Elledan, here's an interesting article concerning the fossil record.
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Here's an excerpt:
The following quotations reflect the current state of affairs in paleontology. All of the quotes are taken from the book Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record by Duane Gish, Ph.D. All of the quotes are made by properly credentialed paleontologists and all are evolutionists. None of them are friendly to the model of Biblical creationism. Hence, their statements simply present an honest observation and not an attempt to force the data into a preconceived bias.
Kuhn has remarked, "The fact of descent remains. However, descent beyond the typologically circumscribed boundaries is nowhere demonstrable. Therefore, we can indeed speak about a descent within types, but not a descent about types."
Du Nouy has commented, "In brief, each group, order, or family seems to be born suddenly and we hardly ever find the forms which link them to the preceding strain. Not only do we find practically no transitional forms, but in general it is impossible to authentically connect a new group with an ancient one."
Professor E.J.H. Corner of the Cambridge University botany school was candid enough to say: "I still think that to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation."
Goldschmidt stated: "The facts of greatest general importance are the following. When a new phylum, class, or order appears, there follows a quick, explosive (in terms of geological time) diversification so that practically all order or families known appear suddenly and without any apparent transitions."
Stephen Jay Gould writes, "The fossil record with its abrupt transitions offers no support for gradual change...." "All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt."
Gould also says, "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."
David B. Kitts writes "Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing' evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them...."
Ayala and Valentine acknowledged, "The evolutionary origins of taxa in the higher categories are poorly known . . . . Most order, classes, and phyla appear abruptly and commonly have already acquired all other characters that distinguish them....We are forced to the conclusion that most of the really novel taxa that appear suddenly in the fossil record did in fact originate suddenly.
David Raup, a professor of Geology at the University of Chicago wrote, "We are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time. By this I mean some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information.... So Darwin's problem has not been alleviated.
British zoologist Mark Ridley is now claiming: "...the gradual change of fossil species has never been part of the evidence for evolution. In the chapters on the fossil record in the Origin of Species Darwin showed that the record was useless for testing between evolution and special creation because it has great gaps in it. The same argument still applies . . . In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation.
Because the evidence of the fossil record so strongly contradicts Darwinian evolution, some paleontologists have proposed an alternative theory called punctuated equilibrium. Their efforts are the result of trying to make an honest effort to combine the actual content of the fossil record with evolutionary theory. Their basic model is that evolution takes place in sudden major steps followed by long periods without change. This model agrees well with the data of the fossil record by intent. However, it has been slow to gain acceptance with most biologists simply because it is inconsistent with what we understand about the manner in which natural selection works. The proposal has even greater problems with information theory, where major new sequences of control information, enzymatic information, and structural information need to be introduced into the genetic code in single-step or very-few-step processes.
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