Missing Links in the Great Chain of Being

The Greek philosopher Aristotle conceptualized a reality he termed the scala naturae—literally the ladder of nature. It classified all living things in a hierarchy, supposedly based on the complexity each displayed and the “soul” each possessed: simple plants at the bottom, then animals, and finally, humans at the top.

As Christianity became the dominant worldview in Western culture, this basic concept later became known as the Great Chain of Being, with God being placed at the apex of the created order with the understanding that Jesus Christ created all things (as per Colossians 1:16).

Alexander Pope is credited with first using the phrase “chain of being” when he penned his philosophical poem (in iambic pentameter, no less) titled “Essay on Man” in 1734.1 The following selection from it reflects the common beliefs of the day, including that the God of the Bible is the Creator of all things.

Vast chain of being! which from God began,
Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no man can see,
No glass can reach; from infinite to thee.

Evolving the Great Chain of Being

This Great Chain of Being concept was co-opted to reinforce the rise of evolutionary theory.

However, as time moved on and the story of evolution began to gain influence over the minds in Western academia, this Great Chain of Being concept was co-opted to reinforce the rise of evolutionary theory. This theory promoted the idea of life being connected, not as part of a grand design but as an ever-changing group of organisms linked to one another as the result of being birthed into existence from—and morphed out of—its evolutionary forerunners.

By 1936, the distinguished philosopher Arthur Lovejoy (with degrees from Berkeley and Harvard and eventually the professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins) published his most famous work: a book titled The Great Chain of Being. In it, he traces the concept’s history and concludes that evolution has taken the place of God. A research article from the Archives of Philosophy summarizes this:

It would be beneficial to address how the chain of being in question was presented and understood in modern times. Unlike the justification of some philosophical or theological subjects, in modern times the hierarchical structure of the great chain of being has been anachronistically read into the theory of evolution.2

Identifying the Weakest Link

We’ve all heard the idiom “the weakest link” and understand that it refers to the most vulnerable point that pressure could be brought against an object or concept. What might be the weakest link in the evolutionary view of the Great Chain of Being?

To answer that, let me quote the father of modern evolutionary thought—Charles Darwin himself—to get his opinion.

Why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.3

Hmm, that’s interesting, isn’t it? Darwin recognized that the weakest link in his theory was the links themselves! Specifically, the missing links—the ones that weren’t there. To be fair to Darwin, he expected that as paleontology advanced, the missing links would be found.

Of course, Darwin first published Origin of Species way back in 1859, so many people might think, “Well yes, but back in his day, they’d probably just not done enough digging and research into this matter. Surely over the next 100 years, they would have found all kinds of evidence showing a nice, graduated chain of fossils that demonstrates that various kinds of creatures slowly changed into completely different kinds in incremental steps over time.”

Still the Weakest Link

However, despite what many people think, that isn’t what happened at all. In fact, over 118 years after Darwin published his missing link conundrum, the eminent evolutionary paleontologist Stephen J. Gould (a giant among leading evolutionists of his day) admitted,

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. . . . To preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.4

And Gould—one of the most factually honest evolution-believing scientists I’ve ever read—expounded on that quotation three years later:

The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.5

Despite Gould’s prominence as a respected figure in the evolutionary community and one of the most prestigious paleontologists of his day, one might think he was a quirky outlier and dissenter among his evolutionary colleagues regarding this topic. However, no less than Dr. Colin Patterson, Gould’s contemporary and the senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History in London, England, admitted the following in a letter to a Mr. Luther D. Sunderland, who had complained about Patterson not having included any transitional fossils in his book on evolution.

I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualize such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader? . . . Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. You say that I should at least “show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.” . . . I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.6

The Missing Links Are Still Missing

So despite what the typical evolutionary keyboard warrior loves to rant and rave about (the “mountain of evidence” for evolution there is, including their belief that the fossil evidence demonstrates it happened), this serious challenge about the lack of missing links remains relevant.

Many might opine that the admissions from these evolution-believing scientists I just quoted are 40 years old now, so surely things have changed drastically since then. Well, let’s move forward 20 years after they were published and see.

In 2004, National Geographic had an article called “Was Darwin Wrong? No.” And this quotation from the article summarized the problem for evolutionists perfectly, “Illuminating but spotty, the fossil record is like a film of evolution from which 999 out of 1,000 frames have been lost.”7

Think about it. How would you like to watch a movie where 99.9% of it was missing and you were then just supposed to trust someone else’s interpretation of what happened in the story? Why would you trust someone else’s interpretation to be accurate? What if there was a whole different way to interpret the few bits you saw?

Or how would you like to use a chain missing 999 out of 1,000 links? Could you trust it to do its job? Would it be accurate to even describe it as a chain if you had never seen it assembled in the first place?

The fact is the missing links are still missing, and even though modern evolutionists don’t tend toward being as candid as they once were, all the modern examples have major flaws when trotted out on an individual basis.

