Even S.J. Gould has criticized Lyell for duplicity. Gould at the relevant time was an advocate of the evolution theory of punctuated equilibrium, which does not require that the fossil record should show the very slow and gradual evolutionary changes required by Darwin's gradualism. Gould wrote that Lyell
"imposed his imagination upon the evidence" and "pulled a consummate fast one,"
when he tried to slip in a substantive claim (which had not been proven) with a methodological statement that must be accepted by any scientist, uniformitarian or catastrophist. ,sup>26
Theistic evolutionists should surely be able to see from these facts that the theory of uniformity is not based upon any scientific observations, nor is it a testable scientific theory, but at its optimum it is no more than pseudoscience.
Faunal Succession. Uniformitarians claim that fossils of fauna appear in rocks in a definite and discernible chronological order and, therefore, older rocks will contain fossils of more primitive organisms than younger rocks.
In a textbook, Growth of a Prehistoric Time Scale, Professor W.B.N. Berry, when Professor of Paleontology and Vice Chairman of the Department of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote of Darwin's contribution to the growth of the time scale and showed the importance he attached to that contribution by giving his book the sub-title, Based on Organic Evolution. 27 Thus, according to this authority, faunal succession is nothing more than Darwinian evolution.
It is notorious that rocks are dated by uniformitarian geologists to accord with the evolutionary age of the fossils found in them and that the age of fossils found in rocks is determined by them according to the alleged age of the rocks in which they are found. Thus, faunal succession, as supposedly evidenced by the rocks, depends, amongst other things, upon circular reasoning. This is recognized by a number of evolutionist writers. 28
26 S.J. Gould, "Catastrophies and Steady State Earth," in Natural History (February 1975).
27 W.B.N. Berry, Growth of a Prehistoric Time Scale: Based on Organic Evolution (San Francisco, U.S.A., and Folkestone, Kent, England: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1968).
28 For example, evolutionist/paleontologist Niles Eldredge stated in Time Frames (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), p. 52: "And this poses something of a problem. If we date rocks by their fossils, how can we then turn around and talk about patterns of evolutionary change through time in the fossil record?" See also Tom Kemp, curator of the university museum at Oxford University, in "A Fresh Look at the Fossil Record," in New Scientist (5 December 1985), vol. 108, no. 1485; and R.H. Rastall of Cambridge University in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, vol. 10 (1956), p. 168.