As we continue to examine the fatal flaws in evolutionary theory, I want to turn my attention to a question that is rarely asked: If evolution is true, where are all the living transitional species? In the next article I will highlight the complete absence of incontestable transitional species in the fossil record, but in this article I am referring to the complete absence of living transitional species today.
WHERE ARE THEY ALL?
So let me ask again: If the evolution of one species into a completely new species is ongoing, shouldn’t our world be full of living, breathing transitional forms? For example, shouldn’t we be able to see extant lifeforms that are half ape and half human, or half reptile and half bird, etc? Yet all we have in existence today are apes in abundance and humans in abundance, or reptiles in abundance and birds in abundance, with no living transitional forms. The same is true of every theoretical transitional life form in the supposed evolutionary tree of life. But why should this be so? Why should our world be full of the original species and the fully evolved species but no transitional species? It is logically inconsistent that both the original and final species would survive to the present day, while transitional forms universally disappeared—especially if evolution operates through random, undirected processes. If evolution is true, why don’t we see transitional forms in existence everywhere today – walking or crawling or hopping or flying around? Where are they all?
Even if we grant long evolutionary timescales, the theory implies a constant process. If evolution never stops, then statistically, we should be living alongside many transitional lifeforms today. Yet we are not.
The response of evolutionists, of course, is to claim that the transitional species all somehow died out. But my response to that is, “Really? Every single one of them? None of them survived to today?” The evolutionary claim strains credulity. It seems statistically implausible that every single transitional form would have vanished without exception. Think about it. How is this likely? How did all the original species (such as apes) and the supposed fully evolved species (such as humans) survive through to today but the transitional forms did not? And how did this happen in every single supposed instance of evolution?
UNIVERSALLY MISSING LIVING TRANSITIONAL FORMS
Let me state it again in simple terms: Evolutionists propose that all we are left with today is the original species and the newly evolved species and that ALL the transitional species died out. Furthermore, they also propose that the original species (such as apes) is no longer evolving into the transitional life-forms that ultimately evolved into the new ‘advanced’ species.
But this doesn’t make sense. Consider the following supposed evolutionary sequence where Species A gradually evolved into Species B via the transitional life-form, Species AB:
SPECIES A —– TRANSITIONAL SPECIES AB —- SPECIES B
According to evolutionary theory, some of Species A gradually evolved into the transitional Species AB, while some of the original Species A remained unchanged and persists through to today. Thus, we can still see Species A (such as apes) today, because not all the original species evolved. Similarly, it is proposed that some of the transitional Species AB gradually evolved into Species B (such as humans) which we see today, while some of Species AB remained unchanged.
This is how evolution is theoretically supposed to work – only a segment of a population evolves and the rest remains unchanged. Yet where is Species AB today? It is non-existent. Why did both the original species (Species A) and the evolved species (Species B) persist until the present day but the transitional species (Species AB) did not? And how did this extinction of the transitional species conveniently occur in EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE of the so-called evolutionary process? How did ALL (or most) the original species survive through to today but NONE of the transitional species did? Why isn’t the earth full of living, breathing transitional species today?
Dr Stephen C Meyer states: “There is a glaring absence of convincing transitional forms in both the fossil record and among living species, which Darwinists attempt to explain away by appeals to incomplete records or extinction events. But at some point, such ad hoc explanations become scientifically untenable.” (Stephen C. Meyer, “Darwin’s Doubt”)
IMPROBABLE PRESUPPOSITIONS
Ultimately, to support their theory, evolutionists must fall back on two propositions that defy common sense. Firstly, they propose that all transitional lifeforms mysteriously died out while all (or most) original species persist through to today. But if the evolutionary process is governed by random processes of natural selection, how could blind chance result in EVERY SINGLE transitional lifeform becoming extinct? What are the chances? The chances are so infinitesimally small as to beggar belief!
The second equally implausible proposition that underlies evolutionary theory is the proposal that the mechanism that drove the evolutionary process for billions of years is now somehow switched off so that we no longer see any evidence of species evolving into new lifeforms today. But once again, what kind of blind chance is at work switching off the evolutionary mechanism across ALL the species?
These two propositions are extremely difficult to swallow for a person of reason. Evolutionists are effectively saying to us, “We can’t observe evolution occurring today and we can’t observe living transitional lifeforms today but trust us when we say that it did happen in the past and that these transitional lifeforms did once exist, but they are all now mysteriously and universally extinct.”
THE EVOLUTIONISTS’ COUNTER-ARGUMENT
Some evolutionists attempt to counter this objection by pointing to a handful of so-called “living transitional species” that they claim represent evolutionary intermediates—for example, the lungfish, the coelacanth, or the platypus. These organisms are often cited as examples of species caught “in between” evolutionary stages. However, these claims do not withstand scrutiny. Rather than displaying ongoing evolutionary change, such species have remained morphologically stable for tens or even hundreds of millions of years (according to the evolutionary timescale), showing no significant directional transformation toward more complex forms.
The coelacanth, once thought to be a “missing link” between fish and amphibians, has been found alive and virtually unchanged from its fossilized ancestors. These creatures are not transitional in the true Darwinian sense of evolving into something else; instead, they are examples of stasis—organisms that have persisted in a stable form, often termed “living fossils.” Far from supporting the theory of continuous transformation, these examples underscore the problem: if transitional lifeforms existed in the past and some still survive, why are they not evolving now, and why are they not abundant? These few so-called transitional species are not halfway through an evolutionary process; they are fully functional organisms with no observable directional change, offering no real support for the grand evolutionary narrative.
Other evolutionists argue that EVERY current species is transitional in the grand scheme of evolutionary history. This is the “continuity” argument: that species evolve slowly, and every current organism is a product of that process. But even if this were so, at any point in time there should be at least SOME clearly “in-between” species undergoing noticeable speciation processes. We should expect to see some living species today that exhibit partial evolutionary development of complex traits—but instead we see fully formed systems with irreducible complexity.
EVOLUTIONARY BLIND FAITH
Does anyone else see that the emperor has no clothes? (This is a reference to a fable where everyone in a kingdom was asked to believe that their naked emperor was actually walking around in invisible clothes). We are being asked to believe in the existence of transitional lifeforms that are not visible today and, as we shall see in the next episode, are also completely missing in the fossil record. We are asked to believe in the emperor’s invisible clothes. There is truly a methodological sleight-of-hand being proposed here that many people are failing to recognise.
Next time you are speaking with an evolutionist, ask them these two simple questions: If evolution is true, why isn’t it still happening today? And where are all the living transitional forms?
In conclusion, the absence of extant transitional forms not only undermines evolutionary theory’s empirical grounding—it also exposes a serious logical inconsistency. If evolution is ongoing, it should be observable. If it is not observable, it is not scientific. And if it is neither observable nor repeatable, then it should not be taught as established fact.
In the next instalment, we will investigate the fossil record, where evolutionary theory faces its most glaring deficiency: the abrupt appearance of fully formed species without clear transitional antecedents.