The Missing Links.

A Missing Link is the common reference to a transitional fossil or transitional form. It refers to the fossilized remains of a life form that illustrates an evolutionary transition. It can be identified by having certain primitive traits in comparison with its more highly evolved relatives. Popularly, Missing Link refers to the transitional forms between apes and Humans.

Charles Darwin was worried that the fossil record did not show what his theory predicted, and thus wrote in The Origin of Species: "Why 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 is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory."

In the 148 years since the publication of Darwin's work, still no satisfactory transitional forms have been discovered. The late Dr Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, wrote a book, Evolution. In reply to a questioner who asked why he had not included any pictures of transitional forms, he wrote: "I fully agree with your comments about the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them … . I will lay it on the line — there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument."

Stephen Jay Gould, another neo-Darwinian paleontologist also wrote: "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution." and "I regard the failure to find a clear ‘vector of progress’ in life’s history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record."

In the words of Darwin himself (and prominent neo-Darwinist experts) the greatest hurdle for neo-Darwinian Evolution is that the Transitional Fossils are in fact Missing, they are not real Links at all. They cannot be found, nor even properly imagined.

Rather than finding these Missing Links, all 32 mammal orders appear abruptly and fully formed in the fossil record. The neo-Darwinian paleontologist George G. Simpson wrote in 1944: "The earliest and most primitive members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous series from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed."

A popular explanation as to "the extreme imperfection of the fossil record" (as Darwin called it) is pointed out by the National Academy of Sciences in Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science. "Some changes in populations might occur too rapidly to leave many transitional fossils. Also, many organisms were very unlikely to leave fossils because of their habitats or because they had no body parts that could easily be fossilized." This in effect is suggesting either evolution occurs not gradually but by jumps or that among the accepted millions of years in which evolution supposedly took place no fossils were formed. Rapid-Evolution does not fit within neo-Darwinian Evolutionary Theory and to have such an abundance of fossils of the different animal orders, both extinct and living, but NONE of the transitional forms speaks for itself.

Here is a brief examination of supposed Evolutionary transitions:

Fish to Amphibian: Some evolutionists believe that amphibians evolved from a Rhipidistian fish, something like the coelacanth (pictured). It was believed that they used their fleshy, lobed fins for walking on the sea-floor before emerging on the land. This speculation seemed impossible to disprove, since according to neo-Darwinist interpretations of the fossil record, the last coelacanth lived about 70 million years ago. But a living coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) was discovered in 1938. And it was found that the fins were not used for walking but for deft maneuvering when swimming. Its soft parts were also totally fish-like, not transitional. It also has some unique features—it gives birth to live young after about a year’s gestation, it has a small second tail to help its swimming, and a gland that detects electrical signals. The earliest amphibian, Ichthyostega, is dated (according to the neo-Darwinist timeline) as living 367-362.5 million years ago. Ichthyostega is hardly transitional, but has fully formed legs and shoulder and pelvic girdles, while there is no trace of these in the Rhipidistians, their alleged evolutionary predecessors.

Amphibian to Reptile: Seymouria (fossil pictured) is a commonly referenced by neo-Darwinists as an intermediate between amphibians and reptiles. However, the neo-Darwinist time line puts Seymouria at 280 million years ago, about 30 million years younger than the ‘earliest’ true reptiles Hylonomus and Paleothyris. That is, reptiles are allegedly millions of years older than their alleged ancestors! Also, there is no good reason for thinking it was not completely amphibian in its reproduction. The jump from amphibian to reptile eggs requires the development of a number of new structures and a change in biochemistry.

Reptile to mammal: The ‘mammal-like reptiles’ are commonly asserted to be transitional. But T. S. Kemp, a specialist on these creatures, has been published in an article for New Scientist titled, The Reptiles that Became Mammals saying: "Each species of mammal-like reptile that has been found appears suddenly in the fossil record and is not preceded by the species that is directly ancestral to it. It disappears some time later, equally abruptly, without leaving a directly descended species." Thus the supposed transitional forms from reptile s to mammals are not transitional at all but merely extinct creatures in their own right.

Reptile to bird: Neo-Darwinists tout Archaeopteryx (pictured) as a transitional form between reptiles and birds. They claim it was a bird that lived 150 million years ago and had many reptilian characteristics, was discovered in 1861 and helped support the hypothesis of evolution proposed by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species two years earlier. However, Alan Feduccia, a world authority on birds at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an evolutionist himself, disagrees. "Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it's not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of ‘paleobabble’ is going to change that."

