Page 84 - Confessions of the Evolutionists

82 CONFESSIONS OF THE EVOLUTIONISTS

progress through time among marine invertebrate faunas. 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 vari-
ation about a set of basic designs than a saga of accumulating excel-
lence. 206
We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to pre-
serve 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. 207

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 much the same as when
they `disappear; morphological change is usually limited and direction-
less.

2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradual-
ly by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and
fully formed. 208

Dr. Colin Patterson is an evolutionist paleontologist and curator of
London's Natural History Museum:
[Stephen Jay] Gould [of Harvard] and the American Museum people are
hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. 209
Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall are paleontologists on the cura-
torial staff of the American Museum of Natural History.
That individual kinds of fossils remain recognizably the same throughout
the length of their occurrence in the fossil record had been known to pa-
leontologists long before Darwin published his Origin. Darwin himself...
prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these
gaps by diligent search.... One hundred and twenty years of paleontolog-
ical research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record
will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a
miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction
is wrong.

The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static enti-