The Fossil Record Debunks Darwinism

Most people believe Darwinism is supported by fossil evidence. It isn't.

Hey Folks,

Today’s piece is a continuation of my exploration of Darwinism, and I think that this might be the chapter that settles the matter for many of you. Maybe not right away, but after you look into it.

The simple fact is that the fossil record does not support Darwinism. Quite the contrary.

If all species on Earth evolved from other species, then one would imagine that there should be evidence of earlier versions of many of those species. If flamingos evolved from proto-flamingos, then there should be fossilized remains of proto-flamingos, shouldn’t there?

Unfortunately for the Darwinists, there is no evidence of proto-flamingos. Nor is there evidence of proto-ostriches, proto-platypi, or proto-Komodo dragons.

No matter how long them indefatigable scienticians stay on the case, they never seem to find what they’re looking for.

Because Darwinism is more of an all-encompassing metaphysical proposition than a testable scientific hypothesis, Darwinists never seem to ask themselves whether their own assumptions are the problem. Over the years, they have become extremely adept at interpreting data as if supports their preconceived conclusions, even when it is the opposite of what they expected to find.

What scientists do find in the fossil record is plenty of evidence of extinct creatures, but it is much harder to detect transitional forms of different species. The general pattern seems to be that an identifiable skeletal form appears in the fossil record, lasts for a certain span of time, and then disappears without transforming into another type of skeletal form.

And there is plenty of evidence of extremely ancient fossils of creatures which still exist on planet Earth today. The Darwinist answer to this is that some species don’t evolve for millions of years because they don’t need to. So apparently some species evolve and some don’t. Science works in mysterious ways.

There is, of course, another possibility - that Darwin was mistaken, and the origins of life are just as mysterious today as they were in 1848, before The Origins of Species was ever published.

But that prospect is plainly too terrifying for some to consider. If the universe didn’t begin accidentally and for no reason, they might be forced to consider the possibility that life is a miracle.

And nothing terrifies a Darwinist more than the prospect that all their theoretical knowledge might be worth less than the paper this kid’s science quiz is printed on.

Nor do they relish the idea of admitting of admitting this guy was right all along.

I hope you enjoy today’s selection, which is the third chapter I have published from the brilliant Philip E. Johnson’s 1991 masterpiece Darwin on Trial.

You can find the first two chapters here:

I also highly encourage people to check out this lecture, in which Dr. Johnson destroys Darwinism in less than 2 hours.

Thanks for reading!

Crow Qu’appelle

The Fossil Problem

by Phillip E. Johnson, excerpted from Darwin on Trial (1991)

Today it is widely assumed that the existence of fossil remains of numerous extinct species necessarily implies evolution, and most people are unaware that Darwin's most formidable opponents were not clergymen, but fossil experts. In the early nineteenth century, the prevailing geological theory was the "catastrophism" advocated by the great French scientist Georges Cuvier, the father of paleontology.

Cuvier believed that the geological record showed a pattern of catastrophic events involving mass extinctions, which were followed by periods of creation in which new forms of life appeared without any trace of evolutionary development.

In Darwin's time, Cuvier's catastrophism was being supplanted by the uniformitarian geology advocated by Darwin's older friend Charles Lyell, who explained spectacular natural features not as the result of sudden cataclysms, but rather as the slow working over immense time spans of everyday forces. In retrospect, an evolutionary theory of the Darwinian kind seems almost an inevitable extension of Lyell's logic—but Lyell himself had great difficulty accepting biological evolution, as did many others who were familiar with the evidence.

Each of the divisions of the biological world (kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders) was noted to conform to a basic structural plan, with very few intermediate types. Where were the links between these discontinuous groups? The absence of transitional intermediates was troubling even to Darwin's loyal supporter T. H. Huxley, who warned Darwin repeatedly in private that a theory consistent with the evidence would have to allow for some big jumps.

Darwin posed the question himself, asking:

"Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?"

