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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2004
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Claim CC216.2:

The fossil record does not show a gradual development from a small animal to the large modern horse. The horse family tree is not simple and direct; some scientists say Eohippus was not an ancestor of the modern horse; and the different types of fossils show stability, not gradual change.

Source:

Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, 1985. Life--How Did It Get Here? Brooklyn, NY, pp. 66-67.

Response:

  1. The fossil record does not show a gradual, linear progression from Hyracotherium (Eohippus) to Equus. Nor is there any reason to think it should. The fossil record of equids shows that various lineages split into several branches. Evolution was not smooth and gradual; traits evolved at different rates and occasionally reversed. Some species arose gradually, others suddenly. All of this is in accord with the messiness we expect from evolution and from biology in general.

  2. Some creationists consider all the species in the horse family to be the same "kind." They accept "microevolution" from Hyracotherium at the time of the Flood, to modern horses and donkeys first recorded less than four hundred years later (Wood and Cavanaugh 2003). This rate of change is far greater than biologists accept.

Links:

FLMNH, n.d. Fossil horses in hyperspace. http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/natsci/vertpaleo/fhc/fhc.htm

Hunt, Kathleen, 1995. Horse evolution. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/horse_evol.html

References:

  1. Wood, T. C. and D. P. Cavanaugh, 2003. An evaluation of lineages and trajectories as baraminological membership criteria. Occas. Papers of the BSG 2: 1-6. http://www.bryancore.org/bsg/opbsg/002.html

Further Reading:

Gould, Stephen J., 1991. Life's little joke. In: Bully for Brontosaurus, New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 168-181.
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created 2003-7-3, modified 2004-5-17