NO EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION

Scientists' Research and Darwinism

Edited by Emerson Thomas McMullen, 2002

Simply stated, Neo-Darwinism is the gradual origin of species from a common ancestor by natural selection of chance mutations. (Theistic evolution introduces God into this otherwise naturalistic process.) The idea fails because of the fossil record shows none of the predicted transitional forms but rather reveals the complexity and diversity of the early animal forms. Additionally, these forms have no precursors according to the fossil record. This has always been a problem for Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism from its inception until now. The following are what scientists have said about this in somewhat reverse chronological order:

Some General Examples

Paleontologist Alan Cheetham, a gradualist evolutionist, summed up decades of his own research: "I came reluctantly to the conclusion that I wasn't finding evidence for gradualism." Reported by R.A. Kerr in "Did Darwin Get It All Right?" Science 276:1421, 10 March 1995.

". . . no human has ever seen a new species form in nature." Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1981), p. 73.

"There are no fossils known that show what the primitive ancestral insects looked like, . . . . Until fossils of these ancestors are discovered, however, the early history of the insects can only be inferred." Peter Farb, The Insects, Life Nature Library (New York: Time Incorporated, 1962), pp. 14-15

."Thus so far as concerns the major groups of animals, the creationists seem to have the better of the argument. There is not the slightest evidence that any one of the major groups arose from any other. Each is a special animal complex related, more or less closely, to all the rest, and appearing, therefore, as a special and distinct creation." Austin H. Clark, "Animal Evolution," Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 3, No. 4, December 1928, p. 539.

"When we descend to details, we can prove that no one species has changed; nor can we prove that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the groundwork of the theory [of evolution]." Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. 2, editor Francis Darwin (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1898), p. 210

No Transitional Forms

"But the curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps: the fossils go missing in all the important places. When you look for links between major groups of animals, they simply aren't there; at least, not in enough numbers to put their status beyond doubt. Either they don't exist at all, or they are so rare that endless argument goes on about whether a particular fossil is, or isn't, or might be, transitional between this group or that." [emphasis in original] Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong (New Haven Ct,:Ticknor and Fields, 1992) p. 19. (See my articleThe Coelacanth, Living Fossils, and Evolution).

There is no fossil record establishing historical continuity of structure for most characters that might be used to assess relationships among phyla." Katherine G. Field et al., "Molecular Phylogeny of the animal Kingdom," Science, Vol. 239, 12 February 1988, p. 748.

Evolutionists believe that amphibians evolved into reptiles, with either Diadectes or Seymouria as the claimed transition. Actually, by the evolutionist's own time scale, this "transition" occurs 35 million years (m.y.) after the earliest reptile, Hylonomus (a cotylosaur). A parent cannot appear 35 million years after its child! The scattered locations of these fossils also present problems for the evolutionist. [See Steven M. Stanley, Earth and Life Through Time (New York: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1986), pp. 411-415. See also Robert H. Dott, Jr. and Roger L. Batten, Evolution of the Earth, 2nd edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), p. 311.

"And let us dispose of a common misconception. The complete transmutation of even one animal species into a different species has never been directly observed either in the laboratory or in the field." Dean H. Kenyon (Professor of Biology, San Francisco State University), affidavit presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, No. 85-1513, Brief of Appellants, prepared under the direction of William J. Guste, Jr., Attorney General of the State of Louisiana, October 1985, p. A-16.

"The fact that all the individual species must be stationed at the extreme periphery of such logic [evolutionary] trees merely emphasized the fact that the order of nature betrays no hint of natural evolutionary sequential arrangements, revealing species to be related as sisters or cousins but never as ancestors and descendants as is required by evolution." [emphasis in original] Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, London: Barnett Books, 1985, p. 132

". . . there are no intermediate forms between finned and limbed creatures in the fossil collections of the world." G.R. Taylor, The Great Evolution Mystery, ( N.Y: Harper and Row, 1983) p. 60.

". . . the gradual morphological transitions between presumed ancestors and descendants, anticipated by most biologists, are missing." David E. Schindel (Curator of Invertebrate Fossils, Peabody Museum of Natural History), "The Gaps in the Fossil Record," Nature, Vol. 297, 27 May 1982, p. 282.

"Gaps at a lower taxonomic level, species and genera, are practically universal in the fossil record of the mammal-like reptiles. In no single adequately documented case is it possible to trace a transition, species by species, from one genus to another." Thomas S. Kemp, Mammal-like Reptiles and the Origin of Mammals (New York: Academic Press, 1982), p. 319.

"Modern apes, for instance, seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans - of upright, naked, tool-making, big-brained beings - is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter." Lyall Watson, "The Water People," Science Digest, May 1982, p. 44.

"At any rate, modern gorillas, orangs and chimpanzees spring out of nowhere, as it were. They are here today; they have no yesterday, unless one is able to find faint foreshadowings of it in the dryopithecids." Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981; reprint edition, New York: Warner Books, 1982), p. 363.

It is true that the skeletal features of some amphibians and some reptiles are similar. However, huge differences exist in their soft internal organs, such as their circulatory and reproductive systems. For example, no evolutionary scheme has ever been given for the development of the many unique innovations of the reptile's egg. [See Denton, pp. 218-219 and Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution (London: Rider, 1984) pp. 199-200.]

"In fact,the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another." Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable (New York: Basic Books, 1981) p. 95

"Well, 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. 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. By this I mean that 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 - what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic. So Darwin's problem has not been alleviated in the last 120 years and we still have a record which does show change but one that can hardly be looked upon as the most reasonable consequence of natural selection." David M. Raup, "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Vol. 50, No. 1, January 1979, p. 25. (He says a similar thing on p. 50.)

Dr. Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum (Natural History), was asked by Luther D. Sunderland why no evolutionary transitions were included in Dr. Patterson's recent book entitled Evolution. In a personal letter, Patterson said:

"I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be asked to visualize such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic licence, would that not mislead the reader?. . . Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say that there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least `show a photo of the fossil from which each type organism was derived.' I will lay it on the line - there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument." Copy of letter, dated 10 April 1979, from Patterson to Sunderland.

"Surely the lack of gradualism - the lack of intermediates - is a major problem." Dr. David Raup, as taken from page 16 of an approved and verified transcript of a taped interview conducted by Luther D. Sunderland on 27 July 1979.

". . . there are about 25 major living subdivisions (phyla) of the animal kingdom alone, all with gaps between them that are not bridged by known intermediates." Francisco J. Ayala and James W. Valentine, Evolving, The Theory and Processes of Organic Evolution (Menlo Park, California: The Benjamin Cummings Publishing Co., 1979), p. 258.

The following was based on an interview with Dr. Niles Eldredge, an invertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History.

"But the smooth transition from one form of life to another which is implied in the theory is . . .not borne out by the facts. The search for `missing links' between various living creatures, like humans and apes, is probably fruitless . . . because they probably never existed as distinct transitional creatures. This oddity has been attributed to gaps in the fossil record which gradualists expected to fill when rock strata of the proper age had been found. In the last decade, however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them. If it is not the fossil record which is incomplete then it must be the theory." "Missing, Believed Nonexistent," Manchester Guardian (The Washington Post Weekly), Vol. 119, No. 22, 26 November 1978, p. 1.

"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 . . . . We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study." Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution's Erratic Pace," Natural History, Vol. 5, May 1977, p. 14.

"New species almost always appeared suddenly in the fossil record with no intermediate links to ancestors in older rocks of the same region." Ibid., p. 12.

"All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt." S.J. Gould, "The Return of Hopeful Monsters," Natural History, Vol. 86, June-July 1977, p. 23.

"Most orders, classes, and phyla appear abruptly, and commonly have already acquired all the characters that distinguish them." Ibid., p. 266.

"The absence of any known series of such intermediates imposes severe restrictions on morphologists interested in the ancestral source of angiosperms and leads to speculation and interpretation of homologies and relationships on the basis of the most meager circumstantial evidence." Charles B. Beck, Origin and Early Evolution of Angiosperms (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 5.

"The geological record has so far provided no evidence as to the origin of the fishes . . . ." J.R. Norman, A History of Fishes, 3rd edition (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), p. 343.

"All three subdivisions of the bony fishes first appear in the fossil record at approximately the same time. They are already widely divergent morphologically, and they are heavily armored. How did they originate? What allowed them to diverge so widely? How did they all come to have heavy armor? And why is there no trace of earlier, intermediate forms?" Gerald T. Todd, "Evolution of the Lung and the Origin of Bony Fishes - A Causal Relationship?", American Zoologist, Vol. 20, No. 4, p. 757.

