We often hear: "We have fossils, the proof is there."

Henry Gee, palaeontologist, former editor-in-chief of the renowned scientific journal Nature and defender of evolutionary theory, acknowledges that fossils are static objects. They say nothing by themselves.

He says: "The time intervals separating fossils are so vast that nothing certain can be affirmed about their possible ancestral connection."

Stephen Jay Gould, another reference in the field, also emphasized that the majority of fossils show above all the stability, or sudden appearance, of species.

Why?

• the fossilization process is extremely rare.
• The majority of species that have existed left no trace.
• And above all, we interpret after the fact.

And when fossils are found, they are bones, teeth, footprints.

What we see are forms. What we imagine is an evolutionary link.

But this link is constructed from conceptual frameworks, like that of neo-Darwinism, and is not demonstrated by the fossils themselves.

A striking example is the Cambrian explosion, where numerous species appear suddenly in the fossil record, without visible transitional forms.

And worse still, Darwin himself claimed that his theory rested on gradualism, and that if this were not the case, his theory would not be valid.

Yet fossils continue to be presented to us as the ultimate proof. In the laboratories, however, the debate has largely shifted to the terrain of DNA.

But even there, nothing is simple. Neo-Darwinism tends to see DNA as a central program that dictates everything (the Brain). Other approaches consider it more as a toolkit (a database), which the cell uses in a far more complex way than previously imagined.