"Missing Link Discovered" Headlines Are an Unscientific Deception

If you've ever read a newspaper headline announcing the discovery of a "missing link," then you can be certain that the report has no scientific value. Serious scientists long ago abandoned the idea of "missing links" and accepted that it is unscientific to make evolutionary conjectures based on fossils.

Henry Gee, a paleontologist and editor of the scientific journal Nature, writes this on the subject in his 1999 book In Search of Deep Time:

Çin'in Chengjang bölgesinde ortaya çıkarılan Kambriyen canlılarındaki çeşitlilik ve özel yapılar oldukça dikkat çekicidir. Bu canlılar, çeşitli bölümlerden oluşmuş bedenlere, özel fonksiyonlara sahip antenlere, avlanma yeteneğine ve oldukça kompleks anatomik yapılara sahiptirler. Yaklaşık yarım milyar yıl önce böyle canlıların yaşamış oldukları gerçeği, evrim teorisini tümüyle ortadan kaldırmaktadır.

Given the ubiquitous chatter of journalists and headline writers about the search for ancestors, and the discovery of missing links, it may come as a surprise to learn that most professional palaeontologists do not think of the history of life in terms of scenarios or narratives, and that they rejected the storytelling mode of evolutionary history as unscientific more than thirty years ago.53

Pro-Darwinist reports appearing so frequently in the evolutionist media consist of conjecture and propaganda. These reports are written to conceal the fact that Darwinism has been defeated.

These persistent reports about missing links aim to give the impression that simply making a discovery will confirm the hypothesis that one species develops into another. Yet excavations over the last century and more have left totally unfounded the expectations that intermediate forms between species would be discovered. The eminent palaeontologist A. S. Romer admitted this as far back as 1963:

"Links" are missing just where we most fervently desire them [to point to a transition between species] and it is all too probable that many "links" will continue to be missing.54

Paleontologists have kept their missing links on the "missing list." Yet their own admissions run contrary to the impression that certain media outlets seek to give. For example, Niles Eldredge, and Ian Tattersall lack the media's positive air of expectation:

One of the most pervasive myths in all of paleontology...is the myth that the evolutionary histories of living beings are essentially a matter of discovery. … But if this were really so, one could confidently expect that as more hominid fossils were found the story of human evolution would become clearer. Whereas if anything, the opposite has occurred.55

To sum up, the missing link is not a creature waiting to be discovered, but an idea that palaeontologists have long since abandoned, and which cannot be the subject of any truly scientific inquiry. Therefore, why is it the subject of so much insistent propaganda?

The answer to this question lies in the world-view espoused by the theory of evolution. Materialists and atheists have attempted to keep Darwin's theory alive ever since he first put it forward in the mid-19th century. Because although the theory is based on a completely imaginary scenario, materialists seized on it as a supposedly scientific hypothesis.

The evolutionist thinker Mary Midgley expresses this:

One important characteristic of the insects that appear suddenly in the fossil record, together with all their flawless structures, is their extraordinary flight techniques. These marvelous flying insects have had the same wing architecture since they were first created as they have today, 125 million years later. They have never undergone any evolution. This beetle that lived 125 million years ago was petrified in stone together with all its fine detail.

It [the theory of evolution] is, and cannot help being, also a powerful folk-tale about human origins. … Suggestions about how we were made and where we come from are bound to engage our imagination, to shape our views of what we now are, and so to affect our lives.56

At the end of his biology text book Life on Earth, the Darwinist biologist Edward O. Wilson makes this admission on the subject of evolutionist claims:

Every generation needs its own creation myths, and these are ours.57

"Missing link" propaganda is therefore a deception intended to keep the evolutionary myth about the origins alive and influential. Evolutionary propaganda is the most important vehicle materialists have for spreading their views. The concept of the "missing link" is key in terms of Darwin's fictitious idea of all species being traceable to common ancestors. Therefore, the more that evolutionists can keep their concept in the spotlight, the more support they hope to muster for their materialist views. That is behind all their efforts to distract the public from the collapse of Darwinism by means of "missing link" headlines.

Despite the evolutionist media's best endeavors, the fossils they describe are not missing links, and neither can anything about them confirm Darwin's theory. These "news" reports consist solely of unscientific speculation regarding newly discovered fossils of extinct species. Yet this unscientific propaganda will not alter the fact that evolutionist scientists themselves admit that there is no scientific basis to the concept of the missing link, nor is there any trace of intermediate forms in the fossil record. The reality that the fossil record reveals is that evolution never occurred.