> At the risk of stating the obvious, the matter boils down to
>whether one believes that the morphological gap between any of the
>sarcopterygians and the earliest tetrapod was crossed by Darwinian
>processes without leaving a trace of the forms that must have
>existed between them. As the evolutionist sees it, the gap is too
>small and the vagaries of fossilization are too great to expect,
>let alone demand, fossil evidence of the transition. As the
>creationist sees it, the gap is so large that the number of
>transitional forms needed to cross it would be too great to
>completely escape fossilization and discovery. These differences
>in how one weighs the evidence have much to do with one's philo-
>sophical or theological commitments.
This is at least half true. The problem is I think, that we haven't
got enough of a grip on the theory of evolution. That is, if we
knew more about how exactly genetic information translated into
morphological form, then we could say much more about _how_fast_
evolution could be expected to work. Then this information combined
with some knowledge about how frequently fossilization occurs, would
allow us to predict how many "gaps" we would be likely to find. Until
we know more about these things, it will be hard to say whether the
gaps seen in the fossil record are compatible with evolution.