How do fossils provide evidence of a common ancestor?
1 Answer
Jun 19, 2017
Actually the fossils do not provide evidence of a common ancestor.
Explanation:
Stephen Jay Gould in Natural History vol 86 1977 talking about the fossil record and the evidence says " The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches, the rest is inference however reasonable, not the evidence of the fossils.
The idea of a common ancestor is a philosophically based inference or extrapolation of the fossil record. As Gould says it is a reasonable inference based on common assumptions and a naturalistic philosophy. However the conclusion is not supported by actual fossil evidence.