From Darwin’s time until present day, the trend has been the same. There is typically only a handful of controversial so-called transitional fossils out there at any given time, whose legitimacy is debated among leading evolutionists. New ones enter that grouping as older ones fall off the back end in disgrace as the evolutionary community finally admits their failure and abandons the examples because they’re too flimsy to support any longer.

This Horse Can’t Run

An example would be the horse evolution series. As one of the earliest examples of so-called transitional fossil evidence, the horse series was claimed to demonstrate a clear evolutionary chain from early precursors to modern-day horses.

During the famous Scope’s trial in 1925, Professor Horatio Newman, a zoologist from the University of Chicago, was part of Clarence Darrow’s pro-evolution defense team and apparently helped outline their strategy. As an embryologist, Newman’s scientific expertise in promoting evolutionary theory was crucial to their case.

And Newman cited the horse series as proof of evolution in his testimony when he said, “One could hardly ask for a clearer or more conclusive story of evolution than this, and this is only one of many similar cases.”8

And where is the “conclusive proof” of the horse evolution series today? Although there are still some evolutionists who hold to a modified version of it to this day (clearly demonstrating the often-conflicted nature of such evidence within the evolutionary community), Dr. Niles Eldredge, the evolution-believing doctor in biology and paleontology, commented on the horse series as imaginary storytelling being taught as science about 50 years after Newman’s declaration concerning the validity of the series:

I admit that an awful lot of that [imaginary stories] has gotten into the textbooks as though it were true. For instance, the most famous example still on exhibit downstairs (in the American Museum) is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps 50 years ago. That has been presented as literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I think that that is lamentable, particularly because the people who propose these kinds of stories themselves may be aware of the speculative nature of some of the stuff. But by the time it filters down to the textbooks, we’ve got science as truth and we’ve got a problem.9

It’s “Science and Fact” Until It’s Not

See how this works? It used to be fact and science, and if you didn’t believe the experts, you were just a religious fundamentalist who was denying reality because of your commitment to believing in a “magic man in the sky”!

But fast-forward a few years, and what do we consistently see regarding some of the most iconic supposed missing links of the past and present?

Archaeopteryx. Once, Archaeopteryx was declared the undisputed transition between dinosaurs and birds, but now, even popular scientific publications have all featured articles disputing that openly. For example:

• Nature magazine’s “Archaeopteryx No Longer First Bird”10
• National Geographic’s “Archaeopteryx’s Evolutionary Humiliation Continues”11
• Scientific American’s “Archaeopteryx Knocked off Its Perch as First Bird”12

Neanderthals. Once, neanderthals were claimed to be brutish, slope-browed dimwits, a sort of missing link between apes and humans. They’re now classified as fully human with the scientific designation homo (human) neanderthal. Articles such as “Neanderthals ‘As Clever as Modern Humans’”13 declare, “We found no data in support of the supposed technological, social and cognitive inferiority of Neanderthals compared to their modern human contemporaries.”

Tiktaalik. Tiktaalik is the supposed tetrapod link between fish and land animals. It was even celebrated by the avid atheistic champion of evolution Richard Dawkins: “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.”14

Just a few years later, because of the discovery of fossil footprints dated earlier than Tiktaalik, it was downgraded by numerous evolutionary scientists. Publications made backtracking statements such as the following:

They force a radical reassessment of the timing, ecology, and environmental setting of the fish-tetrapod transition, as well as the completeness of the body fossil record.15

[It] will cause a significant reappraisal of our understanding of tetrapod origins.16

We thought we’d pinned down the origin of limbed tetrapods. We have to rethink the whole thing.17

These results force us to reconsider our whole picture of the transition from fish to land animals.18

If you believe the few examples that are out there right now—like Pakicetus, which was based on a few scraps of bone—have any legitimacy whatsoever, just wait a few more years and see what happens. Because sooner or later, they all fall.

Dealing with the Lack of Evidence

So what will a committed evolution believer do upon learning the truth about these so-called transitional fossils, or rather, the lack thereof? Will they be forced to admit defeat and become creationists? No! One doesn’t simply abandon their faith because of a lack of evidence—you just change the story. And what do I mean by that?

Well, here are two examples of completely different claims that prominent evolutionists have made to remain loyal to their materialistic faith in spite of the lack of direct evidence. Firstly, let’s talk about Stephen Gould and his friend Niles Eldredge, who openly admitted to the barrenness of transitional fossils in the rocks despite decades of research. As two professional paleontologists who knew the fossil record well, what was their solution?

Too Fast to Find!

They invented a new type of evolution to account for the lack of transitions: punctuated equilibrium. This idea rejected the slow and gradual model of evolution in favor of stating that organisms basically stayed the same over millions of years but then evolved so rapidly into other kinds that you wouldn’t expect to find any transitional fossils. Basically—quick evolution.