He answered with a theory of extinction that was the logical counterpart of "the survival of the fittest." The appearance of an improved form implies a disadvantage for its parent form. Thus, “if we look at each species as descended from some other unknown form, both the parent and all the transitional varieties will generally have been exterminated by the very process of formation and perfection of the new form.”

This extermination-by-obsolescence implies that appearances will be against a theory of evolution in our living world, because we see distinct, stable species (and larger groupings), with only rare intermediate forms. The links between the discontinuous groups that once existed have vanished due to maladaptation.

But what if the necessary links are missing not only from the world of the present, but from the fossil record of the past as well?

Darwin acknowledged that his theory implied that “the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great.” One might therefore suppose that geologists would be continually uncovering fossil evidence of transitional forms. This, however, was clearly not the case. What geologists did discover were species, and groups of species, which appeared suddenly rather than at the end of a chain of evolutionary links.

Darwin conceded that the state of the fossil evidence was “the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory,” and that it accounted for the fact that “all the most eminent paleontologists... and all our greatest geologists... have unanimously, often vehemently, maintained the immutability of species.”

Darwin argued eloquently that the fossil problem, although concededly serious, was not fatal to his theory. His main point was that the fossil record is extremely imperfect. Fossils are preserved only in special circumstances, and thus the various fossil beds of the world probably reflect not a continuous record but rather snapshots of relatively brief periods separated by wide intervals of time. Additionally, we might fail to recognize ancestor-descendant relationships in the fossils even if they were present. Unless we had all the intervening links to show the connections between them, the two forms might appear entirely distinct to our eyes.

At times Darwin even seemed to imply that the absence of transitionals was itself proof of the inadequacy of the record, as it would be if one had a priori knowledge that his theory was true:

“I do not pretend that I should ever have suspected how poor a record of the mutations of life, the best preserved geological section presented, had not the difficulty of our not discovering innumerable transitional links between the species which appeared at the commencement and close of each formation, pressed so hardly on my theory.”

Darwin did as well with the fossil problem as the discouraging facts allowed, but to some questions he had to respond frankly that “I can give no satisfactory answer,” and there is a hint of desperation in his writing at times, as in the following sentence:

“Nature may almost be said to have guarded against the frequent discovery of her transitional or linking forms.”

But Darwin never lost faith in his theory; the only puzzle was how to account for the plainly misleading aspects of the fossil record.

At this point, I ask the reader to stop with me for a moment and consider what an unbiased person ought to have thought about the controversy over evolution in the period immediately following the publication of The Origin of Species. Opposition to Darwin’s theory could hardly be attributed to religious prejudice when the skeptics included the leading paleontologists and geologists of the day.

Darwin’s defense of the theory against the fossil evidence was not unreasonable—but the point is, it was a defense. Very possibly, the fossil beds are mere snapshots of moments in geological time, with sufficient time and space between them for a lot of evolution to occur in the gaps. Still, it is one thing to say that there are gaps, and quite another thing to claim the right to fill the gaps with the evidence required to support one’s theory.

Darwin’s arguments could establish at most that the fossil problem was not fatal; they could not turn the absence of confirming evidence into an asset.

There was a way to test the theory by fossil evidence, however, if Darwin and his followers had wanted a test. Darwin was emphatic that the number of transitional intermediates must have been immense—even “inconceivable.” Perhaps evidence of their existence was missing because in 1859 only a small part of the world’s fossil beds had been searched, and because the explorers had not known what to look for.

Once paleontologists accepted Darwinism as a working hypothesis and explored many new fossil beds in an effort to confirm the theory, this situation ought to have changed. In time, the fossil record could be expected to look very different—and very much more Darwinian.

The test would not be fair to the skeptics, however, unless it was also possible for the theory to fail. Imagine, for example, that belief in Darwin’s theory were to sweep through the scientific world with such irresistible power that it very quickly became an orthodoxy. Suppose that the tide was so irresistible that even the most prestigious of scientists—Harvard’s Louis Agassiz, for example—became an instant has-been for failing to join the movement. Suppose that paleontologists became so committed to the new way of thinking that fossil studies were published only if they supported the theory, and were discarded as failures if they showed an absence of evolutionary change. As we shall see, that is what happened. Darwinism apparently passed the fossil test, but only because it was not allowed to fail.

Darwin’s theory predicted not merely that fossil transitionals would be found; it implied that a truly complete fossil record would be mostly transitionals, and that what we think of as fixed species would be revealed as mere arbitrary viewpoints in a process of continual change.

Darwinism also implied an important prediction about extinction—that necessary corollary of the struggle for existence. Darwin recognized that his theory required a pattern of extinction even more gradual than the pattern of evolutionary emergence:

"The old notion of all the inhabitants of the earth having been swept away at successive periods by catastrophes, is very generally given up, even by those geologists... whose general views would naturally lead them to this conclusion... There is reason to believe that the complete extinction of the species of a group is generally a slower process than their production: if the appearance and disappearance of a group of species be represented, as before, by a vertical line of varying thickness, the line is found to taper more gradually at its upper end, which marks the progress of extermination, than in its lower end, which marks the first appearance and increase in numbers of the species. In some cases, however, the extermination of whole groups of beings, as of ammonites towards the close of the secondary period, has been wonderfully sudden."

Continual, gradual extinctions are a necessary consequence of the assumption that ancestor species are constantly being supplanted by better adapted descendants. Suppose, however, that it were shown that a substantial proportion of extinctions have occurred in the course of a few global catastrophes—such as might be caused by a comet hitting the earth or by some sudden change in temperature. In such catastrophes, survival would not necessarily have been related to fitness in more normal circumstances and might have been entirely at random. Darwinism could therefore be tested not only by searching for transitional species in newly discovered fossil beds, but also by studying the pattern of extinctions to measure the importance of catastrophes.

Evolution triumphed during Darwin’s lifetime, although his opposition to saltations remained controversial in scientific circles for a long time to come. The discovery of Archaeopteryx—an ancient bird with some strikingly reptilian features—was enough fossil confirmation in itself to satisfy many. Thereafter it was one apparent fossil success after another, with reports of human ancestors, ancient mammal-like reptiles, a good sequence in the horse line, and so on.

Paleontology joined the neo-Darwinian synthesis in the work of George Gaylord Simpson, who declared that Darwin had been confirmed by the fossils—a declaration that was communicated to generations of biology students as fact. What Stephen Jay Gould described in 1980 as “the most sophisticated of modern American textbooks for introductory biology” endorsed the synthetic theory on the basis of fossil evidence:

"[Can] more extensive evolutionary change, macroevolution, be explained as an outcome of these microevolutionary shifts? Did birds really arise from reptiles by an accumulation of gene substitutions of the kind illustrated by the raspberry eye-color gene?

The answer is that it is entirely plausible, and no one has come up with a better explanation... The fossil record suggests that macroevolution is indeed gradual, paced at a rate that leads to the conclusion that it is based on hundreds or thousands of gene substitutions no different in kind from the ones examined in our case histories."

But that last sentence is false—and has long been known to paleontologists to be false.

The fossil record was revisited in the 1970s in works by Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldredge, and Steven Stanley. Gould and Eldredge proposed a new theory they called punctuated equilibrium ("punk eek" to the irreverent), to deal with an embarrassing fact: the fossil record today, on the whole, looks very much as it did in 1859—despite the fact that an enormous amount of fossil hunting has gone on in the intervening years. In the words of Gould:

The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:

1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on Earth. They appear in the fossil record looking pretty much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.

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.”

In short, if evolution means the gradual change of one kind of organism into another kind, the outstanding characteristic of the fossil record is the absence of evidence for evolution. Darwinists can always explain away the sudden appearance of new species by saying that the transitional intermediates were, for some reason, not fossilized. But stasis—the consistent absence of fundamental directional change—is positively documented. It is also the norm, not the exception.

