The short answer is one change, that itself is profound, that opens up a wide untapped evolutionary space for evolutionary exploration. Which is precisely what occurred in the Cambrian.
In a billion years you could say something similarly outrageous about humans, tool use, and thinking creatures. Billions of years of the same sort of self centered instinct driven organisms then (from their future perspective) boom, suddenly mammals, pack animals, social creatures, thinking, tool using. In the snap of a finger there are cities and technology, and a single species dominating the globe. Where's the fossil record of where it all came from? It was all reptiles and birds and fish and then in a blink of an eye suddenly spacefaring self aware social creatures with huge extremely well developed brains.
You're not going to find a ten thousand year fossil record buried in all that. So that's 'not evolution', there was no gradual process. That has to therefore be intelligent design. Someone snapped their fingers and put them there like that with purpose and intention. And we are nothing special compared to what sparked the Cambrian!
The Cambrian was a paradigm shift of proportions I'd argue even greater than cyano bacteria. You went from at most colonies of the same, or collaborative single cells banding together to share divergent function, to the game charger: A single cell containing all the regulatory capacity to differentiate. If it was at the top of the colony it produced more chloroplasts, if at the sides it produced defenses against invaders, if at the bottom it produced more flagellum.
This wasn't a game changer just because it made the perfectly optimized colony, but because it was the development of a toolset that made the previously impossible, possible. Proper multicellular organisms. The world had never seen a tail before, but now you could. Light sensitive patches in a cell could detect light and shadow, but now 'eye' cells could cluster together, they could bend inward the way multicellular structures can and cell membranes can't to create cups and then pinholes, and sight as we better know it. You could become large, too large for anything single celled to predate upon.
All thanks to unlocking regulatory processes that allowed for cellular differentialization!
And because all this was new, because there was no competition in these spaces to restrict, and because so much was such low hanging evolutionary fruit, it happened very quickly. A complex nervous system takes time, but a simple one doesn't. Legs are quite difficult actually, but neither a tail's construction or it's use is hard. And because there is no apex creature out there to constrain, evolution can try a thousand different suboptimal variations as it fills out and explores the world's diverse niches. You can get there fast, in an assortment of combinations because you don't have to build the perfect combination like we do today, any tail is an advantage. Any eye, any system to anchor yourself to the sea bed, or grasp, or bite, the bar is so low and the rewards so immense.
Today we have things largely figured out, back then they hadn't. You could have the perfect eye but not figured out locomotion yet, while some long distant cousin had perfected locomotion but not vision - so neither had an aggregate advantage. Both competed relatively equally for the same niche, so two version (or three, or thirteen) could co-exist where today one would compete out the rest. Because this ends up being the case across so many additional dimensions, invertebrates, vertebrates, exoskeletons, fins, gills, pinchers and teeth and mouths, digestive, circulatory, and nervous systems -- so many early and unperfected systems unique to life as a multicellular organism that you end up with insane diversity. Because each of these dimensions was one where you could advantage yourself in a way to compete against the others that were further along a different path in another.
Today we have less comparative diversity because there is largely a right way to do all these things, learned back in the days of the Cambrian. We can't have a predator with shitty vision that makes up for it with great locomotion, because we have predators with both that will out compete it. When organisms first burst onto the scene, everything low hanging was there to trial without cost of being punished because everything was new and advantage, until one species figured it all out, another down another path which figured things out in a different order could compete.
Measured against today, it was fast and diverse, but of course it was. Today isn't the benchmark. If you want to take the Savanah from the Lions, you can't just be a cheetah, or a hyena both serving a different niche - you have to be a straight up better lion. The Cambrian had dozens of new dimensions to advance and coexist in incompleteness along.
No transitional fossils just means it happened fast. Gradual, but fast. And it only takes one thing, just one new change to go from extremely simple life, to complex life - internal regulation. It's how a single embryo and a single sperm turn into a human being. It's the systems which allow our cells to query their environment and their neighbors and up regulate this protein, down regulate the expression of this gene, and become myocardial versus neural.
What the precise factor was that took basic regulation to the levels necessary for proper multicellular organisms is unknown but irrelevant - the advantage once that threshold is past is absurdly profound and invariably leads where we see it lead. And which ever cellular species that got there first was destined to be THE precursor to everything that would quickly follow.
I suppose the TLDR is: Who told you evolution is necessarily slow?
