Top-Name Evolutionist Sounds Like Creationist

For the last couple of hundred years, Evolutionists have been insisting that Evolution is supported by vast amounts of evidence, particularly from the fossil record.

In contrast, Creationists have been claiming that the fossil record (and real life) does not show this slow, gradual change from simple life-forms to complex life-forms, but rather that it shows groupings of different types of animals (cat types and dog types and horse types and dinosaur types, etc) without any linkage between these different types of groupings (which is also the Biblical claim).

In other words, you can see variation-on-a-theme within a type -- in the horse group you can find big horses, little horses, horses with three toes, horses with one toe, zebras, donkeys, etc -- but you never see this variation stretched on out beyond the horse-type connecting it to some other type such as a cow.

Now a big name in evolutionist circles, ...

Eugene Koonin of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, has written a devastating critique of traditional Darwinism in an open-source journal, Biology Direct[reference footnote provided in original]. Koonin, an evolutionist himself, basically said that all major life forms, with all their complexity, appear suddenly in the record without intermediate forms, and this fact can no longer be denied.

Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin’s original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution. The cases in point include the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla. In each of these pivotal nexuses in life’s history, the principal “types” seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate “grades” or intermediate forms between different types are detectable.

(from http://creationsafaris.com/crev200710.htm#20071008a, emphases have been removed)

In other words, this evolutionist says the exact same thing that Creationists have been saying all along -- "No intermediate 'grades' or intermediate forms between different types are detectable".

The web-boards are lit up with conversation about this, but the evolutionists have to tread softly because, as mentioned, Koonin is a big name. As Robert Crowther writes over at EvolutionNews,

Koonin is widely regarded and is certainly at the center of the scientific establishment. So it is no surprise that the orthodox Darwinian priesthood were careful in denouncing his heresy.

Evolution may be popular; it may be career-killing to question it (and it is); it may be what society regards as "Science"; but according to the paleontologist (fossil scientist) experts (the late Stephen J. Gould, essentially said the same thing 20 years ago, as did Niles Eldridge), it's not supported by the fossil record.