Correcting Erroneous Views of Evolution Part Two: No Transitional Fossils?

There are no transitional forms, really? Well this is perhaps the bread and butter of the creationist movement; picking at the fossil record in an attempt to find something that doesn’t exist. That’s right! There are no transitional forms! Okay, I’m joking there are, but in the case of what creationists think transitional forms are, there are none. Let’s explain what a transitional form is not: it is not a halfway point between a crocodile and a duck; it is not a half man half chimp. I’m surprised that creationists aren’t searching the fossil record for centaurs, mermaids and satyrs, because that is what they seem to think a transitional form is. So what is it really? Well it is every creature that has ever lived; a genuine transitional fossil shows very slight change from one species to another. For example as Professor Dawkins so eloquently put, we have fossils showing the transition from the reptilian jaw to the mammalian jaw, and all of the intermediates between the two jaws show the slow movement of the reptilian jaw bones into the inner ear of the mammal. This is what we would expect to find if evolution is correct. Then the transition from land mammals into whales and dolphins: we see the slow movement of the nostril to the top of the head in the fossils, and the slow loss of the legs into fins and vestigial features, each form found in the correct strata sequence. If these are, as creationists claim, all individually created species, why do we find them perfectly distributed throughout the strata to suggest evolution over time? Well either God continued to bury coincidently similar species in rock over six thousand years creating the illusion that those higher up were the ancestors of those lower; or they were all placed in that sequence by Noah’s flood, as suggested by Kent Hovind, Ken Ham etc. But if the flood put the fossils in their current places, why are they so ordered such as to show slight changes leading up to what appears to be evolution? Wouldn’t the flood randomize the fossil record, not create the chronological order which we see? So to summarize a transitional form is not a complete half way point between any two species, it is every single fossil ever found, showing slight variation from one fossil to the next and so on, until they accumulate into a long line of change clearly showing one species to another.