Tldr: Charles Darwin told me in The Origin of The Species. Gradual, by the very definition of the word, means slow. We gradually age. Rocks are gradually eroded by wind and water. A tree gradually matures from a seedling into a mature tree.
Something cannot be gradual and fast at the same time. That is a logical contradiction. It's like saying a square circle exists. The fact that you claim something can be gradual and fast at the same time is ridiculous, especially when talking about a process that by it's very nature takes thousands of generations to occur. Micro-evolution can happen rather quickly, but we are speaking about macro-evolution. You don't just evolve entire new body systems in the geological blink of an eye.
Also, the speed of the process would have no effect on the appearance of transitional fossils. If those transitional species actually existed they would die and leave fossils just like anything else. The speed at which they evolved wouldn't make them exempt from death or the fossilization process.
Once again, all the current evidence refutes the theory of gradual evolution and points strongly and convincingly towards purposeful design by a creator.
Gradual means incremental, and fast and slow are all relative. That which takes tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years is both slow or fast, gradual or rapid, entire based on it's context.
If your argument is Darwin is wrong because it isn't ALWAYS 'slow' then fine, no one cares. Darwin was wrong about a ton of things. Evolution isn't married to Darwin's description of it.
If those transitional species actually existed they would die and leave fossils just like anything else
It's a numbers game. If you're looking for something that existed in small relative numbers for a short period of time it's going to be overwhelmed by species that have established themselves in greater numbers in those same layers.
Transitional fossils are nice, but you're asking the impossible to demand those in an explosion. "Sure, we have transitional fossils for all sorts of other cases... but you don't have them for this that or the other things, checkmate" ... WRONG
all the current evidence refutes the theory of gradual evolution and points strongly and convincingly towards purposeful design by a creator.
That's an outright lie. There is zero evidence. Demanding x or else it must not be so isn't "evidence". Provide one piece of evidence that argues against evolution.
And that argument is a fine one, but it's no more a defense of evolution being fake, than water not being wet because god replaces your memory every time your interact with it.
At the end of the day you have to define reality in how it presents itself because the point is to be falsifiable and predictive. Evolution is, god creating the universe yesterday at 3pm isn't.
So while it's a fine semantic exercise it doesn't hold utility.
The short answer is one change, that itself is profound, that opens up a wide untapped evolutionary space for evolutionary exploration. Which is precisely what occurred in the Cambrian.
In a billion years you could say something similarly outrageous about humans, tool use, and thinking creatures. Billions of years of the same sort of self centered instinct driven organisms then (from their future perspective) boom, suddenly mammals, pack animals, social creatures, thinking, tool using. In the snap of a finger there are cities and technology, and a single species dominating the globe. Where's the fossil record of where it all came from? It was all reptiles and birds and fish and then in a blink of an eye suddenly spacefaring self aware social creatures with huge extremely well developed brains.
You're not going to find a ten thousand year fossil record buried in all that. So that's 'not evolution', there was no gradual process. That has to therefore be intelligent design. Someone snapped their fingers and put them there like that with purpose and intention. And we are nothing special compared to what sparked the Cambrian!
The Cambrian was a paradigm shift of proportions I'd argue even greater than cyano bacteria. You went from at most colonies of the same, or collaborative single cells banding together to share divergent function, to the game charger: A single cell containing all the regulatory capacity to differentiate. If it was at the top of the colony it produced more chloroplasts, if at the sides it produced defenses against invaders, if at the bottom it produced more flagellum.
This wasn't a game changer just because it made the perfectly optimized colony, but because it was the development of a toolset that made the previously impossible, possible. Proper multicellular organisms. The world had never seen a tail before, but now you could. Light sensitive patches in a cell could detect light and shadow, but now 'eye' cells could cluster together, they could bend inward the way multicellular structures can and cell membranes can't to create cups and then pinholes, and sight as we better know it. You could become large, too large for anything single celled to predate upon.
All thanks to unlocking regulatory processes that allowed for cellular differentialization!
And because all this was new, because there was no competition in these spaces to restrict, and because so much was such low hanging evolutionary fruit, it happened very quickly. A complex nervous system takes time, but a simple one doesn't. Legs are quite difficult actually, but neither a tail's construction or it's use is hard. And because there is no apex creature out there to constrain, evolution can try a thousand different suboptimal variations as it fills out and explores the world's diverse niches. You can get there fast, in an assortment of combinations because you don't have to build the perfect combination like we do today, any tail is an advantage. Any eye, any system to anchor yourself to the sea bed, or grasp, or bite, the bar is so low and the rewards so immense.