According to Steven Stanley, the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming contains a continuous local record of fossil deposits spanning about five million years, during an early period in the age of mammals. Because this record is so complete, paleontologists once assumed that certain populations in the basin could be linked together to illustrate continuous evolution.

On the contrary, species that were once thought to have turned into others turn out to overlap in time with their alleged descendants. As Stanley puts it:

"The fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another."

In addition, species remain fundamentally unchanged for an average of more than one million years before disappearing from the record.

Stanley uses the example of the bat and the whale, which are supposed to have evolved from a common mammalian ancestor in little more than ten million years, to illustrate the insuperable problem that fossil stasis poses for Darwinian gradualism:

"Let us suppose that we wish, hypothetically, to form a bat or a whale by a process of gradual transformation of established species. If an average chronospecies lasts nearly a million years, or even longer, and we have at our disposal only ten million years, then we have only ten or fifteen chronospecies to align, end-to-end, to form a continuous lineage connecting our primitive little mammal with a bat or a whale.

This is clearly preposterous. Chronospecies, by definition, grade into each other, and each one encompasses very little change. A chain of ten or fifteen of these might move us from one small rodent-like form to a slightly different one, perhaps representing a new genus—but not to a bat or a whale!"

To provide more rapid change, Stanley relies partly upon the so-far untestable theory that random mutations in the regulatory genes might alter the program for embryonic development sufficiently to produce a new form in a single generation.

Whether or not macromutations are involved, the most important concept of evolution by punctuated equilibrium, as developed by Gould and Eldredge, is that speciation (the formation of new species) occurs rapidly, and in small groups which are isolated on the periphery of the geographical area occupied by the ancestral species.

Selective pressures might be particularly intense in an area where members of the species are just barely able to survive, and favorable variations could spread relatively quickly through a small, isolated population. By this means, a new species might arise in the peripheral area without leaving fossil evidence. Because fossils are mostly derived from large, central populations, a new species would appear suddenly in the fossil record following its migration into the central area of the ancestral range.

Punctuated equilibrium explains the prevalence of stasis in the fossil record by linking macroevolution with speciation. This identification is necessary, according to Eldredge and Gould, because in a large interbreeding population something called gene flow hinders evolution. What this means is simply that the effect of favorable mutations is diluted by the sheer bulk of the population through which they must spread. This factor explains why species seem so unchanging in the fossil record: the population as a whole is not changing. The important evolutionary change occurs only among the peripheral isolates, who rejoin the stable ancestral population suddenly after forming a new species.

Most evolutionary biologists do not accept Eldredge and Gould’s hypothesis that evolutionary change is closely associated with speciation. A great deal of variation can be obtained within a biological species (remember those dogs), whereas separate species are often very similar in visible characteristics. Speciation and change in form therefore seem to be different phenomena. Whether dilution or gene flow actually impedes change in large populations is the subject of an apparently unresolvable theoretical dispute.

Note: Terms like rapidly in this connection refer to geological time, and readers should bear in mind that 100,000 years is a brief period to a geologist. The punctuationalists’ emphatic repudiation of “gradualism” is confusing, and tends to give the impression they are advocating saltationism. What they seem to mean is that the evolutionary change occurs over many generations by Darwin’s step-by-step method, but in a relatively brief period of geological time. The ambiguity may be deliberate, however, for reasons that will be explained in this chapter.

Evidence that daughter populations form and then rejoin the parent species is lacking. According to Douglas Futuyma, “few if any” examples have been documented of an ancestral form persisting in the same region with a modified descendant.

For these and other reasons, orthodox neo-Darwinists prefer to explain sudden appearance on the traditional basis of gaps in the fossil record, and stasis as a reflection of mosaic evolution and stabilizing selection. The former means that the soft body parts might have been evolving invisibly while the parts which fossilized stayed the same. The latter means that natural selection prevented change by eliminating all the innovations—sometimes for periods of millions of years, and despite changing environmental conditions that ought to have encouraged adaptive innovation.

