Dawkins on Evolution and Gaps in the Fossil Record
On page 72 of Richard Dawkins’s, The Ancestor’s Tale: A
Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, we read why absence of
fossils helps confirm the truth of the theory of evolution:
It is in the nature of sedimentary rock that its materials are
continually being recycled. Old mountains such as the Scottish
Highlands have been slowly ground down by wind and water, yielding
materials which later settle into sediments and may ultimately push up
again somewhere else as new mountains like the Alps, and the cycle
resumes. In a world of such recycling, we have to curb our importunate
demands for a continuous fossil record to bridge every gap in
evolution. It isn’t just bad luck, that fossils are often missing,
but an inherent consequence of the way sedimentary rocks are made. It
would be positively worrying if there were no gaps in the fossil
record. Old rocks, with their fossils, are actively being destroyed by
the very process that goes to make new ones.
This is not a fallacious argument, but it is in the spirit of the
equally valid “God of the Gaps” argument which Dawkins so criticizes.