord with gradualism.  What is remarkable is that, through a variety of historical circumstances, even the history of opposition has been obscured.   The majority of paleontologists felt their evidence simply contradicted Darwin's stress on minute, slow and cumulative changes leading to species transformation.  Their story has been suppressed."
         S. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable:  Fossils, Genes and the Origin of Species, pg 71, 1981.
 

"Since the time of Darwin, paleontologists have found themselves confronted with evidence that conflicts with gradualism, yet the message of the fossil record has been ignored.  This strange circumstance constitutes a remarkable chapter in the history of science, and one that gives students of the fossil record cause for concern."
         S. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable:  Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species, pg 101, 1981.
 
 

IV.  Proposed Mechanisms Of Macroevolution
 
 
 

A. Orthodox Neo-Darwinian position:  Continuous, gradual change via random
genetic variation + natural selection
 
 

Some minimize or ignore the problems
 

"One of the most amazing aspects of evolution is how easy it is to account for major transformations through rather simple changes in developmental processes.  ...."

 D. Futuyma, Science on Trial, pg. 62.

 

Others acknowledge the problem, but claim to have solved it

 
"The problem is that of complex design"

"Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."

 R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p. xiii, 1

 

Mechanism:  gene duplication + (random) point mutations coupled with natural selection
 

    -Most realize that it is mathematically impossible to account for complex biological structures by chance
 

    -For this reason, it is strenuously agued that NeoDarwinism is not a theory of chance!

 
"Since living complexity embodies the very antithesis of chance, if you think that Darwinism is tantamount to chance you'll obviously find it easy to refute Darwinism.  One of my tasks will be to destroy this eagerly believed myth that Darwinism is a theory of "chance"."

"Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random"

 R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, pg xv
 

"Creationists often accuse biologists of attributing all of evolution to chance, and this would be true if mutation were the whole story.  But natural selection is part of the story, and it is not chance.  Quite the opposite, it is this factor that shapes order out of mutational chaos."

 D. Futuyma, Science on Trial, pg 136.
 
 
 

Cumulative Selection
 

"Each improvement, however slight, is used as the basis for future building"
         R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, pg 49
 

Dawkins' series of questions justifying cumulative selection:
 

1.  Could the human eye have arisen directly from something slightly different from itself, something that we may call X?

2.  Is there a continuous series of Xs connecting the modern human eye to a state with no eye at all?

3.  Considering each member of the series of hypothetical Xs connecting the human eye to no eye at all, is it plausible that every one of them was made available by random mutation of its predecessor?

4.  Considering each member of the series of Xs connecting the human eye to no eye at all, is it plausible that every one of them worked sufficiently well that it assisted the survival and reproduction of the animals concerned?

 

Three examples used by Dawkins to try to establish plausibility:
 

1)  waves sorting pebbles by size on a beach

2)  monkeys typing Shakespeare

 
Hamlet     Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in share of a
                        camel?
Polonius  By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet    Methinks it is like a weasel.
 

Generate a random sequence of 28 letters:

     Chance of achieving this phrase in a single step - 1 in 10⁴⁰

     Steps to achieve this phrase by cumulative selection - 43, 64, 41
 

3) computer bimorphs (doodling)
 

These examples are irrelevant distractions, as they do not even touch upon the real issue - the origin of information!

 
 

Major Problem #1 - Information must be created!  There is no direct evidence, nor plausible theoretical analysis, to suggest that random mutations and natural selection can account for that.
 
 

Major Problem #2 - Every intermediate step must be accessible and sufficiently advantageous to
assist the survival and reproduction of the organism
 

Dawkins' view:

“The idea of tiny changes cumulated over many steps is an immensely powerful idea, capable of explaining an enormous range of things that would be otherwise inexplicable.”
         R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, pg 90.
 

“Not a single case is known to me of a complex organ that could not have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications.  I do not believe that such a case will ever be found.  If it is, ...  I shall cease to believe in Darwinism.”
         R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, pg 91.
 

Opposing view (not just design proponents):

"  the reasons for rejecting Darwin's proposal were many, but first of all that many innovations cannot possibly come into existence through accumulation of many small steps, and even if they can, natural selection cannot accomplish it, because incipient and intermediate stages are not advantageous."
         S. Lovtrup, Darwinism:  The Refutation of a Myth, 1987, p 275.
 

