Steven Gould and Uncle Don Carney

If only your attempts at srgument werent mostly bald faced lies, you might be worth debating. As it is, gunga is merely a target for derisio....

"...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

Alexander Mebane, Tampa Bay skeptics:

"But it may be questioned, on obvious probability grounds, whether this way of accounting for the observed absence of intermediates will really wash. Admitting that every intermediate stage "must have" a small population, we may nevertheless observe that there must have been a far greater number of them than of the stable, " finished" species known to us, since (according to the Darwinist picture) every species-transition must necessarily pass through several intermediate stages. That greater number would increase the likelihood that some intermediate forms, here and there, would chance to be preserved as fossils. And the dogma further requires that the larger transitions - between different genera, families, orders, classes, and even different phyla, must all have come about in just the same gradual and continuous manner, simply by a long- continued succession of normal species-transitions! We have all seen "genealogical trees" drawn by evolutionists, to show the order in which these taxonomic groups have all come into existence over a long period, by successive "branchings from a common root".

But it must be asked: Where are all the fossils that should have been left by the many millions of species that this tree requires to have once existed on its trunk, boughs, and branches, before its final branchings took place? Why are none of these seen in the fossil record of the period during which the evolutionists' tree requires them to have lived? (That this perhaps surprising charge does not exaggerate the real situation will be seen under "First Taxonomic Disconfirmation", where the explicitly contradicts Darwinian testimony of the "transformed cladists" will be presented.)

Moreover, why have none of this great multitude of Darwinian intermediate species chanced to survive unchanged to our own time, among the considerable number of ancient life-forms that, as we know, have had the luck to do so? You may perhaps have read that that actually ts the case: the lungfishes, the monotremes (platypus) and the hoatzin, among others, were at one time said to show us "living fossils" of "primitive" life at a stage that was still intermediate to two different later forms, and ancestral to both of them. But those claims are no longer heard; for, on closer investigation, all of these creatures turned out to be curious "mosaic" constructions of a kind that could not rationally be seen as representing the real historical transitions between one group and another. (See Denton's book for a detailed exposition of these cases.) The recent discovery' of that living fossil par excellence, the coelacanth, was an exciting event for evolutionists, because these "lobe-finned" fish were supposed to have already begun to "evolve toward amphi- bians"; but when a well-preserved specimen was obtained, examination of its fins and its internal organs (previously unknown and only guessed-at) quashed that fond hope for some real confirmation of Darwin's ideas, and I think that you will no longer find coelacanths called "pre-amphibians".