“Darwin’s theory of natural selection has always been closely linked to evidence from fossils, and probably most people assume that fossils provide a very important part of the general argument in favor of Darwinian interpretations of the history of life. Unfortunately, this is not strictly true.” David M Raup,
“We have no idea why most structures in extinct organisms look the way they do. And, as I already have noted, different species usually appear and disappear from the record without showing the transition that Darwin postulated.” David M Raup,
“Instead of finding gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin’s time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record.” David M Raup,
“Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin, and knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded … 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–what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic.” David M Raup,
“The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution…” Steven Stanley,
“Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin’s time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record. and it is not always clear, in fact it’s rarely clear, that the descendants were actually better adapted than their predecessors. In other words, biological improvement is hard to find.” David M Raup,