Chapter 9. Evolutionists' Confessions Regarding the Lack of Intermediate-Form Fossils

According to the theory of evolution, life forms are descended from one another. One species supposedly gradually developed into another, and each new species emerged in that same way. According to the theory, this transition took place over a very long period of time, hundreds of millions of years, and proceeded stage by stage. That implies that countless intermediate life forms must have emerged and lived during the course of such a lengthy transition Darwinists claimed.

If the claims of Darwinists were to be true, semi-fish, semi-amphibian creatures that, despite having fish-like features, had also acquired some amphibious ones must once have existed. And since these were in an imaginary process of transition, their limbs must have been rudimentary, flawed and awkward, if not handicapped. Evolutionists refer to these fictitious entities, which they believe existed at one time, as "intermediate forms." But this is a deception. There is no such thing as intermediate forms. Not a single intermediate form has ever been found in the fossil record. Because no such transition of the kind alleged by evolutionists ever happened. If a transition in between species had really existed and if those transitional forms had really lived in the past, then there must have been untold billions of them. Traces of such monstrous creatures should still be visible in the fossil record. Today we have approximately 300 million fossils in the fossil records, and not even one single fossil belonging to an intermediate form has ever been discovered!

In other words, no traces of half-fish, half-amphibian, or half-reptile, half-bird-much less any half-ape, half-human creature have ever been encountered in any of the Earth's strata. All the fossils discovered represent perfect forms of life and have been identical to present day species or else they belong to species which lived in the past but subsequently became extinct. It has emerged that the fossils that are the subject of such speculation and that Darwinists declare to be intermediate forms actually belong to perfect life forms. All the propaganda about intermediate forms is therefore a deception.

What follows is a selection of evolutionist admissions on this, one of the most serious dilemmas confronting the theory of evolution:

Charles Darwin:

But, 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?175

But in the intermediate region, having intermediate conditions of life, why do we not now find closely-linking intermediate varieties? This difficulty for a long time quite confounded me.176

First, 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?177

But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why, then, 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 serious objection which can be urged against my theory.178

From these several considerations, it cannot be doubted that the geological record... becomes much more difficult to understand why we do not therein find closely graduated varieties between the allied species which lived at its commencement and at its close.179

But I do not pretend that I should ever have suspected how poor was the record in the best preserved geological sections, had not the absence of innumerable transitional links between the species which lived at the commencement and close of each formation, pressed so hardly on my theory.180

On this doctrine of the extermination of an infinitude of connecting links, between the living and extinct inhabitants of the world, and at each successive period between the extinct and still older species, why is not every geological formation charged with such links? Why does not every collection of fossil remains afford plain evidence of the gradation and mutation of the forms of life?181

Derek W. Ager is an English paleontologist and head of the Department of Geology and Oceanography at University College of Swansea:

The point emerges that if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find–over and over again–not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another.182

W. R. Thompson is an entomologist and director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control:

Modern Darwinian paleontologists are obliged, just like their predecessors and like Darwin, to water down the facts with subsidiary hypotheses...183

Mark Czarnecki is an evolutionist paleontologist:

A major problem in proving the theory [of evolution] has been the fossil record. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin's hypothetical intermediate variants-instead, species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God.184

Carlton E. Brett is professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati:

Did life on Earth change steadily and gradually through time? The fossil record emphatically says "no."185

Dr. David Raup is a paleontologist at University of Chicago:

... most people assume that fossils provide a very important part of the general argument in favour of Darwinian interpretations of the history of life. Unfortunately, this is not strictly true.186

Edmund J. Ambrose is Professor Emeritus at the University of London and heads the department of Cell Biology at the Chester Beatty Research Institute University of London:

We have to admit that there is nothing in the geological records that runs contrary to the views of conservative creationists.187

Gareth Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History:

It is a mistake to believe that even one fossil species or fossil "group" can be demonstrated to have been ancestral to another. The ancestor-descendant relationship may only be assumed to have existed in the absence of evidence indicating otherwise... The history of comparative biology teaches us that the search for ancestors is doomed to ultimate failure, thus, with respect to its principal objective, this search is an exercise in futility. Increased knowledge of suggested "ancestors" usually shows them to be too specialized to have been direct ancestors of anything else.188

Dr. Colin Patterson is an evolutionist paleontologist and curator of London's Natural History Museum:

In a letter of reply to Luther D. Sutherland, who asked why he never referred to intermediate forms in his book Evolution, he says:

