Scientists Have Not Discovered Millions of Transitional Fossils

By Brannon S. Howse

Scientists have discovered millions of transitional fossils. False. 

Remember that Wendy’s commercial “Where’s the beef?” Well, to the evolutionist I say, “Where’s the transitional fossil?” 

Charles Darwin expected countless transitional fossils would eventually be found. Although he was somewhat puzzled by the lack of transitional fossils even in his day, few enough dinosaur remains had been uncovered that Darwin could readily assume future discoveries would unearth what he was expecting. But nearly 150 years and thousands of fossil digs later, not one credible transitional fossil has been found. Not a single bone substantiates the idea that one species has ever mutated into another. Transitional forms do not exist. Darwin himself posed the central question that is more embarrassing to evolutionists today than ever: “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.”

Dr. Colin Patterson, an evolutionist with the British Museum of Natural History, wrote a book but did not include a single picture of a transitional fossil. When someone wrote him to ask why this was the case, Dr. Patterson responded:

[quote] 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, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader? . . . 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. [end quote] 

Stephen Jay Gould is perhaps one of the most well-known evolutionists, and he, too, recognizes the problem: “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.”

Gould also states, “I regard the failure to find a clear ‘vector of progress’ in life’s history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record.”

But what about those ape-men bones that were found and used to draw pictures of man changing from ape to man? After all, they were in our school textbooks. Dr. Walter Brown in his book, In the Beginning, writes:

[quote] It is now universally acknowledged that Piltdown man was a hoax, and yet it was in textbooks for over forty years.

The only evidence for Nebraska man turned out to be a pig’s tooth.

Prior to 1978, the evidence for Ramapithecus consisted of a mere handful of teeth and jaw fragments. It is now known that these fragments were pieced together incorrectly by Louis Leakey in a form resembling part of the human jaw. Ramapithecus was just an ape.

Eugene Dubois acknowledged forty years ago when he discovered Java “man” that it was probably just a large gibbon. Dubois also admitted that he had withheld parts of four other high bones of apes, found in the same area, that supported that conclusion.

The fossils of Perking man are considered by many experts to be the remains of apes that were systematically decapitated and exploited for food by true man. Furthermore, Skull 1470, discovered by Richard Leakey, is more humanlike and yet older than Homo erectus (Java man and Peking man) and the Australopithecines. Since man cannot be older than his ancestors, something is obviously wrong.

The first confirmed limb bones of Homo habilis have recently been discovered. They show that this animal clearly had apelike proportions and should never have been classified as manlike (Homo).

Detailed computer studies of the Australopithecines have shown that they are not intermediate between man and living apes. The Australopithecines, which were made famous by Louis and Mary Leakey, are actually quite distinct from both men and the living apes. One Australopithecine fossil, referred to as Lucy, was initially presented as evidence that the Australopithecines walked upright in a human manner. However, studies of Lucy’s entire anatomy, not just her knee joints, now show that this is highly improbable. She probably swung from trees. The Australopithecines are a type of extinct ape.

For about 100 years the world was led to believe that Neanderthal man was stooped and apelike. Recent studies show that this erroneous belief was based upon some Neanderthal men who were crippled with arthritis and rickets. Neanderthal man, Heidelberg man, and Cro-Magnon man were completely human. Artists’ depictions of them, especially of their fleshly portions, are often quite imaginative and are not supported by the evidence.

Furthermore, the techniques used to date these fossils are highly questionable. [end quote] 

It is galling to note that when these various “discoveries” were unearthed, the liberal media considered it big news. Yet, when the discoveries were shown to prove nothing about transitional evolution, the same media outlets either did not mention the new findings or did so on the “back page in small print.”

So if the fossil record does not show transitional forms, then what does it reveal? According to Oswald Spengler, “We find perfectly stable and unaltered forms preserving 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.”

