Missing Link?

I recently stumbled upon this while perusing through MSNBC the other day. This fossil, known as Ida, was discovered and highly heralded initially as the famed "missing link" that links us, humans, to the other apes. There was a huge media storm, a Discovery feature, a book deal, things that generally follow a find of such a perceived magnitude, as recently witness following the discovery of Ardi. Media blitzes like these are not rare, and people love to jump on the "missing link" bandwagon whenever something like this is found. That's all and good, I am glad that people are embracing the fossil record as something to be studied and be interested in. The problem that I have is with the fascination of this missing link. These missing links, also known as transitional fossils, don't really exist in great numbers. This has nothing to do with flaws in the theory of evolution, and the lack of their existence does not disprove anything, as some might have you believe. It's just that the problem with these media storms and the constant hammering of the misnomer "missing link" tend to insinuate that the only way we can prove the theory of evolution as accurate is to find these links between species that are so long sought after. Darwin himself commented on the lack of transitional forms in the record (a point creationist are always willing to bring up, but as the good scientist that Darwin was, he was not blind to his own inconsistencies):

"The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, (must) be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory."

The steady state of evolution was long popular, both before and after the inception if the field of genetics. This gradualism, as it became to be known, has its detractors, most notably the late Stephen Gould. Gould was a huge proponent of the newer, much more radical idea of punctuated equilibrium. It is this idea that has gained the most steam recently, and is starting to be backed up by genetics research. The evidence that is being found states that genetic mutation does not advance at a uniform speed. Conversely, species experience periods of stagnated evolution followed by a period of expedited mutation, leading to a greater rate of change of the species than would be normally observed. That being true, it would mean that a species tenure on this Earth would being fairly consistent. Throughout the fossil record we would see a species exist for a few million years and then see it exist no longer, which is exactly what we do see:

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear… 2. Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."

It is these trees that Gould is referencing:



That beautiful sinuous pattern on the left, the one that so amazingly looks like a stream system, in fact, does not exist. We do not have evidence for a tree to look like such, instead we have the evidence for the tree on the right. This step-wise pattern of evolution is looking to be more and more accurate as the fossil record is probed.

And I suppose that brings me to my last point... the fossil record itself. If you want to keep something for posterity, fossilization is not the way to do it. It is horribly inconsistent, as one would expect of a process that more or less requires a body to stay intact long enough for all of the calcium in the bones to be replaced silicate minerals. Not an easy feat to say the least. Then the layer that the specimen is fossilized within needs to be preserved til the present, i.e. no erosion of the layer, thereby losing the layer altogether. Finally, the specimen needs to be at the surface and visible so someone can stumble upon it. Honestly, not the easiest thing in the world. I don't know the numbers, unfortunately, and I can't seem to find them, but the percentage of species that have ever lived that are actually fossilized in the record somewhere is horribly low.

Alright, it seems that I have deviated from my point somewhere along the line, whatever it was to begin with, I may never know. These transitional species truly are astonishing when they are found, we have the fossil evidence for the reptile to bird transition in archaeopteryx, from water dweller to amphibian in tiktaalik, and from land dweller to whale in ambulocetus, amongst many others. It is these creatures that we should be fascinated with. They are the ones that made the giant leaps in evolutionary history, and our planet would look much different if these species never advanced towards the land, or air, or back to the sea again. Humans, or something like them, have roamed this Earth for about 300,000 years, a drop in the bucket of the history of this planet.

I suppose what really has been grinding my gears lately is just our constant pursuit of what lead to us, why are we what we are, what came before. So much time is spent on finding our direct ancestor, the species just before. There are 550 million years of macrobiologic history on this planet, why are we so fascinated my the last half a million years when there is so much more out there to be explored?