Is the ‘missing link’ argument outdated?

Creationists who use the 'missing link' argument, ironically, assume beforehand that the change we see in the fossil record is driven by heredity. In fact, the fossil record is really just a reflection of the change in our biosphere over the past few billion years. Realistically, though, our view of the fossil record has changed dramatically since Darwin's day. I always use the image of those flip-movies I make for my kids on note pads: the Spy vs. Spy guys tossing a bomb back and forth, a pole vaulter, whatever. We 'see' motion through the quick succession of frames.In the old view (and for most contemporary creationists), the flip-movie of the fossil record has a species at the left of the page, and each page represents a very slight shift to the right. Over thousands of pages, the species finally make it to the right of the page (our modern species). The action should be smooth, the transitions seamless. Even if we only have ten percent of these pages, the changes should be easily reconstructed. Unfortunately, the fossil record does not reflect this: the vast majority of fossils don't reflect such perfectly gradual transitions from the previous species.The way we see the fossil record post-Gould is this: the species remains in the same spot at the left of the page for hundreds of pages, then there are ten or so pages where it shifts to the center. Then it stays in the center of the page for hundreds more pages, before shifting to the extreme right of the page in ten or so frames. Thereafter it remains at the right of the page. This makes for abrupt shifts when we flip the movie, and the quick transitions go by too quickly for our eyes. Now if we only have ten percent of the frames, the chances that we'll see any of those quick transitions is statistically slim.So the missing links are that way for a reason, and the criticism of the fossil record on that basis doesn't reflect well on the people who continue to raise the point.regards,
Esteban Hambre

I'm not a big Gould fan either. I think Daniel Dennett did a job on Gould's complaints against "panadaptationism" in the chapter of Darwin's Dangerous Idea dedicated to Gould's 'spandrels' essay. Anyone who likes a savage debate should be impressed by Dawkins's "Puncturing Punctuationism" chapter in The Blind Watchmaker, in which he disputes not the validity but rather the revolutionary nature of Gould's pet theory. It's true that Gould took credit for ideas that had been aired long before, overstated his case, and gave creationists a lot of fodder.However, Gould is to be praised for pointing out that our mistaken expectations concerning the fossil record are what fuels the "missing link" argument. As Ned asserted, even the statistical improbability of finding a fossil of one of the rare 'transition' species hasn't stopped paleontologists from doing so on several occasions. I'm no expert on human fossils, but it's hard to deny that there are precious few of them (especially compared to such groups as trilobites, which were Eldredge's specialty), certainly to be expected for a recent transition that took place over a mere few million years. Therefore, our evidence of human ancestry is based on the same fortuitous breaks to which Ned refers.regards,
Esteban Hambre