THE DARWIN PAPERS
VOLUME 1 NUMBER V
FOSSILS:
HISTORY
WRITTEN IN STONE
From The Nebulous Hypothesis:
A Study of the
Philosophical and
Historical Implications
of Darwinian Theory
© 1996 by James M. Foard
Editor and Publisher
James M. Foard.
The Darwin Papers may be freely Here at last we have hit on the cornerstone of Darwinian theory, the Fossil
Record. Now, perhaps we shall find the story of Darwin's magnificent
discoveries written in stone. The rocks speak, and should we not find in the
book of nature's past vast convincing arguments to validate Darwin's Theory of
Evolution? Let us examine the evidence. Ever since (and before) Darwin's time, evolutionists have repeatedly
insisted that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor as a
result of a purely natural process of adaption to changing circumstances.
Darwin wrote: "I believe that animals are descended from at most only four
or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number. Analogy would
lead me one step farther, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants are
descended from some one prototype."(1) "Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties,
linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have
existed; but the very process of natural selection constantly
tends, as has been so often remarked, to exterminate the parent-forms and the intermediate
links. Consequently evidence of their
former existence could be found only amongst fossil remains
which are preserved, as we shall attempt to show in a future chapter, in an
extremely imperfect and intermittent record." So in lieu of the existence of any present proof for evolution, Darwin said
that the only evidence of it would come from examining the fossil record. We
have also read in the previous chapter, by Darwin's own admission both to F.W.
Hutton and in his Origin itself, that he had never seen any real
evidence of evolution taking place at present, and we have read his rather
brutal reason as to why he saw no evidence of evolution occurring at
the present time. Yes, the record in stone is held to be the one incontrovertible testimony of
evolution. Nicholas Hotton lll, curator of fossil amphibians and reptiles at
the Smithsonian Museum, has stated: "In consequence, most living species do not in themselves show
recognizable evolutionary change. . . All
the evidence we have of the history of organic evolution is provided by the
fossil record." (2) Carl O. Dunbar, Professor Emeritus of Paleontology and Stratigraphy from
Yale University, said: "Although the comparative study of living animals and plants may give
very convincing circumstantial evidence, fossils
provide the only historical, documentary evidence Paleontologists, geologists, and evolutionists have what is known as the
"geologic column," which is a supposed historical sequence of rock
formations containing fossils that would tell of the early history and
formation of life on the earth. Thus if evolution did occur, one would expect to find a gradual series of
fossils embedded in the rocks, from simple "almost life" chemicals,
(of course there is no such thing as "almost life", an organism is
either living or it is not) to one-celled creatures, then two-celled creatures,
on and on with greater complexity until you have the sponges and algae, the
chordates and the trilobites and all of the invertebrates, then the vertebrates
appearing (animals with backbones), these last including fish, amphibians,
reptiles, and man. That is only the Animal Kingdom; there is still the Plant
Kingdom to be considered, with grapes and giant sequoia trees, carrots and
flowers, potatoes and lawn grass, all of which supposedly evolved from the same
common ancestor, according to evolutionists. Now let us find out what kind of evidence Darwin was able to produce from
the fossil record to show that evolution had occurred. The lowest level of fossiliferous
rock (rocks bearing fossils) was known as the Cambrian layer in Darwin's
time and was supposedly laid down some six hundred million years ago. Darwin wrote in his Origin, "Consequently if this theory be
true (evolution) it is indisputable that before the lowest
Cambrian stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably
far longer than, the whole interval from the Cambrian age to the present day;
and that during these vast periods the world swarmed with living
creatures."(4) Darwin stated here that if his theory
were true there should have been multiplied billions of living
creatures evolving who lived then for millions of years before the Cambrian era
on the earth. What evidence did Darwin provide for any of this? Darwin wrote immediately afterward: "To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest
periods prior to the Cambrian system I
can give no satisfactory answer . . . Nevertheless, the difficulty of assigning
any good reason for the absence of vast piles of strata rich in fossils beneath
the Cambrian system is very great." (5) Thus the fossil record of these necessary multitudes of living
creatures that the earth should have swarmed with were nowhere to be found,
and Darwin offered no explanation for this contradiction to his theory at
all! This shouldn't be so surprising after reading the title to this section
of his Origin, which was self explanatory: On
the Sudden Appearance of Groups of allied Species in the lowest known
Fossiliferous Strata. Darwin continued: "The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged
as a valid argument against the views here entertained." Further on from the very same section he wrote ". . . the sudden manner in which several groups of species first
appear in our European formations;-the almost entire absence, as at present known, of formations
rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian strata,-are all undoubtedly of the most
serious nature. We see this in the fact that the most eminent paleontologists,
namely Cuvier, Agassiz, Barrande, Pictet, Falconer, E. Forbes, &c., and all
our greatest geologists, as Lyell, Murchison, Sedgewick, &c., have
unanimously, often vehemently, maintained the immutability of species [in other words, species do not evolve]." (6) Darwin stated that many of the great scientists of his time held the fossil
record up as evidence against evolution, not for it. This is a very serious and important difficulty: we have two noted
paleontologists of the twentieth century informing us that the best
evidence for evolution are fossils; Darwin said that if his theory is
true then there must have been innumerable transitional links before the
Cambrian strata; and yet Darwin wrote that
there was no fossil evidence for these supposed multitudes of diverse forms of
life before the Cambrian era. All of the major phyla of life on earth today already existed in the
Cambrian layer and they appear suddenly with no evidence of any pre-existing
intermediate forms leading up to them! Moving on from the
Cambrian layer, did Darwin provide any evidence at all for
intermediate links as evidence for evolution in any of the strata of
the fossil record? Darwin wrote in his Origin: "So that the number of intermediate
and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been
inconceivably great. But assuredly, if this theory be true, such have lived
upon the earth." He wrote immediately after this in his Origin: "Independent of our not finding fossil remains of such
infinitely numerous connecting links”. (Origin, Chapter Ten: Imperfection
of Geol. Rec.) In the same section Darwin further confessed the lack of evidence for his
theory: “Why then is not every geological
formation and every strata full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly
does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this perhaps, is
the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory.” (7) By Darwin's own admission we discover that there
is a complete absence of any fossil evidence for evolution not only in the
pre-Cambrian layer, but throughout the entire geologic column. Darwin clearly revealed in his Origin that geology, the fossil
record, does not affirm any evidence of evolution occurring and Darwin
could give no answer to this objection either except to cite the imperfection
of the fossil record, hence the title of the chapter in his book. In yet another revealing section in his Origin, titled On the
Absence of Numerous Intermediate Varieties in any Single Formation, Darwin
wrote: "It should not be forgotten, that at the present day, with perfect
specimens for examination, two forms can seldom be connected by intermediate
varieties, and thus proved to be the same species, until many specimens are
collected from many places; and with fossil species this can rarely be done . . . What
geologic research has not revealed, is the former existence of infinitely
numerous gradations, as fine as existing varieties, connecting together nearly
all existing and extinct species . . . this has been repeatedly advanced as a
most serious objection against my views." (8) The only response that Darwin could muster was to embark upon a flight of
fancy to support his views: "It may be worthwhile to sum up the
foregoing remarks on the causes of the imperfection of the geologic record under
an imaginary illustration." (9) Once again, Darwin plainly admitted that he had no evidence from the fossil
record to lend credibility to his theory of evolution, that he had found no
transitional forms showing gradual stages of the evolutionary development of
life throughout long millennia! What manner do fossils appear then in the geologic strata? There is a section of his Origin titled On the Sudden Appearance
of whole groups of allied Species, where Darwin wrote: "The abrupt manner in which whole groups suddenly appear
in certain formations, has been urged by several palaeontologists-for
instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and Sedgewick (three of the greatest
palaeontologists of the last century)-as
a fatal objection to my theory. If numerous species, belonging to the same
genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be
fatal to my theory."(10) Darwin had to confess that all species
appeared fully developed and distinct whenever they were found as fossils, and
he had no evidence of any gradual evolution occurring for any life forms in the
fossil record, a fact contrary to his theory . Furthermore, the greatest geologists of
Darwin's day, and the greatest paleontologists of his day were unanimous in
stating that there was not one iota of evidence from the fossil record that
would lend support for his theory that evolution had ever occurred.
What was Darwin's answer to this? He was completely dumbfounded. His only
excuse for the absence of any intermediate links again was to cite the
imperfection of the geologic record, and he stated his belief that in the future
more fossils would be found to verify his theory. "But I do not pretend that I should ever have suspected how poor was
the record in the best preserved geological sections, had not the absence of
innumerable transitional links between species which lived at the commencement
and close of each formation, pressed so hardly on my theory."(11) Despite Darwin's excuse that the paleontology record was
"imperfect," we know that fossil hunting was going on at a tremendous
pace throughout the nineteenth century, there was an unprecedented level of
interest in geology and paleontology throughout the world, so this sounds not
unlike some of Darwin's other pathetic attempts to explain away the lack of any
real evidence to support his theory. Darwin even wrote in the Origin
of "the descriptions which we possess of the Silurian deposits over
immense territories in Russia and in North America."(12) Darwin further wrote: "I am convinced that nearly all our ancient formations, which are
throughout the greater part of their thickness rich in fossils, have thus been
formed in subsidence [formed under water]." (Origin, chapter Ten,
pp.156, Benton Pub.) Later on we will discuss the significance of Darwin's admission that most
fossils were formed under water, but for now it is sufficient to see that there
was no lack of fossil evidence even in Darwin's day. Still, paleontologists
have lost no time in trying make up for this defect since then, bones of
ancient animals have been unearthed with the greatest zeal and persistency ever
since, so has the situation changed at all? Have those numerous transitional links that Darwin said were essential if
his theory were to be true ever been found? W e have read where
Darwin and two noted scholars have stated that fossils were our best source for
evidence of evolution. In Darwin's day, by his own admission, there were no
numerous transitional links for evidence of evolution found in the fossil
record. Darwin’s’ excuse was the lack of research and he believed that with
time those missing links would be found. What has happened since then to bolster up the best hope for evolution? "Since Darwin's time the search for missing links in the fossil record
has continued on an ever-increasing scale. So vast has been the expansion of
paleontological activity over the past one hundred years that probably 99.9% of
all paleontological work has been carried out since 1860." Denton further wrote: "Despite the tremendous increase in geological activity in every corner
of the globe and despite the discovery of many strange and hitherto unknown
forms, the infinitude of connecting links has still not been discovered and the
fossil record is about as discontinuous as it was when Darwin was writing the
Origin. The intermediates have remained as elusive as ever and their absence
remains, a century later, one of the most striking characteristics of the fossil
record." (13) Thus the sudden abrupt appearances of entire classes of organisms appearing
in all levels of the fossil record since Darwin's time has remained the most
serious objection to his theory, something Darwin said should be fatal to his
ideas. Denton went on to say: "An enormous effort has been made over the past century to find missing
links in these rocks which might bridge the deep divisions in the animal
kingdom. Yet no links have ever been found and the relationships of
the major groups are as enigmatic today as one hundred years ago . . . As we
have seen, newly discovered hitherto unknown groups, whether living or
fossilized, invariably prove to be distinct and isolated and can in no way be
construed as connecting links in the sense required by evolution theory." Here are some more quotes from present day evolutionists, taken in context,
in other words these references express the honest opinions of these men: "One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has
become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin’s
predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record
simply shows that this prediction is wrong." Eldredge & Tattersall,
The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p45-46 "The old Darwinian view of evolution as a ladder of more and more
efficient forms leading up to the present is not borne out by the
evidence." N.D. Newell, Why Scientists believe in Evolution, 1984, p 10,
American Geological Institute pamphlet "Many fossils have been collected since 1859, tons of them, yet the
impact they have had on our understanding of the relationships between living
organisms is barely perceptible. _ In fact, I do not think it unfair to say
that fossils, or at least the transitional interpretation of fossils, have
clouded rather than clarified our attempts to reconstruct phylogeny" P.L.
