Page 19 - The Transitional Form Dilemma

HARUN YAHYA

the common ancestor of each great class. 3

What Darwin is referring to is that no matter how little difference
there may be among living species today—between a pedigreed
German shepherd dog and a wolf, for example—, the difference among
the ancestors and the descendants which are claimed to have followed
one another, needs to be equally small.
For that reason, had evolution really taken place as stated by
Darwin, then it would progress in very minute, gradual changes.
Effective change in a living thing subjected to mutation would have to
be very small. Millions of minute tiny changes would need to combine
over millions of years for legs to turn into functional wings, gills into
lungs able to breathe air, or fins into feet able to run on land. Yet such a
process would have to give rise to millions of transitional forms.
Darwin drew the following conclusion in the wake of his statement:
So that the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living
and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great. 4

Darwin also expressed the same point in other parts of his book:
If my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all
the species of the same group together, must assuredly have existed . . .
Consequently evidence of their former existence could be found only amongst
fossil remains, which are preserved, as we shall in a future chapter attempt to
show, in an extremely imperfect and intermittent record. 5
However, Darwin was well aware that no fossils of such transi-
tional links had ever been discovered. This he regarded as a major
stumbling block for his theory. Therefore, in the chapter “Difficulties of
the Theory” in On The Origin of Species, he wrote the following: :
But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enor-
mous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly
existed on the earth, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological for-
mation and every stratum full of such transitional forms? Geology assuredly
does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is
the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. 6
In the face of this major dilemma, the only explanation Darwin put

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