"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of `seeing' evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists the most notorious of which is the presence of `gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them." David B. Kitts (School of Geology and Geophysics, University of Oklahoma), "Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory," Evolution, Vol. 28, September 1974, p. 467.

"The transition from insectivore to primate is not clearly documented in the fossil record." A.J. Kelso, Physical Anthropology, 2nd edition (New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1974), p. 141.

". . . experience shows that the gaps which separate the highest categories may never be bridged in the fossil record. Many of the discontinuities tend to be more and more emphasized with increased collecting." Norman D. Newell (former Curator of Historical Geology at the American Museum of Natural History), "The Nature of the Fossil Record," Adventures in Earth History, editor Preston Cloud (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1970), pp. 644-645.

"A person may choose any group of animals or plants, large or small, or pick one at random. He may then go to a library and with some patience he will be able to find a qualified author who says that the evolutionary origin of that form is not known." Bolton Davidheiser, Evolution and Christian Faith (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: The Presbyterian and reformed Publishing Company, 1969), p. 302.

"There is no more conclusive refutation of Darwinism than that furnished by palaeontology. Simple probability indicates that fossil hoards can only be test samples. Each sample, then, should represent a different stage of evolution, and there ought to be merely `transitional' types, no definition and no species. Instead of this we find perfectly stable and unaltered forms persevering through long ages, forms that have not developed themselves on the fitness principle, but appear suddenly and at once in their definitive shape; that do not thereafter evolve towards better adaptation, but become rarer and finally disappear, while quite different forms crop up again. What unfolds itself, in ever-increasing richness of form, is the great classes and kinds of living beings which exist aboriginally and exist still, without transition types, in the grouping of today." [emphasis in original] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 2 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 32.

But whatever ideas authorities may have on the subject, the lung-fishes, like every other major group of fishes that I know, have their origins firmly based in nothing, a matter of hot dispute among the experts, each of whom is firmly convinced that everyone else is wrong . . . . I have often thought of how little I should like to have to prove organic evolution in a court of law." [emphasis in original] Errol White, "A Little on Lung-Fishes," Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, Vol. 177, Presidential Address, January 1966, p. 8.

". . . to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favour of special creation. If, however, another explanation could be found for this hierarchy of classification, it would be the knell [the death signal] of the theory of evolution. Can you imagine how an orchid, a duckweed, and a palm have come from the same ancestry, and have we any evidence for this assumption? The evolutionist must be prepared with an answer, but I think that most would break down before an inquisition. Textbooks hoodwink." E.J.H. Corner, "Evolution," Contemporary Botanical Thought, editors Anna M. MacLeod and L.S. Cobley (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), p. 9

."The [evolutionary] origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved." W.E. Swinton, "The Origin of Birds," Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds, editor A.J. Marshall (New York: Academic Press, 1960), Vol. 1, Chapter 1, p. 1. See my article Did Birds Evolve from Dinosaurs? Latest Research Says No!

"When and where the first Primates made their appearance is also conjectural. . . . It is clear, therefore, that the earliest Primates are not yet known. . . ." William Charles Osman Hill, Primates (New York: Interscience Publishers, Inc., 1953), Vol. 1, pp. 25-26.

"As our present information stands, however, the gap remains unbridged, and the best place to start the evolution of the vertebrates is in the imagination." Homer W. Smith, From Fish to Philosopher (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1953), p. 26.

"It may, therefore, be firmly maintained that it is not even possible to make a caricature of an evolution our of palaeobiological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as due to the scarcity of the material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled." Nilsson, p. 1212

"In spite of the immense amount of the paleontological material and the existence of long series of intact stratigraphic sequences with perfect records for the lower categories, transitions between the higher categories are missing." Richard B. Goldschmidt, "Evolution, As Viewed by One Geneticist", American Scientist, Vol. 40, January, 1952, p. 98.

"There is, however, no fossil evidence bearing on the question of insect origin; the oldest insects known show no transition to other arthropods." Frank M. Carpenter, "Fossil Insects," Insects (Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), p. 18.

"It has long been hoped that extinct plants will ultimately reveal some of the stages through which existing groups have passed during the course of their development, but it must be freely admitted that this aspiration has been fulfilled to a very slight extent, even though paleobotanical research has been in progress for more than one hundred years. As yet we have not been able to trace the phylogenetic history of a single group of modern plants from its beginning to the present." Chester A. Arnold,An Introduction to Paleobotany (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947), p. 7.

