That the fossil record shows something more than random evolution has frequently been suggested by proponents of so-called 'punctuated equilibrium'. The record shows a distinct set of patterns exhibiting the interplay of continuity and discontinuity. One of the most persistent criticisms of Darwin has always been that of the so-called gaps in this record. There can be no doubt that the record is incomplete, and that something suspicious lurks in the data Darwinists give for the theory of natural selection. Over and over we see the phenomenon of rapid emergence followed by relative stasis. The record of human evolution itself is ambiguous here. The fossil record isn't really homogenous, in the sense that random evolution should not show sudden changes in direction. Nonetheless considerable progress has been made here by paleontologists. And many of these supposed gaps have been filled, or, if not filled, given some inkling of a transitional something (e.g. dinosaurs with feathers, or the basilosaurus), so at least to a some degree the record is filling out, although this does not add one jot to the claims for natural selection. 

Here critics of Darwin have too often fallen into confusion themselves, because the whole idea of a 'gap' in the record suffers from misdefinition, if not incoherence. Fatal theological temptations induce hallucination here in many otherwise sincere minds aware of the problems of the fossil accounts. Although it is certainly true that the fossil record is very sparse, too sparse to maintain Darwinian certainties, it is not likely that one will find 'gaps' in the record. Some form of macromutation (i.e. a sudden change in developmental genes), for example, might well produce what looks like a gap. What is a gap? It is highly likely that there is a continuous sequence of organisms showing an unbroken lineage of bodily forms. That is not the same as saying that natural selection alone is at work. However, we have no conclusive grounds to extend this claim to the factor of consciousness, especially in the human case. A sudden change of consciousness, or its transformation as ‘self-consciousness’, can, as we see from the Axial Age, change the direction of history. But these critics have a point, and a refinement of the 'gaps' argument is easy to provide, hence the challenge to Darwin's theory remains in some form. Taken over all, without claiming gaps in the record, we should suspect that something is speeding up the process of evolution beyond the rate entailed by natural selection. 

Indeed, conventional Darwinians such as S. J. Gould upgraded this argument with the various claims for so-called 'punctuated equilibrium', which amounts to seeing that emergence is often very sudden, followed by a period of stasis where the rate of change is small, or nonexistent. Granting that such data is hard to interpret, the basic issue simply won't go away. These theories suffered from the inability to disassociate themselves from the fallacies of natural selection, as they attempted to have their cake and eat it too, by proposing various 'levels of selection'. But real evolution is altogether likely to be something different. And it might well 'punctuate', this being followed by some sort of 'equilibrium'. The issue is bound up in distinctions of microevolution and so-called macroevolution, or speciation. The existence of microevolutionary processes is not in doubt, but the elusive factor of macroevolution remains unclear. 

Those who propose this issue of 'gaps' in the record, then, are onto something, but need to consider that the fossil record is always going to be continuous in some sense. This does not preempt the possibility, not of 'gaps', but of some other evolutionary process that creates a real discontinuity in some definable sense on top of that continuity. Think in terms of acceleration, as artificial as physics logic might be applied to evolution. Acceleration is not a 'gaps' argument, and its discontinuous action is not in contradiction with continuous motion. To propose discontinuity as antithetical to continuity is logical in the abstract, but in this case leads to the hopeless quagmire of miraculous interventions of one kind of another in the creationist vein. We cannot say in advance what that kind of process it would be that generates this sense of discontinuity, but its existence is something that we must suspect based on the evidence that we have. The discovery of complex genetic components such as the developmental genes suggests one way of resolving the seeming paradox. But that is not enough. Consider the Axial Age again.

Gap argument in history As we move to study world history in light of the eonic effect, we will discover how tricky the question of 'gaps' really is. Considering the sudden compression or close packing of innovations in the Axial Age, in a finite interval, we have something that shows, not a gap, but historical continuity at all points, yet also shows a sudden speed up of development, and on a level that has no connection that we know of to genetics. This could be defined as 'discontinuity' but hardly a gap. That should leave us wary of pronouncements about deep time. Only close observation at the level of centuries suffices to discover what is going on. It is better to bypass the confused language of discontinuity and gaps, and think in terms of transitions. 

Remarkably, the perfect example of the discontinuity factor, and its elusive basis, lies in the attempt to resolve the mystery of the descent of man. There the (not very adequate) evidence of the so-called Great Explosion stands out as a mockery of the basic Darwinian claims. Something very sudden occurred in the emergence of man, or so it seems from the evidence. We should be wary here of inadequate evidence, and simply note that we are under no evidentiary obligation to accept Darwinian claims at the current level of demonstration. However, this example typifies the confusion Darwin critics often succumb to, because the evidence of some sudden crossing of a threshold for species man is not the same as man's speciation as such, nor is it incompatible with earlier continuous processes that may also have been crucial. Once again the question of two levels suggests its relevance. But, in any event, the descent of man is beset with the issue of continuity/discontinuity dead center in its data set. So much for Darwinian certainties here. They are based on a monopoly of public communication to drown out critics, and little more. The evidence for this Great Explosion, as a sudden transition, poor as it is, is at least on a par with Darwinian presumptions in advance they have explained it all via the nearly metaphysical projection backwards of selectionist theory. So the evolution of man shows the prime difficulty latent in all theories of the Darwinian type, if they can be called theories at all. The point is that Darwinists merely assert they have solved the issue of man's descent, when they most definitely have not.  

We might consider again the example of acceleration, and beyond that the definition of science in the case of biology. On the one hand, biologists wish to make evolutionary theory compatible with physics, and yet to do so they must fail to do what physicists do: build a science around a type of 'force'. This question was very clear in the eighteenth century, but the result was the emergence of vitalism, which was not up to the job of explanation. It is this search for the missing process that Darwinists find unacceptable, because there are no candidates for this in the thinking of reductionist science. It is nonetheless worth considering the force analogue, and then matching that to, say, the Axial Age phenomenon. Clearly natural selection operates through history, but the Axial period shows there is a ‘something like a force’ that suddenly drives the historical process in a new direction.

There is something peculiar about this limitation in the Darwin scheme, in the sense that any science is going to have a 'force' argument, this force is going to show itself in terms of its own action, archetypically 'acceleration', and this action will seemingly be short acting. Such language is heuristic and must be set aside as at best metaphor once we have real data to examine, but the point is that Darwinists constantly remind us of the right way to do science, even as they propose a science with no substance to it. This example of the missing 'force' uses the language of physics, but the basic issue must remain. Of course, we have already criticized the physicalism that created reductionist thinking, and there is no reason why biological evolution should conform to a force argument. But there is likely to be an analogue to a force argument in the sense of some intangible ‘principle of sufficient reason’. That is, any phenomenon is going to have an explanation of some kind. This is the oddity of Darwinism. The surrogate substitute of natural selection for a true ‘explanation’ of what drives evolution leaves it with a strange void at its core. The point is that Darwinism is quite anomalous as a 'science' in the sense that this process that actually 'does evolution' is missing, and the strong suspicion is always there that natural selection, however real in the survival struggles of organisms, is simply the microevolution we see in the absence of 'real evolution'. Darwinists become adamant here, or change the subject, but the sword of Damocles has always stood over Darwin's claims for this reason. It is like confusing Newton's first and second laws. We begin to suspect that the regime of natural selection too often perpetuates continuity, and is really the opposite of 'evolution'!