This article was originally written for Question Evolution Day 2020.
According to Charles Darwin himself, the fact that geology does not reveal a finely graduated organic chain is the most obvious and serious objection that can be urged against Evolution. Darwin did attempt to make an excuse: The fossil record is incomplete. The fossil record didn't show Evolution because we just hadn't found enough fossils yet. In his view, as palaeontology developed, it would continue to reveal more and more transitions from one form to the next. He did make some exceptions, as he believed that "no organism wholly soft can be preserved".
As it turns out, Darwin was completely wrong on that. There are plenty of soft organisms that have been preserved, including thousands of jellyfish, which Evolutionists claim are over 500 million years old. Aside from the made up age, these jellyfish fossils show no Evolution, and there are no transitional forms between them and other organisms.
The excuse that the fossil record is incomplete may have held up in Darwin's time. However, we now have fossil representatives of 97% of all living orders of land vertebrates. Of living families of land vertebrates, we have 79% represented by what we currently have. That increases to 87% if you remove birds. Aside from the fact that a lot of them show up in the "wrong" place (according to Evolutionary predictions), that blows up the "incomplete fossil record" argument. While it obviously can't be claimed to be perfectly complete, the only reason to assume it is so incomplete as to excuse the absence of transitional forms is if we assume those transitional forms ought to show up one day in the first place.
The fact that they still haven't shown up is especially troubling for Evolutionists. What Darwin called the "most obvious and serious objection" to Evolution remains both obvious and serious, but without Darwin's excuse to justify it. To this day, every single living order appears "suddenly" in the fossil record. The missing links, including the links in the human Evolution story, are still missing.
But are they? That depends on who you ask and when you ask them. Historically, there have been some honest Evolutionists, like Stephen J. Gould, who admitted "the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of palaeontology". (1) This is a well kept trade secret. So well, in fact, that in spite of the fact every Creation apologist in the world is capable of exposing it, Evolutionists act like there are hundreds upon thousands of transitional forms. That is until, as sometimes happens, the media lights up with what they claim is a newly discovered transitional form. Or rather, a missing link that is no longer missing.
If you think I'm exaggerating, consider the words of David Attenborough when Ida was discovered: "This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of all mammals. The link they would have said until now is missing … it is no longer missing." (2) This is because there is no link, fossil or living, between apes and the rest of the animal kingdom. Ida, supposedly, bridges that gap. In reality, this is not the case. Ida isn't even related to apes. The media hype didn't last very long, and it seems the scientists behind the scenes already knew Ida wasn't anything like a missing link. Although in my earlier days, I had some discussions about it, it is now rare for me to find an Evolutionist who even knows what Ida is. I'm not sure if that's just personal experience or if Evolutionists have generally abandoned Ida, but either way I don't hear much about it.
Tiktaalik is a different kettle of fish. And that pun really works, because despite its portrayal in Evolutionist pop culture, it's a literal fish. Just as with Ida, Evolutionists proclaimed that this link is no longer missing. Richard Dawkins, for example, wrote "Tiktaalik is the perfect missing link—perfect, because it almost exactly splits the difference between fish and amphibian, and perfect because it is missing no longer." (3)
But once again, it turns out Tiktaalik is anything but the perfect missing link. Aside from the fact literally nothing about its anatomy suggests it is transitional between fish and tetrapods, even the Evolutionary narrative now contradicts the claim. Fossil tracks were discovered in Poland which are (supposedly) 18 million years older than Tiktaalik.
Because they hype about Tiktaalik was so much bigger than Ida, it remains a lot more prominent even to this day. Outside of the scientific community, the overwhelming majority of Evolutionists still think Tiktaalik is a missing link.
These two examples tell us two things:
1. Media hype and scientific understanding are two different things. Unfortunately, Evolution survives through the former, not the latter. People fall for these alleged "missing links" very quickly, even when the scientific community refutes them almost as fast. Just as with any biased media hype, we don't see the retractions as much as the headline. We see "missing link found", we don't often see "missing link refuted". Thus, ignorance thrives.
2. The evidence is still missing. If it had been found already, a new one wouldn't sell many headlines. How often do you see "scientists drop a new item, the evidence for gravity is no longer missing"? You don't see this. Drop literally any item, it will fall. Pen, ball, iPhone, soap, yourself, it doesn't matter what you release from suspension in the air, it will always head towards the earth until it encounters some resistance. Therefore, when scientists drop a new object, they don't announce "we've finally found the evidence the sceptics demanded!" What would really make headlines is if gravity didn't work.
In the same way, if the fossil record really did show Evolution, Evolutionists would never need to hype up a new "missing link" that is "no longer missing". They'd be spoilt for examples. Instead, there are a handful of candidates called "transitional forms", all of which are highly questionable, if they haven't already been thoroughly refuted, or even flat out dropped by Evolutionists themselves.
Therefore, what Darwin once called the most obvious and serious objection that can be urged against Evolution remains, to this day, extremely obvious, and extremely serious. Evolutionists have had 150 years to solve this problem, but science has only made it worse. Being an Evolutionist requires large amounts of imagination and vain hope. Far better to trust the God who rose from His grave.
References
1. Gould, Stephen Jay - Evolution’s erratic pace, Natural History86(5):14, May 1977.
2. Attenborough, David, cited in Common Ancestor of Humans, Modern Primates? “Extraordinary” Fossil Is 47 Million Years Old, ScienceDaily, May 19, 2009 (link)
3. Dawkins, Richard - The Greatest Show On Earth, 2009