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Colin Paterson, though one of the world's top experts on fossils and though he has studied evolution for over 20 years, has been seriously questioning it. He does still believe evolution, as far as I am aware. He has made comments shocking to other leading evolutionists. The following quote is a more recent quote of Paterson, taken from an article in the Sept. 1988 issue of Moody Monthy magazine. [LINK]

"For the last 18 months or so I've been kicking around non-evolutionary or even anti-evoluitonary ideas. For over 20 years I had thought I was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up and something had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for more than 20 years, and there was not one thing I knew about it. It's quite a shock to learn that one can be misled for so long.

For the last few weeks I've tried putting a simple question to various people and groups: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution? Any one thing ...that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said, 'I do know one thing--it ought not to be taught in high school.'"

"Thirdly, when they first appear the organisms are fully functional at their first appearance. Evolution implies that creatures would gradually change over time from one form of creature to another. This would lead to their being many many creatures that never made it and died because they had something wrong with them. They perhaps were not strong or fast enough or lacked something in their body that others of their kind had. These unfortunate mutant creatures that couldn't make it are known as transitional forms or intermediates. If evolution occurred, when we look at the fossils, from the old layers to the young layers, we should see living forms that were not fully functional early which then became able to survive better later on. We should see, for instance, fish gradually changing into amphibians, amphibians gradually changing into reptiles, single-celled organisms becoming larger multicelled creatures, and so on. This is not what scientists have found.

Because of the long periods of time required by evolution for the changes to take place, there should be many of these transitional forms fossilized and available for us to find and study. This brings us to the fourth important point--that there are no fossils of living things that are real transitional forms. This point is hotly contested by many evolutionist scientists. Some of this disagreement revolves around what exactly constitutes a transitional fossil. Also, science textbooks often have photos or drawings of creatures that are said to be transitional forms. There are certain misleading things about the way these examples are described in textbooks. Many of the top evolutionists know better than to claim there are known examples of these intermediates. But there is a strong desire to make the textbooks confidently support evolution in order to influence the values and beliefs of millions of students"