Origin of Species is a deeply defensive book

"Origin of Species is a deeply defensive book , written by a man who had quietly listened for years to other scientists scoff at evolution, and had imagined them scoffing at him as well . He addressed their objections one by one. If old species gradually turned into new species, then why were animals so distinct from one another? Darwin’s answer was that competition between two similar species would tend to drive one of them extinct , so that the animals alive today would be only a scattered selection of all the species that had ever lived.

But shouldn’t we be able to see these intermediate forms as fossils? Darwin reminded his readers that fossils, by their nature, could provide only a few fragments of life’s history. In order to become a fossil , a carcass had to be properly buried in sediment , turned to rock , and then avoid destruction by volcanoes or earthquakes or erosion. Those chances are abysmally low, and so a species, which once included millions of individual animals, might be known from a single fossil . Gaps in the fossil record shouldn’t be a surprise – they should be the rule. “The crust of the earth is a vast museum, ” Darwin wrote, “but the natural collections have been made only at intervals of time immensely remote. ”"