Gaps for God
What are the flaws in the theory of evolution, according to creationists? To consider all of the objections would require an entire book on creationism. But let's look at a few of their more popular views.
Many creationists claim that if evolution were true there should be transitional fossils between species, but since there are no transitional fossils, evolution must be false. This is simply wrong. Notwithstanding the odds against fossilization, there are plenty of transitional fossils, despite creationists' claims. These transitional fossils include the archaeopteryx, a crow-sized animal that had features of both reptiles and birds. There are australopithecine fossils, which are transitional between apelike animals and humans. And most famously there are the many transitional fossils leading from Eohippus, the earliest known member of the horse group, to modern horses. In fact, there are so many known transitional fossils between reptiles and amphibians, (14) as well as between an order of warm-blooded reptiles (called therapsids) and mammals, (15) that it's hard to know exactly which groups to classify them in.
There are gaps in the fossil record, of course. How could it be complete? Soft-bodied animals such as worms will rarely fossilize. Hard body parts such as shells, bones, and teeth are more likely to fossilize, but most don't because they've either been broken into bits, chemically dissolved, weathered, or they just didn't end up where they needed to be, namely, where sedimentary rocks formed. Even if specimens do become fossilized, many are easily destroyed before they're ever found because of erosion, shifting landmasses, earthquakes, and volcanoes. The earth can change a lot in millions or hundreds of millions of years.
Yet creationists are fond of pointing out the existence of gaps in the fossil record, as if this disproves evolution and confirms creationism. This is like arguing that if you can't trace your ancestry back more than, say, two hundred years, that you have no ancestors older than those, and that those ancestors must have popped up out of nowhere in some special act of creation.
Notes to Myth Eight: Creationism Disproves Evolution
14. T. M. Berra, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism: A Basic Guide to the Facts in the Evolution Debate (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 127.
15. E. Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 14.