Convenient, eh? They claimed the lack of transitional fossils was evidence of their new story of evolution! Personally, I associate positive evidence as proof of whatever is being argued for rather than a lack of evidence, but I’ll leave the assessment as to how “scientific” that explanation is up to you.

Actually, I think even most evolutionists would agree with me that the idea of “punk eek” (as it was sometimes called) was pretty weak. After Gould’s death, punctuated equilibrium has fallen by the wayside for the most part in evolutionary circles, so I’m not setting up a strawman against modern evolutionary thought but using it here as one example of how evolution has been supported in the past by experts in their field—despite evidence.

“No Real Scotsman” Argument

How else might one argue against somebody like me, after being shown the lack of all these links in the supposed great chain of evolutionary life? Well, here is a quote from Dr. Mark Ridley, a zoologist from Oxford University, explaining how he feels about the topic:

The gradual change of fossil species has never been part of the evidence for evolution. . . . In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation.19

Hmm, that’s an interesting take. So what he’s arguing is that whatever we find or don’t find in the fossil record really doesn’t matter because no “real” evolutionist uses the fossil record as evidence in the origins debate anyway! I mean, these silly creationists are just laughable in their gullibility!

Define “True Evolutionist”

But Darwin himself said the lack of transitional fossils was the weakest link in his theory, which means he recognized this as a legitimate argument. Should we consider the father of modern evolutionary theory not to have been a “real evolutionist”?

Gould, Patterson, and Eldredge also used the fossil record to argue evolutionary mechanisms. Were they not “real evolutionists”? One can find various articles, videos, and textbooks touting examples of “intermediate fossils” as proof of evolution. One resource is the University of Berkeley’s current website where a whole section is dedicated to “transitional features.”20 Are they not “true evolutionists”?

A video by Professor Richard Dawkins, the former chair of public understanding of science at Oxford University, titled “Show Me the Intermediate Fossils!” argues that fossils supposedly prove that land animals evolved into whales.21 Is Richard Dawkins not a “real evolutionist”?

A Convenient New Trend

Now at this point, you might be thinking I’m overplaying my hand by quoting Dr. Ridley because maybe he doesn’t really speak for the evolutionary community and just made a bit of an overstatement.

However, Dr. Ridley has written one of the most prominent textbooks on evolution22 used around the world, which is touted in its promo on Amazon23 as having “become the premier undergraduate text in the study of evolution.”

It isn’t just him who is now arguing that the missing links don’t really matter. For example, this type of argumentation can be found in articles such as this one from Scientific American called “The Fossil Fallacy: Creationists’ Demand for Fossils That Represent ‘Missing Links’ Reveals a Deep Misunderstanding of Science.” In it, they say,

We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more.24

However, you can then slide over to fivebooks.com where the anti-creationist Dr. Jerry Coyne (who is an evolutionary biologist, so obviously a “true evolutionist”) has his selection titled “The Best Books on Evolution Recommended by Jerry Coyne.” One of those recommendations is a book titled Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. Let’s read the description for this book, shall we?

Evolution is an entertaining and rigorous history of the transitional forms and series found in the fossil record. Its engaging narrative of scientific discovery and well-grounded analysis has led to the book’s widespread adoption in courses that teach the nature and value of fossil evidence for evolution. . . . The book also details the many alleged “missing links” in the fossil record, including some of the most recent discoveries that flesh out the fossil timeline and the evolutionary process.25

If Dr. Coyne (a true evolutionist) is recommending this as one of his top five reads on evolution, obviously he considers the idea of transitional fossils to be important, correct?

However, if you argue against these conclusions or object to the lack of facts that prove evolution occurred—such as no legitimate transitional fossil discoveries—then you are gaslit by them because “no real evolutionist . . . uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation.” Do you see how this game is played?

It seems that whether you use the “evidence” only when convenient or make up a new story to fit the lack of evidence, these evolutionary stories just don’t make sense.

Genesis Creation—the Missing Link

The fact is that missing links are still missing because they never existed in the first place because there is no Great Chain of Being in an evolutionary sense. There is uniformity to the fossil record, as expected based on the history recorded in Genesis 6–9. The massive deluge of Noah’s day would have rapidly buried organisms in their ecological niches as the sedimentary layers built up during the cataclysm.

There is a hierarchy in creation because of how Jesus created, but there is also separation and uniqueness between each individual thing he made that demonstrates his master design. This distinction is still recognizable despite living in a world stained by sin caused by man’s rebellion.

Breaking the Chain of Materialistic Thought

You are not just another “missing link” in some materialistic chain of life.

For any of you who have been caught up in the idea that you are somehow part of a long line of insignificant matter constantly morphing from one thing to the next with no meaning, value, or purpose, understand that you are not just another “missing link” in some materialistic chain of life.

You are a special creation, made in the image of God, and precious in his sight: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

Don’t be duped by materialistic storytelling, and remember God’s warning in his Word where it says, “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8).