"We avoid the excellent question, What good is 5% of an eye? by arguing that the possessor of such an incipient structure did not use it for sight."
        S. J. Gould, quoted in The Blind Watchmaker, p. 81.

"  we can readily understand how complex and fully developed structures work and owe their maintenance and preservation to natural selection - a wing, an eye, the resemblence of a bittern to a branch or of an insect to a stick or dead leaf.  But how do you get from nothing to such an elaborate something if evolution must proceed through a long sequence of intermediate stages, each favored by natural selection?  You can't fly with 2% of a wing or gain much protection from an iota's similarity with a potentially concealing piece of vegetation.  How, in other words, can natural selection explain these incipient stages of structures that can only be used (as we now observe them) in much more elaborate form?

One point stands high above the rest:  the dilemma of incipient stages.

        S. J. Gould, "Not Necessarily a Wing", (1985).
 

 

Irreducible complexity,  or adaptational package

Many parts are required before any useful function will result

Does 5% of an eye   =   5% vision?

Analogy - opening a combination lock

 
"The technique of problem solving by trial and error, for example, a mechanism which is strictly analagous to evolution by natural selection, is often successful in solving relatively simple problems, but it would obviously be wrong to conclude that it is capable, at least in finite time, of solving more involved complex sorts of problems."
         M. Denton, Evolution:  A Theory in Crisis, pg 88.
 

"There is no experimental evidence to show that a new organism or even a novel structural feature has ever been produced from raw material produced by mutations."
         Davis and Kenyon, Of Pandas and People,  pg 66.
 

"..it has not been demonstrated that mutations are able to produce the highly coordinated parts of novel structures needed again and again by macroevolution."
         Davis and Kenyon, Of Pandas and People,  pg 66.

 
 

Major Problem #3:   Fossil record does not show the patterns (especially gradual transformation) predicted by this theory

 
S. J. Gould honestly admits that the Neo-Darwinan synthesis is not supported by fossil evidence and

"is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy."

    S. J. Gould, "Is A New And General Theory Of Evolution Emerging"  Paleobiology, 6(1), pg
    120, 1980.
 

(See also section III on the fossil record above)
 

Regarding the Cambrian Explosion, Dawkins writes:
 

"the Cambrian strata of Rocks  ... are the oldest in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups.  It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.  Evolutionists of all stripes believe, however, that this really does represent a very large gap in the fossil record, a gap that is simply due to the fact that, for some reason, very few fossils have lasted from periods before about 600 million years ago.  One good reason might be that many of these animals had only soft parts to their bodies;  no shells or bones to fossilize.  ....  Both schools of thought (NeoDarwinians and punctuationalists) agree that the only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation, and both would reject this alternative.

        R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, pg 229-230.

 

James Valentine, paleontologist from Univ. of Calif. who specializes on the Cambrian era, points out (video interview) that there are plenty of good Pre-Cambrian rocks that have been investigated, and so the hypothesis that a large period of time is lost from the record is untenable.  Regarding the late Pre-Cambrian record just before the phyla appear, he comments:
 

"There are lots of sediments from over fifty localities around the world which have good sections which have yielded fossils and when you get that many samples of an interval of just  ... a few tens of millions of years or so it means that the record is reasonably complete.  So we are quite confident that the pattern we're seeing is not an artificial one, not caused by lack of the fossil record.  The rocks are there, plenty of rocks, perfectly good rocks, laid down in the appropriate environment.  So the fossils we see probably record the story that happened.
        J. Valentine, Video Interview

 

Valentine notes that the record is "top down" rather than "bottom up"as predicted by Darwinian Macroevolution.
 
 

Moreover, the argument that all organisms were soft-bodied and therefore would not fossilize is no longer tenable, as the Ediacaran fossils found in the PreCambrian strata worldwide are simple and soft-bodied.
 
 
 
 
 

 1.  based on observations of the fossil record:

  -abrupt appearence
  -stasis
  -absence of transitional forms

 2.  Gould questioned the usefulness of intermediate structures, revisited the idea of saltations or
      macromutations
 

 3.  Microevolution does not extrapolate to macroevolution
 

Deduction - evolution proceeds in jumps (or jerks), followed by stasis
 
 
 
 
 

Problem:  macromutations that produce entirely new structures all at once are so improbable
that this view is essentially equivalent to special creation!
 