Other Glimpses of the Obvious

The fossil record doesn’t substantiate evolution, and neither do several other not-too-difficult observations. Again, invoking what we see around us, there has never been an example of macroevolution observed in any species. And with good reason. Macroevolution requires that organisms mutate, and there’s a problem with mutations. Have you ever heard of a good mutation?

In How Now Shall We Live?, Nancy Pearcey observes, “Since breeding does nothing more than shuffle existing genes, the only way to drive evolution to the new levels of complexity is to introduce new genetic material. And the only natural source of new genetic materials in nature is mutations. In today’s new neo-Darwinism, the central mechanism for evolution is random mutation and natural selection.”

Only an evolutionist attempting to justify a worldview that rejects God would be desperate enough to propose that mutations are a positive thing. The odds are astronomically against enough good mutations occurring to outweigh the bad ones so that a species can successfully transition from one type into another. Mutations are not a good thing. They are almost always fatal to the mutated organism. Yet, once again, let’s not confuse evolutionists with the facts. Evolutionists press on. Scientists have spent years subjecting fruit flies and the like to mutations, attempting to change a fruit fly into something else. What they’ve managed to do is change eye color, wing size, and a few other characteristics—and to kill a few tens of thousands by mutating them into unviable fruit flies. But the persistent little things always seem to remain fruit flies. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? 

Consider this startlingly revealing statement by a former chief science advisor with BBC Television: “It is a striking, but not much mentioned fact that, though geneticists have been breeding fruit flies for sixty years or more in labs all round the world—flies which produce a new generation every eleven days—they have never yet seen the emergence of a new species or even a new enzyme.”

In Not by Chance, biophysicist Dr. Lee Spetner, who taught information and communication at John Hopkins University, wrote:

[quote] In this chapter I’ll bring several examples of evolution [i.e., instances alleged to be examples of evolution], particularly mutations and show that information is not increased. . . . But in all reading I’ve done in the life-sciences literature, I’ve never found a mutation that added information. All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information and not to increase it. The NDT [neo-Darwinian theory] is supposed to explain how the information of life has built up by evolution. The essential biological differences between a human and a bacterium is in the information they contain. All other biological differences follow from that. The human genome has much more information than does the bacterial genome. Information cannot be built up by mutations that lose it. A business can’t make money by loosing it a little at a time. [end quote] 

Remember, according to Darwin himself, mutations are absolutely necessary for his evolutionary process to work. Additional testimony by experts further damages the possibility that mutations would do what Darwin claimed in order for you and me to evolve.

James F. Crow, while professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin, wrote, “Even if we didn’t have a great deal of data on this point, we could still be quite sure on theoretical grounds that mutants would usually be detrimental. For a mutation is a random change of a highly organized, reasonably smoothly functioning living body. A random change in the highly integrated system of chemical processes which constitute life is almost certain to impair it—just as a random interchange of connections in a television set is not likely to improve the picture.”74 Geneticist Richard B. Goldschmidt also notes, “If life really depends on each gene being as unique as it appears to be, then it is too unique to come into being by chance mutations.”

In conclusion, I challenge you to commit to memory two or three of the incredible things we’ve discussed that an evolutionist has to believe to think evolution is for real. Then the next time you talk to an evolutionist or someone thinking of accepting the evolution lie, ask why they are willing to believe in billions upon billions of mathematically impossible happenings that contradict known and tested laws of science when the alternative is a well-reasoned faith in one all-knowing, all-powerful, intelligent designer known as God. 

Remember: The real goal of evolution is not to gain knowledge about how the world came to be. The primary purpose is to explain away the existence of God because of foolish pride and the humanistic desire to be “as god.” Atheists just don’t want to admit that Someone could be so powerful and unimaginably intelligent as to put together the cosmos as we know it. It’s too . . . well . . . humbling.

Copyright 2006 ©Brannon Howse. This content is for Situation Room members and is not to be duplicated in any form or uploaded to other websites without the express written permission of Brannon Howse or his legally authorized representative.