And yet no answer from the creationists to the problem of fossil assemblages. When you refer to the "fossil assemblalges(TM)", are you referring to the tens of millions of fossils which show no evidence of ever having evolved, or to the zero fossils which show evolution?
A few comments and notes by real experts:
"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, PhD (Zoology)
Head Curator, Dept of Geology, Stoval Museum
Evolution, vol 28, Sep 1974, p 467
"The curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps; the fossils are missing in all the important places."
Francis Hitching
The Neck of the Giraffe or Where Darwin Went Wrong
Penguin Books, 1982, p.19
"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."
Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
"Is a new general theory of evolution emerging?"
Paleobiology, vol 6, January 1980, p. 127
"...Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils ... I will lay it on the line, there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument."
Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist,
British Museum of Natural History, London
As quoted by: L. D. Sunderland
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 89
"We do not have any available fossil group which can categorically be claimed to be the ancestor of any other group. We do not have in the fossil record any specific point of divergence of one life form for another, and generally each of the major life groups has retained its fundamental structural and physiological characteristics throughout its life history and has been conservative in habitat."
G. S. Carter, Professor & author
Fellow of Corpus Christi College
Cambridge, England
Structure and Habit in Vertebrate Evolution
University of Washington Press, 1967
"The history of most fossil species includes two features 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 ... 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'."
Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
Natural History, 86(5):13, 1977
"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?" (p. 206)
"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 gravest objection which can be urged against my theory (of evolution)." (p. 292)
Charles Robert Darwin
The Origin of Species, 1st edition reprint
Avenel Books, 1979
The Abundance of Fossils
"Darwin... was embarrassed by the fossil record... 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, ... 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."
David M. Raup, Curator of Geology
Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago
"Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology"
Field Museum of Natural History
Vol. 50, No. 1, (Jan, 1979), p. 25
"Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are filled with over 100-million fossils of 250,000 different species. The availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What is the picture which the fossils have given us? ... The gaps between major groups of organisms have been growing even wide and more undeniable. They can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection of the fossil record."
Luther D. Sunderland (Creationist)
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems,
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 9
"My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 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."
Prof N. Heribert Nilsson
Lund University, Sweden
Famous botanist and evolutionist
As quoted in: The Earth Before Man, p. 51
Normally creationists don’t believe in fossils since the Bible makes no reference to them. Pulling quotes out of context isn’t much of an argument in any case.
Since creationists have created their own theory of evolution to argue against, it’s hard for them to understand that evolution comes from Christians working in the field. Christianity is the rational religion and has long tried to understand why fossil organisms appear in the same order all around the world regardless of whether they’re in valleys or on top of mountains.
Still waiting for a creationist to address this fact with some other description than that they are tears of angels or sweat of the devil.
varmintman post #144: re-posting a list of quotes,
"A few comments and notes by real experts:" including Stephen Jay Gould from January 1980, purporting to deny the existence of "transitional forms."
You previously posted these quotes and I responded here.
Stephen Jay Gould complained bitterly about the misrepresentations of his view by Creationists.
Gould well understood the existance of "transitional fossils" and cited examples.
Gould: "Faced with these facts of evolution and the philosophical bankruptcy of their own position, creationists rely upon distortion and innuendo to buttress their rhetorical claim.
If I sound sharp or bitter, indeed I am—for I have become a major target of these practices...."
And I don't know how you could find a better example of transitions than this one here -- or how anyone can look at it and still claim "no transitional fossils":
