[Charles Darwin] "Innumerable transitional forms must have existed. But why do we not find them imbedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?... Why is not every geological formation in every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain, and this perhaps is the greatest objection which can be urged against my theory."⁵³

[Thomas Huxley] "If it could be shown that this fact [gaps between widely distinct groups] had always existed, the fact would be fatal to the doctrine of evolution."⁵⁴

[Theodosius Dobzhansky] "These evolutionary happenings are unique, unrepeatable, and irreversible. It is as impossible to turn a land vertebrate into a fish as it is to effect the reverse transformation. The applicability of the experimental method to the study of such unique historical processes is severely restricted before all else by the time intervals involved, which far exceed the lifetime of any human experimenter. And yet, it is just such impossibility that is demanded by anti-evolutionists when they ask for "proofs" of evolution which they would magnanimously accept as satisfactory."⁵⁵

[Niles Eldredge] "Darwin also holds out the hope that some of the gap would be filled as the result of subsequent collecting. But most of the gaps were still there a century later and some paleontologists were no longer willing to explain them away geologically."⁵⁶ (Dr. Niles Eldredge is the chairman and curator of invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.)

[Stephen Jay Gould] "One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin’s predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction was wrong."⁵⁷ (Dr. Gould taught biology, geology and the history of science at Harvard University.)

[George Gaylord Simpson] "The reason for abrupt appearances and gaps is not the imperfection of the fossil record. With over 200 million cataloged specimens of about 250,000 fossil species, many evolutionist paleontologists argue that the fossil record is sufficient: ‘In part, the role of paleontology and evolutionary research has been defined narrowly because of a false belief, tracing back to Darwin and his early followers, that the fossil record is woefully incomplete. Actually, the record is of sufficiently high quality to allow us to undertake certain kinds of analysis meaningfully at the level of the species.’

"It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera and families and that nearly all new categories above the level of families appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences."⁵⁸ (Dr. Simpson, one of the world’s best-known evolutionists, was professor of vertebrate paleontology at Harvard University until his retirement.)

[Donn Rosen] "Evolutionism has been unable to yield scientific data about the origin, diversity and similarity of the two million species that inhabit the earth and the estimated eight million others that once thrived."⁵⁹ (Dr. Donn Rosen is curator of fishes at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, New York.)

[Austin Clark] "On the basis of the paleontological record, the creationist has the better of the argument." ⁶⁰ (Dr. Austin Clark was curator of paleontology at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.)

[Betty Farber] "Several cockroach fossils...from the carboniferous period of earth’s history make one thing clear, even back then, about 350 million years ago, the cockroach looked disgusting. It hasn’t changed much since."⁶¹

[L. Harrison Matthews] "The ‘peppered moth’ experiments beautifully demonstrate natural selection—or survival of the fittest—in action, but they do not show evolution in progress, for however the populations may alter in their content of light, intermediate or dark forms, all the moths remain from beginning to end biston betularia."⁶²

[Pierre-P. Grasse] "We are in the dark concerning the origin of insects."⁶³ (Dr. Grasse is considered the outstanding scientist of France, the dean of French zoologists.)

[Louis L. Carroll] "Unfortunately, not a single specimen of an appropriate reptilian ancestor is known prior to the appearance of true reptiles. The absence of such ancestral forms leaves many problems of the amphibian—reptilian transition unanswered."⁶⁴

[Jean L. Marx] "True birds have existed at least as long as archaeopteryx so that the latter could hardly have been their ancestor."⁶⁵

[Charles Darwin] "Nothing is more extraordinary in the history of the Vegetable Kingdom, as it seems to me, than the apparently very sudden or abrupt development of the higher plants."⁶⁶

[Gerald T. Todd] "All three subdivisions of the bony fishes first appear in the fossil record at approximately the same time. They are already divergent morphologically, and they are heavily armored. How did they originate? What allowed them to diverge so widely? How did they all come to have heavy armor? And why is there no trace of earlier, intermediate forms?"⁶⁷

[Robert Barnes] "The fossil record tells us almost nothing about the evolutionary origin of phyla and classes. Intermediate forms are non-existent, undiscovered, or not recognized."⁶⁹

[Colin Patterson] "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. So, much as I should like to oblige you by jumping to the defense of gradualism, and fleshing out the transitions between the major types of animals and plants, I find myself a bit short of the intellectual justification necessary for the job."⁷⁰  (Colin Patterson is a senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History in London and a life-long evolutionist. Colin Patterson’s statement that he had left out the evolutionary transitions in his book, if he had known of any fossils, he certainly would have included them, is stated in Personal Communications by Colin Patterson to Luther Sunderland, Appalachian, New York, April 10, 1979.)

