Bob Dutko and I Discuss Transitional Fossils

Bob Dutko is a smart guy, but he's got a tough task as a radio talk show host. He needs to be prepared for anything. Anybody can call him on a Friday and challenge him on anything. Obviously since a caller knows what he intends to talk about he can be fully prepared with facts and figures that Bob isn't intimately familiar with.

I think Bob makes up for this by talking over his callers and doing a little bit of filibustering, but I can hardly blame him because he is at a disadvantage. Even still he does usually give me a chance to express my question or challenge, so I do give him credit for that.

He's made many bold claims. One is that there are no transitional fossils. I was thinking about this claim, and how it is Bob can make it when obviously he doesn't know all the specimens available. It occurred to me that he can say it because nothing is a transitional fossil in Bob's world. No matter what you present to him he'll just say it's one of God's unique creatures now extinct, or it's a deformed existing animal. It will never be that the fossil descended from a different species and has since evolved into another species.

So I thought I'd give him a call, describe what I would consider a transitional fossil, concede that I know he won't see it the same way and will call it one of God's unique creatures, at which point I'd ask him to describe what would qualify as a transitional fossil in his mind. He can't describe one, because for him there is no such thing. Listen here.

I knew he wouldn't answer my question, and he didn't. Unfortunately I didn't get the question out early enough to press him on it because he jumped in and talked for long stretches, but it was still a pretty good call as far as I'm concerned.

He asserts that everything we see in the fossil record ought to appear transitional. I corrected him on this point and said in fact most of what we see should appear from our perspective as extinct, since most of the nodes on the evolutionary tree are dead ends. This is very difficult to explain for a young earth creationist. He just denied my claim, but my claim is certainly true. For proof see here and here.