Evidence Against Neo-Darwinian Evolution from the Fossil Record

The Science and Culture Network Chapter in Southern California invites you to join the latest in a series of webinars on intelligent design featuring a variety of Center for Science & Culture scientists and scholars.

Renowned German paleontologist Dr. Gunter Bechly will present a talk on how the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution predicts a gradual bottom-up pattern of appearances of new biological kinds and body plans in the fossil record. The actual fossil record strongly contradicts this prediction and consistently features discontinuities and abrupt appearances in all groups and all geological eras. To demonstrate that this is not restricted to the famous Cambrian Explosion, 20 more examples are provided from the origin of life to the “Big Bang” of the genus Homo. This accumulation of conflicting evidence can no longer be explained away as an artifact of undersampling of an incomplete fossil record, as demonstrated by statistical analyses (collector’s curve). Even for the low taxonomic level of species-to-species transitions, almost all supposed fossil evidence for gradualism has not withstood scrutiny by modern research. The cumulative evidence is better explained with pulses of infusion of new information from outside of the system than with a purely mechanistic unguided process like Neo-Darwinism.