Forey, Neontological Analysis Versus Palaeontological Stories, 1982, p 120-121 Indeed, what was the major dilemma in Darwin's day continues to be the major
closet secret among evolutionists today: The sudden, abrupt appearance of every
major phylum in the Cambrian period and the abrupt appearance of all other
forms of life as well, lending evidence that life did not evolve, but was
created: "the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years, are the
oldest in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many
of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear.
It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.
Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted
creationists"
Richard
Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1987, p 229 "One of the most difficult problems in evolutionary paleontology has
been the almost abrupt appearance of the major animal groups" A. G.
Fisher, Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, 1998, fossil section Steven Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard, wrote in
Natural History, Vol LXXXVI (6), June-July, 1977, "All paleontologists
know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate
forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt."(14) Senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History in London,
Dr. Colin Patterson, wrote a personal letter to Luther Sunderland, the late
aerospace engineer and author of the excellent book, Darwin's Enigma, dated
April 10, 1979, in which he said, ". . . I fully agree with your comments
on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I
knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them." (15) Phylogenic "trees" are used by evolutionists as props to lend
support to their theory that all life forms on earth descended from a common
ancestor. The Tree
of Life Project on the internet is a very popular representation of just
such a phylogenic tree. The illustration is meant to suggest that all of the
different species shown in the tree can be traced to a common ancestor, and the
branches are meant to illustrate the evolutionary history of our common
descent. What is not mentioned though is that all of the branches of the tree
both in the main illustration and in the linked secondary pages where the
phylogeny of organisms is supposedly represented don't exist in real life! "Ants use their mandibles for a diverse array of activities, and are
thus constrained by the need to have mandibles which can fulfill a number of
functions. Despite these constraints, ants have evolved a spectacular diversity
of mandible shapes." (Chris A.
Schmidt, ponerine@tolweb.org
IDP
Insect Science/Department of Entomology 410 Forbes Building, University of
Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721) Does it really make more sense to
state that ants "have evolved a spectacular diversity of mandible
shapes" instead of saying "ants were created with a spectacular diversity of mandible
shapes"? A conversation between an
evolutionist and a curious questioner might go something like this: Evolutionist: "We have all of
these different species of ants that evolved a spectacular diversity of
mandible shapes" Curious Onlooker: "But sir, how
do you know that they evolved"? Evolutionist: "Didn't you just
hear me? I said they evolved." Curious Onlooker: "But isn't it
possible they were created as ants from the very beginning by God instead of by
chance evolutionary processes from some unknown ancestor"? Evolutionist: I only deal with
science, not with blind faith. Keep your religion out of the classroom." There is a lot of fascinating
material on Mr. Schmidt's site on ants. As anyone can see, ant mandibles are
incredibly complex structures; ants would not be able to survive without
mandibles; a half formed ant mandible would have no survival value in some
mythical evolutionary sequence. How then did they evolve with no
pre-designed pattern? Well, they just showed up one day in ancient history,
they just stumbled onto the scene through evolution. Nature just spit them out,
purely by accident. To get a better idea of the absurdity of this happening through
blind evolution, imagine if you will a chicken with its head chopped off
running through a barnyard. Some chickens still run about in this manner after
they have been dispatched for plucking. Now, let us put a keyboard in the
barnyard connected to a very powerful computer. All the headless chicken has to
do is run over to the keyboard and with his feet key in a particular letter
code of, say 100,000 letters. It has to get it perfect for it to work. This
letter code would be sufficient for one single protein out of many hundreds of
thousands of different kinds of proteins that would go into the make-up of ant mandibles.
Of course, this protein all by itself would be useless unless there were
hundreds of other proteins keyed in along with it, at nearly the same time, so
that the ant mandible would be able to work well enough nearly on the first
try, otherwise the efficient process of natural selection would discard the
entire process. "Unfortunately the fossil record is
never that complete, and in no case can we follow such a transition species by
species. . . Nor do fossils provide us with much of a record of
breeding populations . . . Living animals are separated by reproductive
isolation [no present evidence of evolution], and fossil animals by the
incompleteness of the fossil record [reiterating Darwin's excuse for no past
evidence]. In fact, so sparse is the
fossil record, despite the tens of thousands of fossils that are stored and studied
in museums, that to get a complete picture of evolution is a little like trying
to reconstruct Gone with the Wind from the scraps on the cutting-room floor.
Although we may be able to deduce that the story takes place during the Civil
War, that it is told from a southern point of view, and that it is centered in
Atlanta, we might not be certain who the major characters are, let alone what
the relationship was between Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler." (Hotton,
pp. 42, ibid). It is rather ironic that this came from his book, titled The Evidence of
Evolution. Thus there still is an embarrassing lack of fossil evidence for evolution. Just as Darwin attempted to do over one hundred years ago, Hotton cited the
imperfection of the geologic record as an excuse for the absence of any
transitional forms found today as fossils, But just how numerous are fossils? Norman D. Newell, former curator of
Historical Geology and Fossil Invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural
History and Professor of Geology at Columbia University, said at the
Commemoration of the Centennial of the publication of The Origin of Species
in April, 1959: "One of the earliest discoveries about the paleontological record is
that fossils actually are more abundant in fossil-bearing rocks than might
be assumed from cursory inspection. In many cases it may be suspected that
even those forms represented in collections by a few specimens, or only one,
are numerous or abundant within the rocks. . . Strata considered to be only
sparsely fossiliferous as judged from superficial inspection actually may be
abundantly so. The degree to which this is true is clearly shown by methods of
mass collecting fossils, wherein a volume of fossiliferous clay or marl is dug
by hand shovel, or power machinery, washed with water, and sieved for fossils.
This method has long been used widely for microscopic fossils such as spores
and Foraminifers, but it also is coming into use for larger invertebrates and
bones and teeth of small vertebrates. The number of fossils thus obtained is
usually greater per unit volume of rock than per unit surface and fossils
collected in matrix have an advantage that they are damaged less frequently by
weathering than those found at the surface. Small fossils are incredibly
numerous in certain strata . . .Leidy once estimated a quarter of a million
Foraminifera in an ounce of marine sediment . . . Teichert (1956) has
undertaken an interesting estimate of the total number of fossil species of
animals and plants. . Taking twelve million (evolutionary) years as the average
longevity of a species, he concludes that the number of species of animals and
plants preserved in the rocks may reach a total of ten million. According to an
estimate made by Muller and Campbell (1954), about ninety-two thousand fossil
species of animals are now described . . . and I think that the plants would
bring the total to around one hundred thousand or only ten percent of
Teichert's estimate of the ultimate richness of the fossil record." Thus fossils turn up
just about anywhere you want to dig, enormous beds of fossils exist all over
the globe, and yet those transitional fossils necessary for documenting the
evolution of species that would lend validation to Darwin’s theory are still
missing! The fact that fossils exist at all should say something about the way that
they died, since Newell goes on to say, "Fossils may be destroyed
quickly by weathering . . . The process of sedimentation in many cases
complicates interpretation of the associations of fossils . . .The dead
remains of various forms may be transported from diverse habitats and deposited
together in association that do not reflect any single life environment. Under
these conditions there is much winnowing and sorting of organic remains by
size, shape, and effective specific gravity." So fossils found at different levels in the geologic column may not
necessarily mean that the ones laid down underneath those above represent older
fossils, they could have all been transported and buried by some natural
process at the same period of time. Massive tidal action from in-rushing water
would have laid them out in sequence according to specific gravity and buoyancy
(see Chapter Seven, Dinosaurs and the Flood of Noah). This would ruin the
imagined separation of the different parts of the geologic column by millions
of years, compressing it perhaps into only some few thousands of years. The well known carbon 14 method for
dating fossils does not yield reliable dates for anything older (by evolutionists
standards) than one hundred thousand years, thus for anything thought to have
lived more than a million years ago, such as the dinosaurs that were thought to
have lived from 200 million years ago to 65 million years ago, the carbon 14
method is useless. Potassium argon dating is used to date igneous rocks, while
fossils are found in sedimentary rocks, thus potassium argon is not used for
dating fossils either. How then are fossils dated? This may sound incredible,
but fossils are dated by the sedimentary rocks that they are found in, while
the sedimentary rocks that they are found in are dated by the fossils that are found
in them! This type of circular reasoning is very common in evolutionist
literature, where the assumption of evolution is used as part of the criteria
for the evidence of evolution itself! 99 % of all fossils are only found in one type of rock-sedimentary
rock-which is formed primarily (the estimates run from 75%-85%), although not
universally, by swift hydraulic action. Fossils in sedimentary rock could only
be formed within a specific time period shortly after death, otherwise
the organism would be totally reduced to unrecognizable particles (we don't
find vast buffalo fossil graveyards, despite the enormous amount of them killed
in the last century). Thus there had to have been rapid sedimentation, and of an overwhelming
proportion to create the tremendous number of preserved fossils often found
buried together in mass tombs in sedimentary rock, in other words, a great
flood. In fact, most of the early paleontologists of the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries used the term diluvium to
describe sedimentary strata; it was even used by Darwin in his Origin to
describe the conditions under which fossils were formed. The word diluvium means deposited by a deluge, a massive influx of
water. This obvious fact has been ignored by present day evolutionists because
it hints too much at verification of the Biblical account of a great flood. We
will discuss the flood theory in more detail in a later chapter, but for now it
would be appropriate to examine the supposed evolutionary tree of life, letting
the experts speak for themselves. Since
Darwin's time mysterious animals have been found in pre-Cambrian rock
strata, known as the Vendian epoch, or the Ediacaran layer, and these are
called "Vendian biota" or "Ediacara fauna", but they have
no clear relationship to the phyla that appear suddenly in the Cambrian and
they are sort of a mystery to scientists, who haven't found out precisely how
to classify them: "The question of what these fossils are is still not settled to
everyone's satisfaction; at various times they have been considered algae,
lichens, giant protozoans, or even a separate kingdom of life unrelated to
anything living today. Some of these fossils are simple blobs that are hard to
interpret and could represent almost anything."(University of
California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, 4/05/02) One of these extinct creatures, the Arkarua, is supposedly related to the
Echinodermota, spiny-skinned animals like star fish, sea urchins and others in
their phylum. "The evolutionary origins of five-fold symmetry remain obscure"
So as far as the phylogeny (supposed evolutionary "tree") of the
Echinodermota, there is no evidence for their evolution and the evidence that
Arkarua is related to the Echinodermota is pure speculation. There were extinct Echinodermota that were not penta-lateral, the
carpoids and the helicoplacoids. Were there any transitional forms linking them
and the penta-lateral Echinodermota? GeoNews reports that the "carpoids are at the center of an ongoing
controversy about their origin and evolution" (GeoNews,
December 1999), thus the matter is by no means settled among evolutionists as
to their status and phylogeny. What of the helicoplacoids? Did they look anything at all like the other
Echinodermota? The Geological Society of America reported: "Shaped like a football, a helicoplacoid had "armor" that was
essentially small mineralized plates formed into spirals. Even its food-gathering
organ was a spiral that wound around its body." (Geological Society of
America, 11/08/01) Furthermore we find once again from the Tree of Life Web Project: "Phylogenetic
relationships, and in some cases status as monophyletic groups, remains unclear
for the extinct classes . . ." of Echinodermota such as the carpoids
and the helicoplacoids. All of the major phyla show up fully distinct in the Cambrian era, and since
then every Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species appear fully distinct in the
fossil record, something that Darwin said should be "fatal" to his
theory. Let us now therefore go
through the evolutionist’s ladder from simple, single cell creatures on to more
complex life forms to find out whether we have found any evidence to support
the evolutionary hypothesis since Darwin. Since some of these quotes come from
the middle and latter period of the twentieth century, some evolutionists have
complained that the quotes aren't "current". My answer to that is,
simply because a fact or a quote is twenty five, fifty or one hundred years
old, that does not make it irrelevant, indeed the longer a fact has remained
uncontested, thus if it has "stood the test of time", the more
verifiable it becomes. If it were the case that old facts are no longer
reliable, then we could certainly throw out the Pythagorean Theorem, along with
Euclid's Geometry, which are both over two thousand years old, and we could get
along without Pascal's work and Newton's Principia and every other scientific
work written over the past one thousand years, were this argument to hold any
salt. These facts have not changed, and the facts listed here in this work have
not been contested yet either. An excellent site to go to and view the various groups of organisms would be
Mikko's
Phylogeny Archive, although the name Phylogeny Archive is a slight
misnomer. The entire site is in fact (unintentionally) a good testimony to the
creationist viewpoint on life. There are no phylogenic lineages between any of
the major Phylums that exist: The Virus's (not a phylum, but presumed by many
evolutionists to have led up to the Prokaryotae) and the Prokaryotae (bacteria)
are well defined with no intermediates; The Prokaryotic bacteria and the
Eukaryotae (life forms that have a well defined nuclear membrane in the cell),
are quite distinct with a huge gap between them; Fungi and the Metazoa have no
evolutionary intermediates; The Radiata and the Bilateralia are not
"cousins" and show no ancestor/descendant relationship; Not only are there no living or fossil intermediates to be found, but what
is not told in Mikko's Phylogeny Archive is that the so-called progression from
more primitive life to more complex life as shown by the chart is very
misleading from a biochemical point of view: Although it can be said that the
Monera (Eubacteria and Archaea) are in certain ways simpler than the
Eukaryotae, the Eukaryotic organisms higher up on the chart are just as far
removed genetically from the Eubacteria and the Archaea placed just above them
as the Eukaryotae farther down on the chart are. The Eumetazoa, containing the
Radiata and Bilateralia, with the Deuterostoma and the Chordatata down at the
bottom, are just as close genetically to the Prokaryotae up at the top as the
more "primitive" organisms in the middle are. And the other thing to
remember is the earlier organisms, both among the Prokaryotae and the
Eukaryotae, have very complex cellular structure; among the Eukaryotae there is
nothing about a Fungi cell that would indicate that it is any
"simpler" than a chordates cell, or that it is in anyway an
"intermediate" cell between a more primitive cell and an animals' cell.
