NO MISSING LINKS
According to the evolutionary theory, the transition from one form of creature to another was a very gradual process, a particular characteristic developing over a very long period of time. To take a simple example, the giraffe's long neck would have grown slightly longer over very many generations, until after millions of years it reached the length it is today. Thus for every single fossil of a long-necked giraffe there should be hundreds with a neck of some intermediate length. And the same should apply to all other animals: the missing links should be more numerous than those creatures at the beginning and end of the long chain. In the case of a transition from one type of creature to an entirely different one – for example, a reptile to a bird – then these missing links should be even more in evidence. Nevertheless, these intermediates are just not there.
From the outset, the absence of these intermediate forms has been recognised as one of the major objections to the theory of evolution. In his ‘Origin of Species’ Darwin wrote: ‘As by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?’ He agrees that this absence of intermediate fossils is ‘probably the gravest and most obvious of all the many objections which may be urged against my views’; and that ‘he who rejects this view of the imperfection of the geological record, will rightly reject the whole theory.’ However, he was confident that, with increased geological exploration, those intermediate forms would turn up. But since then, although the fossils of over 250,000 different species of plants and animals have been found, no such definitely transitional forms have been unearthed. Darwin's ‘grave objection’, with its implicit rejection of his whole theory, still applies today. As one geologist says: ‘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. We have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time.’ 34
Reference
34 D.M.Raup: ‘Conflicts between Darwin and Paleontology’,Bulletin, Museum of Natural History (January 1979): 22,25.