Missing Link ?, What Do You Mean 'Missing' ?

Missing Link ?, What Do You Mean 'Missing' ?

by : Aria Ratmandanu

          I shall emphasize  that we don’t need fossils in order to demonstrate that evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution would be entirely secure, even if not a single corpse had ever fossilized. It is a bonus that we do actually have rich seams of fossils to mine, and more are discovered every day. The fossil evidence for evolution in many major animal groups is wonderfully strong. Nevertheless there are, of course, gaps, and the opponents of Darwin love them obsessively.

              The fossil record, like the spy camera in the murder story, is a bonus, something that we had no right to expect as a matter of entitlement. There is already more than enough evidence to convict the butler without the spy camera, and the jury were about to deliver a guilty verdict before the spy camera was discovered. Similarly, there is more than enough evidence for the fact of evolution in the comparative study of modern species  and their geographical distribution. We don’t need fossils – the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution. We are, as I say, lucky to have fossils at all. 

              What would be evidence against evolution, and very strong evidence at that, would be the discovery of even a single fossil in the wrong geological stratum. I have already made this point as J. B. S. Haldane famously retorted, when asked to name an observation that would disprove the theory of evolution, ‘Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian!’ No such rabbits, no authentically anachronistic fossils of any kind, have ever been found. All the fossils that we have, and there are very very many indeed, occur, without a single authenticated exception, in the right temporal sequence. Yes, there are gaps, where there are no fossils at all, and that is only to be expected. But not a single solitary fossil has ever been found before it could have evolved.

            A good theory, a scientific theory, is one that is vulnerable to disproof, yet is not disproved. Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours. Sceptics of evolution who wish to prove their case should be diligently scrabbling around in the rocks, desperately trying to find anachronistic fossils. Maybe they’ll find one. Want a bet ?

            Why, on the evolutionary view, are there so few fossils before the Cambrian era ? Well, presumably, whatever factors applied to the flatworms throughout geological time to this day, those same factors applied to the rest of the animal kingdom before the Cambrian. Probably, most animals “before the Cambrian were soft-bodied like modern flatworms, probably also rather small like modern turbellarians – just not good fossil material. Then something happened half a billion years ago to allow animals to fossilize freely – the arising of hard, mineralized skeletons, for example. An earlier name for ‘gap in the fossil record’ was ‘missing link.

           The fact that one of the first candidates for a man-ape fossil to be discovered turned out to be a hoax provided an excuse for history-deniers to ignore the very numerous fossils that are not hoaxes; and they still haven’t stopped crowing about it. If only they would look at the facts, they’d soon discover that we now have a rich supply of intermediate fossils linking modern humans to the common ancestor that we share with chimpanzees. On the human side of the divide, that is. Interestingly, there are as yet no fossils linking that ancestor (which was neither chimpanzee nor human) to modern chimpanzees. Perhaps this is because chimpanzees live in forests, which don’t provide good fossilizing conditions. If anything it is chimpanzees, not humans, who today have a right to complain of missing links! That, then, is one meaning of ‘missing link’. It is the alleged gap between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. The missing link in that sense is, to put it mildly, no longer missing. I shall return to this in the next chapter, which is specifically about human fossils.”

          Another meaning concerns the alleged paucity of so-called ‘transitional forms’ between major groups: between reptiles and birds, for example, or between fish and amphibians. ‘Produce your intermediates!’ Evolutionists often respond to this challenge from history-deniers by throwing them the bones of Archaeopteryx, the famous ‘intermediate’ between ‘reptiles’ and birds. This is a mistake, as I shall show. Archaeopteryx is not the answer to a challenge, because there is no challenge worth answering. To put up a single famous fossil like Archaeopteryx panders to a fallacy. In fact, for a large number of fossils, a good case can be made that every one of them is an intermediate between something and something else. The alleged challenge that seems to be answered by Archaeopteryx is based on an outdated conception, the one that used to be known as the Great Chain of Being; and that is the title under which I shall deal with it later in this chapter.”

            The silliest of all these ‘missing link’ challenges are the following two (or variants of them, of which there are many). First, ‘If people came from monkeys via frogs and fish, then why does the fossil record not contain a “fronkey”?”. “And, second, ‘I’ll believe in evolution when I see a monkey give birth to a human baby.’ This last one makes the same mistake as all the others, plus the additional one of thinking that major evolutionary change happens overnight.”

          Why doesn’t the fossil record contain a fronkey ?’ Well, of course, monkeys are not descended from frogs. No sane evolutionist ever said they were, or that ducks are descended from crocodiles or vice versa. Monkeys and frogs share an ancestor, which certainly looked nothing like a frog and nothing like a monkey. Maybe it looked a bit like a salamander, and we do indeed have salamander-like fossils dating from the right time. But that is not the point. Every one of the millions of species of animals shares an ancestor with every other one. If your understanding of evolution is so warped that you think we should expect to see a fronkey and a crocoduck, you should also wax sarcastic about the absence of a doggypotamus and an elephanzee. Indeed, why limit yourself to mammals? Why not a kangaroach (intermediate between kangaroo and cockroach), or an octopard (intermediate between octopus and leopard)? There’s an infinite number of animal names you can string together in that way.* Of course hippopotamuses are not descended from dogs, or vice versa. Chimpanzees are not descended from elephants or vice versa, just as monkeys are not descended from frogs. No modern species is descended from any other modern species (if we leave out very recent splits). Just as you can find fossils that approximate to the common ancestor of a frog and a monkey, so you can find fossils that approximate to the common ancestor of elephants and chimpanzees. Here is one called Eomaia, which lived in the early Cretaceous period, a little more than 100 million years ago.

Figure.1 Eomaia

          As you can see, Eomaia was nothing like a chimpanzee and nothing like an elephant. Vaguely like a shrew, it probably was pretty similar to their common ancestor, with which it was roughly contemporary, and you can see that a lot of evolutionary change has taken place along both pathways from an Eomaia like ancestor to an elephant descendant, and from the same Eomaia- like ancestor to a chimpanzee descendant. But it is not in any sense an elephanzee. If it were, it would also have to be a dogatee, for whatever is the common ancestor of a chimpanzee and an elephant is also the common ancestor of a dog and a manatee. And it would also have to be an aardvapotamus, for the same ancestor is also the common ancestor of an aardvark and a hippopotamus. The very idea of a dogatee (or an elephanzee, or an aardvapotamus or a kangaroceros or a buffalion) is deeply unevolutionary and ridiculous. So is a fronkey, and it is a disgrace that the perpetrator of that “ if evolution were true the fossil record should contain ‘fronkeys”.

          Once again, humans are not descended from monkeys. We share a common ancestor with monkeys. As it happens, the common ancestor would have looked a lot more like a monkey than a man, and we would indeed probably have called it a monkey if we had met it, some 25 million years ago. But even though humans evolved from an ancestor that we could sensibly call a monkey, no animal gives birth to an instant new species, or at least not one as different from itself as a man is from a monkey, or even from a chimpanzee. That isn’t what evolution is about. Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact, it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work. Huge leaps in a single generation which is what a monkey giving birth to a human would be are almost unlikely and are ruled out for the same reason, too statistically improbable. It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing.