Very many discontinuities in the fossil record disprove neo-Darwinism

The many major discontinuities or "explosions" in the fossil record and the overall evolution of life on Earth disprove Neo-Darwinism.

Perhaps the most basic failure of Neo-Darwinism is the ubiquitous occurence from the origin of life through the entire fossil record including human evolution of many abrupt discontinuities where new innovative forms suddenly appear with none of the gradualist precursors predicted by Darwinism. The Cambrian Explosion is just one of many.

Gunter Bechly has just written a really excellent essay enumerating and going into detail on all of these "explosions" in the fossil record and before, at https://evolutionnews.org/2024/05/fossil...darwinism/ . His extensive summary gives a good idea of the great weight of this evidence. 

In order to defend their theory, ardent Darwinists have to somehow explain it.

Background: Leading orthodox neo-Darwinist evolutionary biologists have fully recognized evolutionary discontinuities as a major problem for their theory.

"Austrian scientist Prof. Gerd Müller held a very revealing keynote at the conference New Trends in Evolutionary Biology at the prestigious Royal Society in London in November 2016. In his keynote Professor Müller showed a slide that introduced five explanatory deficits of the Modern Synthesis, which is just a synonym for Neo-Darwinism. Among these five explanatory deficits, which Neo-Darwinism fails to explain, he listed phenotypic complexity, phenotypic novelty, and non-gradual forms of transition. If Neo-Darwinism cannot explain these crucial phenomena then it miserably fails as sufficient explanation for macroevolution in general."

The following is Bechly's list of the major evolutionary discontinuities that invalidate neo-Darwinism. As you can see, with 21 of them there is a lot of evidence here:

The Origin of Life (3.8 bya)
The Origin of Photosynthesis (3.8 bya)
The Avalon (Ediacaran) Explosion (575-565 mya)
The Cambrian Explosion (537-508 mya)
The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event / GOBE (485-460 mya)
The Silurio-Devonian Terrestrial Revolution (427-393 mya)
The Odontode Explosion (425-415 mya)
The Devonian Nekton Revolution (410-400 mya)
The Devonian Terrestrial Revolution (395 mya)
The Carboniferous Insect Explosion (325-314/307 mya)
The Triassic Tetrapod Radiation (251-240 mya)
The Early Triassic Marine Reptile Radiation (248-240 mya)
The Upper Triassic Dinosaur Explosion (234-232 mya)
The Mid Triassic Gliding / Flying Reptile Radiation (230-210 mya)
The Abominable Mystery of the Origin of Flowering Plants (130-115 mya)
The Upper Cretaceous Mosasaur Radiation (89-66 mya)
The Paleogene Big Bang of Modern Birds (65-55 mya)
The Paleogene Explosive Radiation of Placental Mammals (62-49 mya)
The Paleogene Butterfly Radiation (55-25 mya)
The Big Bang of the Genus Homo (2 mya)
The Upper Paleolithic Human Revolution (65-35 kya)

"Conclusion:
The gradualistic core predictions of any unguided evolutionary mechanisms such as neo-Darwinism are strongly contradicted by the empirical evidence. The cumulative conflicting evidence from molecular biology, genetics, population genetics, and the discontinuous fossil record can no longer be explained away as anomalies or as artifacts such as under-sampling of an incomplete fossil record. The total evidence is better explained with pulses of infusion of new information from outside of the system (top-down), rather than with a purely mechanistic stepwise bottom-up process. The only known cause in the universe that is able to produce significant amounts of new complex specified information is the activity of an intelligent conscious agent, so that intelligent design theory qualifies as superior alternative to unguided Darwinian evolution in an inference to the best explanation (abductive reasoning) among competing hypotheses. This is not an argument from ignorance (i.e., God of the gaps) as is often incorrectly claimed by critics, but is based on empirical data and our positive knowledge about the regular causal structure of the universe and the type of causes that exclusively are known to produce certain effects."

The many major discontinuities or "explosions" in the fossil record and the overall evolution of life on Earth disprove Neo-Darwinism.

I have lost count of how many times I strongly believed something was proven or disproven only to, at a later date after many more things were discovered, realize that I was wrong to be so certain.  I would have written your statement thus:

The many major apparent discontinuities or "explosions" in the fossil record and the overall evolution of life on Earth create questions concerning Neo-Darwinism.

I have lost count of how many times I strongly believed something was proven or disproven only to, at a later date after many more things were discovered, realize that I was wrong to be so certain.  I would have written your statement thus:

For credibility you'll have to substantially back up with evidence your implication that there are substantial arguments against the view that the presence of very many major abrupt discontinuities in the fossil record disprove the neo-Darwinism theory which fundamentally requires there to be a long series of intermediate forms leading up to any new configuration in an organism.