"When a new phylum, class, or order appears, there follows a quick, explosive (in terms of geological time) diversification so that practically all orders or families known appear suddenly and without any apparent transitions." Ibid., p. 97.

"This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists. It is true of almost all orders of all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate. A fortiori, it is also true of the classes, themselves, and of the major animal phyla, and it is apparently also true of analogous categories of plants." George Gaylord Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution (New York: Columbia university Press, 1944), p. 107.

". . . the geologic record did not then and still does not yield a finely graduated chain of slow and progressive evolution. In other words, there are not enough intermediates. There are very few cases where one can find a gradual transition from one species to another and very few cases where one can look at a part of the fossil record and actually see that organisms were improving in the sense of becoming better adapted." Ibid., p. 23.

Complex and Diverse Early Animals

Developmental biologist Rudolf Roff of Indiana University concludes from the fossil evidence from Canada, Greenland, China, Siberia, and Nambia of a Cambrian explosion of life: "There must be limits to change, after all we've had these same old body plans for half a billion years." Reported by J.M. Nash in the cover story, "Evolution's Big Bang: New discoveries show that life as we know it began in an amazing biological frenzy that changed the planet almost overnight," Time Magazine, 4 December 1996, p. 74. (See my article, The Implications of the Cambrian Explosion for Evolution).

"Vertebrates and their progenitors, according to the new studies, evolved in the Cambrian, earlier than paleontologists have traditionally assumed." Richard Monastersky, "Vertebrate Origins: The Fossils Speak Up," Science News, Vol. 149, 3 February 1996, p. 75.

"Evolutionary biology's deepest paradox concerns this strange discontinuity. Why haven't new animal body plans continued to crawl out of the evolutionary cauldron during the past hundreds of millions of years? Why are the ancient body plans so stable?" Jeffrey S. Levinton, "The Big Bang of Animal Evolution," Scientific American, Vol. 267, November 1992, p. 84.

"The most famous such burst, the Cambrian explosion, marks the inception of modern multicellular life. Within just a few million years, nearly every major kind of animal anatomy appears in the fossil record for the first time . . . . The Precambrian record is now sufficiently good that the old rationale about undiscovered sequences of smoothly transitional forms will no longer wash." Stephen Jay Gould, "An Asteroid to Die For," Discover, October 1989, p. 65

."If there has been evolution of life, the absence of the requisite fossils in the rocks older than the Cambrian is puzzling." Marshall Kay and Edwin H. Colbert, Stratigraphy and Life history (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965), p. 103

."There are no fossils known that show what the primitive ancestral insects looked like, . . . . Until fossils of these ancestors are discovered, however, the early history of the insects can only be inferred." Peter Farb, The Insects, Life Nature Library (New York: Time Incorporated, 1962), pp. 14-15.

". . . it is well known that the fossil record tells us nothing about the evolution of flowering plants." E.J.H. Corner, "Evolution?" in Macleod and Cobley, eds., Contemporary Botanical Thought (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961) p. 100.

"Granted an evolutionary origin of the main groups of animals, and not an act of special creation, the absence of any record whatsoever of a single member of any of the phyla in the Pre-Cambrian rocks remains as inexplicable on orthodox grounds as it was to Darwin." T. Neville George (Professor of Geology at the University of Glasgow), "Fossils in Evolutionary Perspective," Science Progress, Vol. 48, No. 189, January 1960, p. 5.

"One of the major unsolved problems of geology and evolution is the occurrence of diversified, multicellular marine invertebrates in Lower Cambrian rocks on all the continents and their absence in rocks of greater age." Daniel I. Axelrod, "Early Cambrian Marine Fauna, " Science, Vol. 128, 4 July 1958, p. 7.

"There is another and allied difficulty, which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks." Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 348.

"The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several palaeontologists - for instance , by Agassiz, Pictet, and Sedgwick - as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection." Ibid., p. 344.

"To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer." Ibid., p. 350.

"The case at present must remain inexplicable, and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained." Ibid., p. 351.

Acknowledgments

Many of these quotes were compiled by Walt Brown, In the Beginning, spec.ed., (Phoenix, Az: Center for Scientific Creation, 1996). Sharon Ann McMullen did the word processing.