As we have seen in a couple of previous posts I’ve put on here, the gaps in the fossil record present the gradualist Darwinist with some serious theoretical problems. Since the problems are so apparent, Darwinists have responded to some degree.(In this blog post, I’ll reference the chart I first mentioned in this blog post.)
One of the most common explanations of the fossil gaps goes like this (again, simplified for the chart). Fossil 1 really is the ancestor for Fossil 2. The way it works is this: Fossil 1 is highly adapted to its environment, so it lasts for millions of years. This explains why it shows up so many times in the fossil record.
However, while it lives, it still has descendents who are slightly modified. These descendents aren’t quite as adapted, however, so they only last for a few thousand years. This gives them just enough time to have slightly modified descendents before they go extinct. Those modified descendents are still not quite as adapted as the original parent organism, but they do last for a few thousand years—long enough for more modified organisms to come from them, but short enough that they don’t appear in the fossil record. This process repeats over the course of a few million years until Fossil 2 is sufficiently evolved. Fossil 2 is, of course, more adapted than its predecessors so it lasts for a few million years giving it time to show up in great detail in the fossil record.
This idea might, after all, solve the problem of the fossil gaps. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit into the idea of gradualistic Darwinism.
An organism has modified descendents that are more advanced (since they are advancing toward Fossil 2) and yet are less adapted to the environment than the parent organism (since they don’t show up in the fossil record). In fact, they are so poorly adapted to the environment that they will die out before leaving any record whatsoever of their existence. Yet in the few thousand years (a blink in the evolutionary time scale) that they exist, they are simultaneously required to get enough descendents to produce a sufficient chance for random mutation to further evolve the organism toward Fossil 2 while not becoming so adapted that they will survive in the environment; all while their parent organism (Fossil 1) lives happily content for millions of years without changing so that it does show up in the fossil record.
That’s right. The organism must become more highly evolved without gaining a survival advantage and must, before it becomes extinct, have offspring that are also more highly evolved than they are yet without granting them a survivability advantage either! Even if this only happened to a handful of organisms, it would strain credibility. But in fact it must have happened to every single organism because there are no transitionary species in the fossil record at all. In short, the Darwinist must conclude that this must be the norm for Evolution.
All this requires that Darwinism be discarded. Descendents of an organism are not presented with a survivability advantage as they evolve; not until they reach a sufficient stage of evolutionary change so that they will show up again in the fossil record. Thus, what is most obviously not working is the idea of evolution that explain (again, according to evolutionary theory) the finch’s beak thickness or the peppered moth colorations. In short, microevolution cannot be extrapolated into macroevolution under this theory.
