Even though evolution is Fact and Proven and True, evolutionary scientists somehow keep wanting to come up with a new idea to prove it, even resurrecting old ideas that have already been discredited, scientists like Olivia Judson, writing for the Times.  She writes about The Hopeful Monster Theory.

Anyone familiar with the problems of evolution should know the phrase “hopeful monster,” coined in the 1930s as a way to explain how evolution might happen instantly, rather than gradually.  The idea here is that for most complicated genetic changes to occur in a creature, the creature needs to have billions of mutations, all occuring in his favor.  What ends up happening is that evolution produces lots of hopeless monsters and only a few hopeful ones that go on to live and reproduce.  The problem here is that we’ve never found the billions and billions of fossils in the ground that would show these billions of hopeful and hopeless monsters.  This is one of my favorite arguments against evolution. 

Here’s how it works: to get from, oh, a fish to a mammal – say a catfish to a cat – we need billions of changes over many generations.  I mean, so many changes that one out of a million might be good mutations, rather than bad.  All those mutations and changes over eons and ages should produce quite a lot of missing links, and that’s just for one type of fish evolving into a single other type of mammal.  So when the Omniscient Narrator on the Discovery Channel says, “We may have found the missing link,” he’s lying to you.  He’s really looking for millions and billions of missing links between every known creature and every other one.  And we haven’t found any.  Any.  At all.  Oh, we found old fishes with flippers that looked like fingers, and old birds with scaly skin like dinosaurs, but science always eventually determines that these creatures belong to this or that species and aren’t, in fact, linking anything to anything.