Potentially there are four ways in which one might interpret the order of fossils over time:

(1) The most familiar is the interpretation pioneered by Charles Darwin – the idea that all life arose naturally by evolution:

This was not an interpretation of the fossil record as such, for in Darwin’s time the record was not well known and he based his theory on other evidence, such as variation amongst domestic dogs and pigeons. It was more a prediction. As knowledge increased, he predicted, the record would reveal a branching pattern, where organisms became gradually more diverse and complex, one form passing into the next by what he called a ‘finely graduated organic chain’. Gradualism was of the essence:

Natural selection acts only by the preservation and accumulation of small inherited modifications… If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

The Origin of Species, 1859.

Paradoxical though the suggestion was that chance could of itself produce exquisite design, Darwin wished the burden of proof to be on those who could not imagine a finely graduated series of forms meandering from, say, no eye at all to the complex eye of an octopus or eagle. Nonetheless, the ultimate test lay with the fossil record. The question was whether life actually had so evolved, not whether it could have.

The prospects were not good. As yet, fossils did not reveal any such pattern:

Why then is not every geological formation and every strata full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory.

But time, at the time, was on his side. One hundred and fifty years later, it is no longer on his side. The fossil record is well sampled and well known. Some lineages show gradual evolutionary change and others show jerky change, including a number of quite amazing transformations. But what palaeontologists have not been able to trace is a tree beginning with simple organisms in the sea and ending with an array of complex organisms on land. Organisms appear to have had multiple ancestries. An audacious and never very plausible idea has had ample opportunity to prove itself, and has not delivered.

(2) The diluvialist theory was popularised in 1961 by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris in their book The Genesis Flood. Their idea was that the entire sequence, from the lowermost fossiliferous strata to all but the uppermost strata, was laid down in the course of Noah’s Flood. They expected to be able to detect a pre-Flood surface (whether preserved, eroded or completely destroyed) that was overlain by catastrophic Flood deposits. All terrestrial animal fossils would be compatible with their having been transported from that surface.

However, this theory too is not borne out. From the moment fossils first appear, the geological record is stacked with living surfaces, both in marine and terrestrial settings, as is apparent from the reefs, animal tracks, burrows, droppings, nests and roots that are sometimes fossilised on or in them. Each such surface was a fresh colonisation and the whole succession clearly occupied a substantial length of time.

How, then, should one explain the sequence of fossils, seeing that, whatever diluvialists might say, there certainly are evolutionary lineages within the Phanerozoic sequence? If it is not a record of life gradually creating itself, nor a catastrophic record of organisms that perished in the Flood, two possibilities remain:

(3) The start of every new evolutionary lineage in the record represents a fresh act of creation – the view taken, for example, by 19th-century geologist Charles Lyell and 20th-century founder of ‘Reasons to Believe’, Hugh Ross. Commonly called ‘progressive creationism’, this is an attempt to explain the fossil record in the light of the Genesis account. Whenever it proves difficult to connect a new form of life to a form that went before, the inference is that God created the organism shortly before its appearance. The days of creation are interpreted as aeons hundreds of millions of years long, with numerous creative interventions occurring at different moments in the course of each day. To quote an expositor of Ross, ‘God may have supernaturally intervened millions, possibly even billions, of times throughout the history of the universe.’ As the total number of species ever to have existed does not exceed billions, this comes very close to the fixity of species concept.

The explanation infers creation from biological design, but the acts of creation are now spread across the whole of history, continually punctuating evolution, and have no chronological logic of their own. If (as sometimes happens) a new discovery pushes back the first appearance of a lineage by tens or hundreds of millions of years, God is assumed to have created the new form that much earlier. Indeed, in this view, the fossil record contradicts Genesis, since whole groups of organisms appear in an order different from the order in which Genesis presents them, notably marine animals before seed plants and trees. New species of marine animal continued to appear right through to the end of the fossil record. There was never a time when God rested.

It is also difficult to see how one should reconcile the creation of the Sun one aeon after photosynthesising plants and four aeons after the Earth. Reasons to Believe suggests that the Genesis passage should be re-translated. Others will see such contradictions as reasons not to believe, and as an indication that the six days of creation cannot be interpreted as six distinct time-divisions of Earth history. It would be surprising if they could. Creation ought to have occurred ‘in the beginning’, not episodically throughout history.

We therefore suggest that the facts are best accounted for by the following:

(4) The fossil sequence represents the recovery of marine and terrestrial populations after a cataclysm at the base of the geological record. The original landmass was destroyed by water rupturing it from below and asteroids pelting it from above. This is attested in the period called the Hadean, which has no record on Earth but is recorded elsewhere in the solar system. Dense impact craters on the Moon, Mercury and Mars show that all non-gaseous planets were completely resurfaced by the event.

Preserved Earth history begins immediately after the catastrophe, as magma surged towards the surface behind the released subterranean waters and renewed terrestrial crust. Conventional geology is increasingly describing the beginning in these terms. The geological record documents the planet’s gradual recovery, in conditions that were to remain unstable for thousands of years, adding layer after layer.

The Hadean cataclysm was not the only global catastrophe in Earth history, albeit the first and by far the most deadly. A second occurred at the end of the Permian period and a third, only slightly less devastating, at the end of the Cretaceous. These mark respectively the end of the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic eras. The macrofossil record is divided into the Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic precisely because of these catastrophes and the extinctions they caused. They had a profound effect on the history of life.

Thus at various points along the way (for there were also other, lesser extinction events) the recolonisation of the Earth was severely set back. At the end of the Permian, more than 90% of species are estimated to have gone extinct. The succeeding period was not merely a story of continuing recovery from the Hadean cataclysm but also of recovery from another ecological disaster that had only just happened. The Hadean provides the context and some of the explanation for these later events. The Earth has not always been as tranquil as in the last few thousand years when man, taking advantage of its quietness, has completed the recolonisation process and built cities on the Earth as if it would last forever.

See also:
Current theories don’t work
What fossils tell us