Creationists say, “If evolution happened, the fossil record should show continuous and gradual changes from the bottom to the top layers. Actually, many gaps or discontinuities appear throughout the fossil record.” 

One example they often use relates to the wonderful toad I witnessed yesterday.  Creationists say there is no evidence of a transition between fish and amphibian; the transition from sea to land.  Actually, in the 1970’s when creationists began aggressively using such arguments, there were legitimate gaps in the evolutionary record.  Since then, gaps have been closing up everywhere.  This year, I read Your Inner Fish, a popular new book by Neil Shubin, who leads a paleontology and genetics team that specializes in finding early forms of animals.  He is the man who discovered Tiktaalik, a kind of fish that crawled. 

In Your Inner Fish, Shubin writes,

But our new creature broke down the distinction between these two different kinds of animal.  Like a fish, it has scales on its back and fins with fin webbing.  But, like early land-living animals, it has a flat head and a neck.  And, when we look inside the fin, we see bones that correspond to the upper arm, the forearm, even parts of the wrist.  The joints are there, too: this is a fish with shoulder, elbow and wrist joints.  All inside a fin with webbing.

Pastor, there will always be gaps in the fossil record.   But the magic of evolutionary biology and paleontology is that we don’t need to dig everything up; we just need the framework.  Tiktaalik was found not by chance. Tiktaalik was found because Shubin knew such a creature must exist, based on the life forms before and beyond it, and because as a paleontologist, he knew how to find it.

Amphibians are in worldwide decline.  Many frog and toad species have already slipped from the Earth in our life-times.  And populations are crashing around the world.  Amphibians are likely only an indicator of what is to come for other organisms - they are the first to go. If you are right, and evolutionary biology is all a farce, none of this should matter.  But if the scientific community is right, we are about to lose the living embodiments of our earliest land ancestors.