Missing links: Where Are They? Part 1
'BurkBaiNickChen Maritimensis'...latest study shows these creatures are actually modern humans. :)
Missing Links Part 2. (See the link to Missing Links Part 1 above if you haven’t already)
Today we’ll be a bit more specific, but you’ll still need to check out other resources (see the ‘origins’ section close to the bottom of the resource page) if you want to follow up with more detail.
Missing Links: Reptiles to Birds
Most evolutionary scientists believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Many of you may have heard of a fossil bird called Archaeopteryx presented as a missing link between birds and dinosaurs. It has some features of reptiles as well as birds. The media was quick to promote it as one of the missing links scientists have been searching for. The truth is that there are no fossils I can find in any of my searches that evolutionary science agrees are true missing links.
Some of the reptilian features of purported missing link Archaeopteryx, are the long bony tail, clawed fingers, the shape of the legs, and its teeth. Teeth have also been found on a number of extinct birds. There are other debates on more specific structural areas like the spine, for example. Follow up with your own research if you are interested in these details.
On the ‘bird’ side, Archaeopteryx had fully formed flying feathers, wings like modern woodland birds, wishbones (for muscle attachment for down stroke while flying), large cerebellum and visual cortex, and the upper and lower jaw both movable, like modern birds.
There is good reason to think these creatures were ancient birds, and not ’missing links’. This view is held by many evolutionary scientists as well. Several other possible dinosaur-to-bird ‘missing links’ have similar stories.
Other difficulties surrounding dinosaur-to-bird evolution is body type, heavy tail, bone, lung and heart structure, etc. that would make it very unlikely. An alternate proposal using gliding tree dwelling lizards as the starting point has been promoted as well, but this has even more links missing…it is my understanding that fossil finds of the supposed original ancestor for this theory are missing along with missing transitional links.
Other Missing Link Issues
Some of the other theories of fish-to-amphibians, amphibians-to-reptiles, and reptiles-to-mammals have even less fossil evidence for possible missing links. In some cases a species put forth as a transitional form between two groups is later shown to appear in the fossil record chronologically much later than the group for which it is supposed to be an ancestor. For example, Jonathan Sarfati in Refuting Evolution shows how reptile fossils predated Seymouria, which was a supposed missing link between amphibians and reptiles… by 30 million years according to current dating methods.
Transitional Soft Tissues
Soft tissues don’t fossilize. Soft tissue changes are much more complex than the bony anatomy that can be observed in fossils. There would be huge changes needed in the soft tissues and organs of the missing links, but none of this can be recorded in fossil finds. Sarfati lists a number of soft tissue changes that would have had to occur in missing links for reptiles to evolve into mammals:
- Red blood cell, heart, and blood vessel anatomy.
- Blood supply system to the eye.
- Milk production.
- Skin layers, hair and sweat glands.
- Diaphragm for diaphragmatic breathing.
- Complex temperature control for warm-bloodedness.
- Ear organs.
- Kidney system.
- Amniotic rather than reptilian egg: multiple changes.
All of these changes would need to develop in a series of transitional creatures (missing links).
These changes, which are only a small few of what would be necessary, could not be seen in fossils whether they occurred or not. It seems it would be extremely difficult to label fossils as missing links based on solely bone structure without any evidential knowledge of the proposed missing links’ soft tissue anatomy.
Missing Links: Ape-To-Human
Though you may be sure you’ve found one in the neighboring cubicle at work or in the desk behind you in your biology class, the fossil evidence for human missing links doesn’t fare any better than the others we’ve talked about. It does get a lot more attention however. The media has always been vigilant to report on the possible missing links paleontologists discover. Though there are actually very few of them.
I won’t go through the different primate fossils placed in the tenuous ‘chain’ of human evolution today. The evidence for a human evolutionary chain is pretty sketchy. As of a few years ago, all of the bones on the entire planet from all of the proposed ‘missing links’ in the human evolutionary chain put together would fit in a box the size of a coffin. Even the most complete skeletons found only had about 30% of their fossilized bones found. There have been a number of hoaxes and fakes as well.
Like with the search for missing links in other areas of the animal kingdom, no theory around human evolution is uncontested even within the evolutionary establishment. What is consistent is the idea that humans did evolve from apes and there is a missing link out there to keep searching for.
Lucy is one of the most famous examples of a fossil creature presented as a possible missing link. She is now thought my many paleontologists to be a separate species from both humans and modern apes and not a good candidate as a missing link. According to Sarfati, this opinion is that of Johanson, the paleontologist who found her, as well. The rest of the australopithecines would also be included in this category.
Missing Links Explained by Hopeful Monsters or Punctuated Equilibrium?
