Rating: 
Summary: excellent
Review: this is the only fossil book you need to own!!!!!!!!!!
Rating: 
Summary: What happened to all the transitional forms?
Review: We've all heard confident claims about "multitudes" of transitional forms in the fossil record, but what have the evolutionary paleontologists been forced to admit? Are there any transitional forms at all?"... I fully agree with your comments on 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. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualize such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader? I wrote the text of my book four years ago. If I were to write it now, I think the book would be rather different. Gradualism is a concept I believe in, not just because of Darwin's authority, but because my understanding of genetics seems to demand it. Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least 'show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.' I will lay it on the line-there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument." --Personal letter (written 10 April 1979) from Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Palaeontologist at the British Museum of Natural History in London, to Luther D. Sunderland; as quoted in "Darwin's Enigma" by Luther D. Sunderland, Master Books, San Diego, USA, 1984, p. 89. "I know that, at least in paleoanthropology, data are still so sparse that theory heavily influences interpretations. Theories have, in the past, clearly reflected our current ideologies instead of the actual data." --Dr. David Pilbeam (Physical Anthropologist, Yale University, USA), "Rearranging our family tree". "Human Nature", June 1978, p. 45. "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." --Stephen Jay Gould (Professor of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University), "Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?" "Paleobiology", vol. 6 (1), January 1980, p. 127. "All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt." --Stephen Jay Gould (Professor of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University), "The return of hopeful monsters". "Natural History", vol. LXXXVI (6), June-July 1977, p. 24. "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. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record: "The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps. He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory." Darwin's argument still persists as the favored escape of most paleontologists from the embarrassment of a record that seems to show so little of evolution. In exposing its cultural and methodological roots, I wish in no way to impugn the potential validity of gradualism (for all general views have similar roots). I wish only to point out that it was never 'seen' in the rocks. Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet 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." --Stephen Jay Gould (Professor of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University), "Evolution's erratic pace". "Natural History", vol. LXXXVI (5), May 1977, p. 14. So how important is the fossil record to the evolutionist? In 1960 the point was still being made... "Although the comparative study of living animals and plants may give very convincing circumstantial evidence, fossils provide the only historical, documentary evidence that life has evolved from simpler to more and more complex forms." --Carl O. Dunbar, Ph.D. (geology) (Professor Emeritus of Paleontology and Stratigraphy, Yale University, and formerly Assistant Editor, "American Journal of Science") in "Historical Geology", John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1960, p. 47. But more than 20 years later, after concerted creationist exposure of the true nature of the fossil record... "In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation." --Mark Ridley (zoologist, Oxford University), "Who doubts evolution?" "New Scientist", vol. 90, 25 June 1981, p. 831. "Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are great con-men, and the story they are telling may be the greatest hoax ever. In explaining evolution, we do not have one iota of fact." --Dr. T. N. Tahmisian (Atomic Energy Commission, USA) in "The Fresno Bee", August 20, 1959. As quoted by N.J. Mitchell, "Evolution and the Emperor's New Clothes", Roydon publications, UK, 1983, title page. Books I also strongly recommend reading are: "Bones of Contention" by Marvin Lubenow, "Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No!" by Duane Gish, "Icon of Evolution" by Jonathan Wells and "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael Behe.
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