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In his 1991 book Beyond Natural Se- with all species eventually coming into
lection, the American paleontologist Ro- being in this way. According to the the-
bert Wesson describes how the gaps in ory, this transition took place over hun-
the fossil records are real and objective: dreds of millions of years and proceeded
in stages. That being the case, countless
The gaps in the fossil record are real, ho-
wever. The absence of a record of any im- transitional forms should have appeared
portant branching is quite phenomenal. and persisted over a fairly lengthy time
Species are usually static, or nearly so, frame. (See Transitional Forms.)
for long periods, species seldom and ge- Indeed, the number of these transitio-
nera never show evolution into new spe- nal forms should be even greater than
cies or genera but replacement of one by that of the species we know of today.
another, and change is more or less ab- Darwin admitted that this represented an
rupt. 174
enormous difficulty for his theory in the
chapter “Difficulties on Theory” of his
book The Origin of Species:
Fossil records
Why, if species have descended from ot-
Observational biological findings do her species by fine gradations, do we not
not support the claim that different li- everywhere see innumerable transitional
ving things are descended from a com- forms? Why is not all nature in confusi-
mon forebear, and it is paleontology, the on, instead of the species being, as we se-
study of fossils, which clarifies this fact. e them, well defined. . . . But, as by this
theory innumerable transitional forms
Evolution, they say, is a process that to-
must have existed, why do we not find
ok place in the past, and our only scienti-
them embedded in countless numbers in
fic source of information about the his-
the crust of the earth? . . . Why then is not
tory of life is fossil findings.
every geological formation and every
The famous French zoologist Pierre
stratum full of such intermediate links?
Paul Grassé has this to say: Geology assuredly does not reveal any
Naturalists must remember that the pro- such finely graduated organic chain; and
cess of evolution is revealed only through this perhaps, is the most obvious and
fossil forms. . . Only paleontology can gravest objection which can be urged
provide them with the evidence of evolu- against my theory. 176
tion and reveal its course or mecha-
The argument that Darwin proposed
nisms. 175
140 years ago in the face of the absence
According to the theory of evolution, of transitional form fossils—that there
living things are descended from one may be no transitional forms now, but
another. One living species already in these may be discovered through later
existence gradually turned into another, research—is no longer valid. Today’s

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar)