Just spotted this.

That “scientist” was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and if there’s an afterlife I’m going to go kneecap him, though he’s a lot further down the list than a lot of frauds I want to get to first.

What would you accept as fossil evidence for macro-evolution? That’s a question in earnest.

What we have in the fossil record is a timeline of species appearing and going extinct in a sequence that strongly suggests that macro evolution happened, but there’s no complete progression, generation by generation showing the evolution of one species from individuals that are part of another. When you see something like Archaeopteryx that had bird like features, before anything else did, but also had dinosaur like features, it’s a strong inference that it was a transitional species between a certain sub-group of dinosaurs (close relatives of T-Rex, albeit much smaller) and the birds we see around us today. But you don’t get to see the twenty intermediate steps between the T-rex-like dinosaur (in fact, we probably don’t have that dinosaur either) and Archaeopteryx, nor the twenty steps between archaeopteryx and the first thing that you’d say was absolutely a bird.

Such a find–or more accurately, series of finds–would be astounding because fossilization is quite rare. In order to become a fossil, a critter has to die and not be eaten, either by predators, scavengers, or just the sorts of bacteria that cause decomposition. Basically, it has to be buried alive or fall into an anaerobic bog. To have that happen over and over again during a speciation would be, say, about as unlikely as a hundred thousand people all voting for Joe Biden.

The fossil record is more like being in a dark room and someone occasionally takes a flash photo. If you see two of those photos and some guy hasn’t moved, one photo to the next, you can infer that he stayed still. If someone shows up in only one photo, you can’t tell whether he moved somewhere else right after the picture was taken (or stopped moving just before).

Similarly, if you see the same species twice, five million years apart, you can infer it wasn’t evolving (it would be ridiculously unlikely, 100000 Biteme vote unlikely, to have changed to something else then changed back, so my flash bulb in a dark room analogy starts to fall apart). But if you see a species at precisely ONE point in time, you don’t know if it was “stable” or in a period of rapid change. Rapid change, of course, would be caused by ending up in a rapidly changing environment very suddenly, then it must adapt or die.

Even a well-preserved fossil, though, is problematic. I’ve noticed paleontologists prefer to talk of genuses, rather than species, as if they just don’t expect the fine granularity that would allow them to distinguish between closely related species. Or maybe they just figure they won’t find all the species but could distinguish if they did. I’m uncertain which one. (I know with regards to our immediate ancestors, there’s a tendency to declare something to be a different, new species, because that’s where the fame comes from; oftentimes a couple of decades later in the light of additional evidence, they decide it wasn’t. It’s an iterative process of processing evidence; they can’t look in the back of the book (or the front of it either) for the answer.)

And the notion of a species is a bit problematic too, to be honest. If you look at a slice of time, e.g., the present, you can distinguish species, but evolution is enough of a gradual process that you simply would not be able to go to a specific point in time and say “before this, it was species A, after this it’s species B,” because the differences between succeeding generations are so slight…every offspring can successfully interbreed with the prior generation, and usually the dividing line between species is drawn where they cannot interbreed and produce fertile offspring. But whether you could interbreed with people who were around, say, 200,000 years ago is another matter, even if you have an unbroken line of descent from them.

(That looks tiny; I strongly urge you to click on that and read it.)

That illustrates the difficulty. Imagine picking five letters at random from that. Just from the way random choices tend to work, you’d likely see a couple of groups close enough together you’d likely decide they were essentially the same color, but different enough from each other that you’d see two different species with no intermediate forms.

As I said the fossil record strongly suggests macro evolution but if you want it to provide a movie of one species evolving into another, it’s not going to happen. But it does provide a coarse grained movie of the larger picture of entire development of vertebrate life (as well as many other phyla, but it’s almost completely limited to creatures that have hard parts like bones and shells or wood).

But the simple fact of the matter is that fixating on fossils is not going to prove evolution (it could in principle disprove it, but such has not happened) and every evolutionist knows this. But they make the claim that even if there weren’t a single fossil anywhere, they’d have enough evidence to know evolution was true anyway. Darwin (the naturalist, not the lizard) used no fossils. And what’s more, lines of evidence he had no access to, like genetics and differences in molecular biology, confirm it. That’s a powerful, very likely true theory if additional evidence is consistent with it. The ancestral “tree” of life looked very much the same taken from genetics as it did from simply looking at structure of extant organisms (there are a few differences, but it’s down to the level of correcting typos). In fact the differing lines of evidence support each other to such an extent that the chances of it being wrong are about the same as 100,000 votes all being for Biteme. ‘

Who, I hasten to add, did not win.