[allmendream]

“why the archeological record only seems to contain successful mutations. Of course, there's more of the successful mutations over the years. But shouldn't there also be billions of unsuccessful mutations in nearly every generation of every species?” Ramius

Only ‘one in a million’ animals is ever fossilized and preserved. Only ‘one in a million’ animals are born with substantial morphological changes that would be obvious by looking at the preserved skeleton. So the fossil you are looking for is one in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. And would you know it if you saw it?

According to some creationists every Neanderthal fossil was a diseased and deformed human.

It isn't Science that supposes that we will find a bunch of mutated monstrosities in the fossil record. We are lucky to find healthy intact specimens who fell down some crack or got buried in a landslide or fell in a peat bog or something; we have found a lot of good fossils, but a gazillion?

[allmendream]

bad math alert. still only one in a million. but most major mutations would never live long enough to die in a way that they would be fossilized. Evolution doesn’t take place by ‘hopeful monsters’ anyway, the link in a chain of being would be only slightly smaller, slightly more streamlined, a specialized tooth slightly smaller and more general use, etc, etc. As such it would be hard to recognize an outlier as not being indicative of an entire species. Time for rest.