Natural selection appears here in its formulation as a tautology with rather too much explanatory power—an invisible all-purpose explanation for whatever change or lack of change happened to occur.

If Darwinism enjoys the status of an a priori truth, then the problem presented by the fossil record is how Darwinist evolution always happened in such a manner as to escape detection. If, on the other hand, Darwinism is a scientific hypothesis which can be confirmed or falsified by fossil evidence, then the really important thing about the punctuationalism controversy is not the solution Gould, Eldredge, and Stanley proposed but the problem to which they drew attention.

I see no reason to doubt that punctuationalism is a valid model for evolution in some cases. There are instances, such as the proliferation of fruit fly species in Hawaii, where it appears that rapid diversification has occurred following an initial migration of a parent species into a new region. The important question is not whether rapid speciation in peripheral isolates has occurred, however, but whether this mechanism can explain more than a relatively narrow range of modifications which cross the species boundary but do not involve major changes in bodily characteristics.

Consider the problem posed by Stanley’s example of whales and bats, a mid-range case involving change within a single class. Nobody is proposing that an ancestral rodent (or whatever) became a whale or a bat in a single episode of speciation, with or without the aid of a mutation in its regulatory genes. Many intermediate species would have had to exist, some of which ought to have been numerous and long-lived. None of these appear in the fossil record. Of course, the intermediates could have been very short-lived if they were not well fitted for survival, as would probably be the case with a creature midway in the process of changing legs to fins or wings. Raising this issue, however, adds nothing to the plausibility of the Darwinist scenario.

No doubt a certain amount of evolution could have occurred in such a way that it left no trace in the fossil record, but at some point we need more than ingenious excuses to fill the gaps. The discontinuities between the major groups—phyla, classes, orders—are not only pervasive, but in many cases immense. Was there never anything but invisible peripheral isolates in between?

The single greatest problem which the fossil record poses for Darwinism is the Cambrian explosion of around 600 million years ago. Nearly all the animal phyla appear in the rocks of this period, without a trace of the evolutionary ancestors that Darwinists require. As Richard Dawkins puts it, “It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.”

In Darwin’s time, there was no evidence for the existence of pre-Cambrian life, and he conceded in The Origin of Species that:

“The case at present must remain inexplicable, and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.”

If his theory was true, Darwin wrote, the pre-Cambrian world must have “swarmed with living creatures.”

In recent years, evidence of bacteria and algae has been found in some of the earth’s oldest rocks, and it is generally accepted today that these single-celled forms of life may have first appeared as long ago as four billion years. Bacteria and algae are prokaryotes, which means each creature consists of a single cell without a nucleus and related organelles. More complex eukaryote cells (with a nucleus) appeared later, and then dozens of independent groups of multicellular animals appeared without any visible process of evolutionary development.

Darwinist theory requires that there have been very lengthy sets of intermediate forms between unicellular organisms and animals like insects, worms, and clams. The evidence that these existed is missing, however, and with no good excuse.

The problem posed by the Cambrian explosion has become known to many contemporary readers due to the success of Gould’s book Wonderful Life, describing the reclassification of the Cambrian fossils known as the Burgess Shale.

According to Gould, the discoverer of the Burgess Shale fossils, Charles Walcott, was motivated to “shoehorn” them into previously known taxonomic categories because of his predisposition to support what is called the artifact theory of the pre-Cambrian fossil record. In Gould’s words:

“Two different kinds of explanations for the absence of Precambrian ancestors have been debated for more than a century: the artifact theory (they did exist, but the fossil record hasn’t preserved them), and the fast-transition theory (they really didn’t exist, at least as complex invertebrates easily linked to their descendants, and the evolution of modern anatomical plans occurred with a rapidity that threatens our usual ideas about the stately pace of evolutionary change).”

