Here are a few articles on the kinds and the fossil record.
"...every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of families appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences." (Major Features of Evolution, 1953 p. 360)
Speaking of the highest level of animal classification, evolutionist Philip Handler claimed that:
"Some 25 major phyla are recognized for all the animals, and in virtually not a single case is there fossil evidence to demonstrate what the common ancestry of any two phyla looked like." (Biology and the Future of Man, 1970 p. 506)
As for the lowest level of taxonomic classification, the popular evolutionist Steven J. Gould said:
"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." (Natural History, 86:12-16)
This, of course, is exactly what creationists would expect to find.
Raup writes:
"We are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much -- ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information." (Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, 50:22-29)
The Fossil Record
The Only Direct Evidence.
CARL DUNBAR, Yale, "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." HISTORICAL GEOLOGY, p. 47
S. M. Stanley, Johns Hopkins, "It is doubtful whether, in the absence of fossils, the idea of evolution would represent anything more than an outrageous hypothesis. ...The fossil record and only the fossil record provides direct evidence of major sequential changes in the Earth's biota." NEW EVOLUTIONARY TIMETABLE, p.72, 1981
HISTORICAL — NOT EMPIRICAL, JOHN H. HORNER "...paleontology is a historical science, a science based on circumstantial evidence, after the fact. We can never reach hard and fast conclusions in our study of ancient plants and animals... These days it’s easy to go through school for a good many years, sometimes even through college, without ever hearing that some sciences are historical or by nature inconclusive." Dinosaur Lives, 1997, p.19
In Their "Beginning": Sudden; Complex; Diverse; Every Animal Phylum; Assumed History Missing
STEPHEN J. GOULD, HARVARD, "The Cambrian Explosion occurred in a geological moment, and we have reason to think that all major anatomical designs may have made their evolutionary appearance at that time. ...not only the phylum Chordata itself, but also all its major divisions, arose within the Cambrian Explosion. So much for chordate uniqueness... Contrary to Darwin's expectation that new data would reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness and geological abruptness of this formative event..." Nature, Vol.377, 26 10/95, p.682
Preston Cloud & Martin F. Glaessner, "Ever since Darwin, the geologically abrupt appearance and rapid diversification of early animal life have fascinated biologist and students of Earth history alike....This interval, plus Early Cambrian, was the time during which metazoan life diversified into nearly all of the major phyla and most of the invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known." Science, Aug.27, 1982
RICHARD Monastersky, Earth Science Ed., Science News, "The remarkably complex forms of animals we see today suddenly appeared. ...This moment, right at the start of the Earth's Cambrian Period...marks the evolutionary explosion that filled the seas with the earth's first complex creatures. ...‘This is Genesis material,’ gushed one researcher. ...demonstrates that the large animal phyla of today were present already in the early Cambrian and that they were as distinct from each other as they are today...a menagerie of clam cousins, sponges, segmented worms, and other invertevrates that would seem vaguely familiar to any scuba diver." Discover, p.40, 4/93
Richard Dawkins, Cambridge, "And we find many of them already 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. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. ...the only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation...", The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, p229-230
TREES & FISH IN CAMBRIAN, John Repetski, U.S.Geol. Survey, "The oldest land plants now known are from the Early Cambrian... Approximately 60 Cambrian spore-genera are now on record...represent 6 different groups of vascular plants..." Evolution, V.13, 6/'59, p.264. Daniel I. Axelrod, UCLA, "This report of fish material from Upper Cambrian rocks further extends the record of the vertebrates by approximately 40 million years." [WY, OK, WA, NV, ID, AR] Science, Vol.200, 5 May, 1978, p.529
PATCH FAILED, "Over the decades, evolutionary theorists beginning with Charles Darwin have tried to argue that the appearance of multicelled animals during the Cambrian merely seemed sudden, and in fact had been preceded by a lengthy period of evolution for which the geological record was missing. But this explanation, while it patched over a hole in an otherwise masterly theory, now seems increasingly unsatisfactory. Since 1987, discoveries of major fossil beds in Greenland, in China, in Siberia, and now in Namibia have shown that the period of biological innovation occurred at virtually the same instant in geologic time all around the world. ...just as the peculiar behavior of light forced physicists to conclude that Newton's laws were incomplete, so the Cambrian explosion has caused experts to wonder if the twin Darwinian imperatives of genetic variation and natural selection provide an adequate framework for understanding evolution..." Time, 12/4, 1995, p.67, 74
BLIND FAITH, Douglas Futuyma, "It is considered likely that all the animal phyla became distinct before or during the Cambrian, for they all appear fully formed, without intermediates connecting one form to another." EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY, 1985, p.325
"Trees" Contradicted By Fossils, From Some Similarities, Ignoring Others
SEPARATE LIVING KINDS" Stephen J. Gould, Harvard, "Our modern phyla represent designs of great distinctness, yet our diverse world contains nothing in between sponges, corals, insects, snails, sea urchins, and fishes (to choose standard representatives of the most prominent phyla).", Natural History, p.15, Oct. 1990
SEPRATE FOSSIL KINDS" Valentine (U. CA) & Erwin (MI St.), "If we were to expect to find ancestors to or intermediates between higher taxa, it would be the rocks of the late Precambrian to Ordivician times, when the bulk of the world's higher animal taxa evolved. Yet traditional alliances are unknown or unconfirmed for any of the phyla or classes appearing then.", Development As An Evolutionary Process, p.84, 1987.
"TREES" NOT FROM FOSSILS, Steven J. Gould, Harvard, "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 the fossils.", Nat.His., V.86, p.13
STORY TIME, COLIN PATTERSON, Senior Paleontologist, British Museum of Nat. History, "You say I should at least 'show a photo of the fossil from which each type or organism was derived.' I will lay it on the line--there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument." "It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another.... But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test. .... I don't think we shall ever have any access to any form of tree which we can call factual." HARPER'S, Feb.1984, p.56
ARBITRARY ARRANGEMENT, R.H.Dott, U.of Wis. & R.L.Batten, Columbia, AMNH, "We have arranged the groups in a traditional way with the 'simplest' forms first, and progressively more complex groups following. This particular arrangement is arbitrary and depends on what definition of 'complexity' you wish to choose. ...things are alike because they are related, and the less they look alike, the further removed they are from their common ancestor." EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, p.602
Unrelated Look-Alikes, J.Z.Young, Prof. of Anatomy, Oxford, "...similar features repeatedly appear in distinct lines. ...Parallel evolution is so common that it is almost a rule that detailed study of any group produces a confused taxonomy. Investigators are unable to distinguish populations that are parallel new developments from those truly descended from each other." LIFE OF THE VERTEBRATES, p.779
similarity IS NoT genetic, Sir Gavin Debeer, Prof. Embry., U.London, Director BMNH, "It is now clear that the pride with which it was assumed that the inheritance of homologous structures from a common ancestor explained homology was misplaced; for such inheritance cannot be ascribed to identity of genes. The attempt to find homologous genes has been given up as hopeless." Oxford Biology Reader, p.16, Homology an Unsolved Problem
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