134 Evolution and the Fossil Record
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all
The hero perish, a sparrow fall . . .
Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroy’d;
From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike,
Ten or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.As Lovejoy (1936) showed, the concept goes back to the ancient Greeks and was widespread
in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. At that time, it was used to justify the inequalities
in human society and the divine right of kings and nobility, as well as to place all of nature in
a religious context. Even as late as the 1790s, most naturalists (including Thomas Jefferson)
refused to accept the idea that this great chain of being could be broken or that God would
allow any of his creations to become extinct. But in the early 1800s, the great anatomist and
paleontologist Baron Georges Cuvier showed conclusively that the skeletons of mastodonts
and mammoths represented giant animals that could no longer be alive on earth today and
must be extinct.
Even though the great chain of being was ultimately discredited when evolutionary
theory came around in the mid-1800s, the imagery was still very powerful. A century
before Darwin’s ideas of evolution, people saw the close similarity between apes and
humans and postulated that there must be a “missing link” to complete the chain between
us. This missing link metaphor then took on an evolutionary meaning after 1859, so that in
the late nineteenth century, people wondered where the missing link fossil could be found
that would connect humans to their ape ancestors. Eugène Dubois’s discovery of “Java
Man,” “Pithecanthropus” (now Homo) erectus in 1891 was hailed as the first such discovery,
although it is still a member of our own genus. Certainly, Raymond Dart’s 1924 discovery
of the skull of the “Taung Child,” Australopithecus africanus, should have been sufficient
to show that there were fossils that were truly intermediate between apes and modern
humans and clearly not members of either group. As we shall discuss in chapter 15,
the fossil record of extinct humans is now incredibly rich, so there are more “discov-
ered links” than there are “missing” links. Nevertheless, the misconception about missing
links leads some people to think that if a certain fossil hasn’t yet been found, then evolu-
tion cannot be true.
Creationists are particularly shifty when this topic comes up. If they bring up the discred-
ited concept of a missing link (knowing that their audience doesn’t realize that the concept is
invalid), they taunt the evolutionist to provide one. As I shall show in every remaining chap-
ter of the book, the fossil record of transitional forms is truly amazing, so there is no shortage
of fossils that could be called missing links (however erroneous the notion). But then the
creationist will play a dirty trick. To divert attention away from the successful presenta-
tion of a transitional form, they will ask, “Where is the missing link between that fossil and
another?” In other words, once you provide one intermediate between two groups, they ask
for the other two “links” that connect the intermediate to each relative. Instead of conceding
that they are beaten, they ask for more evidence, thus moving the goalposts and dishonestly
demanding more evidence even after enough evidence has already been provided. It only
goes to show how badly they misunderstand the fundamental concept: there is no such thing
as a chain of being or a missing link!
Shermer (1997:149) describes their tactics this way,