[An.American.Expatriate]

My use of the term "missing link" does not refer to the transitional form per se, instead to the traditional "where did we split from the apes" (which by definition would also be transitional I guess :-) ).

I concur that the fossil record can never be "complete" - which neither proves nor disproves the theory of evolution.

[Thatcherite]

Your question "where did we split from the apes" is slightly out, I think. Biologically we are apes so we haven't split from them at all. We are a particular species of erect large-brained ape which has evolved from our ape ancestors over the last couple of million years. It seems that in that period the environment and social behavior of our ancestors (and some cousins that eventually went extinct) were such that intelligence was being strongly selected for. So in a hundred-thousand generations (short by geological standards but unimaginably long by human standards) brain-size increased considerably. Such changes are a continuum over time. The fact that it is difficult to point at the moment when we became modern people even if we had a fossil from every generation is a prediction of evolution, because of the gradual nature of the change and because the very definition of species is hard to tie down when constant small changes are accumulating.