There is also no indication that there is or ever has been any progression from
Viruses, from a "non-cell" to a living bacterial cell. The Protostoma and Deuterostoma do not "merge" into each other
with some clear evolutionary pathway, all of the major family groups of living
organisms are clearly separated with no transitional forms bridging the gaps,
thus the entire Phylogenic Archive shows that all living organisms fit into
neatly formed, discreet "packages" in a cladistic manner, as though
some Master Designer has made them all for their particular purposes in life. This will be demonstrated in the remainder of the chapter. Nearly all of the
quotes that follow come from committed evolutionists, hence it cannot be
inferred that any creationist bias has influenced the statements. While some
evolutionists may make the claim that some of these quotes are taken out of
context, it is one thing to say this, but it is quite another thing to prove
it. I have read the source material carefully, and everything that follows was
quoted quite succinctly and in context. The "simplest" forms of life, as just stated, are classed in the
Kingdom Monera. Within this Kingdom we find the blue green algae and certain
forms of bacteria. They are known as Prokaryotes, while all other forms of life
are known as Eukaryotes. Virus's are simpler than cells but are not considered
life forms because they are essentially parasitic and cannot exist long outside
of a cell nor can they reproduce without a host cells' metabolism. Classed
alongside the Kingdom Monera is the Kingdom Protista, which are Eukaryotic
single cell organisms, mainly consisting of the familiar protozoa as well as
various other kinds of algae. Claude A. Villee of Harvard University and
Vincent G. Dethier of Princeton University wrote on these simple forms of life:
"Our concepts of the evolutionary relationships between the major phyla
of plants and animals are rather vague, because the evolutionary events
occurred such a long time ago, and the fossil record of these early
forms is very nearly blank. Thus the evolutionary relationships of viruses and
bacteria to other organisms are unknown, there is little evidence regarding the
relationships between the major kinds of algae and fungi, and the relationships
of the several types of protozoa to multicellular animals is unclear."
(16) Wallace, King and Sanders assert with confidence: "There is no longer any doubt that the prokaryotes preceded all other
modern forms of life," yet a few pages
farther on in their book they wrote: "The evolutionary transition from the prokaryotic cell to the much more
complex and elaborate eukaryotic cell has perplexed biologists for some time.
One hypothesis proposes that eukaryotic membrane-bounded organelles evolved
when infoldings of the cell membrane pinched off and enclosed various cellular
functions. Hypothesis such as this often seem reasonable enough, but they
can't be tested readily enough."(17) They have admitted
that their prior assertion has no basis in observable fact! Botanist Michael Neushul, National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at
Queen Mary College of the University of London, has written of the various
forms of algae: "A search among the Rhodophyta, Cryptophyta, Euglenophyta, and
Pyrrhophyta points of relationship is not overly rewarding. Perhaps the most
striking conclusion that can be drawn from such a survey is that these
divisions contain no organism that clearly lies intermediate in structural
organization between the Procaryota and the Eucaryota."(18) So we have no evidence of any supposed evolutionary transition from the
earliest Procaryotae life to the Eurcaryotae. They are always found fully
separated and distinct, whether living or in fossilized form. N ext is the Kingdom Fungi,
which includes molds, yeasts, lichens, mildews, mushrooms and toadstools.
Villee and Dethier wrote on this Kingdom: "The evolutionary relationships of the slime molds and fungi to each
other and to other living plants and animals are unclear, although ultimately they may
have descended from some simple single-celled flagellated ancestor. The evolutionary
relationships of the several classes of fungi have not been established. . .
Finally, the evolutionary origin of the basidiomycetes [mushrooms and
toadstools] is truly shrouded in mystery, for they show no relationships with
any of the algae."(Villee &Dethier, pp.360) Neushul wrote on the possible evolution of Fungi, for which he has no
evidence, but makes plenty of assumptions: "Although no clear link exists between prokaryotes and fungi, possible
relationships occur between fungi, flagellates, and perhaps even red algae. It
is widely thought that diverse ancestral flagellates have given rise
to the lower fungi. These [as yet undiscovered organisms] are thought to
have resembled the flagellated reproductive stages of existing Chytridiomycetes
and Oomycetes . . .These ancestral types are also assumed to have been
able to use inorganic sulfur and nitrogen and to synthesize a wide variety of
compounds."(Op cit, pp.178) Essentially, he is making up a story, much like Darwin's numerous
hypothesis. The
next Kingdom to be considered is the Plant Kingdom. Concerning the
origin of plants, Chester A. Arnold, Professor of botany and the Curator of
Fossil Plants at the University of Michigan said, "As
yet we have not been able to trace the phylogenetic history of a single group
of modern plants from its beginning to the present." (19) For the supposed development of land plants from green algae, Neushul stated
that there is a "missing link" problem, much like the problem
paleontologist have when trying to reconstruct their stories of man's supposed
simian ancestry: "Students of the green algae do not agree on the identity or even
existence of a "missing link" between the green algae and the
multicellular land plants. This gap has been filled with theoretical
[imaginary] plants. This kind of speculation, even in the absence of an
adequate fossil record or living intermediates, serves to focus attention
on the environmental problems faced by the multicellular land plants that are
discussed . . ."(Neushul, pp.218) For the evolution of liverworts, mosses, and hornworts, classified under the
Phylum Bryophyta, Neushul wrote: "There is rampant indecision as to the possible evolutionary starting
point for the Bryophyta. Although most botanists would concede that bryophytes
are distantly related to green algae, many feel that present-day bryophytes
descended from a now-extinct (and never found) group of archegonia-producing
plants. "Evolutionary speculation about byrophyte sporophytes, as
mentioned earlier, can start with a spherical sporophyte like that of Riccia
and derive the rather more highly differentiated sporophytes like those of Marchantia.
More independent and highly evolved sporophyte types are thought to have been
like those of some mosses and Antithoceros. But an opposing theory reverses this
series and sees the sporophytes of Marchantia and Riccia as progressively
reduced structures." (Neushul, pp.238-239). Of the evolution of the higher land plants, Neushul wrote: "Since algae and fungi preceded these plants by such a long time, it
seems logical to assume that the evolution of the land plant was a gradual
process that extended to pre-Silurian periods. But the fossil record does not support this
view!
Instead, fossils of aerially dispersed spores and land-plants appear abruptly
in the Silurian rocks." (Ibid,
pp.286) Of the link between Lyginopteris (extinct ferns) and Cordaitaleans (non
flowering trees and plants that produce their seed in a cone, or strobilus) he
wrote: "No lower Carboniferous fossils show morphological and anatomical
characteristics intermediate between those of "lyginopterids" and
"cordaitaleans."(Neushul, pp.331) Of the origin of flowering plants, Neushul wrote: "The flowers, fruits, and seeds of living plants represent endpoints of
past and present environmental influence. Unfortunately, speculation as to
how these flowering-plant structures evolved is limited by the absence of a
fossil record. Several attempts have been made to fill this gap, and various
fossil organisms have been suggested as (possible) intermediate between
gymnosperms and angiosperms. . . A clear and undisputable fossil record of early
flowering- plant evolution has not been found." (Ibid, pp.359, 364). As far as any living intermediate links among plants, Neushul wrote that
trying to use an evolutionary system in classifying plants was no help at all,
since all plants are quite distinct, and belong to well formed families,
orders, etc. with no hint of any evolutionary relationship: "There is no need to stress the practical importance to humanity of an
organized body of knowledge about plants. One of the first steps in organizing
botanical information is the development of a system of classification. In the
specific case of the flowering plants, various systems of classification have
been proposed. Nearly all are attempts to represent evolutionary relationships
within the division. The names of classes and subclasses have been frequently
modified and their relationship reassessed [i.e. evolutionary systems lead to
chaos]. Plant families, on the other hand, are well defined and have
remained relatively stable for many years." (Ibid, pp.365) Thus from the records of the most primitive plants to the most complex
varieties found, every single group is already fully distinct and separate from
each other when they first appear as fossils. That, in a nutshell, represents all the evidence that we have for plant
evolution. Nothing. The closest thing ever to be found that would be a transitional form from
plants to animals (or the other way around) would be the fabled
half-plant/half-animal Vegetable-Lamb of Tartary. Ah yes indeed. This mythical
animal-tree produced cotton, which the Europeans in the Middle Ages were
ignorant of, so they mistook it for wool, hence the legend that the cotton was
the fleece of lambs that grew from the tree by their navels. This is of course
absurd, but no more absurd than some of Darwin's incredible explanations for
his theory. Bolton Davidheiser, Ph.D. in Zoology from John Hopkin's University (and who,
incidentally, does not adhere to Darwinism and the traditional
evolutionary theory, but is a staunch Biblical creationist), has made an
interesting observation. Darwin and those who follow slavishly in his folly are
continually making statements such as this one found in World Book
Encyclopedia: "Although the theory of evolution is supported by a vast
amount of scientific evidence . . ."etc. (20) This is quite typical. Evolutionists are so insistent that evolution has
occurred, they commonly make statements like "Evolution is a fact, of that
we can be certain"; "The fact of evolution is now accepted by all
serious scientists," etc., etc, but then reverse themselves when having to
provide any real evidence. The situation is not unlike the phrase, "The
lady protesteth too much!"concerning a woman of dubious morals loudly
proclaiming her innocence. There are certain statements known as redundant statements, because they are
stating something that is so glaringly obvious that the statement does not need
to be said. When a group of engineers and mechanics gather together to discuss
a better method for manufacturing a car engine, you wouldn't hear them making
such statements like: "Although the existence of pistons in car engines is
supported by a vast amount of scientific evidence. . ." Geologists don't often make statements like, "All geologists certainly
agree that the earth exists, of that we can be confident." It would be
sheer idiocy to go around insisting that the earth exists, and anybody doing
that would be considered an absolute loon. There would be no point in insisting upon the obvious, but the fact
that evolutionists have to continually defend their theory with these kinds of
specious statements on the "fact" of evolution shows the very
weakness of their position and the very strength of the creationist position. T o get back to the
meat, or the bones of our study, we shall now look at the animal Kingdom. We
have already seen that the earliest complex life forms appear suddenly and
fully developed in the fossil record, with no sign of any intermediate,
developing species to precede them. Wallace, King and Sanders wrote on animal
origins: "It seems clear that all existing plants, animals, and fungi
sprang from the ancient protists [we have seen that it is anything but
clear that plants and fungi sprang from the protists]. It is generally believed
that the animal kingdom evolved from two different protist lines." (Biosphere,
Wallace, King and Sanders, pp.387) These two different hypothetical lines supposedly produced the sponges (a
unique colonial sort of life form) and the Metazoa. The authors report that the
Metazoa "descended from a protozoan of some sort." Then they wrote
"There is a great deal of argument about the nature of this ancient creature.
