“I've been looking into the issue for more than thirty years, and I have never seen a hint of genuine evidence of species-to-species transitional forms in the fossil record. The theory stands or falls on the supposed links between species. Even if you came up with what you believe is evidence, time would prove it to be another hoax, as it has so often in the past.”

—  Ray Comfort

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)

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Ray Comfort 133
New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist 1949

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“Many people think there are no transitional species because the only fossil forms they’re aware of at all are a handful of plastic pieces in a prehistoric play set. They’ve no idea how rich the fossil record is! We know of several hundred species just within dinosaurs, to say nothing of the thousands of examples of each of hundreds more taxa apart from that. Experts estimate that all the collective genera still roaming around now only amount to about 1% of all the species that have ever lived. Practically everything there ever was ain’t no more. Every species living today has definite relatives both extant and extinct, and evident in the fossil record. And in one sense, all of them, even the things still alive, count as transitional species.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

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“Looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all the species of the same group together, must assuredly have existed; but the very process of natural selection constantly tends, as has been so often remarked, to exterminate the parent forms and the intermediate links. Consequently evidence of their former existence could be found only amongst fossil remains”

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Source: On the Origin of Species (1859), chapter VI: "Difficulties on Theory", page 179 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=197&itemID=F373&viewtype=side

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“I published that theory [of speciational evolution] in a 1954 paper…and I clearly related it to paleontology. Darwin argued that the fossil record is very incomplete because some species fossilize better than others… I noted that you are never going to find evidence of a small local populatlon that changed very rapidly in the fossil record… Gould was my course assistant at Harvard where I presented this theory again and again for three years. So he knew it thoroughly. So did Eldredge. In fact, in his 1971 paper Eldredge credited me with it. But that was lost over time.”

Ernst Mayr (1904–2005) German-American Evolutionary Biologist

Ernst Mayr (2000) " The Grand old Man of Evolution" interview by Michael Shermer and Frank Sulloway http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/mayr_interview.html, Skeptic 8 (1): 79; As cited in: Quotations Ernst Mayr on Gould http://www.stephenjaygould.org/people/mayr_quotations.html, Stephen Jay Gould Archive, 2013

“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. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.”

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“The theory of the origin of new species by variation will also explain why a species which has once died out never reappears, and why the fossil fauna and flora recede farther and farther from the living type in proportion as we trace it back to remoter ages. It would also account for the fact, that when we have to intercalate a new set of fossiliferous strata between two groups previously known, the newly discovered fossils serve to fill up gaps between specific or generic types previously familiar to us, supplying often the missing links of the chain, which, if transmutation is accepted, must once have been continuous.”

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Source: The Magus

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“… dinosaur bones that are supposedly millions of years old have been found to show evidence of arthritis, abscesses, and osteoarthritis. Evidence of cancer and other diseases have also been found in fossil bones. So, if a Christian believes the fossil record was laid down millions of years before the first two people, then they've accepted that there were all sorts of horrible diseases in this world before sin. How could God have described such a world as VERY GOOD?… No - our answers in Genesis make it clear that there were NO diseases before sin. This is another reason why Christians cannot believe in millions of years to form the fossil record.”

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“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 in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 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.””

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“Because it is clear from the fossil record that almost every species that has ever existed is extinct; extinction is the rule, survival is the exception.”

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The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

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