Time for another post on refuting creationist arguments!
Where Are The Transitional Forms?
Here's something I've been tempted to
talk about for some time now but figured I might as well leave it for
people who professionally study biology. Then I thought, “screw
that!”, I think I might be able to help clarify why this argument
is ridiculous to the creationists who still like to use it.
The fact is, every living creature
alive today, and every living creature that lived in the past, is a
transitional form. Evolution is an on-going process and not in the
way you imagine it.
Evolution does not work out a blueprint
for its ultimate goal and set it underway for thousands of years or
more. It is not a mystical force present in a creature that says,
“Hey, I'm gonna give my offspring the starting point for wings so
that many many generations later, my species will be capable of
flying!”
There is no final destination for
evolution, we're all in the midst of evolving now and that will still
be true in a few million years.
What I find especially peculiar about
this argument is that it's usually followed up by a claim that
evolution should produce 'half-and-half' fossils; like a skeleton
that is composed 50% of ape-like features and 50% of human-like
features.
If you don't see the incredibly obvious
flaw with that understanding of evolution, repeat the following
sentence until you do: We are not Lego!
In fact, let me
represent this perception of evolution with Lego: I have two blue
bricks stacked and two red bricks stacked and I say that the blue
bricks are the descendants of the red bricks.
According to this
creationist argument, there must be a stack of one red brick and one
blue brick to fill in the gap.
This
is an egregious misunderstanding of what evolution theory actually
describes. We could much more accurately describe it with a
gradient.
If we
open up Photoshop, or GIMP, or whatever, and make an image that is
101 pixels wide (I'm making it an odd number for a reason) and
however high (doesn't matter for this example) and make a gradient
that goes from totally red to totally blue, then we can observe a
very gradual change in every column of pixels.
Note
that nowhere in this gradient is there a column that's composed 50%
of blue pixels and 50% of red pixels. Instead, we have a column in
the dead centre (this is why I made the width an odd number) that is
one solid colour made from an even blend of red and blue. We, of
course, know this colour as violet.
This
column does not show half of it's features to be decidedly blue and
the other half to be decidedly red, it is just one more step in the
gradual change between the two.
And just like the midway point of the gradient isn't 'half-and-half', the midway point between two species wouldn't look like a cobbled mess of parts from the species it rests between.
