Charles Darwin presents a number of relatively solid arguments to attempt to provide evidence for his theories of natural selection and evolution. The first of the arguments he provides is that the change in organisms takes place over a large span of time. On page 485 he states that “we have reason to believe that only a few species are undergoing change at any one period; and all changes are slowly effected,” (Darwin 485). This provides for the lack of immediate observation of plants or creatures evolving or developing new systems while being watched, or over our course of observation. Next, he states that fossil records may not be the best counter to the theory of evolution, claiming that “the geological record is far more imperfect than most geologists believe,” (Darwin 486) as a result of not all plant and animal matter being accounted for in the fossil layers. Additionally, Darwin brings up the point that we have great amounts of scientifically accepted evidence that the land masses on Earth have undergone significant change over time, and there is no reason to expect that natural beings would not covary with these happenings.
I find Darwin’s arguments that natural selection and evolution occur over extended amounts of time and that the fossil record is not perfectly indicative of all of the life forms to have existed in history to be the most convincing points. Like many natural processes, major changes often do not take place overnight, and are very slow actions. It is not reasonable to believe that fish would develop lungs that could process air and legs to walk on land or that early hominids would be able to develop all of the capacities of normal humans in a matter of months, but it is perfectly reasonable to envision this happening over tens or hundreds of thousands of years as an animal adapts to its surroundings and competition. Furthermore, the fossil records containing historical plants and animals cannot hope to contain every example of beings from a certain time, and people cannot possibly hope to extract every example of creatures from the geological record. Because of this, it is very difficult to say that every evolutionary advancement will be represented in fossil records.