What was it like?" (Ibid) They report on the two leading ideas on what it was like, one being that it
was a flagellate "unlike any of those existing today" and the other
that it was similar to a marine flatworm. It is no wonder that there is a great
deal of argument on the subject, for they further reported: "Unfortunately, we have no relevant fossil evidence at all-in fact,
the oldest eukaryotic fossils (some 680 million years old) are clearly
metazoans, jellyfish similar to those found today. Therefore we can only guess
how the first multicellular animal came to be." These earliest forms of metazoic life (life with diverse cells separated
into specialized tissues for specific functions) were known as invertebrates or
creatures without an internal spinal column for a backbone. Most of the
invertebrates are found in the Cambrian layer of rock. We have previously
discussed the pre-Cambrian Vendian (Ediacaran) fossils which have no
relationship at all with any of the later phyla found in the Cambrian layer and
through no light on how they might have evolved. The creatures that appear suddenly in the Cambrian layer consist of very
complex animals, octopi, mollusks, squid, urchin, jellyfish, trilobites
(extinct), shrimp, limpets, worms, and snails to name a few. "As we have seen, all the main invertebrate types appear already
clearly differentiated very abruptly in early Cambrian rocks. An enormous
effort has been made over the past century to find missing links in these rocks
. . . Yet no links have ever been found and the relationships of the major
groups are as enigmatic today as one hundred years ago . . . Over the past
century a host of rationalizations have been attempted to explain the
mystifying absence of primitive transitional forms in the pre-Cambrian
rocks..." (21) There is quite a bit of difference
between a clam and an octopus, both invertebrates, probably about as much
difference as there is between any other two types of animals in existence, and
yet there is no Let us purview here a condensed
enumeration of some of the major phyla of the invertebrates, with the evidence
for their evolutionary phylogeny as presented in some well known textbooks. (22): A) Coelenterates, which includes jellyfish, sea anemones, corals
and fresh water hydras: B) Platyhelminthes, Flatworms, simplest animals with bilateral
[left and right sides to their bodies] symmetry: "The structure of the
flatworm suggest that it probably evolved relatively early in the history of
the animal kingdom and that the higher animal phyla may have evolved from
primitive flatworms. Certain similarities between coelenterates and flatworms
have led to various theories that one group evolved from the other, but the
origin of these two phyla is still very much a matter of speculation."
(Ibid, pp. 769) C) Aschelminthes, Rounded worms with a true digestion tract:
"Like flatworms, aschelminths have left no fossil record." (Ibid, pp.
771) D) Tentaculata, Creatures with a crown of horseshoe shaped
tentacles: "Although it is suggested that the tentaculates may have
evolved from a common ancestor, little can be said with certainty about the
origin of this group."(Ibid, pp. 773) E) Annelida, Segmented worms with a true circulatory system,
earthworms: "Because of the absence of hard parts, the fossil record of
annelids is sparse, but the chitinous jaws of the polychaetes have been found
in rocks formed more than 500 million years ago. There were no doubt other more
primitive annelids, of which no recognizable fossil record exists."(Ibid,
pp. 775) F) Mollusca, More than 50,000 living species, including snails,
clams, oysters, mussels, scallops, octopi, and related species. Encyclopedia
Britannica reports: "There are six major classes of mollusks. The fossil
record gives little clue as to how the six classes diverged from the molluscan
base." (Enc. Brit., 24:309, 1986) They further state: "Existing Mollusca consist of a number of well defined classes that do
not form an ascending series in terms of evolutionary development but rather
have evolved radially from a common ancestral condition. . . The precise characteristics
of this hypothetical animal have been questioned . . . No satisfactory system
of classification of bivalves [clams and oysters] has so far been
devised." (Ibid pp. 327) Within the mollusks we have the Gastropods, snails and slugs. The Britannica
reports: "Unlike mammals, who have undergone great evolutionary change in the
last 50,000,000 years, gastropods have shown little progressive evolution
during that [much earlier] time." Thus even in their earliest history, mollusks are fully distinct- no
transitional forms. Now we will move on to
the Phylum Arthropoda,
the largest phylum in the animal kingdom, consisting of segmented animals,
lobsters, crabs, and insects, these latter alone comprising 765,257 species.
Listed here are some quotes from noted authorities, most of them evolutionists,
on the evidence (or lack thereof) for the evolution of these various kinds of
creatures. I am indebted to the Zoologist Davidheiser for his research in this
area for some of the following references. As far as the origin of the arthropods, R.E. Snodgrass,
Collaborator of the Smithsonian Institution and U.S. Dept. Of Agriculture
stated: "The evolutionary origin of the arthropods is hidden in remote
Pre-Cambrian times". . .". (23) Within the Phylum Arthropoda we have seven classes: A) Merostomata: The
horseshoe "crabs" (Limulus polyphemus, Carcinoscorpius rotunda
and Tachypleus gigas), mostly aquatic. There are three to five species,
depending on which taxonomic system is being used. They are referred to by
Helena Curtis in her book Invitation To Biology as "living
fossils," in other words, there is no evidence of any evolutionary change
for them in the fossil record from the time that they first appeared until the
present. (Helena Curtis, Invitation to Biology, pp. 585) (24) Not only have they shown no signs of any kind of evolution over these vast
ages, "Because its basic body design has remained almost unchanged for
millions of years, the horseshoe crab is often called a "living
fossil". The horseshoe crab gets its common name from the "U" or
horseshoe shaped of its shell, which is called a carapace. The carapace is the
color of sand or mud. This helps the animal blend in with the muddy and sandy
bottoms on which it lives."(National Aquarium of Baltimore Report to
Baltimore Department of Education, Schools, Puffin Report to Schools, 1991) "Horseshoe crabs have been around in one guise or another for quite
some time now, let's just say since the Lower Silurian for arguments sake. The
earliest examples discovered date to about 435 million years old. Personally, I
reckon they'll outlive that troublesome species Homo sapiens hands (or at least
pincered feet) down. Why? Well, because they are good at what they do and they
don't seem to have any intention of changing their mode of life or gross body
morphology. This is why they are often referred to as 'Living fossils'." (http://lyall.tripod.com/xipho/) "Xiphosurans (horseshoe crabs) have existed since the Silurian (440 to
410 million years ago) with relatively little morphological change." (University
of California Berkeley, Museum of Paleontology, 04/05/02) But now we find such astounding
statements like this one from Patty Sturtevant, which only makes things worse
for the evolutionists: "While we sometimes see the horseshoe crab referred to as a
"living fossil", it is more appropriate and factual to eschew such an
oxymoron, since Limulus polyphemus has no fossil record whatever."
(Patty Sturtevant, Ph.D., Mote Marine Laboratory,
04/04/02), Ms. Sturtevant stated that the horseshoe crab is only 20 million years old
and has no fossil record at all! (If it has no fossil record to be dated by
then how does she know how old it is?) At least she is getting closer to the
creationist position, but what about the other evolutionists quoted above,
including the University of Berkeley, stating that the horseshoe crab has been
around for hundreds of millions of years without any change? And what are we to do with these quotes? "The horseshoe crab, a close relative of the extant trilobite, is the
oldest living fossil in Maryland, living here for approximately 360 million
years." (Benny
Williams, Maryland Horeshoe Crabs, 04/05/02 ); They all state the horseshoe crab has been around for hundreds of millions
of years, with no record of any change. To move on: B) Crustacea: lobsters, crabs, crayfish, and shrimp: "The
phylogenic origin of Crustacea is lost in Precambrian antiquity."
James H. Wilmoth, State University of New York, (Biology of Invertebrates,
Prentice-Hall, 1967, pp. 31.) Modern day
crustaceans show up in rocks 300 million evolutionary years ago, exactly like
their present day counterparts. C) Arachnida: Spiders, mites and ticks: I) " . . .we have no evidence to show that spiders have been
derived from any other living or extinct group of arachnids." Willis
J. Gretsch, Associate Curator, Department of Insects and Spiders, (The American
Museum of Natural History, American Spiders, D. Van Nostrand co.,
1949, pp. 99) II) "The phylogeny [evolutionary ancestry] of the Acarina [mites and
ticks] is obscure" Edward D. Baker, U.S. Dept., of Agriculture and
Department of Zoology, Duke University, (An Introduction to Acarology,
MacMillan, 1952, pp. 34) D) Onychophora: Simple, wormlike, terrestrial arthropods, 73
species. They show up 550
million evolutionary years ago just the same as we see them today. No change.
The editors of Biology Today write:
" Onychophores may be descendants of the primitive arthropods, which probablyevolved
from annelids." (25) There exist no
intermediates between onychophores
and any other arthropods, now or in the fossil record. E) Insecta: Most have two pairs of wings, with three distinct parts
of the body. This class includes bees, ants, beetles, fleas, lice, bugs, flies,
etc., 700,000-800,000 species. These are the most numerous species of animal
life upon the earth, comprising five-sixths of all animal species. A.D. Imms,
MA., D.Sc., F.R.S., Honorary Fellow of Downing College and Reader in
Entomology, Cambridge University wrote: "Even in that remote geologic period, perhaps 500 million years ago,
when mighty forests flourished that are now coal we suddenly come upon
remains of "a wild riot of teeming insect life."(Insect Natural History,
A.D. Imms, pp. 6, Blakiston Co., 1951, Great Britain) Encyclopedia Britannica reports: "By the time (toward the end of the Carboniferous) fossil insects are
found, wings are developed fully. . Winged insects must have made their
appearance very early in the Carboniferous, more than 300,000 years ago; but
there is no fossil evidence to show the way they evolved."(Encyclopedia
Britannica, Vol. 21, 1986, pp. 596) Here are just a few of the evolutionary phylogenies of various insects. I) Mayflies: "Represented largely by wing impressions, the
fossil record is so incomplete that most systems of classification and
interpretations of relationships are based on characteristics of recent forms,
chiefly through morphology." (Ibid) pp.602 II) Hetoptera: Bugs, water strider, stinkbug, bedbugs: "The
fossil record is too poor to offer significant help in reconstructing the
phylogeny of the Heteroptera . . ." (Ibid pp. 633.) III) Beetles: "Although many beetle fossils are known, they
consist mostly of isolated elytra, which reveal little about the history of the
order. Complete fossil specimens are closely related to living forms."
(Ibid pp. 656) IV) Ants, bees and wasps: " . .
.the paleontological record, going back to the Upper Jurassic, exhibits no
evidence of kinship with other fossil insects." P.W. Whiting,
University of Pennsylvania, (Journal of Heredity, 38:11, 1947.) Alexander B. Klots, Associate Professor of Biology at City College of New
York and Research Associate of the American Museum of Natural History, with his
wife, Elsie B. Klots, Professor at Cornell University, wrote: "Insects are the dominant animals in the land world today. Nearly
everywhere they are abundant, invading a multitude of environments and
exploiting almost all possible food supplies. Yet the details of their
early evolution are lost in the mists of antiquity. This is due in part . . .
to the almost total absence of rocks that contain fossils of the land animals
from the period when insects were beginning to appear . . The trilobites
lasted for some 140 million years and then became extinct, but the span of
their existence largely covers the long blank record of early insect
evolution." "Although a number of specimens of doubtful identity are known, there
are no fossils unquestionably recognized as insects from earlier than the
Carboniferous period, some 175 million years after the Cambrian . .