Another famous alleged reptile-to-bird link was Mononykus, claimed to be a ‘flightless bird.’ The cover of Time magazine even illustrated it with feathers, although not the slightest trace of feathers had been found. Later evidence in On the Origin of Birds and of Avian Flight, by J.H. Ostrom indicated that "Mononykus was clearly not a bird … it clearly was a fleet-footed fossorial [digging] theropod."

Two fossils found in Northern China are claimed to be feathered theropods (meat-eating dinosaurs). The fossils, Protarchaeopteryx robusta and Caudipteryx zoui, are claimed to be the immediate ancestors of the first birds. These two latest discoveries are considered by neo-Darwinists as 120 to 136 million years old while Archaeopteryx, a true bird, is considered only 140 to 150 million years, making these ‘bird ancestors’ far younger than their descendants! Feduccia is not convinced, and neither is his colleague, University of Kansas paleontologist Larry Martin who said: "You have to put this into perspective. To the people who wrote the paper, the chicken would be a feathered dinosaur." Feduccia and Martin believe that Protarchaeopteryx and Caudipteryx are more likely to be flightless birds similar to ostriches. They have bird-like teeth and lack the long tail seen in theropods. Caudipteryx even used gizzard stones like modern plant-eating birds, but unlike theropods.

There are many problems with the dinosaur-to-bird dogma. Feduccia points out that "It's biophysically impossible to evolve flight from such large bipeds with foreshortened forelimbs and heavy, balancing tails, exactly the wrong anatomy for flight."

Apes to Humans: The apemen fossils are often based on fragmentary remains, and this is true of the latest of a long series of ‘missing link claims,’ Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba. But when more bones are excavated, the specimens are found to be either man or non-man. Australopithecus (‘southern ape’) is the name given to a number of fossils found in Africa. The most well known australopithecine is ‘Lucy’, a 40% complete skeleton found by Donald Johanson in Ethiopia in 1974 and called Australopithecus afarensis. Casts of Lucy’s bones have been imaginatively restored in museums worldwide to look like an apewoman, e.g. with ape-like face and head, but human-like body, hands and feet. However, the original Lucy fossil did not include the upper jaw, nor most of the skull, nor hand and foot bones! Several other specimens of A. afarensis do have the long curved fingers and toes of tree-dwellers, as well as the restricted wrist anatomy of knuckle-walking chimpanzees and gorillas. The late Glynn Isaac of Harvard University said "The australopithecines are rapidly sinking back to the status of peculiarly specialized apes."

Homo habilis or ‘handy man’, so named because he supposedly was handy with tools. The most well known is called KNM-ER 1470, comprising a fossil skull and leg bones found by Richard Leakey in Kenya in 1972. CAT scans of the inner ear of a Homo habilis skull known as Stw 53 show that it walked more like a baboon than a human. Today most researchers, regard Homo habilis as ‘a waste-bin of various species’, including bits and pieces from Australopithecus and Homo erectus, and not as a valid category, or rather that Homo habilis never existed at all.

There is strong evidence that Homo erectus or ‘upright man’ had the use of tools, the controlled use of fire, that they buried their dead, and that some used red ochre for decoration. Their brain size, though smaller on average than modern humans, was within the human range. Recent research has even shown evidence of seafaring skills. CAT scans of their inner ear architecture show that their posture was just like ours. Even some evolutionists concede that they should be put in the same species as modern man, i.e. Homo sapiens. Homo erectus was not a transitional form but actually human.

There are only minor skeletal variations from the modern human average to that of Neandertal man. These include a larger brain case volume on average, but are still within the minor physical differences between people groups today, which have been shown to be consistent with the genetic unity of humanity. Despite attempts made on the basis of mitochondrial DNA fragments in one set of Neandertal bones to try to assign them to a separate species, even some evolutionist authorities claim that they should be also regarded as Homo sapiens.

So, of the alleged transitional forms from primates to humans:
Australopithecus was a true ape; Homo habilis never existed at all; and both Homo erectus and Neandertal man should be regarded as true Humans.

So with the lack of any convincing transitional forms alive today or transitional fossils there is a lot of pressure on the neo-Darwinian Theory to produce some evidence. As Darwin himself said, "the extreme imperfection of the fossil record" is the "most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory."

Transitional forms are not called Missing Links because they have been proven to have existed. The hypothetical links are still missing, and will remain missing. They never existed, the theory is flawed.

________________________________________________________

For more information please refer to:
Refuting Evolution and
Refuting Evolution 2
by Dr. Jonathan Sarfati
Are there monkeys in your ancestry?
by Russell Grig

Answers in Genesis
Creation on the web