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. As a paleontologist 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 of organism was derived." I will lay it on the line-there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.189

David B. Kitts is Professor of the History of Science at Oklahoma University:

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.190

John Adler and John Carey are journalists:

The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms that lie between species, the more they have been frustrated.191

Mark Ridley is a zoologist at the University of Oxford:

In any case, no real evolutionist...uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation...192

Steven M. Stanley is Professor of Paleontology at The University of Hawaii at Manoa:

The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution [the evolution of a species' entire population into a new species] accomplishing a major morphologic[structural] transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.193

Hoimar Von Ditfurth is a German Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry and a well-known evolutionist science writer:

When we look back, we see there is no need to have been surprised at our failure to find those transitional forms searched for almost painfully. Because the great likelihood is that such transitional stages never existed.194

The most ancient fossils discovered to date are objects fossilized inside minerals, such as non-nucleic algae. No matter how primitive these may be, they still represent relatively complex and expertly organized forms of life. The story of the development between these first fossil organisms and molecules emerging by way of chemical combinations, biopolymers in other words is a gap that we have been as yet unable to fill.... On the other hand, this "temporary" gap that has been unable to be filled is quite attractive to some people, for understandable reasons. Someone who sees that it is impossible for life to begin in the absence of any supernatural effect can see the signs of a miracle in such a gap, intervention by a supernatural force.195

Edmund J. Ambrose is professor of cellular biology at the University of London:

At the present stage of geological research, we have to admit that there is nothing in the geological records that runs contrary to the view of conservative creationists, that God created each species separately..."196

Anthropologist Jeffrey H. Schwartz:

"most paleontologists found themselves facing a situation in which there were only gaps in the fossil record, with no evidence of transformational evolutionary intermediates between documented fossil species.197

George Gaylord Simpson is professor of zoology at Columbia University:

It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of families, appear in the [fossil] record suddenly, and are not led up to by gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.198

In the early days of evolutionary paleontology it was assumed that the major gaps would be filled in by further discoveries, and even, falsely, that some discoveries had already filled them. As it became more and more evident that the great gaps remained... The failure of paleontology to produce such evidence was so keenly felt that a few disillusioned naturalists even decided that the theory of organic evolution, or of general organic continuity of descent, was wrong, after all.199

Thomas S. Kemp is curator of the zoological collections at the University of Oxford:

As is now well known, most fossil species appear instantaneously in the record, persist for some millions of years virtually unchanged, only to disappear abruptly...200

In no single adequately documented case is it possible to trace a transition, species by species, from one genus to another.201

Science magazine:

A large number of well trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is…In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been found -- yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks.202

Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in "Punctuated Equilibria: The Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered" published in Paleobiology:

From such scrappy data it is hard to see how anyone could derive with confidence the gradualistic interpretation... unless one were predisposed to gradualism from the start...203

Stephen Jay Gould (Harvard Üniversitesi):

Hayali soy ağacı çizimi

Stephen Jay Gould was professor of geology and paleoanthropology at Harvard University:

The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches...204

I regard the failure to find a clear "vector of progress" in life's history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record.... we have sought to impose a pattern that we hoped to find on a world that does not really display it.205

... one feature stands out as most puzzling-the lack of clear order and progress through time among marine invertebrate faunas. We can tell tales of improvement for some groups, but in honest moments, we must admit that the history of complex life is more a story of multifarious variation about a set of basic designs than a saga of accumulating excellence.206

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.207

The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:

1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on Earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they `disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.

2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and fully formed.208

Dr. Colin Patterson is an evolutionist paleontologist and curator of London's Natural History Museum:

[Stephen Jay] Gould [of Harvard] and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils.209

Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall are paleontologists on the curatorial staff of the American Museum of Natural History.

That individual kinds of fossils remain recognizably the same throughout the length of their occurrence in the fossil record had been known to paleontologists long before Darwin published his Origin. Darwin himself... prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search.... One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong.