." "Suddenly in the rocks of the Carboniferous we find
unmistakable insect fossils-and they are the remains of highly evolved,
already winged insects of a number of well-differentiated orders. Such
complex animals do not spring into being overnight or in the course of a mere
few million years. They must have been evolving for scores of millions of
years-as the vertebrates and spiders had been doing during the same time.
But the detailed record of this has not yet been found." " . . .the insects of the mid-Tertiary period, some 25 to 35 million
years ago were very similar to those of today . . .Even butterflies have been
found with the patterns of their wings showing plainly, although not in the
original colors. One of these would fit into a modern genus, and perhaps, with
a bit of stretching of the imagination, into a modern species . . . Enormous
numbers of insects are known from Baltic and other amber of the Tertiary . . .
At least one of the ants found in Baltic amber belongs to a species that, it is
claimed, still exists in Asia; and three others are so similar to three species
that live in the Baltic region today that William Morton Wheeler admitted his
inability to tell them apart. Despite their age of 20 to 35 million years, the
Florissant and Baltic amber insects bring the group right down to modern
times." (Living Insects of the World, Alexander B. Klots, Doubleday
and Co. Inc., pp. 11-12) Hence, no evidence of any evolution among the insects, no transitional
forms, only differences in size in most instances, and the ancient sizes were
usually considerably larger than their modern counterparts, whereas
evolution would supposedly develop smaller creatures into larger ones, not the
other way around. L.H. Newman wrote: "Many species [of insects] were so successful that they have
remained unchanged for millions of years." (Man and Insects, pp.
10, Natural History Press, Garden City, New York, 1966) Thus the insects show no evidence for their evolution at all. Let us continue now with the rest of the arthropods. F) Chilopoda: Centipedes, 15-173 trunk segments, each has a single
pair of appendages. I was unable to find any evidence for the evolution of
these in any of the literature on the subject. Thus for the entire class of arthropods, comprising insects, insect like
creatures, and crustaceans, there is no evidence for the evolution of any of
them at all. The next link in Darwin's Evolution Tales
should be that between the invertebrates and the vertebrates, that is, between
animals who have no internal skeleton or backbone and animals with an internal
backbone. The earliest vertebrate fish suddenly appear in the Silurian level of
the geologic column, about 435 million years ago (evolutionary years). In Mankind
So Far, William Howells wrote: "It is obvious that we have come from
a still lower form of life, some one-celled amoeba-like affair, but this is
an assumption . . . The fact is that the evidence which might connect the
vertebrates with a major group of the invertebrates is unknown."(26) In the Larrousse Encyclopedia of Animal Life, the editors report:
"Although it is customary to accept the Hemichordata, Tunicata and
Cephalochordata as successfully bridging the gap between invertebrates and
vertebrates, in fact they do no more than indicate some of the possible
features of early vertebrate evolution, as there is still a gulf between them
and even the most primitive of modern backboned animals which the fossil does
little to bridge . . .Even the most lowly of the true vertebrates are far more
advanced and more complicated in structure than anything found in the
protochordates."(27) Thus for the next major step in the supposed sequence of evolution, that
between invertebrates and vertebrates, there is absolutely no evidence. F or the next rung in
this diminishing ladder of evolution, we would look for an intermediate
candidate linking fish with amphibians. Amphibians show up about 360 million J.Z Young, M.A., F. R.S., Professor of Anatomy at University College,
London, has written: "There are such close resemblances between the skulls
of the earliest amphibians and those of the Devonian crossopterygian fishes
that there can be no doubt of the relationship. At present there is,
however, no detailed fossil evidence of the stages of transition from the one
type to the other. . . .The term Stegocephalia is convenient to cover the whole
group of palaeozoic amphibia, all probably of common descent. At least seven
types can be recognized, but attempts to group these have not been altogether
successful; the nomenclature remains confused . . .The earliest Stegocephalia
were definitely tetrapods and already showed sharp changes from the fish
type" (29) Thus for the next hypothetical major step in evolution, that between fish
and amphibians, there is no evidence. Young stated at the beginning of the
above cited passage that "there can be no doubt of the relationship" between crossopterygian fish and
Stegocephalia, but then concluded that there was no evidence to prove this
hypothesis, it was based solely on similarity of skulls. However we know that morphological resemblance in bone structure does not
necessarily connote a common phylogenic line of descent. All placental mammals
are thought to be more closely related to each other than any marsupial would
be, yet a fossil skull of the extinct marsupial Tasmanian wolf, still existing
as late as the early 1930's, would undoubtedly exhibit more similarities with
the skull of a placental mammalian wolf than it would with any other marsupial
skull. Likewise, the placental mammalian wolf skull would resemble the
marsupial wolf skull more than, for instance, it would the skull of a placental
bear, or a rat, or a man, all supposedly more closely related to the placental
wolf in evolutionary terms than the marsupial wolf was. One example that amply demonstrates the accuracy of evolutionary dating and
sequencing of fossil fish, or any fossil for that matter, would be the story of
the coelacanth. This is a genuine fish story. For many years evolutionists had
assured us that the coelacanth, a member of the crossopterygian family and a
supposed link to amphibians, had most definitely been extinct for at least sixty
million years, at least according to their precise methods of dating and
their exact analysis of the indisputable evidence of the fossil record. No
doubt about it, the coelacanth died out millennia ago along with the dinosaurs,
at least until a living coelacanth was dredged up off the coast of Africa in
1938. Since then hundreds of live coelacanths have been found. In the June, 1988
National Geographic Magazine they featured numerous pictures of the coelacanth
swimming around in the ocean depths, where they differ very little from the
ones found entombed in the fossil layers, thus providing no evidence of any
kind of evolution occurring for the coelacanth, despite the fact that the
evolutionists say these fish have been swimming around for at least four
hundred million years. The ancient coelacanths, from the first time they appeared in the fossil
record were virtually identical to the living ones we find at the present day,
extending all the way back through the geologic record past the Paleocene age
of the mammals (63 million years), before the Cretaceous and Jurassic age of
the dinosaurs (100 million through 225 million years ago), before the Triassic
age of early mammals (200 million through 250 million years ago), before the Permian
age of early reptiles (250 million through 300 million years ago), before the
Carboniferous age (300 million through 370 million years ago), all the way back
to the Devonian era, 400 million years ago in the fossil record, according to
the time scale of the evolutionists. Initially it couldn't be admitted that a living coelacanth had appeared that
was identical to a species that evolutionists had calmly assured us was
extinct for so many millions of years. Thus when a live example of this extinct fish had been found, J.L.B. Smith,
a chemist and ichthyologist at Rhodes University in Grahams town University,
South Africa, pronounced it an entirely new genus and species, different
from any coelacanth previously recorded as fossils. Smith gave the living coelacanth
a very scientific name, Latimeria chalumnae, after Marjorie
Courtenay-Latimer who discovered the fish, and the mouth of the Chalumna River
where it was captured. Just how different is this fish from the ancient coelacanth? On
pp.832 of the National Geographic article of 1988, there is a study of the
comparative anatomy between the living and ancient coelacanth with this caption
next to pictures of each one. They state: "LIKE CARBON COPIES, the tail of
a live coelacanth and a 140-million year-old fossil virtually match." They go on to report: "Few creatures have endured such an immense span
of time with so little change as the coelacanth. The cut-away drawing
of a present-day specimen seems almost identical with the 140-million year-old
fossil found in a quarry in southern West Germany. It is that extraordinary
lack of change that enabled Professor J.L.B. Smith in Grahamstown to
identify the coelacanth caught in South Africa in 1938 from a rough sketch,
although he had never seen a live specimen."(30) Throughout the entire history of vertebrate animals the coelacanth appears,
differing very little in structure, showing absolutely no signs of evolving
from one species and/or changing into any other kind of species through the
supposed millions of years of its existence. It would seem that giving the
newly discovered living coelacanth the status of an entirely new species and
genus was simply to hide their embarrassment while they were scrambling to come
up with some kind of an explanation as to why they had been so sure that it had
been extinct for sixty million years. I think there's something fishy here in
what the evolutionists have been trying to tell us. This is true of virtually
all fossils found, whether sharks or sand-dollars, they show no signs of
evolutionary change to or from another distinct species. Evolutionists had long speculated that the crossopterygians (the class of
fish including the coelacanth), because they had bony elements in their fins,
may have had the ability to walk while in the water on the floor of the sea,
which somehow led to the development of legs to walk on the land. This scenario was put to rest when the authors wrote in the National
Geographic article: "Our films settled another question that has
intrigued scientists: whether the coelacanth can walk on its lobed fins. Though
we observed several individuals resting with their fins braced against the sea
bottom, we never saw any of them walk, and it appears the fish is unable to do
so."(31) It should be noted that the coelacanth does not lay eggs like most fish,
amphibians and reptiles do, but gives live birth. Thus as evolutionists
had tried to connect the coelacanth with some unknown link between amphibians
and fish, this would put it in a rather dubious position as an intermediary
candidate. The red-tailed sun perch off the northwest coast of the United
States also gives live birth after nine months, two thirds of all
existing sharks give birth to live, wriggling, little, sharks, some lizards
give live birth, so a supposed evolutionary sequence demonstrating how fish,
amphibians and reptiles lay eggs while only mammals and marsupials give live
birth would be in serious trouble. T he missing links are
still missing between amphibians and reptiles. R.A. Sirton, Professor of Any scientific study of the amniotic hard-shelled egg of the reptiles and
the gelatin type eggs of the amphibians would demonstrate the colossal
differences between their structures, both of these eggs are extremely complex
in their makeup, and there is no evidence of anything even approaching a
transitional type of egg between the two. The editors of Biology Today describe the Tuatara lizard
as "a 'living fossil.' The history of this organism dates back 200 million
years to the age of the dinosaurs."(33)
There are many living fossils around. All of the major plant and animal groups,
when found in the fossil record, show a remarkable consistency in form, in many
cases being no different at all than their modern counterparts. Whether they be
pelicans or crocodiles, dragonflies or elephants, rhinos or seahorses, except
for size and some extinct varieties, they have not changed dramatically from
their earliest ancient counterparts. When scientists find a "two hundred million year old cockroach"
embedded in slime or tree sap, it is generally identical to the cockroaches of
today, still a pretty unattractive creature (except to other cockroaches); it
is not evolving from some "proto-cockroach" into a modern cockroach.
