Abstract
Now I want to turn to the evidence for evolution. If you ask the average person-in-the-street about this, they will probably mention the fossil record – the remains of types of organism no longer living on the Earth. But this is incorrect – the fossil record is consistent with both separate creationism and with transformism, which, you will recall, both propose that species had separate, natural origins but can become extinct. Darwin did not use the fossil record as one of his main lines of evidence to support the idea of evolution because he thought that there were not enough fossils known in his time. He devoted a whole chapter in On the Origin of Species to this problem, stressing the absence of numerous transitional forms between fossil species and species alive today that his theory predicted should occur. He suggested that this absence could be explained if the fraction of organisms that end up as fossils is extremely small and dependent on particular geological events that themselves vary with time. He lists at the end of the chapter the names of nine eminent scientists that specialised in studying fossils in his day but who rejected the idea that species had changed over geological time.
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The Making of The Fittest: A DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution. Sean B. Carroll. Published by Quercus 2006. ISBN 978 1 84724 4765. This book is a very readable account for the non-specialist of the evidence for evolution that resides in the sequences of DNA molecules.
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Ellis, J. (2016). The Evidence for Evolution. In: How Science Works: Evolution. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7749-0_5
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