Argon
You make the same mistake as Darwin (though he did it deliberately) of opposing your argument to special creation, which (as I pointed out earlier in the thread) was not the subject of my post, nor of my comment, any more than it was the predominant biological theory or Darwin’s time…
The question was about using lack of evidence as a support for a theory, which is to me methodologically weak. Saltations (to use the transitions argument) don’t require “no transitions” but “far fewer transitions” than gradualism. Specifically, the 250,000 or so recorded fossil species is a number several orders of magnitude smaller than the number of species predicted to have existed under gradualism (1-4 billion), and the species discovered since Gould and Eldredge proposed punc. eek. have not changed that proportion significantly - it is still predominantly a picture of stasis and saltation. We still predominantly sample many examples of each taxon, across wide geographical areas, rather than individual examples of many gradated taxa.
To take a random example, Iguanodon is known from “large numbers” of specimens across Eurasia and North Africa, yet all of which are now considered to belong to just two species. The genus is indeed nested within a group of 6 genera called the Iguanodontidae, but despite the good fossil representation, “There is no consensus on the phylogeny of the group.”
Meanwhile, though, the work of those like Michael Benton has shown, by several different metrics, the essentially representative nature of the fossil record, which means that, at least, it is unsafe to assume the observed pattern to be a result of incompleteness of the fossil record.
Furthermore, of course, on gradualism’s assumptions we would have only have discovered around 1:4000 - 1:16000 species that have lived. That makes it not so much incomplete, as unlikely to reveal any reliable patterns of phylogenesis, which it clearly does.
So I feel justified in saying “sometimes there are transitions, but far more often there are not,” as evidence for the complexity of the evolutionary process, rather than treat the lack of fossils as evidence that they must have been there once.