Dr. Frank M. Carpenter, professor emeritus at Harvard University's Museum of
Comparative Zoology stated: "Cockroaches have survived dinosaurs, ice
ages, and who knows what since they first appeared in Upper Carboniferous
times. Astonishingly, there's almost no difference in form between ancient
cockroaches and those in our homes." (34) The Encyclopedia Britannica goes into great depth in their article on
turtles (Vol. 26, 1986). For the evidence of turtle evolution they state:
"The evolution of the turtle is one of the most remarkable in the history
of vertebrates. Unfortunately, the origin of this highly successful order is
obscured by the lack of fossils, although turtles leave more and better fossil
remains than do other vertebrates. By the middle of the Triassic Period (about
200,000,000 years ago) turtles were numerous and in possession of basic turtle
characteristics . . . Intermediates between turtles and cotylosaurs, the
primitive reptiles from which turtles probably sprang, are entirely lacking
. "(35) The same thing is true for alligators, amphibians, invertebrates, fish, etc,
except for extinct varieties that are in no way intermediates. (36) Scientist Eugenie Clark has studied sharks for 26 years. Of the 350 species
of sharks, she wrote that they "have inhabited the seas for much the
same form for 300 million years." (37)
When Darwin was confronted with this inconsistency between his theory and
the geologic record, he came up with the idea that the identical animal had
evolved and become extinct many times: "Hence when the same species occurs
at the bottom, middle, and top of a formation, the probability is that it has
not lived on the same spot during the whole period of deposition, but has
disappeared and reappeared, perhaps many times, during the same geological
period. (Origin, pp. 159, Benton Ed.) Of course Darwin, in customary form, completely contradicted himself
elsewhere in the Origin, stating his belief that after a species had
once become extinct, it would not ever reappear again by evolutionary
means: "We can clearly understand why a species when once lost should
never reappear, even if the very same conditions of life, organic and
inorganic, should recur."(Origin, pp. 168) T he evolution of the
mammals is just as mysterious. Although it is often suggested by evolutionists
that mammals only appeared after the demise of the dinosaurs, the creatures
that evolutionists claim were transitional forms between reptiles and mammals,
the therapsids, actually show up in the fossil record before many of the better
known dinosaurs themselves existed, in the Triassic period, 240 million evolutionary
years ago. Then, the most extraordinary thing happened: These strange creatures
that supposedly became mammals went extinct, and mammals disappeared almost
entirely from the fossil record for 100 million years! Then mammals suddenly show up again after the dinosaurs went extinct, with
no evidence for their evolutionary lineage. (I use the term "evolutionary
years," in discussing these supposed great ages much as a scientist would
use the term "light years" in discussing vast distances between
stars, although with an astronomer "light years" would have some real
meaning based on accurate scientific data. When I am using the term
"evolutionary years" I am not necessarily speaking of real years, it
is merely a device to deal with the evolutionists hypothetical schemes,
nonetheless it is a useful term since we need to have some basis in
nomenclature when discussing this subject) The Class of creatures known as Mammalia are distinguished by having warm
blood and double circulation, usually covered with hair, four limbs, young
nourished with milk from the mothers mammary glands, jaw made up of a single
pair of bones, diaphragm used in re As far as the so-called "mammal like" reptiles, the therapsids and
specifically the dicynodonts, that evolutionists claim are the ancestors of
mammals, not much is really known about them, except that they became extinct
210 million evolutionary years ago, at the end of the Triassic, and show no
close resemblance to any living or extinct mammal. Out of the entire group of
dicynodonts, only the cynodonts were considered possible ancestors to mammals,
yet the cynodonts died out millions of years before the dinosaurs became
extinct and the mammals became the predominant life forms, according to the
evolutionary schemes. There never were any "mammal-like reptiles" that evolutionists are
desperately clinging to as evidence for their theory, outside of an
evolutionist's imagination. These were the therapsids, but they were not
reptiles at all; they were as different from reptiles as any class of animals
are from another. And the fact that they supposedly went extinct millions of
years before true mammals showed up on the scene should cause some to at least
doubt the veracity of evolutionist speculations. No true transitional form linking mammals with any reptilian creature has
ever been found, and for all the evolutionists know mammals could be as closely
related to birds as to reptiles. In fact, an animal with a bird-like bill has
been suggested over the years as some kind of evolutionary link between mammals
and reptiles, however this animal, the platypus, is now securely classified as
a mammal of the Order Monotremata, in the Subclass Prototheria,
along with the echidnas. Since the platypus lays eggs, this further removes it
from being in an intermediate category, as there are a few reptiles, among them
the very common lacerta vivipara lizard of Europe that do not lay eggs
themselves, but give live birth. Thomas Huxley and Vladimer Kovalsky worked out the supposed horse evolution
scheme independently in the nineteenth century, much as Darwin and Wallace
worked out their identical theories independently, both merely reiterating
prevalent evolutionary theories of their day. The problem with this is that all of the supposed ancestors of the horse,
the Paleotherium, the Anchitherium, and the Hipparion, became extinct at
different times in totally unrelated geologic strata in the fossil sequence,
sometimes on entirely different continents, without leaving any descendants.
There was no direct line of descent from any of them to the present day horse.
Many of the fossil horses dug up no doubt represent extinct types of horses, a
fossil zebra would be confused with a horse, they are both essentially of the
same species. So we are to believe that the horse supposedly evolved four
times, died out three of those times leaving no descendants, until finally the
modern horse evolved, without any evidence of its evolution in the fossil
record. Some of these supposed precursors of the modern horse are merely differing
in size, yet today's living varieties of horses range in size from the tiny
miniatures all the way up to the giant Clydesdales, though they are all of the
same species. Some of the fossil horses are distinguished by having a differing
number of toes on their hooves, but the African elephant has a different number
of toes on its feet than the Indian elephant does, yet neither is classified as
being ancestral to the other. Different types of sloths have varying numbers of
toes on their feet, yet this does not in itself connote an evolutionary
phylogeny. Some people are born with six fingers on each hand, but they are not
classified as some other, less evolved species. The rhino supposedly evolved from the hyracotherium as well as the horse,
but the fossil series leading up to the rhino are not found in any kind of
orderly sequence in the geologic strata either. The Brontotherium, the
Hyrocianth, the Mynocerous, etc. died out at different times, while their
scattered remains have been another example of an evolutionary fairy tale that
has been cooked up by paleontologists to enthrall their gullible followers. In fact, the modern hyrax, in overall body plan is nearly identical, except
for some minor skull variations and dental anomalies, to the creature that
supposedly became the rhino, the horse and a few other animals in the
evolutionists' stories. This is not to say that the hyracotherium was the exact same animal as the
hyrax. The extinct marsupial thylacine is virtually identical skeletally to the
wolf or dog, yet it was definitely a distinct species, in fact, an entirely
different subclass of animal than any placental mammal. Thus to make
comparisons based on fossils alone to suggest a phylogenic or taxonomic
relationship is highly suspect. The point is that the hyracotherium is definitely more similar skeletally to
the hyrax than to the questionable "intermediates" that evolutionists
claim led up to the horse. The hyracotherium was even named after the hyrax by it’s'
discoverer, although lately Gould and other evolutionists have taken issue with
this. The so-called "mammal like" reptiles do not exhibit any
characteristics that would indicate that they possessed notable mammalian traits.
The evidence for all of this is as nebulous as the evidence that medieval
alchemists changed lead into gold, but it satisfies the evolutionists in much
the same way that ancient cultures believed that the earth sat on a turtles'
back, and both slept well at night in their faith. Darwin stated in his Descent
of Man his belief that all classes of mammalia were descended from a
common ancestor and that through environmental influences or pure luck the
descendants of this unknown ancestor gradually adapted to different demands on
their physiognomy, and thus became tigers and elephants and whales and horses,
etc. etc. Surely for such a sweeping hypothesis he must have compiled literally
volumes of evidence for such a claim. It couldn't all have been entirely
speculation, could it? For the answer let us look at the startling proof that
Darwin had to offer to back up his (not so) novel contention. Darwin wrote:(39) " In attempting to trace the
genealogy of the Mammalia, and therefore of man, lower down in the series, we become involved in greater and greater
obscurity . . . no true
bird or reptile intervenes in the direct line of descent . . . Every evolutionist will admit that
the five great vertebrate classes, namely, mammals, birds, reptiles,
amphibians, and fishes, are descended from some one prototype . . . As the
class of fishes is the most lowly organized, and appeared before the others, we
may conclude that all the members of the vertebrate kingdom are derived from
some fishlike animal . . . The belief that animals so distinct as a
monkey, an elephant, a hummingbird, a snake, a frog, and a fish, &c. Could
all have sprung from the same parents . . . implies the former
existence of links binding closely together all these forms, now so utterly
alike." So Darwin could provide no actual proof for his contention of a common
ancestor, he based his entire theory on the belief in the theory, not
from observable evidence. Note the line of reasoning in Darwin's writing:
"every evolutionist will admit that . . . The belief
that animals so distinct . . . implies the former existence of
links" etc. In other words, the evidence presented here for the existence
of evolution was based on a presumption, not on actual fact, but this did not
in any way deter Darwin's enthusiasm for his theory, as we have just read where
he went on to claim, despite the lack of evidence, that all vertebrate animals had
descended from a common ancestor. This is the traditional and classic evolutionary story, built up step by
step, link by link, entirely on the supposition of evolution with no
evidence for it in the slightest! We have clearly documented in the previous
sections that in Darwin's day and continuing on down to the present there has
been no substantiated historic fossil species or living species of transitional
forms of life for his theory of evolution from a common ancestor to be tenable. Thus, as in everything he wrote, Darwin could provide no substantial
evidence for his claims. Failing to find any fossil evidences in the imaginary
phylogeny of the common ancestry of animals, he resorted to the now totally
debunked theory of embryonic recapitulation, which is the belief that the human
embryo goes through the various stages of evolution while developing inside the
mother’s womb. He spent quite some time on this in his Descent, in
fact he thought it was the best clue he could come up with to try and
demonstrate his theory. He wrote: "Thus, if we may rely on embryology,
ever the safest guide in classification, it seems that we have at last gained a
clue (in other words he had no evidence at all for evolution before this) to
the source whence the Vertebrate were derived."(40) Darwin, of course, did not originate the theory of embryonic recapitulation
on his own. Johann Meckel toyed with the idea in 1811, and Karl von Baer
suggested that the stages in the development of the human embryo corresponded
to the different adult stages of life of the lower animals. It was in 1866 that
Haeckel proposed it as a fundamental biogenetic law. The whole idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, i.e., that the human
embryo goes through the various stages of fish and primate evolution before
birth, has since been entirely discredited, but it is still presented in some
textbooks as one of the "proofs" for evolution. Various organs were
once considered to be "vestigial organs," evolutionary leftovers from
our distant past when we needed them in order to survive but which are now no
longer necessary. The supposed section of a human embryo that evolutionists said recapitulated
the tail never develops any actual skeletal structure of a tail, there was
never any genetic code there for a tail to be produced in the first place,
and it is now known that it serves a purpose necessary for human life in the
fetal stage, as it produces the red blood cells needed for the developing
child, since the bones that would normally produce the red blood cells
necessary for life have not formed in the embryo as yet. Michael Denton and Sir Gavin de Beer have shown conclusively that the
embryos of different vertebrate animals are totally dissimilar to each other,
that even in the various early stages of embryonic development similar organs
such as forelegs, kidneys, and alimentary canals develop from entirely
different places and that tissues in the embryos of frogs, reptiles, fish and
mammals are not alike at all. (41) Scientists now know that the supposed "gill slits" in a human
embryo never develop into anything like gills in the fetus, they are folds in
the pharyngeal region that develop into the thymus glands, parathyroid glands,
and the Eustachian tubes, which are cartilaginous tubes that connect the ear
with the nasopharynx and serve to equalize pressure. There is never any type of
"fish stage" that the human fetus passes through. For one thing the
basic genetic code from the very beginning of human life at the single cell
stage of conception is one hundred percent entirely human, i.e., not fish, not
reptile, not monkey or ape. Pregnant women do not have little fish swimming
around inside their wombs. Many organs once considered to be vestigial are known to be useful and even
essential in human life. We now know that the tonsils and the appendix are
specialized tissues making up part of the lymphoid system that pass on stem
cells from the bone marrow to the blood stream in immunological response to
disease in early childhood. The popularizer of the theory of embryonic recapitulation, Ernst Haeckel,
was accused of forgery while at the University of Jena by L. Rutimeyer,
professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at the University of Basel (L.
Rutimeyer, "Referate," in Archiv fur Anthropologie, 1868), which
demonstrates the lengths that evolutionists will go to in order to promote
their theories. Haeckel was an associate of Darwin and enthusiastically supported his ideas,
and Darwin even makes many references to Haeckel in his Descent of Man,
which shows that the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. Haeckel was
involved with another dubious "proof" of evolution, the
"Pithecanthropus Man," which we will deal with in time. We find where Darwin wrote in his Descent: "As some of my
readers may never have seen a drawing of an embryo, I have given one of man and
another of a dog, at about the same early stage of development, carefully
copied from two works of undoubted accuracy. After the foregoing statements
made by such high authorities (Haeckel, Huxley, et. al.), it would be superfluous
on my part to give a number of borrowed details, shewing that the embryo of man
closely resembles that of other animals . . .the embryos of wonderfully
different forms should still retain, more or less perfectly, the structure of
their common ancestor. No other explanation has ever been given of the
marvelous fact that the embryos of a man, dog, seal, bat, reptile, &c., can
at first hardly be distinguished from each other."(42) Of course any glob of cells before they began to differentiate into their
respective characteristics would look quite similar to another glob of cells to
the inexperienced eye, yet even at the cellular level species are
differentiated by quite distinct DNA, the fish DNA is just not available to
produce fish organs in humans, we have no coding for "gill slits."
