Yes! The devil really is in the details, billions of ancestors, hundreds of fossils. A lot of intermediate forms simply weren’t preserved. Some had some slight edge, or just the luck, to pass on their genes.
I don’t favor the hopeful monster theory, we’re all hopeful monsters!
What little we can glean from the fossil record seems to say that punctuated equilibrium rules not the day, but the aeon. Vast stretches of time pass with little changes in species. Then there is a burst of diversity.
To me this makes sense, most of the time the environment is stable, and there is no need to adapt to an environment you’re already well adapted to.
Then something changes, sea level drops enough to expose a dry path between continents allowing the mutual invasions of critters from one land mass to another, a meteor hits, volcanoes erupt, ice sheets grow, or?
Now the old rules don’t apply. Some populations have enough diversity to allow better adapted members to survive and further adapt.
Some don’t.
All of mine did...
This is not my field at all, but of course the skeptics would say that PE is a very convenient way of rationalizing away the distinct lack of transitional forms in the fossil record.
You raise an interesting point though with respect to environmental stability. It would seem logical that if some researcher could convincingly prove a direct relation between sudden or extreme environmental change and the periods when the "equilibrium" is "punctuated", then they might be "cooking with oil" on the likely validity of PE.
Has such a correspondence ever been demonstrated? Your comments seemed to imply that it hasn't. If so, then the skeptics still have some good points to make about the lack of transitional fossils.
That's just my "agnostic" layman's view (in these fields) of the current debate regarding PE...
Punkt Eek!
So did mine.
...so far...