The Fossil Record 89Through all this intense debate within evolutionary biology, the creationists are con-
stantly on the lookout for some tidbit they can quote of out context to say just the opposite
of the author’s meaning. Sure enough, many of the quotations about punctuated equilibria
are misconstrued to indicate that Gould and Eldredge claim there are no transitional forms
or that the fossil record doesn’t show evidence of evolution! Typically, these “quote miners”
pull a single short section out of a longer quotation that gives exactly the opposite impres-
sion of what the author really said. Such a practice suggests that the creationists either can’t
read, don’t understand the entire quote, or are intentionally trying to deceive their own read-
ers by claiming that Gould and others have said something that is actually the opposite of
what was meant (which means the creationists are dishonest and deceitful)! (For a complete
archive of corrections of the commonest creationist misquotes, see http://www.talkorigins.org/
faqs quotes.) For example, Gould (1980b:181) writes,
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.This is quoted again and again in creationist books and websites. But if the creationists read
closer and tried to understand the context of the argument, it is clear that Gould is not claim-
ing that there are no transitional forms between species but only that they are rare (as expected
from the fossil record and allopatric speciation theory). More importantly, there are many
transitional fossils between larger groups, as we shall document through the entire second part
of this book. If a series of stable fossil species shows an overall trend linking one major group
to another, each of those fossil species is a “transitional form,” even though we rarely get all
the fossils of the transitions between those species (fig. 3.12).
An important concept here is the distinction between a lineal ancestor and a collateral
ancestor (terms borrowed from genealogy). A lineal ancestor is one of your direct ancestors:
your father and mother, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. A collateral ancestor
shares an ancestor with you, but you are not their direct descendant: your uncles and aunts,
great-uncles and great-aunts, and so on. In the fossil record, we often talk about a specific
fossil not as being directly ancestral to some other organism but as showing anatomical
features that indicate it is almost certainly a collateral ancestor (or a sister group, or closest
relative, if you prefer). The creationist Jonathan Wells (2000) frequently confuses this point
in his highly muddled and misleading book Icons of Evolution. For example, Wells (2000:138)
attacks the use of the fossil Archaeopteryx by arguing that it is not an “ancestor” because
modern birds are not descended from it and that paleontologists no longer consider it “tran-
sitional” and have “quietly shelved” it while looking for other “missing links.” First of all,
there is no such thing as a missing link (as discussed in chapter 5), and paleontologists have
not quietly shelved it but continue to debate and discuss it along with the huge number of
other Mesozoic bird fossils discussed in chapter 12. Archaeopteryx has many transitional fea-
tures between living birds and Mesozoic dinosaurs, so if it was not a direct ancestor, it was
certainly a collateral ancestor. Actually, Archaeopteryx has no derived features that would
exclude it from the ancestry of later birds, so it very well could be the ancestor—but that
is not a testable scientific statement, so paleontologists are cautious about using the term
“ancestor” in this instance.