‘Missing link’ misconceptions

‘Missing link’ misconceptions

By Dr Carl Wieland

What does the term ‘missing link’ mean? Is it helpful, or misleading? Do evolutionists need to find multiple fossils of both sexes to establish an evolutionary link? What about "minimum breeding sizes"? Dr. Wieland clears up these and others.

First, it is in any case a lay/journalistic term that has just ‘developed’ to have certain connotations. Some leading evolutionists themselves often decry others, including other evolutionists, for using the term ‘missing link’ in any case; and for a number of reasons.

One is that there are many links in a chain, so to imply that only one is missing means that once one is found between A and B, call it C, now there is a ‘missing link’ between A and C, and another between C and B.  Some leading evolutionists themselves often decry others, including other evolutionists, for using the term ‘missing link’.

In any case, what we are talking about is usually fossil evidence. And when such a fossil is found, even though it might only be one fossil, it is reasonable to assume that it represents a whole population. So just because a specimen is labeled e.g. ‘Java Man’, and might be hailed as the (or a) ‘missing link’, it would not be fair to evolutionists, really, to say that their use of the singular means that they believe or are implying that there was only the one, let alone only that gender; far from it. So I trust that you can see from this that the whole question raises about one male and female is, really, beside the point, as is the question of a minimum breeding population.