Today we have things largely figured out, back then they hadn't. You could have the perfect eye but not figured out locomotion yet, while some long distant cousin had perfected locomotion but not vision - so neither had an aggregate advantage. Both competed relatively equally for the same niche, so two version (or three, or thirteen) could co-exist where today one would compete out the rest. Because this ends up being the case across so many additional dimensions, invertebrates, vertebrates, exoskeletons, fins, gills, pinchers and teeth and mouths, digestive, circulatory, and nervous systems -- so many early and unperfected systems unique to life as a multicellular organism that you end up with insane diversity. Because each of these dimensions was one where you could advantage yourself in a way to compete against the others that were further along a different path in another.
Today we have less comparative diversity because there is largely a right way to do all these things, learned back in the days of the Cambrian. We can't have a predator with shitty vision that makes up for it with great locomotion, because we have predators with both that will out compete it. When organisms first burst onto the scene, everything low hanging was there to trial without cost of being punished because everything was new and advantage, until one species figured it all out, another down another path which figured things out in a different order could compete.
Measured against today, it was fast and diverse, but of course it was. Today isn't the benchmark. If you want to take the Savanah from the Lions, you can't just be a cheetah, or a hyena both serving a different niche - you have to be a straight up better lion. The Cambrian had dozens of new dimensions to advance and coexist in incompleteness along.
No transitional fossils just means it happened fast. Gradual, but fast. And it only takes one thing, just one new change to go from extremely simple life, to complex life - internal regulation. It's how a single embryo and a single sperm turn into a human being. It's the systems which allow our cells to query their environment and their neighbors and up regulate this protein, down regulate the expression of this gene, and become myocardial versus neural.
What the precise factor was that took basic regulation to the levels necessary for proper multicellular organisms is unknown but irrelevant - the advantage once that threshold is past is absurdly profound and invariably leads where we see it lead. And which ever cellular species that got there first was destined to be THE precursor to everything that would quickly follow.
I suppose the TLDR is: Who told you evolution is necessarily slow?
Tldr: Charles Darwin told me in The Origin of The Species. Gradual, by the very definition of the word, means slow. We gradually age. Rocks are gradually eroded by wind and water. A tree gradually matures from a seedling into a mature tree.
Something cannot be gradual and fast at the same time. That is a logical contradiction. It's like saying a square circle exists. The fact that you claim something can be gradual and fast at the same time is ridiculous, especially when talking about a process that by it's very nature takes thousands of generations to occur. Micro-evolution can happen rather quickly, but we are speaking about macro-evolution. You don't just evolve entire new body systems in the geological blink of an eye.
Also, the speed of the process would have no effect on the appearance of transitional fossils. If those transitional species actually existed they would die and leave fossils just like anything else. The speed at which they evolved wouldn't make them exempt from death or the fossilization process.
Once again, all the current evidence refutes the theory of gradual evolution and points strongly and convincingly towards purposeful design by a creator.
Gradual means incremental, and fast and slow are all relative. That which takes tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years is both slow or fast, gradual or rapid, entire based on it's context.
If your argument is Darwin is wrong because it isn't ALWAYS 'slow' then fine, no one cares. Darwin was wrong about a ton of things. Evolution isn't married to Darwin's description of it.
If those transitional species actually existed they would die and leave fossils just like anything else
It's a numbers game. If you're looking for something that existed in small relative numbers for a short period of time it's going to be overwhelmed by species that have established themselves in greater numbers in those same layers.
Transitional fossils are nice, but you're asking the impossible to demand those in an explosion. "Sure, we have transitional fossils for all sorts of other cases... but you don't have them for this that or the other things, checkmate" ... WRONG
That's an outright lie. There is zero evidence. Demanding x or else it must not be so isn't "evidence". Provide one piece of evidence that argues against evolution.
I think you would be better served to replace the term gradual with incremental.
A simple thought experiment I like to bring up with people:
Agree with incremental
And that argument is a fine one, but it's no more a defense of evolution being fake, than water not being wet because god replaces your memory every time your interact with it.
At the end of the day you have to define reality in how it presents itself because the point is to be falsifiable and predictive. Evolution is, god creating the universe yesterday at 3pm isn't.
So while it's a fine semantic exercise it doesn't hold utility.