"Ah, the Gap Game! And if we start discovering fossils to fill the platypus gap (as has happened in recent decades with the once-touted whale gap and the bird gap), then you go to the bat gap or whatever else is left. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Especially when we have a lot of examples now of the general principle (and we've filled a lot of gaps already)." - VadeRetro
No, not the gap game. I simply asked you to substantiate the wild-eyed claim that you made that Intelligent Design NEVER introduced big new design changes.
There is one mammal, and only one mamal, in all of history that is poisonous. Intelligent Design can explain it with ease. Can Evolutionary Theory explain that animal?
You didn't even try to explain it. Perhaps that's because you can't...
The monotremes branch off before mammals invented live birth. This has to do with the separation of Australia from the rest of Gondwonaland . . .
Well, why am I telling this?
The Natural History of the Monotremes.
Your main point is that a lack of record is a lack of history. Wrong. Even if you don't know who your Daddy is, you had one.
What does this disingenuous protest mean?
We didn't used to know much about the history of whales. Duane Gish was still in 1994 quoting some guy named Colbert as follows:
Speaking of whales, Colbert said, "These mammals must have had an ancient origin, for no intermediate forms are apparent in the fossil record between the whales and the ancestral Cretaceous placentals. Like the bats, the whales (using the term in a general and inclusive sense) appear suddenly in early Tertiary times, fully adapted by profound modifications of the basic mammalian structure for a highly specialized mode of life. Indeed, the whales are even more isolated with relation to other mammals than the bats; they stand quite alone."You have to follow a footnote pointer to get to the following:
[3] E. H. Colbert, Evolution of the Vertebrates, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1955, p. 303.Do you see the problem? In the same article, Gish tries to undermine all the new whale finds from the Tethys Sea sediments in Pakistan and India. (Ambulocetus, Pakicetus, etc.) It's clearly dishonest, but never mind that.
The gradual transition happened. Nothing sprang from nothing. We just didn't have the evidence for many decades. You have to look in the right place, assuming it even fossilized.
You're simply lawyering on the lack of evidence. Don't forget to change your tune if it turns up; you wouldn't want to look like Gish.
In all of history?! That's a long time. How do you know?