Darwin for one:
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree possible. (Darwin, Origin of Species, 155.)
"Firstly, why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined? (Darwin, Origin of Species, 143.)
"Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory." (Ibid., 230)
"Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed." (Ibid., 149)
The late Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University:
"The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Statis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear… 2. Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'. 6 The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils." (Gould, "Evolution's Erratic Pace," Natural History, Vol. 5, 1977)
Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum and editor of a prestigious scientific journal:
"..I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualize such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader? I wrote the text of my book four years ago. If I were to write it now, I think the book would be rather different. Gradualism is a concept I believe in, not just because of Darwin's authority, but because my understanding of genetics seems to demand it. Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a paleontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least "show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived." I will lay it on the line - there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument." (Colin Patterson, personal communication. Luther Sunderland, Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems, 4th edition, 1988, 88-90.)
David B. Kitts. PhD (Zoology) is Head Curator of the Department of Geology at the Stoval Museum. In an evolutionary trade journal, he wrote:
"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of "seeing" evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of "gaps" in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them" (Evolution, vol. 28, 467.)
N. Heribert Nilsson, a famous botanist, evolutionist and professor at Lund University in Sweden:
"My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed… The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled." (Nilsson quoted in The Earth Before Man, p. 51.)
In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions… these have not been found -- yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks. (David M. Raup, "Evolution and the Fossil Record," Science, vol. 213, July 1981, 289)
Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are filled with over 100 million fossils of 250,000 different species. The availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What is the picture which the fossils have given us?… The gaps between major groups of organisms have been growing even wider and more undeniable. They can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection of the fossil record. (Luther D. Sutherland, Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems, 4th edition, Master Books, 1988, 9.)
And there are many many more.
[snip quote mines]
So, Darwin earnestly considering the questions his theory brings up, questions he answers later on, is a statement of Darwin's putative belief that he should abandon the ToE? You really ought to read the book rather than regurgipost drivel from creationist sites that you believe will back up your claim. Darwin contemplated these questions not because he questioned his theory but because they were valid questions that needed answering, which he did in a later chapter.
"The late Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University:
Again you mistake contemplation of valid questions about the ToE for the author's consideration of abandonment of the theory. You are assuming that questions about the theory equate to abandonment. That is bad logic and nonsensical. In this case, Gould was questioning the consistency of the rate of evolutionary change and postulated that the rate of change could be inconsistent. His hypothesis has since been incorporated into the ToE because it fits observations and does not falsify adaptation.
"Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum and editor of a prestigious scientific journal:"
Now you have turned to another discussion of the necessity of gradualness in evolution. The question of transitionals raised by both Gould and Patterson, and explained quite convincingly by Gould, is in regards to the sparseness of intermediate species level fossils. Species as defined by science, not creationists. In other words, fossils that would be separated by a few tens of thousands of years. The transitional fossil sequences we have are millions of years apart and show a consistent and morphologically gradual change between taxonomic levels much farther apart than species - which is the lowest taxon of importance in these discussions.
The rest of your quotes I do not know enough about to rebut, but a number look to be based on the absence of continual intra-species fossils, something, that because of the difficulty in recovering fossils that are from short-lived organisms, are unlikely to be found.
Creationists are fond of basing their doubt of abiogenesis on probability, perhaps you could perform the probability calculations on the likelyhood of finding 3 or 4 directly connected sequential fossils at the species level. Don't forget to include the number of species possible in 500 million years, the geologic upheaval from tectonics, difficulty in the preservation of bones, weathering of exposed fossils, dispersion of both bones and fossils by erosion, the percentage of earth searched for fossils - don't forget the depth of the strata, and any other condition likely to bear on our recovery of a specific fossil.
When you have finished the calculations, please post them. I would be very interested in the calculations themselves as well as the result.
I find it interesting that only one evolutionist bothered to reply to your most detailed post; and it wasn't very coherent.
Seems to me that if you were wrong in your citations of Darwin, Gould, and others; they would have pointed it out.