[David Raup] "Unfortunately, the origins of most higher categories are shrouded in mystery: commonly new higher categories appear abruptly in the fossil record without evidence of transitional forms."⁷¹ (Dr. David Raup, previously curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, is now professor of geology at the University of Chicago. He is a strong advocate of evolutionary theory.)

[George Gaylord Simpson] "Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes and phyla are systematic and almost always large."⁷²

[Steven N. Stanley] "The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic (gradual) evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid."⁷³ (Dr. Stanley is professor of Paleobiology at Johns Hopkins University. He is a recipient of the Schuchert award of the Paleontological Society and has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.)

[Stephen Jay Gould] "Increasing diversity and multiple transitions seem to reflect a determined and an inexorable progression toward higher things. But the paleontological record supports no such interpretation. There has been no steady progress in the higher development of organic design. We have had, instead, vast stretches of little or no change in one evolutionary burst that created the entire system."⁷⁴

[British Museum publication] "We assume that none of the fossil species we are considering is the ancestor of the other."⁷⁵

[Steven N. Stanley] "The fossil record now reveals that species typically survived for a hundred thousand generations, or even a million or more, without evolving very much. We seem forced to conclude that most evolution takes place rapidly, when species come into being by the evolutionary divergence of small populations from parent species. After their origins, most species undergo little evolution before becoming extinct."⁷⁶

[Niles Eldredge] "If life had evolved into its wondrous profusion of creatures little by little, then one would expect to find fossils of transitional creatures which were a bit like what went before them and a bit like what came after. But no one has yet found any evidence of such transitional creatures. This oddity has been attributed to gaps in the fossil record which gradualists expected to fill when rock strata of the proper age had been found. In the last decade, however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them."⁷⁷

[Stephen Jay Gould] "New species almost always appeared suddenly in the fossil record with no intermediate links to ancestors in older rocks of the same region."⁷⁸

[Stephen Jay Gould] "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches...in any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the gradual transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed.’"⁷⁹

[Frederick Nietzsche] "If one were to prove this God of the Christians to us, we should be even less able to believe in Him."⁸⁰

[Clarence Darrow] "It is bigotry for public schools to teach only one theory of origin."⁸¹

[Norman Geisler] "Fifty-six years later at the Scopes II Trial in Arkansas, which was to decide whether Creation could be taught along with Evolution, the Secular Humanists argued in effect and won, that it is bigotry to teach two theories of origin. Apparently what Secular Humanists mean is that it is bigotry to teach only one view when Creation is that view, but not when Evolution is that view."⁸²

[Michael Denton] "...The twentieth century would be incomprehensible without the Darwinian revolution. The social and political currents which have swept the world in the past 80 years would have been impossible without its intellectual sanction.... the influence of evolutionary theory on fields far removed from biology is one of the most spectacular examples in history of how a highly speculative idea for which there is no really hard scientific evidence can come to fashion the thinking of a whole society and dominate the outlook of an age. Considering its historic significance and the social and moral transformation it caused in Western thought, one might have expected that a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth.... In the final analysis, we still know very little about how new forms of life arise. The ‘mystery of mysteries’—the origin of new beings on earth—is still largely as enigmatic as when Darwin set sail on the Beagle."⁸³

[Sir Peter Medawar] "There is a pretty widespread sense of dissatisfaction about what has come to be thought of as the accepted evolutionary theory in the English-speaking world, the so-called neo-Darwinian theory."⁸⁴

[H. S. Lipson] "I think, however, that we must go further than this and admit that the only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it."⁸⁵