Francis Hitching wrote: "But as a matter of biological fact, the embryos
of men, apes, dogs, and rabbits are not at all the same and can easily be
distinguished by any competent embryologist. They only looked the
same, in Haeckel's books, because he had chopped off bits here and there, and
added bits elsewhere, to make them seem identical." (43) Many so-called primitive metazoa that are supposed to resemble the early embryo
of man are not in the least bit "primitive", they have quite complex
and diversified structures and functions, causing Professor John Tyler Bonner
of Princeton University to remark, "We may have known for almost a hundred
years that Haeckel's blastaea-gastraea theory of the origin of the metazoa is
probably nonsense, but it is so clear-cut, so simple, so easy to hand
full-blown to the student."(44) There is almost no evidence of juvenile recapitulation in the plant world,
from seedling to full grown organism. Zoologist Bolton Davidheiser mentions
other difficulties with this theory that occur in the insect world, where
certain flies are virtually identical in their adult stage, however in their
larvae stage they are entirely different. He mentions the freshwater crayfish
and the lobster, nearly indistinguishable except for size in their adult
stages, but the crayfish hatch from eggs as fully developed miniature crayfish
while the lobster pass through several complex larvae stages on their way to
maturity. (45) Let us now go through a
few of the more familiar orders of mammals to find out what is presently known
of their evolutionary history. Ivan T. Sanderson, an evolutionist with degrees
in botany, geology, and zoology from Cambridge University and an honored member
of numerous national and international scientific societies, has provided us
with the following seven examples. Sanderson has been a world-wide lecturer,
published numerous books and articles on evolution, and supervised zoological
expeditions throughout the world. A) Marsupialia: Pouched Mammals: "The strange thing is
that already at that early period [100 million years ago] these little
animals were of several distinct kinds . . .Among the opossums were animals
astonishingly like some that are still living today . . ."(Living
Mammals of the World, Ivan T. Sanderson, pp. 16, Doubleday and Co. Inc.,
Garden City, New York, 1967.) B) Seals: "Also, apart from one fossil form, which may have been
a seal-like otter, or an otter like seal but is not a missing link and
therefore does not indicate any true relationship between the two, no
animal living or extinct gives us any real clue to their origin."
(ibid pp. 155.) C) Rodentia: Rodents, mice, rats, beavers, squirrels, gophers,
hamsters, porcupines: "Despite their great variety of form and habit, the
Rodents constitute the most clear cut and readily definable order of mammals,
both as they exist today and as found in a fossilized condition. Since the dawn
of the age of mammals they have been quite distinct, and there is nothing
known, dead or alive, that in any was links them to any other mammals living or
extinct." (ibid) pp. 114.) D) Equus: Horses: "The origin of the horse was until recently
thought to be better known than that of any other mammal . . .However, this
pleasantly neat evolutionary picture of orderly progression in tooth structure,
loss of toes, increase in size, and wrist and ankle elongation has now
unfortunately come under grave suspicion. So many side-branches have been
brought to light and so many intermediate forms are completely lacking that we
can now only say that the classic description is no more than a guide to the probable
steps by which the modern horse evolved." (ibid pp. 222) E) Cetacea: Whales, dolphins and porpoises: " . . . not only
is there a great mystery about the origin of whales, there is also a much wider
puzzle which requires investigation. This-the time factor in evolution-cannot,
however be discussed here . . . It is not absolutely sure that the two living
groups of whales had a common origin . . . [Concerning the ancestors of toothed
whales] Whatever these animals may have been, however, is not known and nothing
like them has been found in the fossil state. Whatever the ancestors of the
whales may have been, they must have lived and presumably become extinct
more than sixty million years ago." (Ibid, pp. 210) F) Hippopotamines:"The exact position in the scheme of life of
these remarkable beasts was for long a puzzle to naturalists and zoologists . .
. They must be of considerably venerable ancestry per se but, although
sundry creatures are known from fossil remains that look like missing links
between them and the original Suines, there is really no information on
their earliest history." (Ibid, pp. 246) G) Camelines: Camels: "At one time it was rather confidently
believed that these animals evolved exclusively in the continent of North
America and that the stages of this evolution were as fully extant as those
pertaining to the Horses. Now, however, a host of other related creatures
have come to light and the whole subject has become blurred." (Ibid,
pp. 247) H) For the origin of the elephants, P. E. P. Deraniyagala, Director of the
National Museum of Ceylon wrote: "The two survivors of the great Order
Proboscidia are Elephas maximusof Asia and Laxodonta africana
of Africa. The origins of both are obscure . . ."(Government
Press of Ceylon, 1955, pp. 11) T here has been quite a
bit of attention being given lately to the supposed novel discovery that
dinosaurs and birds might be related, as though this is some significant new
breakthrough in paleontological thought. It isn't. Darwin suggested the
connection over a century ago in his Descent, and of course he didn't
originate the idea either, it had been discussed already by Huxley and Cope. (46)Every now and then some old, discarded
evolutionary concept is wheeled out and highlighted by the press and the
scientific community as a brand new development in evolutionary theory, which
helps to spur occasional flagging interest in the subject by an often confused
and mystified public. As far as the archaeopteryx, the supposed link between reptiles and birds
that Darwin mentioned in his Descent, which has for all practical
purposes been the only fossil that evolutionists have ever come up with to
attempt to validate their theory, a true transitional bird would have scales
turning into feathers, sort of like "fales" or "sceathers",
but the archaeopteryx fossils had fully developed feathers and wings.
The other so-called primitive features of the archaeopteryx, it's talons and
shallow breastbone, are shared by living ostriches, it's solid bones are shared
by the hoatzin, the African darter, and the Florida "swamp turkey,"
both alive and well, and some ancient birds had teeth. A feather itself is a very marvelous and intricate instrument, having
delicately woven barbules and hooks functioning together in beautiful fashion
that does not point to any kind of a random, evolutionary process having the
ability to produce it, wither from natural selection or genetic mutations. Recently (October 1995) a true fossil bird has been found that has been
dated as older than archaeopteryx, thus the archaeopteryx
could not be the ancestor of birds in the evolutionists time framework. [Since
writing this, a supposed fossil intermediate link between dinosaurs and birds
has been found in China, however this fossil is estimated to be only 120
million years old, while the archaeopteryx is supposedly 150 million years old,
and other fossil birds have been found that are older] In addition, the avian lung is totally unlike any reptilian [or mammalian]
lung. Instead of having sponge type lungs with bronchia, a birds lungs are
circulatory, with the air passing through them in one direction, similar to the
way blood flows through veins in the body. The avian lung would have to be
perfectly developed in its present state for a bird to survive, a half-formed
avian lung would spell instant death to any bird, and no intermediate lungs
between reptiles and birds have ever been known. Another seldom mentioned difficulty with the dinosaur-to-bird scenario is
the fact that the types of dinosaurs that birds supposedly evolved from had the
wrong kind of pelvis. There were two basic pelvic structures among the
dinosaurs, both of them exhibiting major differences. The two legged Saurischiandinosaurs,
among them the Ornitholestes, hypothetical ancestors of birds, had
pelvic structures unlike any bird, fossil or modern, but had pelvises like
lizards. The type of dinosaurs that had pelvic structures similar to birds were
the four legged dinosaurs, from which birds are not thought to have
evolved from at all. We have
seen that the fossil record, supposedly the best proof that we have for
evolution, does not support the theory at all. Indeed, the fossil record is the
best witness against the theory of evolution. Thus the characteristic feature
of the missing links is that they really are missing, and this is from the
writings of world renowned evolutionists! This situation has proven to be
rather an embarrassment to the evolutionists when it is pointed out. There is a Book written that fully accords with what we find in the fossil
record, that tells us that all creatures were created suddenly, after their
kind, and that they did not all evolve gradually from some common ancestor.
That Book is, of course, the Bible. Still, evolutionists since the time of Darwin have stubbornly refused to
acknowledge the evidence before their very eyes, and they have continued to try
and pawn their theories off to the public, and sadly enough to young children
who are developing their ideas on the origin of human life and who are struggling
to find meaning and purpose in the world as they grow up. We will investigate more of the arguments that evolutionists use to try and
validate their theory since Darwin's time in the next Chapter of The Darwin
Papers. (i)Erik von Kuenhelt-Leddihn, "Leftism
Revisited," Pg. 456. (ii) Richard Dawkins Climbing Mount Improbable, 1. Darwin, The Origin of Species, Recapitulation and
Conclusion, pp. 241-243, William Benton Pub., 1952, Edited under the
auspices of Encyclopedia Britannica and the University of Chicago, Great
Books of the Western World Series. Darwin wrote: "Analogy would lead me . . ." in his argument, but
then wrote immediately thereafter, "But analogy [inference] may
be a deceitful guide."! He based his entire argument on analogy alone, not
actual evidence. 2. Nicholas Hotton lll, The Evidence of Evolution, American
Heritage Publishing Co., Smithsonian Institution, pp. 42, 45. 3. Carl O. Dunbar, Historic Geology, John Wiley
and Sons, 1960, pp. 47. 4. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, chapter
Ten: On the Imperfection of the Geologic Record: On the Sudden Appearance
of Groups of Allied Species in the lowest known Fossiliferous Strata.pp. 164from
Great Books of the Western World, Volume 49, Darwin, Published by
William Benton under the auspices of the University of Chicago and Encyclopedia
Britannica, Mortimer Adler associate Editor, Chicago, London, Toronto, 1952. 7. (ibid) Origin, Chapter Ten: On the
Absence of intermediate varieties at the present day; On the nature of extinct
intermediate varieties; On the lapse of time, as inferred from the rate of
denudation and deposition. 10. (ibid) pp. 162, Benton Pub., 1952 Edition of the
Origin. 13. Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis,
pp. 160-162. 14. Steven Jay Gould, The Return of Hopeful
Monsters, Natural History, Volume LXXXVI (6), June-July, 1977, pp.24. 15. Luther Sunderland, Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and
Other Problems, pp. 89, Master Books, Santee California, 1988, From a
quote of a letter written by Dr. Patterson to Luther Sunderland dated April 10,
1979. 16. Claude A. Villee and Vincent G. Dethier, Biological
Principles and Processes, pp. 304, W. B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia, London, Toronto, 1976. 17. Wallace, King and Sanders, Biosphere, The Realm
of Life, pp. 291, Scott, Foresman and Company, Glenview, Illinois, 1984. 18. Michael Neushul, Botany, pp. 148, Hamilton
Publishing Company, Santa Barbara, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1974. 19. Chester A. Arnold, Botany, pp. 7, An
Introduction to Paleobotany, Mcgraw-Hill, New York, 1947. 20. World Book Encyclopedia, Volume 6, pp. 330, Scott
Fetzer Co., Chicago, London, 1982. 21. Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis,
pp. 186-187, Adler & Adler Publishing, 4550 Montgomery Avenue, Bethesda,
Maryland, 20814, 1986. 22. Not wishing to plague the reader with redundancies,
nevertheless what I mentioned in the previous chapter regarding the dated
material in some of my quotes bears repeating, since this will surely become an
item to be seized upon by evolutionists. First, an article of evidence does not
become discredited simply by the passage of time, but only by being disproved
by contrary evidence. In fact, the longer evidence has stood the test
of time the more its credentials are verified. Secondly, the arguments that
evolutionists promote have not changed dramatically since the time of these
quotes, they have merely been reworked and parroted to an unwitting public as
supposedly new data. Third, since Darwin and Darwinism are still regarded as
almost synonymous with evolutionary theory, and Darwin lived nearly two
centuries ago, the evidence is still relevant. 23. Snodgrass, R. E., Crustation Metamorphosis,
Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, 131:10:6, 1956, pp. 6. 24. Invitation to Biology, Helena Curtis, pp.
