Fossil Gaps 6a

“... there are about 25 major living subdivisions (phyla) of the
animal kingdom alone, all with gaps between them that are not bridged
by known intermediates.” Francisco J. Ayala and James W. Valentine,
Evolving, The Theory and Processes of Organic Evolution (Menlo Park,
California: The Benjamin Cummings Publishing Co., 1979), p. 258.

“Most orders, classes, and phyla appear abruptly, and commonly have
already acquired all the characters that distinguish them.”  Ibid., p.
266.

“All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious
little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major
groups are characteristically abrupt.” Gould, “The Return of Hopeful
Monsters,” p. 23.

“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record
persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees
that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their
branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence
of fossils. ... We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s
history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural
selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very
process we profess to study.” Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution’s Erratic
Pace,” Natural History, Vol. 86, May 1977, p. 14.

 “New species almost always appeared suddenly in the fossil record
with no intermediate links to ancestors in older rocks of the same
region.”  Ibid., p. 12.

“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, “Is a New and General Theory of
Evolution Emerging?” Paleobiology, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1980, p. 127.

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