Why do major groups of plants and animals have no transitional forms in the fossil record?
This question also makes blatantly wrong presuppositions. The fossil record is, in fact, replete with splendid examples of transitional forms, as the National Academy of Sciences has taken pains to point out: So many intermediate forms have been discovered between fish and amphibians, between amphibians and reptiles, between reptiles and mammals, and along the primate lines of descent that it often is difficult to identify categorically when the transition occurs from one to another particular species. Actually, nearly all fossils can be regarded as intermediates in some sense; they are life forms that come between the forms that preceded them and those that followed (NAS 1999: 21). How did you and all living things come to possess such a complete and complex set of instructions for building a living body? This is an excellent question, and students would be well-advised to keep it in mind as they study biology. They may wonder why, for example, the “complex set of instructions” referr
