Evolution by Catastrophe: Does it indicate Intelligent Design? (cont.)
By Bibhu Dev Misra (IIT, IIM)
In 1977 Gould said, ‘The extreme rarity of transitional forms
in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology…to
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.’[v]
In 1980 Gould reiterated the problems in the fossil record for
gradualism: ‘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.’[vi]
It is worth noting that the absence of ‘missing links’ in
the geological data had also concerned Darwin. In the Origin of
Species (1859) he says that the absence of intermediaries ‘is
the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my
theory.’
Punctuated Equilibrium
also raises uncomfortable questions for the field of genetics. Too
much biological complexity must be built into too few generations.
The level of DNA change a species can undergo in a few thousand years
is grossly insufficient to justify the rapid and transitionless
morphological jumps in the fossil record which ‘punctuated
equilibrium’ purports are possible during speciation.
In 1999, writing in
Nature, Oxford zoologist Mark Pagel stated while reviewing a
book by Niles Eldredge: ‘Paleobiologists…saw in the
fossil records rapid bursts of change, new species appearing
seemingly out of nowhere and then remaining unchanged for millions of
years-patterns hauntingly reminiscent of creation.’[vii]
Endnotes
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