More recent investigation has shown that the Burgess Shale fossils include some 15 or 20 species that cannot be related to any known group and should probably be classified as separate phyla, as well as many other species that fit within an existing phylum but still manifest quite different body plans from anything known to exist later. The general picture of animal history is thus a burst of general body plans followed by extinction. No new phyla evolved thereafter.

Many species exist today which are absent from the rocks of the remote past, but these all fit within general taxonomic categories present at the outset. The picture is one of evolution of a sort, but only within the confines of basic categories which themselves show no previous evolutionary history.

Gould described the reclassification of the Burgess fossils as the “death knell of the artifact theory,” because:

“If evolution could produce ten new Cambrian phyla and then wipe them out just as quickly, then what about the surviving Cambrian groups? Why should they have had a long and honorable Precambrian pedigree? Why should they not have originated just before the Cambrian, as the fossil record, read literally, seems to indicate, and as the fast-transition theory proposes?”

An orthodox Darwinist would answer that a direct leap from unicellular organisms to 25 to 50 complex animal phyla without a long succession of transitional intermediates is not the sort of thing for which a plausible genetic mechanism exists, to put it mildly.

Gould is describing something he calls “evolution,” but the picture is so different from what Darwin and his successors had in mind that perhaps a different term ought to be found. The Darwinian model of evolution is what Gould calls the “cone of increasing diversity.” This means that the story of multicellular animal life should begin with a small number of species evolving from simpler forms. The dozens of different basic body plans manifested in the Cambrian fossils would then be the product of a long and gradual process of evolution from less differentiated beginnings.

Nor should the cone have stopped expanding abruptly after the Cambrian explosion. If the disconfirming facts were not already known, any Darwinist would be confident that the hundreds of millions of years of post-Cambrian evolution would have produced many new phyla. Instead, we see the basic body plans all appearing first, many of these becoming extinct, and further diversification proceeding strictly within the boundaries of the original phyla. These original Cambrian groups have no visible evolutionary history, and the “artifact theory” which would supply such a history has to be discarded.

Maybe a few evolutionary intermediates existed for some of the groups, although none have been conclusively identified, but otherwise just about all we have between complex multicellular animals and single cells is some words like “fast-transition.” We can call this thoroughly un-Darwinian scenario “evolution,” but we are just attaching a label to a mystery.

Sudden appearance and stasis of species in the fossil record is the opposite of what Darwinian theory would predict, and the pattern of extinctions is equally disappointing. There appear to have been a number of mass extinctions in the history of the earth, and debate still continues about what caused them. Two catastrophes in particular stand out:

1. The Permian extinction, about 245 million years ago, which exterminated half the families of marine invertebrates and probably more than 90 percent of all species.

2. The “K-T” extinction, at the end of the Cretaceous era, about 65 million years ago, which exterminated the dinosaurs and a great deal else besides, including those ammonites whose disappearance Darwin conceded to have been “wonderfully sudden.”

According to Gould, paleontologists have known about these “great dyings” all along, but they have tried to minimize their importance because:

“Our strong biases for gradual and continuous change force us to view mass extinctions as anomalous and threatening.”

Catastrophic explanations of extinction are making a strong comeback, however, and many researchers now report that the mass extinctions were more frequent, more rapid, and more profound in their effects than had previously been acknowledged.

Catastrophism is a controversial subject among geologists and paleontologists. Many scientific papers have argued that dinosaurs and ammonites were disappearing from the earth for millions of years before the meteorite impact which may have set off the K-T catastrophe. The stakes in this esoteric controversy are high, because Darwinism requires that old forms (the missing ancestors and intermediates) die out gradually as they are replaced by better-adapted new forms. A record of extinction dominated by global catastrophes—in which the difference between survival and extinction may have been arbitrary—is as disappointing to Darwinist expectations as a record of sudden appearance followed by stasis.

There will be new controversies about the fossils before long, and probably anything written today will be outdated within a few years. The point to remember, however, is that the fossil problem for Darwinism is getting worse all the time. Darwinist paleontologists are indignant when creationists point this out, but what they write themselves is extraordinarily revealing. As usual, Gould is the most interesting commentator.

After attending a geological conference on mass extinctions, Stephen Jay Gould wrote a remarkable essay reflecting on how the evidence was turning against Darwinism. He admitted to being long puzzled by the lack of evidence for progressive development over time in the invertebrates with which he was most familiar:

"We can tell tales of improvement for some groups, but in honest moments we must admit that the history of complex life is more a story of multifarious variation about a set of basic designs than a saga of accumulating excellence."

But Darwinist evolution should be a story of improvement in fitness, and so Gould regarded:

"The failure to find a clear 'vector of progress' in life's history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record."

He thought the solution might lie in alternating periods of evolution by punctuated equilibrium on the one hand, and arbitrary extinction during catastrophes on the other. Under these circumstances, evolution would not be a story of gradual adaptive improvement, but rather:

"Evolutionary success must be assessed among species themselves, not at the traditional Darwinian level of struggling organisms within populations."

Adopting without hesitation the tautology formulation of natural selection at the species level, Gould proposed:

"The reasons that species succeed are many and varied—high rates of speciation and strong resistance to extinction, for example—and often involve no reference to traditional expectations for improvement in morphological design."

Just about everyone who took a college biology course during the last sixty years or so has been led to believe that the fossil record was a bulwark of support for the classic Darwinian thesis—not a liability that had to be explained away. And if we didn't take a biology class, we saw Inherit the Wind and laughed along with everybody else when Clarence Darrow made a monkey out of William Jennings Bryan.

But I wonder if Bryan would have looked like such a fool if he could have found a distinguished paleontologist having one of those “honest moments,” and produced him as a surprise witness to tell the jury and the theater audience that the fossil record shows a consistent pattern of sudden appearance followed by stasis, that life’s history is more a story of variation around a set of basic designs than one of accumulating improvement, that extinction has been predominantly by catastrophe rather than gradual obsolescence, and that orthodox interpretations of the fossil record often owe more to Darwinist preconception than to the evidence itself.

Imagine the confusion Bryan could have caused by demanding the right to read his own preferred evidence into those famous gaps. Why not, if Darwin could do it?

Paleontologists seem to have thought it their duty to protect the rest of us from the erroneous conclusions we might have drawn if we had known the actual state of the evidence. Gould described:

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record" as "the trade secret of paleontology."

Steven Stanley explained that the doubts of paleontologists about gradualistic evolution were for long years suppressed. He wrote that the process began with T. H. Huxley himself, who muted:

"His negative attitudes toward gradual change and natural selection," presumably because "as a believer, Huxley was not inclined to aid those who were disposed to throw the baby of evolution out with the bathwater of gradualistic natural selection."

But why would Huxley fear that, unless the baby and the bathwater were impossible to separate?

Niles Eldredge has been even more revealing:

"We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports [the story of gradual adaptive change], all the while really knowing that it does not."

But how could a deception of this magnitude possibly have been perpetrated by the whole body of a respected science, dedicated almost by definition to the pursuit of truth? Eldredge’s explanation is all too believable to anyone who is familiar with the ways of the academic world:

"Each new generation, it seems, produces a few young paleontologists eager to document examples of evolutionary change in their fossils. The changes they have always looked for have, of course, been of the gradual, progressive sort. More often than not their efforts have gone unrewarded—their fossils, rather than exhibiting the expected pattern, just seem to persist virtually unchanged... This extraordinary conservatism looked, to the paleontologist keen on finding evolutionary change, as if no evolution had occurred. Thus studies documenting conservative persistence rather than gradual evolutionary change were considered failures, and, more often than not, were not even published."

"Most paleontologists were aware of the stability—the lack of change—we call stasis... But insofar as evolution itself is concerned, paleontologists usually saw stasis as ‘no results’ rather than as a contradiction of the prediction of gradual, progressive evolutionary change. Gaps in the record continue (to this day) to be invoked as the prime reason why so few cases of gradual change are found."

