Recent research on the origin of the higher taxa confirms what paleontologists have known for decades. This situation is in fact true of most invertebrate orders during the remaining Phanerozoic as well. There are no chains of taxa leading gradually from an ancestral condition to the new ordinal body type. The origin of the phyla constitutes an even greater difficulty for Darwinian theory. The results of recent research have squeezed the explosion down to a few million years.
Darwinian evolution predicts the regular presence of transitional forms.
The fossil record reveals their regular absence. It also reveals a natural phenomenon which until recently was virtually ignored by paleontologists. That phenomenon is stasis. The tragedy of Darwinism is that it has impeded the progress of science by turning the attention of biologists and paleontologists away from the empirical data and distracting them from developing theories which explain the pervasive natural phenomenon of stasis. Darwinian Theory vs. the Fossil Record Darwinian theory attempts to explain the common ancestry of all species through the gradual transformation of major body plans.