Bible Q & A

Don't some evolutionists reject gradual evolution? Doesn't this nearly make them creationists?

I think I'll let Stephen Jay Gould, a leading paleontologist and stanch evolutionist, answer this question himself:

"The fossil record offered no support for gradual change. New species almost always appeared suddenly in the fossil record with no intermediate links to ancestors in older rocks of the same region . . . 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; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils . . . The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1) STASIS: most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear . . . looking much the same as when they disappear. 2) SUDDEN APPEARANCE: in any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and fully formed . . . Gradualism, the idea that all change must be smooth, slow and steady, was never read from the rocks. It represented a common cultural bias." (Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, 1980, pp.179-82,226)

Gould is one of the authors of a theory called "Punctuated Equilibrium" which basically says that macro evolution is sudden and happens over a short period of time. This theory was created in an attempt to explain why species suddenly appear in the fossil record. Another explanation that has been around a lot longer is called Creationism.

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