To explain the missing links, scientists have come up with other theories.
- Hopeful Monsters would be creatures that are born completely different than their parents with huge functional changes in DNA all at once.
- Punctuated Equilibrium would mean short periods of rapid evolutionary change between long periods of stasis (no change).
There is no hard evidence for these theories. Both are designed to explain away the problem of missing links in order to hold on to the theory of Darwinian evolution. They are basically theories in which the evidence is a lack of evidence (i.e. missing links). They are presented to support another larger theory (evolution).
I encourage anyone who is interested to investigate further. Try to find any proposed missing links that are uncontested by evolutionary science. I haven’t seen any. Even if there were a couple dozen of uncontested examples, the rarity of transitional ‘missing links’ would be extremely troublesome to the evolutionist because there should be so many more of them if everything did evolve slowly over time.
I hope you found something interesting in this article. As always, the purpose of this blog overall is to give my reasons why I believe it’s rational to accept the existence of the Christian God as the creator of our universe…and everything else that entails. The case against evolution by talking about missing links, etc. is not the main issue and I’m looking forward to moving on to something else!
Evolution in itself does not contradict the idea of God per se…God could have decided to use a process like evolution if He chose to do so. Likewise, refuting evolution doesn’t prove that God exists, though it would take away the only competing theory of how we came to be here outside of supernatural intervention. Personally, I can not see any solid evidence to accept Darwinian evolution as a proven theory, but do see a lot of conjecture on the part of scientists who are dedicated to naturalism.
I hope you have a great week! I’m still deciding whether or not to do one more article on this evolutionary stuff or move on to the argument for the existence of God based on the existence of morality…I’m leaning toward moving on, but I guess you’ll have to come back to find out which way it goes.
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{ 4 comments }
This is just plain wrong. There are plenty of transitional fossils during the Cambrian era. The problem Gould was pointing out, and is most famous for, was that the gradualism that was subscribed to prior to his theory on punctuated equilibrium didn’t explain the speed at which many things were evolving at the time. It isn’t as if new species were seen popping out of nothing. It also isn’t as if things evolved instantaneously either. The Cambrian era lasted 70 million years. While geologically this is a relative instant, it isn’t an instant like creationists would like to believe.
Now, I think the big question about what transitional fossils are is generally the problem. If you want to see the head of a chimp on the body of a man, or a human with a prehensile tail, you will be sadly disappointed. That is not how evolution works. Unfortunately, I think that all too often creationists believe this is what they should see. What we should see is exactly what we do see. We should see fossils where there are more and more similarities with modern humans and less and less similarities with ancient apes. These fossils should also be found in earth layers that are subsequent in time. This is what we see.
So, unless you are wanting to see the head of a fish on the body of a dog, which would actually prove creationism, I don’t see how you can say there are no transitional fossils.
If you want to see pictures of transitional fossils, talkorigins.org has tons of them. They also have tons of information about transitional fossils and other evidence we have about evolution.
I understand that you are not a biologist or a paleontologist, but the information is available and there are plenty of people that make it very easy to understand. There are also plenty of people that are more than willing to help you understand and point you to the information you are looking for if you are really interested in learning what it is that we know about evolution and why we know it. You won’t even have to go to school to get a degree.
I have a degree in conservation biology, but I am not an evolutionary biologist. I can’t avoid using evolutionary theory in my line of work though, and most biologists can’t. If you do have questions, it is better to ask them than to just state things as you feel them to be true. I won’t have all the answers, but I can at least point you to people that do.
You will find that biologists are more than willing to discuss things with you for the most part, as long as you are actually interested in learning.
Anyway, good luck.
P.S. You may consider implementing a comment system like Disqus or Intensedebate. Or at the very least a plugin that allows people to get an email update when a comment is made if they choose to. It encourages people to return at least to respond to comments. At the very least, the Disqus and Intensedebate systems look quite a bit better than the standard Thesis comments.
When I say I tell it as I see it, I don’t mean I conjure things up out of thin air. “I interpret the available facts, read about other’s opinions, and report my conclusions as I see them” would be more accurate. As I said, I’m not a paleontologist, but I have studied gross anatomy…actually performing actual cadaver dissection with a focus on muscle and bony and neural anatomy. I’ve also studied neuroanatomy, physiology, neurophysiology, histology, kinesiology, microbiology, and basic chemistry, amongst a few other ‘ologies’. I’m familiar with most of the list of proposed transitional forms from the link you provided, and I’ve read arguments for and against most of them as predecessors of humans… I’m not convinced that there is any good evidence that they are anything more than separate species and variations within species.
