Page 83 - Confessions of the Evolutionists

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar) 81

major gaps would be filled in by further discoveries, and even, falsely,
that some discoveries had already filled them. As it became more and
more evident that the great gaps remained... The failure of paleontology
to produce such evidence was so keenly felt that a few disillusioned nat-
uralists even decided that the theory of organic evolution, or of general
organic continuity of descent, was wrong, after all. 199

Thomas S. Kemp is curator of the zoological collections at the
University of Oxford:
As is now well known, most fossil species appear instantaneously in the
record, persist for some millions of years virtually unchanged, only to dis-
appear abruptly... 200

In no single adequately documented case is it possible to trace a transi-
tion, species by species, from one genus to another. 201

Science magazine:
A large number of well trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology
and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record
is far more Darwinian than it is…In the years after Darwin, his advocates
hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been
found -- yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept
into textbooks. 202

Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in "Punctuated Equilibria:
The Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered" published in
Paleobiology:
From such scrappy data it is hard to see how anyone could derive with
confidence the gradualistic interpretation... unless one were predisposed
to gradualism from the start... 203
Stephen Jay Gould was professor of geology and paleoanthropol-
ogy at Harvard University:
The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips
and nodes of their branches... 204
I regard the failure to find a clear "vector of progress" in life's history as
the most puzzling fact of the fossil record.... we have sought to impose a
pattern that we hoped to find on a world that does not really display it. 205
... one feature stands out as most puzzling-the lack of clear order and