The Fossil Record 85Morris is fond of citing figures that indicate that about 5 million metric tonnes of
cosmic dust falls on the earth each year. He calculates that over 5 billion years, we should
have accumulated a layer of dust 55 meters (182 feet) thick! But if you do the calculation
correctly (which Morris does not), it amounts to only a shoebox full of dust over an entire
square kilometer. This is so minuscule it can barely be detected even in the best sedimen-
tary records from deep-sea cores, which are undisturbed and have extremely low sedimen-
tation rates (the only place so little dust could be detected). In shallow marine or terrestrial
sediments, which are highly mixed and weathered, this tiny amount of dust would be
homogenized quickly.
Creationists are so wildly inconsistent in their attempts to discredit all the lines of evi-
dence of an ancient earth and universe that sometimes they stumble into self-contradiction.
Chris McGowan (1984:89) recounts the following example:
During a recent encounter I had with Dr. Gish, he was careless enough to make some
reference to astronomical distances in terms of millions of light-years. When I asked
him how he could rationalize this statement with a belief in a ten-thousand-year-old
universe, he was unable to give a reply.Punk Eek, Transitional Forms, . . . and Quote Miners
Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be
quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do
not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transi-
tional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between
larger groups. Yet a pamphlet entitled “Harvard Scientists Agree Evolution Is a Hoax”
states: “The facts of punctuated equilibrium which Gould and Eldredge . . . are forc-
ing Darwinists to swallow fit the picture that Bryan insisted on, and which God has
revealed to us in the Bible.”
—Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution as Fact and Theory”Like most people in Victorian England, Charles Darwin was part of a culture that believed
in progress and gradual change. Shaken by the revolutions in France and America, the
British instead subscribed to the notion that slow, steady change was the best model for
societal change and reform. As a close friend and disciple of Charles Lyell, Darwin wanted
to extend Lyell’s approach of gradual, uniformitarian transformations of the earth to biology.
As he began to work on his ideas about evolution, the notion of gradual change was deeply
embedded in his thinking. As he wrote in 1859, the fossil record should yield “infinitely
numerous transitional links” that demonstrated the slow, steady work of natural selection.
“Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation,
even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good;
silently and insensibly working. . .. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress until
the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages. . .. Why then is not every geological for-
mation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal
any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the gravest objection which
can be urged against my theory” (Darwin 1859:280). In reviewing his manuscript, however,