Consider what Darwin expected to find in the rocks and sedimentary layers of the earth: all forms of life connected by “infinitely numerous transitional links” and “every stratum full of such intermediate links”. This is not seen in the fossil record, and the majority of paleontologists I’ve read agree with me on that, at least in what they have published.
Gould included… Stephen Jay Gould in Natural History, writes about species stasis and the absence of transitional forms; “The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 2. Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed’.”
Gould, one of the most respected evolutionary scientists of his time, did not see the fossil record as including the transitional fossils needed to support Darwinian evolution. He and Niles Eldredge came up with the theory of punctuated equilibrium (long periods of unchanging stability followed by rapid periods of evolutionary changes) in order to explain the lack of transitional fossils in the fossil record.
Graduated equilibrium only makes sense if there are a lack of transitions. The only good evidence I can find for it, in fact, is the lack of transitional fossils…a theory based on a lack of evidence.
Even Dawkins admits that the fossil record does not fit as well with traditional evolutionary theory as it should, Especially when it comes to the Cambrian: “…the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years [evolutionists are now dating the beginning of the Cambrian at about 530 million years], are the oldest in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.” – Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), p. 229.
As far as I see it, we all have the same evidence, and there are differing opinions on how to interpret it. These discussions usually end up being a waste of time, as we have our own opinions and will not change them, so I may not reply to additional comments in this discussion. I encourage anyone who is interested in this topic to read as much as possible form both sides of the equation and make up their own minds.
Check my other articles and resources page. Go to godlesons.com and see what they have available…any issue relating to God and His existence is of vital importance…if you don’t know whether or not there is a God, it would make sense to explore the possibility…maybe there is an afterlife…and maybe there is something God has revealed to us about what he requires of us while we’re in this life. It only makes sense to explore the question and decide what you believe one way or the other.
We have so many intermediary fossils between humans and apes that we have gotten to the point where there is argument between whether certain intermediates are actually new species, or just different versions of the same species.
I don’t know where you are looking for your fossil evidence, but it certainly isn’t in museums. Any large museum will have fossils for you to look at that show the evolution between man and more primitive apes.
On top of that, we have plenty of evidence in the genetic record that even if there were no fossils we could show that man evolved from apes. Look up endogenous retroviruses for example. I even give it a once over on my post A Layman’s Guide to Endogenous Retroviruses. Also there is the fusion of Chromosomes, not to mention the rest of the genetic evidence.
I don’t know what more evidence you want, but there is plenty, and claiming there are no transitional fossils is pure bunk.
Thanks for your comments.
There certainly are lots of fossils in museums around the world. Whether they are actual transitional forms from one species to another is the question. I have found no transitional forms in my reading that are undisputed within the paleontological community…even if we exclude creationist organizations from the discussion altogether.
Much of this question is a matter of interpretation. As you said, many of the intermediary fossils are considered to be new species or variations of the same species instead of transitions. Good arguments can be made for this for all of the proposed transitional fossils in the literature.
Dr Colin Patterson, who was the senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History at the time, wrote a book for the British Museum simply called ‘Evolution’ in the late 70′s. Evolutionary theory was well advanced by this time. Luther Sunderland wrote to Dr Patterson asking why he had not shown a single photograph of a transitional fossil in his book. Patterson then wrote back with the following, which was reproduced in its entirety, by Sunderland in ‘Darwin’s Enigma’:
‘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 visualise 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 licence, would that not mislead the reader?’
He also wrote:
‘Yet Gould [Stephen J. Gould—the now deceased professor of paleontology from Harvard University] and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. … 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.’3 [Emphasis added].
Much of what is toted as transitional fossils today were available then, and you’d find only a few new discoveries that could be included in his book today…and none that would be considered ‘undisputed’. A lot of Gould’s work was focused on coming up with new evolutionary paradigms that didn’t require transitional fossils because he couldn’t find any.
You can look at a fossil and assume it is a transitional form…or you can look at the same fossil and assume it is a variation of another species, or a unique species itself. Much of this has to do with your worldview…naturalists will see transitional fossils and creationists will see new species or variations within a species.
Undisputed and undeniable transitional forms? The purpose of this article is to point out that there are none I can find, even within the paleontological community, and to point out that things that are presented to the public by media and science as watertight, may not be such a slam dunk.
I’m not a professional scientist and certainly not a paleontologist, but write about things as I see them. I’m sure we’ll continue to disagree on whether fossil finds are transitional or not. I’m also not a debater (nor do I have time to be) and will usually make one reply to a post instead of going through a lot of back and forth, so if I don’t continue to respond to future comments don’t take it personally!
Thanks again for your feedback.
Rod
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