Who is the Missing Link in Evolution?

Although scientists are busy debating each other all the time, they don't care much for debating religious fundamentalists. This is partly because it is very frustrating (as you can imagine), and it leads nowhere professionally, as even if you win the debate, you don't exactly get a Nobel prize. Creationists are interested in debating because they can gain converts, and converts vote and contribute more money to the cause. Recently, scientists have started taking up the debate more energetically because of the damage done by a creationist President of the USA, and various murders committed by Christian fundamentalists against liberals. Also there is the Movie by Ben Stein (Expelled) that accuses scientists of being the cause of the Nazi holocaust.

Here is a video of a debate between Kent Hovind and Dr. Matthew Rainbow. two and a half hour debate,

It would be worth watching a few minutes if only just for the comparisons in style between Hovind and Rainbow. Hovind is the ultimate slick fast talker, Rainbow goes way beyond the traditional dishevelled look and somewhat bumbling style of a college lecturer. Hovind is actually many times wealthier than Dr. Rainbow, although that point is now moot since Hovind is serving a ten year sentence for tax fraud.

The lengthy video touches on probably hundreds of topics, but I want to look at one question, and try to determine why it is still an open debate after all these years on the classic "missing link" question started by Charles Darwin himself. It is still often argued by Creationists that there is not a single fossil that shows a link between one species and another.

Scientists really do try to answer this question. Dr. Rainbow showed a whole series of fossils going from dinosaurs to birds, with the Archaeopteryx in between. But the question never goes away. Apparently evolutionists' answers sound weak in debates against creationists. So I'm going to try to make some sense of why this argument goes on and on, despite the many "Links" that scientists have actually found, starting over a hundred years ago with the Archaeopteryx. On this species alone there is a mountain of information, here is a website about it and how it fits or does not fit the requirements of a link between birds and dinosaurs.

Creationists admit there are step-by-step sequences that you can see in the fossil record, and I don't think Kent Hovind even questioned Rainbow's sequence of fossils, which led sort of gradually from dinosaurs to birds. Creationists are just saying that there are gaps that are not filled in, where you would expect there to be some "linking" fossils that come between the other ones. The gradual steps are not gradual enough for creationists, but they are acceptably gradual to scientists.

The most obvious answer by scientists is that the linking species were probably not very long lasting compared to the forms that quickly followed, so we have a hard time finding the rarer in-between stages. For example, if penguins learned to fly, there would be some intermediate form of flying penguins that were almost like the non-flying penguins, but once flight became a reality, then the winged penguins would evolve relatively rapidly to a much more capable flying species, which might then stabilize and exist almost unchanged for many thousands of more years. The semi-flying penguins would either have to compete with the better flying penguins and lose, or go back to being flightless, Either way, the in-betweeners don't last too long, and so don't leave a lot of fossils. But this argument does not seem very convincing to most creationists who think, yes but out of all those billions of fossils at least one should be a clear cut in-betweener.

So I want to dig deeper into why there is a lack of understanding on this seemingly simple question, yet still so complex that it defies every attempt at settling it.

To a young earth creationist, who believes that the world is only a few thousand years old, we seem to have have a huge number of fossils for every year of the Earth's existence. Therefore the gaps in the fossil record are significant. But according to scientists, who believe the Earth is between a thousand and a million times older, we do not have enough fossils per year to provide continuity as smooth as creationists would like to see. So to know if the gaps in the fossil record are big enough actually disprove evolution, it helps to know how old the Earth is.

The question of why has evolution stopped can also be answered by the age of the Earth. If the Earth is 4000 years old, evolution is happening so fast that we should be able to see a significant number of new species evolve in 50 years or less. But if the age of the Earth is a hundred thousand times older, then it would take 5 million years to notice the same number of new species.

To put the age difference in perspective, if the Earth was only 25 metres in diameter, people would have figure out right away that it was round. The figure of 25 metres, I believe is an accurate comparison if you compare 4000 years old to 2 billion years old, it is 500,000 times as much. The diameter of the Earth is about 12,000 km, and by the same calculation you could divide by 500,000 to get .025 km.

I don't want to answer the age of the Earth question right now, just to note that one question sometimes leads to another that is equally controversial. It makes debating large and complex issues like this very difficult. Science is now so complex that biologists do not all really understand the specific details of explaining the age of the Earth. Also, scientists often do not understand the Bible, some of them come from religions that are not based on the Bible.

But let's say we took "age of the Earth" right out of the equation, and just discuss species in known recorded history.

It is still difficult for a creationist to discuss biological species with a scientist, and especially the meaning of a "Link" or transitional phase between species. Scientists do not even agree on how to define the separation between known species, let alone transitional species. They see species classification as an arbitrary boundary between infinitely variable living things. Although they have a system by which they come to a majority decision, they don't always agree the decision is a good one.

Creationists see species as distinct categories designed/invented/created by God. All creatures created by God must fall into those classifications one way or another, because of how they were created. If they don't fit in, then they would be the missing link. End of story. (By the way, creationists also do not accept there are humans who are half man, half woman. So no fossil is likely going to satisfy the missing link question.)

To further explain this divergence in point of view, let me give an example: If today you wanted to classify all the photographs you have ever taken, you might come up with some classifications like Landscape, People, Pets, Vacations. But as you go through the photos you are going to come up with all kinds of problems of where to put them because your definition was not clear enough.

The way a Creationist views species, using the photo example, it is as if the photographer started with the categories first, then took all the pictures so that each picture would clearly fall into one of the given categories.

It would influence your decisions in classifying the pictures, whether you believed the photographer made up the classifications and took the picture so that they would fall into one of the classifications, or if the photographer was just taking random pictures and you yourself made up the classifications.