“Phylum-level leaps and modest jumps, up to the class level” are the shearest nonsense.  Jumps above the species level don’t happen, and nobody who thinks about it for two minutes would claim that they do.
         R. Dawkins, “Human Chauvinism”, Evolution 51, 1997, 1015.  (quoting S. Gould who had
            suggested such transitions)
 
 
 

Two important questions that have confused this debate:
 

 1.  Do innumerable intermediate stages occur but just happen very fast, or are there no intermediates at all!
 

 2.  How big are the jumps (microevol. or macroevol.)
 
 
 
 

Current status of this debate:
 

The punctuationalists seem to have retreated from their earlier claims of large jumps and the death of NeoDarwinism as a macroevolutionary theory.    However, some claims of large macromulations are still postulated based on homeobox (regulatory) genes.  (recent book by J. Schwartz, Sudden Origins)
 
 
 
 
 
 

Summary of Gradualist - Punctuationalist Debate
 
 

Paleontologists  -  There are BIG problems with gradualism:

 i) fossil record is not consistent with gradualism
 ii) microevolution does not extrapolate to macroevolution
 iii) intermediate stages are not functional

Design Proponents  -  Yes, we agree!
 

Paleontologists  -  NeoDarwinism is dead.   New and general theory - punctuated equilibrium

 Mechanism - discontinuous change by alteration in rates of development, macromutations, species sorting

Gradualists  -  Ridiculous!   (discontinuous change, macromut.)
 

Design Proponents  -  Yes, we agree!
 

M. Denton  -  Evolution:  A Theory In Crisis
 

Punct. and Gradualists  -  Fact of evolution is not in dispute!  Just arguing about mechanisms
 
 

Summary

 
Macroevolution is completely unrelated to microevolution - origin of information is the distinction

The characteristics of the fossil record are antithetical to gradual Darwinian macroevolution

Paleontologists recognized the problems of the fossil record and proposed a new theory called "punctuated equilibrium"

Punctuated equilibrium, in its original form, required large abrupt transformations for which there is no conceivable mechanism.
 

There are no direct observations of macroevolution, no direct (fossil) evidence, and no conceivable mechanism.

Belief in macroevolution is based on inferential evidences and a naturalistic worldview!

 
Nils Heribert-Nilson, the accomplished Swedish botanist and geneticist, concluded after forty years of attempting to find evidence for the theory of evolution that the task was impossible and the theory is even "a serious obstruction to biological research."   "[It] ought to be entirely abandoned", in part because it "obstructs - as has been repeatedly shown - the attainment of consistent results, even from uniform experimental material.  For everything must ultimately be forced to fit this speculative theory.  An exact biology therefore, cannot be built up."

" ...a close inspection discovers an empirical impossibility to be inherent in the idea of evolution, ... "

"As I have pointed out, there is no discussion among biologists today whether an evolution has taken place or not.  The discussion concerns the how, the causation of evolution.  No definite answer has been given to this question.
         It then becomes necessary to ask:  Has there really been an evolution?  Are the proofs of its occurrence tenable?
         After a detailed and comprehensive review of the facts we have been forced to give the answer:  No!  Neither a recent nor a palaeohistorical evolution can be empirically demonstrated.
         If this is the case, all discussions and problems concerning the causation of an evolution lose all interest.  Lamarckism or mutationism, monophyletic or polyphyletic, continuity or discontinuity - the roads of the evolution are not problems any more.  It is rather futile to discuss the digestion or the brain functions of a ghost.
         When we have arrived at this standpoint, the evolutionist has the right to ask:  What has caused the fundamental differentiation in the world of organisms, the immeasurable variation among animals and plants?  That it exists is a fact: you owe us an explanation!
         We turn to empirical facts to obtain the answer.  They tell us that during the geological history of the earth, gigantic revolutions have occured which at the same time mean tabula rasa catastrophes for a whole world of organisms but also the origin of a completely new one.  The new one is structurally completely different from the old one.  This origination of biota, which from a geological point of view is sudden as a flaring up I have called emication.
         During palaeobiological times whole new worlds of biota have been repeatedly synthesized.
         I will be asked:  Do you seriously want to make such a statement?  Do you not see that the consequences of such a theory are more than daring, that they would be nearly insane?  Do you really mean to say that an orchid or an elephant should have been instantaneously created out of non-living material?
         Yes, I do."