"Where's the beef?" is a famous question in advertising history. Three old ladies were eyeing some big, fluffy hamburger buns when one of them suddenly, gruffly demanded what all three of them wanted to know, which was why the hamburger patty itself was so small.
According to real science, a version of that same question is appropriate to challenge advocates of Darwinism with:
Where are the intermediate fossils?
Unfortunately for Darwinists it is a question they cannot honestly answer.
Millions of fossilized fish and fossilized amphibians have been found, yet never has an intermediate fossil of a finned fish evolving into a legged amphibian been located. Although claims for transitional candidates are often made, never do the claimed evolutionary links stand up to true scientific scrutiny.
I repeat:
Many frauds have been offered up, however not a single transitional fossil (one kind of creature, such as an amphibian, evolving into another, such as a bird) has ever been verified among any of the millions of fossils that have been found.
Charles Darwin realized that the fossil record, as it was known during his lifetime, did not support the predictions made by his own theory of evolution. However, he hoped that in the future researchers would begin to find the overwhelming number of missing links that should have existed in the fossil record if his thoughts were accurate.
Darwin wrote:
"Why 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 is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory." (C. Darwin, Origin of Species, 6th edition, 1872; London, John Murray, 1902, page 413.)
As one example of the much-promoted missing links. the April 2006 issue of the scientific journal Nature reported the discovery of several well-preserved specimens of fish in sedimentary layers of siltstone in Canada.
These fossilized fish specimens are called Tiktaalik roseae, and like other lobe-finned fish, were declared to be from the late Devonian age, somewhere between 359 and 385 million years old. The discoverers claimed that these "represent an intermediate between fish with fins and tetrapods with limbs."
By claiming the fossils to be the long sought missing link the finders were immediately vaulted to world-class status amongst the Darwinian-worshipping ranks of scientists.
However, the fact is that Tiktaalik roseae was 100% fish.
In a review article on Tiktaalik roseae, which appeared in the same issue of Nature, fish evolution experts admitted that, in many aspects, Tiktaalik roseae "are straightforward fishes: they have small pelvic fins, retain fin rays in their paired appendages and have well-developed gill arches, suggesting that both animals remained mostly aquatic."
In other words, the hailed missing link was just a fish.
However, due to their evolutionary leaning, they did weakly try to claim that Tiktaalik's "skull has a longer snout," feebly supporting the notion that perhaps "a longer snout suggests a shift from sucking towards snapping up prey."
The renowned evolutionary Marxist Stephen Jay Gould wrote:
"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." (S.J. Gould, Evolution Now: A Century After Darwin, ed. John Maynard Smith, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1982.) |
