Monsters of Evolution

When asking for evidence to support the story of evolution, one common answer is an appeal to the fossil record….So commonplace is the idea, and so confident are many in this belief, atheists will sometimes wear T-shirts bearing the phrase “We have the fossils—we win!” almost as if they believe fossils themselves are “proof” of their naturalistic story of origins.

Most are unaware that what Charles Darwin himself considered the weakest link in his entire naturalistic hypothesis—the lack of fossil evidence—has never been overcome. Darwin asked a question then made an admission and a statement all in one quote that sums the problem up perfectly. "Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory."

Of course, many evolutionists will blow off that quite damning quote from the 1800s as no more than a “vestigial” comment from the past when evolution was in its infancy, assuming it’s all been worked out now. [Nevertheless,] one of the most prominent of their own picked up on the same problem and went public with it, causing quite a stir in the evolutionary community during the 1970s and 1980s—100+ years after Darwin.

No less than the eminent American Harvard professor Steven J. Gould (paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science) spilled the beans in spectacular fashion when he began questioning the very same fossil record evolutionists and atheists like himself were parading as proof positive for evolution—and more specifically—a reason to reject the Creator God and his written revelation to humanity, the Bible.

Gould could not be described by anyone in the evolutionary community as coming from a “biased creationist viewpoint” when he offered his honest and expert assessment of the fossil record with statements like the following: "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology…[T]o preserve 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….So he gave up on a gradualist theory of evolution in favor of what he and colleague Niles Eldredge (also a well-known and respected biologist and paleontologist) referred to as “punctuated equilibrium.”

This new story of evolution conceded to the reality of the lack of any visible, graduated chain of fossils that support the idea of evolution happening slowly over millions of years. But rather than admitting this lack was problematic for the evolutionary narrative, it asserted that evolution happened quickly over millions of years—in sudden bursts that occurred periodically throughout the supposed long ages.

Gould’s idea was that evolution took place so quickly that you wouldn’t expect to see it in the fossil record! Which was very convenient indeed.

This “hopeful monster hypothesis” had been proposed previously by other atheist types such as Bertrand Russell, claiming that perhaps large-scale, sudden changes could develop through the “power of x-rays to alter genes.”

Otto Schindewolf developed these ideas in the 1930s, and they were also promoted in 1940 by Richard Goldschmidt, but to most it seemed absurd and immature, almost “comic bookish” in its presentation. Kind of like “gamma rays” somehow turning the fictional Dr. Bruce Banner into the Incredible Hulk in a sudden transformation. It looked good in comic book fiction, but like all evolutionary ideas, it made for poor science.

For example, Schindewolf proposed that the major evolutionary transformations must have occurred in single large steps—such as a reptile laying an egg from which a bird hatched!

Regardless, Gould’s stature and the much more scientifically sounding “punctuated equilibrium” terminology certainly helped this new story of evolution to be promoted more vigorously.

And the admission as to “why” it was being proposed was promoted as well, much to the horror of many of their fellow atheists and evolution believers. "The general preference that so many of us hold for gradualism is a metaphysical stance embedded in the modern history of Western cultures: it is not a high-order empirical observation, induced from the objective study of nature.”

https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/calvin-smith/monsters-evolution/