Is the evolution story really scientific?

[OooSnap]

Some have brought up the fossil record as empirical evidence for evolution. Maybe the op wasn't clear about asking for empirical evidence of evolution while it is occurring.

Even still evolution proponents who study the fossil record have admitted it doesn't support the evolution story.

+Philip Turnbull​ Well, I'll just go ahead and warm you with some quotes:

"The point emerges that if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find' over and over again' not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another."
Paleontologist, Derek V. Ager

"A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth's geological formations. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin's hypothetical intermediate variants - instead species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God."
Paleontologist, Mark Czarnecki

"There is no need to apologize any longer for the poverty of the fossil record. In some ways, it has become almost unmanageably rich and discovery is outpacing integration. The fossil record nevertheless continues to be composed mainly of gaps."
Professor of paleontology - Glasgow University, T. Neville George

"Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them."
David Kitts - Paleontologist

"The long-term stasis, following a geologically abrupt origin, of most fossil morphospecies, has always been recognized by professional paleontologists" –
Stephen Jay Gould - Harvard

"The sweep of anatomical diversity reached a maximum right after the initial diversification of multicellular animals. The later history of life proceeded by elimination not expansion."
Stephen J. Gould, Harvard, Wonderful Life, 1989, p.46

"Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series." -
Ernst Mayr-Professor Emeritus, Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University

"What is missing are the many intermediate forms hypothesized by Darwin, and the continual divergence of major lineages into the morphospace between distinct adaptive types."
Robert L Carroll - Paleontologist