Gradual change to a higher form is not what the fossil record reveals.
Non sequitur. Grapes still yield grapes; and thorns still yield thorns, never grapes. Variation is always within design parameters, never fundamentally changing its nature.
That’s true as far as it goes. However how do you get from dinosaurs to birds or fish to amphibians to reptiles to mammals. There are series of incremental changes involved and we have fossils to track these changes. These series of changes are often hurried up by extinction events but you shouldn’t expect a snake to become a deer or some other illogical out of species sudden change. A lizard will always begit a lizard but over time it may be a different type of lizard.