SCIENTISTS SPEAK ABOUT FOSSILS: 2

Here are still more statements by scientists, that the fossil evidence clearly and overwhelmingly disproves evolutionary theory. Evolution is a myth. God created everything; the evidence clearly points to it. This is science vs. evolution—a Creation-Evolution Encyclopedia, brought to you by Creation Science Facts.

CONTENTS: Scientists Speak about Fossils: 2

Abrupt Appearance With Only Gaps Between: New species suddenly appeared, and there are only gaps between them and other species

This material is excerpted from the book, FOSSILS AND STRATA.
An asterisk ( * ) by a name indicates that person is not known to be a creationist. Of over 4,000 quotations in the books this Encyclopedia is based on, only 164 statements are by creationists.
You will have a better understanding of the following statements by scientists if you will also read the web page, Fossils and Strata.

ABRUPT APPEARANCE WITH ONLY GAPS BETWEEN

New species did not evolve, but suddenly appeared in the fossil record. Between the different species there are only gaps, where we should find transitional species.

"It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly. They are not, as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptible changing forerunners such as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution."—*G.G. Simpson, in The Evolution of Life, p. 149.

"When we examine a series of fossils of any age we may pick out one and say with confidence, `This is a crustacean'—or starfish, or a brachiopod, or annelid, or any other type of creature as the case may be."—*A.H. Clark, The New Evolution: Zoogenesis, p. 100.

"All the major groups of animals have maintained the same relationship to each other from the very first [from the very lowest level of the geologic column] . . Crustaceans have always been crustaceans, echinoderms have always been echinoderms, and mollusks have always been mollusks. There is not the slightest evidence which supports any other viewpoint."—*A.H. Clark, The New Evolution: Zoogenesis (1930), p. 114.

"From the tangible evidence that we now have been able to discover, we are forced to the conclusion that all the major groups of animals at the very first held just about the same relation to each other that they do today."—*A.H. Clark, The New Evolution: Zoogenesis (1930), p. 211.

"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."—*T. Neville George, "Fossils in Evolutionary Perspective," in Science Progress, January 1960, pp. 1, 3.

"The abrupt appearance of higher taxa in the fossil record has been a perennial puzzle. Not only do characteristic and distinctive remains of phyla appear suddenly, without known ancestors, but several classes of phylum, orders of a class, and so on, commonly appear at approximately the same time, without known intermediates."—*James W. Valentine and *Cathryn A. Campbell, "Genetic Regulation and the Fossil Record," in American Scientist, Vol. 63, November-December, 1975, p. 673.

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

"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.

"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.' "—*Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution's Erratic Pace," in Natural History, May 1977, p. 14.

"There are about 250,000 different species of fossil plants and animals known . . In spite of this large quantity of information, it is but a tiny fraction of the diversity that [according to the theory] actually lived in the past. There are well over a million species living today and . . [it is] possible to predict how many species ought to be in our fossil record. That number is at least 100 times the number we have found."—*David M. Raup, "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," in Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, January 1979, p. 22.

"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 used to visualize such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it . .

"[Stephen] Gould [of Harvard] and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. 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. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record . . It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favored by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science; there is no way of putting them to the test."—*Colin Patterson, Letter dated April 10, 1979, to Luther Sunderland, quoted in L.D. Sunderland Darwin's Enigma, p. 89.

"No one has found any such in-between creatures. This was long chalked up to `gaps' in the fossil records, gaps that proponents of gradualism [gradual evolutionary change from species to species] confidently expected to fill in someday when rock strata of the proper antiquity were eventually located. But all the fossil evidence to date has failed to turn up any such missing links . . There is a growing conviction among many scientists that these transitional forms never existed."—*Niles Eldredge, quoted in "Alternate Theory of Evolution Considered," in Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1978.

"So the geological time scale and the basic facts of biological change over time are totally independent of evolutionary theory.

"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."—*David M. Raup, "Evolution and the Fossil Record," in Science, July 17, 1981, p. 289.

"Evidence from fossils now points overwhelmingly away from the classical Darwinism which most Americans learned in high school . . The missing link between man and the apes . . is merely the most glamorous of a whole hierarchy of phantom creatures. In the fossil record, missing links are the rule . . The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms between species, the more they have been frustrated."—Newsweek, November 3, 1980.

"In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, used the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation."—*Mark Ridley, "Who Doubts Evolution?" in New Scientist, June 25, 1981, p. 831.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

To the next topic in this series:

PROBLEM OF GEOLOGICAL OVERTHRUSTS: This one is truly unbelievable! The evolutionists will try to move mountains to support their theory!