Transitional form
A transitional form is a fossil or living organism that is intermediate between two other organism in an evolutionary sequence. A transitional form that has not yet been found is colloquially called a 'missing link'.
Creationists claim that transitional forms between different kinds of creatures are systematically absent. Anti-creationists typically reject this claim. One such attempted rebuttal is that by Kathleen Hunt who created a Transitional Vertebrate Fossil FAQ.[1]
The lack of transitional forms
Many scientists have admitted the lack of transitional fossils.
The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said:
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.[2]
The senior palaeontologists at the British Museum of Natural History, Colin Patterson, agreed with Gould, when asked why he didn't have any illustrations of transitional forms in his book:
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. ... Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. I will lay it on the line- there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.[3]
See also
References
- ↑ Hunt, Kathleen, Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ (Talk.Origins)
- ↑ Quoted in Sarfati, Jonathan, Refuting Evolution, chapter 3.
- ↑ Sunderland, Lewis, Darwin's Enigma, 1988, pp. 88-90 (Quoted in Those fossils are a problem, Creation 14(4):44–45, September 1992).