Gould wrote in the same vein that:

“When Niles Eldredge and I proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium in evolution, we did so to grant stasis in phylogenetic lineages the status of ‘worth reporting’—for stasis had previously been ignored as non-evidence of evolution, though all paleontologists knew its high relative frequency.”

What Gould and Eldredge had to avoid, however, was what Eldredge described as:

“The not-unreasonable relegation to the lunatic fringe that some paleontologists in the past had suffered when they too saw something out of kilter between contemporary evolutionary theory, on the one hand, and patterns of change in the fossil record on the other.”

In short, they had to avoid seeming to embrace saltationism.

In the preceding chapter, I mentioned the paleontologist Otto Schindewolf, whose saltationism extended to the extreme of proposing that the first bird must have hatched from a reptile’s egg. George Gaylord Simpson reviewed Schindewolf’s book disapprovingly, but he conceded that its author’s bizarre conclusions were based upon a thorough knowledge of the fossil evidence. The trouble with Schindewolf was that he made no attempt to impose an interpretation upon the fossil evidence that could be accepted by the geneticists—or perhaps he relied too much on the approval of the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt. He just went ahead and published what the fossils told him, and the fossils said: saltation.

Paleontologists who have to work under the influence of neo-Darwinism do not have the same freedom to draw whatever conclusions their evidence leads them to. Eldredge has described the paleontologist’s dilemma frankly:

“Either you stick to conventional theory despite the rather poor fit of the fossils, or you focus on the empirics and say that saltation looks like a reasonable model of the evolutionary process—in which case you must embrace a set of rather dubious biological propositions.”

Paleontology, it seems, is a discipline in which it is sometimes unseemly to “focus on the empirics.” On the other hand, one can’t just go out and manufacture evidence of Darwinist evolution, and Eldredge wrote movingly about how this combination of restrictions makes it difficult to pursue a successful career:

“Complicating the normal routine is the hassle of obtaining a Ph.D. A piece of doctoral research is really an apprenticeship, and the dissertation a comprehensive report that shows the candidate’s ability to frame, and successfully pursue, an original piece of scientific research. Sounds reasonable, but the pressure for results—positive results—is enormous.”

In these frustrating circumstances, paleontologists clearly needed to find a theory that would allow them to report their projects as successful—but they felt constrained to operate within the boundaries of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. What was required was a theory that was saltationist enough to allow the paleontologists to publish, but gradualistic enough to appease the Darwinists. Punctuated equilibrium accomplishes this feat of statesmanship by making the process of change inherently invisible. You can imagine those peripheral isolates changing as much and as fast as you like, because no one will ever see them.

Gould and Eldredge have consistently described punctuated equilibrium as a Darwinist theory, not a saltationist repudiation of Darwinism. On the other hand, it is easy to see how some people got the impression that saltationism was at least being hinted at, if not explicitly advocated. Gould and Eldredge put two quotes by T. H. Huxley on the front of their 1977 paper—both complaints about Darwin’s refusal to allow a little saltus in his theory. At about the same time, Gould independently endorsed a qualified saltationism and predicted Goldschmidt’s vindication.

The trouble with saltationism, however, is that when closely examined, it turns out to be only a meaningless middle ground somewhere between evolution and special creation. As Richard Dawkins put it, you can call the Biblical creation of man from the dust of the earth a saltation. In terms of fossil evidence, saltation just means that a new form appeared out of nowhere and we haven’t the faintest idea how. As a scientific theory, “saltationist evolution” is just what Darwin called it in the first place: rubbish.

Gould and Eldredge understand that, and so despite hints of saltationism (particularly by Gould), they have always kept open their lines of retreat to orthodox Darwinian gradualism.

This raises the most basic question of all: If there are so many problems with Darwinism, and no satisfactory alternative within the framework of evolution, why not re-evaluate the framework? What makes our scientists so absolutely certain that everything really did evolve from simple beginnings?