The Bible is the claim, not the evidence

[Tonus]

Mutation is random. Natural selection is not. Whoever taught you about evolution did a poor job.

That is how I was "taught" evolution by the JWs. My impression of the theory of evolution for a long time was that a mutation would appear (like a fully formed eyeball) and simply be carried over to each successive generation until you eventually had a new organism. So a lizard would be born with a beak, and successive generations would be born with beaks until there was one that was born with feathers, and they'd have beaks and feathers until one was born with its arms shaped into wings... and so on.

You can understand why such a person would wonder "why aren't there any transitional forms in the fossil record?" I think that many of them are waiting for the discovery of a fossil lizard with a beak, and of a fossil lizard with a beak and feathers, and so on. They cannot envision a scenario where evolution would occur aside from that. The "croco-duck" thing is a perfect example of that. There is this belief that evolution entails massive, wholesale changes on an unimaginable scale (such as a duck being born with a crocodile's head, or vice-versa) and that without those "transitional forms" evolution is simply bad science that shows just how desperate secular scientists are.

It's not that we believed that this could actually happen! On the contrary, it seemed as preposterous to us as it should to you. And we wondered how it was possible that people fell for such obvious silliness. The only possible explanation was that the desire to reject god simply overrode any sense of reasonableness. In other words, SATAN.

And then I learned how evolution really worked and... D'OH!!!