The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor's new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin's predicted pattern, simply looked the other way.210

Lewis L. Carroll is an evolutionist paleontologist and author of Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution:

Unfortunately, not a single specimen of an appropriate reptilian ancestor is known prior to the appearance of true reptiles. The absence of such ancestral forms leaves many problems of the amphibian-reptilian transition unanswered.211

Edwin H. Colbert is an authority on paleontology and curator at the American Museum of Natural History and M. Morales is the author of Evolution of the Vertebrates:

The ichthyosaurs, in many respects the most highly specialized of the marine reptiles, appeared in early Triassic times. Their advent into the geologic history of the reptiles was sudden and dramatic; there are no clues in pre-Triassic sediments as to the possible ancestors of the ichthyosaurs.... The basic problem of ichthyosaur relationships is that no conclusive evidence can be found for linking these reptiles with any other reptilian order.212

Evolutionists' Confessions Stating That They InterpretFossils in a Biased Manner

Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin explain in the People of the Lake which they have co-authored that:

Since the fossil findings were highly insufficient the way was open for different interpretations to be made. Another element making the matter even more difficult, they went on, is the existence of a certain amount of difference in appearance in every animal species, and said that other people around us represent a living example of this. According to Leakey and Lewin, if such variables in extinct species were great, then the differences in the bones they have left behind might mislead scientists into thinking that they were dealing with several different species rather than only one. For that reason, if we were to ask six researchers to classify the fossils as they considered appropriate we should not be at all surprised if each one made a different determination. They concluded by saying that some people would certainly be unable to agree on which group to include a specific fossil in...213

Roger Lewin is the news editor of Science magazine and has degree in biochemistry:

How is it that trained men, the greatest experts of their day, could look at a set of modern human bones the cranial fragments and "see" a clear simian signature in them; and see in an apes jaw the unmistakable signs of humanity. The answers, inevitably, have to do with the scientist's' expectations and their effects on the interpretation of the data.214

It is, in fact, a common fantasy, promulgated mostly by the scientific profession itself, that in the search for objective truth, data dictate conclusions. If this were the case, then each scientist faced with the same data would necessarily reach the same conclusion. But as we've seen earlier and will see again and again, frequently this does not happen. Data are just as often molded to fit preferred conclusions.215

The key issue is the ability correctly to infer a genetic relationship between two species on the basis of a similarity in appearance, at gross and detailed levels of anatomy. Sometimes this approach...can be deceptive, partly because similarity does not necessarily imply an identical genetic heritage: a shark (which is a fish) and a porpoise (which is a mammal) look similar.216

Dr. Tim White is an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California in Berkeley:

A five million-year-old piece of bone that was thought to be a collarbone of a (imaginary) human-like creature is actually part of a dolphin rib. The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone.217

Earnest A. Hooton of Harvard University:

To attempt to restore the soft parts is an even more hazardous undertaking. The lips, the eyes, the ears, and the nasal tip leave no clues on the underlying bony parts. You can with equal facility model on a Neanderthaloid skull the features of a chimpanzee or the lineaments of a philosopher. These alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little if any scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public.... So put not your trust in reconstructions.218

The Separate Reconstructions Produced on the Basis of the Same Skull
N. Parker's reconstruction, National Geographic, September 1960	Maurice Wilson's illustration	Illustration appearing on 5 April, 1964, in the Sunday Times

Confessions Stating that the Fossil Record is Abundant Enough

As always, some evolutionists resort to demagoguery and sleight of hand in order to explain away their failure to find any intermediate-form fossils. They claim that the fossil record is "not sufficiently rich" and that the long-sought intermediate forms will eventually be discovered. However, almost all of the fossil record has actually been unearthed. Some 300 million fossils have been unearthed. And not a single one of those fossils is an intermediate form. This manifestly and definitively proves that there are no intermediate forms on Earth and that no process of evolution ever took place. And as you will see below, most evolutionists accept the fact that it is impossible for fossilized remains of intermediate forms to ever appear.

David M. Raup is a paleontologist at University of Chicago:

David M. Raup

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.219

Prof. Nils Heribert-Nilsson is a Swedish geneticist and Professor of Botany at the University of Lund in Sweden:

My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than forty years have completely failed. 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 being due to the scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.220

D. Dwight Davis of the Chicago Natural History Museum:

The sudden emergence of major adaptive types as seen in the abrupt appearance in the fossil record of families and orders, continues to give trouble. The phenomenon lay in the genetical no-man's land beyond the limits of experimentation. A few paleontologists even today cling to the idea that these gaps will be closed by further collecting... but most regard the observed discontinuities as real and have sought an explanation.221

Prof. T. Neville George is a paleontologist at Glasgow University:

There is no need to apologize any longer for the poverty of the fossil record. In some ways it has become almost unmanageably rich and discovery is outpacing integration... The fossil record nevertheless continues to be composed mainly of gaps.222