585, Worth Publishers Inc., 1972. 25. Biology Today, pp. 779, CRM Books INC.,
1972. 26. William Howells, Mankind So Far, pp. 19,
American Museum of Natural History Series, Vol. 5, Doubleday and Co., Garden
City, New York, 1949. 27. Larousse Encyclopedia of Animal Life, pp. 205, based
on La Vie Des Animaux, by Leon Burtin, The Hamlin Publishing House,
Feltham, Middlesex, England. Printed in Italy for the Hamlin Publishing Company
Limited, London, New York, Sidney, 1967, 1971. 28. Barbara Stall, Vertebrate History: Problems in
Evolution, pp. 148, Mcgraw-Hill, New York, 1974. 29. J.Z. Young, The Life of Vertebrates, Oxford
University Press, New York & Oxford, 1962. 30. National Geographic, June, 1988. 32. Quote taken from Davidheiser's excellent book, Evolution
and Christian Faith, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing House, 1969, pp.
307, quoting from the book, Time, Life and Man, R.A. Sirton, John Wiley and Sons, 1957, pp. 416. 33. Biology Today, pp. 639, Communications
Research Machines Inc., Del Mar, Ca., 1972 34. The Indomitable Cockroach, Allen A.
Boraiko, National Geographic, January, 1981, pp. 134. 35. Evolution of Turtles, Encyclopedia
Britannica, Vol. 26, 1986, Encyclopedia Britannica Pub., pp. 750 36. Maurice Richardson, a worldwide traveler,
journalist, and authority on reptiles, has written of snakes: "The unique
feature of snakes is their limblessness., There is no doubt about their
evolution from some four-legged, lizard like ancestor, though precisely how
this happened we do not know." (The Fascination of Reptiles,
Maurice Richardson, pp. 14, Hill and Wang, New York, 1972). Evolution has become a "magic" word, explaining everything, while
telling us nothing, with statements such as "evolution has produced the
remarkable ability of the dragonfly to mate while in flight", yet never
stating just how evolution accomplished this! Richardson wrote "The origin of the Chelonians [turtles] is obscure . .
.Of living reptiles, the chelonians and the crocodilians appear to have changed
least [no evidence of evolution]. The evolution of the lizards and snakes is
more problematical. . .the evolution of snakes from lizard-like ancestors has
given rise to one speculation (you might call it the cataclysmic hypothesis)
that all snakes are descended from small burrowing forms like living sand boas
. . .But there is no certainty here." (Ibid, pp. 23) 37. Eugenie Clark, SHARKS Magnificent and
Misunderstood, National Geographic, August, 1981, pp. 149. 38. Darwin had to admit the presence of living fossils,
creatures that had not changed substantially over long periods of time, and
admitted that the earliest forms of animal life were in no way intermediate to
later forms: "Some of the most ancient animals, as the nautilus, Lingula,
&c., do not differ much from living species; and it cannot on our theory be
supposed, that these old species were the progenitors of all the species
belonging to the same groups which have subsequently appeared, for they are
not in any degree intermediate in character."(Descent, PP.
164, Benton, 1952) 39. Darwin, The Descent of Man, Chapter 6: On The Affinities and Genealogy of Man, Subsection:
Lower Stages in the Genealogy of Man,
Darwin, G.B.O.W.W., Vol. 49, pp.337, William Benton Publisher, under
the auspices of Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952. 41. Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, pp.145-146; Sir Gavin de Beer, Homology: An Unsolved Problem, Oxford
University Press, London, 1971. 43. Francis Hitching,
The Neck of the Giraffe, pp.174-175.
44. John Tyler Bonner,
from a review of Implications of
Evolution by G.A. Kerkut, American
Scientist, 49:2:240, June, 1961. 45. Bolton Davidheiser,
Evolution and Christian Faith,
Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1986, pp.245-246. 46. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, pp.
337-338. On the Affinities and Genealogy of Man, Lower Stages in the Genealogy
of Man, (Benton Edition, Great Books of The Western World). Here Darwin
expressed the view that Dinosaurs might be the ancestors of birds, it is no new
concept at all: "We have seen that the Ornithorhynchus graduates towards
reptiles; and Prof. Huxley has discovered, and is confirmed by Mr. Cope and
others, that the dinosaurians are in many important characteristics
intermediate between certain reptiles and certain birds-the birds referred to
being the ostrich-tribe and the Archeopteryx, that strange secondary bird with
a long lizard-like tail." Darwin also wrote in his Origin: "Even
the wide interval between birds and reptiles has been shown by the naturalist
just quoted [Huxley] to be partially bridged over by the ostrich and extinct Archeopteryx
and on the other hand, by the Compsognathus, one of the
dinosaurians-that group that includes the most gigantic of all terrestrial
reptiles." (Darwin, Origin: On The Geological Succession of Organic
Beings: ON the Affinities of Extinct species to each other, and to Living Forms,
pp. 173, Benton Publishing, 1952). There have never been found any dinosaurs that had feathers, which are very
complex in their arrangement.
"A Quote
from a Wise Man:
Brazen lies,
needless to say, are usually the most successful ones,
especially if they are
savagely stupid and contradict the truth"
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (i)
A Verse from the Holy
Bible:
"Every prudent man
acts with knowledge,
but a fool lays open his
folly"
Proverbs 13:16
A Brazen Lie (from a
brazen liar):
"It is absolutely
safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims
not to believe in
evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid
or insane (or wicked,
but I'd rather not consider that)."
Evolutionist Richard Dawkins (ii)
copied and distributed
for nonprofit use
provided acknowledgement
is made
for material written by
the author.
The Darwin Papers © 2000
James Foard
© 2004 James Foard
Read about Chris
Schmidt's
evolutionary empire of
ants below.
Chapter Ten of Darwin's Origin is titled On
the Imperfection of the Geological Record.
Where did Darwin derive his evidence for this grand theory from? Not from any
presently existing species:
(Darwin,
Origin, Chapter Six: Absence or Rarity of Transitional Varieties.)
that life has evolved from simpler to more and more complex forms."(3)
Over the past few years they have found strange fossils in Pre-Cambrian
rock called the Vendian epoch, and these will be dealt with
subsequently in this chapter.
Australian scientist and medical doctor Michael Denton wrote:
The branches of the tree are merely drawn in to represent the supposed
evolutionary history of the various families of organisms according to
evolutionist speculation, but there are no transitional forms between humans
and other apes, or between mammals and reptiles, or between any of the major
families of animals at all. There is no evidence of their existence today and
there is no evidence that they ever existed in the past!
In the section on Morphological and Functional Diversity of
Ant Mandibles we are presented with a series of pictures of ants
with various types of mandibles. We are told that
Mr. Schmidt is simply handing us a piece of evolutionist dogma, and we are
meant to blindly accept it. This is the result of the dumbing down process of
feeding our schoolchildren evolutionist propaganda practically from the time
they pick up their first textbook on science on into their college years. Our
public education system is made up of a huge matrix of special interest
groups designed to discourage individual thought and critical analysis on
topics such as evolution, which still remains a vaguely defined pseudo-theory
that all creatures mysteriously descended from some common bacterial great granddaddy
of us all. By the time they reach college they have become so indoctrinated
into the dogma through this process of group-think that they sit
spellbound in a science class and automatically accept anything that the
professor will say to them: "Please check your brains in at the door and
pick them up on the way out. Now class, take my word for it, ants evolved."
Look at the pictures
on Mr. Schmidt's website. Do the ants really look as though they simply arrived
through a chance random accident, evolving up from primeval mud, or do they
appear to be wonderfully and beautifully designed?
What actual evidence has Mr. Schmidt provided to show that ants arrived here
by evolution?
So how do we know that these amazing creatures arrived here by the mysterious process
of evolution? Why Mr. Schmidt has told us so. He said
that is how it happened. And that is all the evidence that he has presented
on his entire website. It's all based on his say so. And where did Mr.
Schmidt gain his knowledge that evolution produced ants? Somebody told him
once when he was in school. And he never questioned it. He never saw any
evidence for evolution, he simply believed it, and then passed it on to you.
That is how myths are propagated and perpetuated from generation to generation,
whether they be myths about Greek gods or myths about the flat earth or myths
that ants and apes and cucumbers and humans share a common phylogenic ancestor through
evolution.
Mr. Schmidt has a link on his site to the classic story about the Galapagos
finches - that they provided some great evidence of evolution. The Galapagos
finches never changed into anything other than Galapagos finches. They could
always interbreed with each other, which even by evolutionist standards
constitutes the definition of one single species. The so-called different
species of finches that evolutionists claim demonstrates evidence of evolution,
in truth merely demonstrates variety within one single species, similar
to the different breeds of dogs that we have, some with long snouts, others
with short snouts, some with long hair, others with short hair, etc. Dogs have never
been bred into anything other than dogs, and it is the same with the Galapagos
finches. We have no idea where they came from, except from previous finches,
and we have no evidence that they are "evolving" into anything else,
except more finches, and there is a limit to the extent of their capacity to
vary, thus they are not "evolving" anything unique other than the
feathers, beaks, talons, etc. that they had in the first place.
"Ah", says the evolutionist, "But given enough time we
will have something other than finches". We have no evidence for this notion,
but based on this flight of fancy, as noted in a previous section on the
so-called evolution of whales from hippos, or cows or some such other supposed
ancestor of the cetaceans, we might just as well suppose that California surfers
would eventually grow flippers, a thermodynamically conditioned outer skin for
protection from the elements, and their noses between their eyes would evolve
into a blowhole on the top of their heads after a few million years. These fantastic
flights of fantasy that evolutionists entertain their unwitting audiences
with are all lacking the least scintilla of any actual evidence. The mathematical possibilities
for such transformations to happen are infinitesimally small;
scientifically they could never occur. Evolution is not scientific, it is not
backed up by science, and it is in fact antithetic to genuine scientific
inquiry.
While there is a wealth of information about ants on Schmidt's website, search
the entire site and he has given us no evidence, not a paragraph, not a
sentence, not a word, not a hyphen to indicate where they came from, except from other ants. We
have to believe by faith his claim that they evolved. He said so, that's it. This,
my friends, is what is known as blind faith; it falls into the realm of dogma,
not of experimentation and conclusion in any scientific method.
The evidence, of sharply separated kinds or "types" of organisms with
no intermediate links living or fossilized actually supports creationism more
than evolution. There is no evidence of any fossil predecessors
of ants, none have ever been found.
The earliest ants
were ants; there are no intermediate links between any of the ant species and
some primitive ancestor that was not an ant. All ants live in colonies; all ant
colonies have worker ants, male ants and female ants. The Sphecomyrma freyi, once claimed by evolutionists to be some
primitive ancestor of ants, is clearly a complete ant, having the metapleural
gland, which is used to produce antibiotics that protect the colony from
hostile bacteria and fungi.
For the millions of years that ants are supposed to have been around, there is
no evidence that they have evolved into anything other than ants, thus
evolution fails the test of being some kind of "universal law" like gravity,
since a universal law would not cease to exist after the passage of time. If
you want to call evolution a "theory" go ahead, however it is a very
bad theory, and belongs more with the theory of crop circles than with the Law
of Gravity or the electrical theory, both of which can be demonstrated in
scientific laboratory experiments and which have practical applications in everyday
life.
Many of the so-called different species of ant are classified merely in the
basis of size and behavior; however the basic body plan of all ants is
astonishingly similar. Some of the different species might merely be variations
within a Biblical "kind" originally created by God. The sudden
appearance of ants in the fossil record supports this thesis more than the
imaginary evolutionary story.
In reality what you are seeing in the Tree of Life Project are different
organisms that just pop up in different spots on the tree with imaginary
branches leading up to all of them.
The limbs of the tree are drawn in to hypothetically represent what is supposed
to be thousands of transitional forms and millions of years of evolution, but they
really give no explanation as to what the transitional forms were or for that
matter any evidence that they were, and at every juncture where a new
branch juts out from the tree there is some unknown, unrepresented common
ancestor that is never identified!
It is like hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree and then telling a visitor
that those ornaments actually grew out of the Christmas tree. And your host
would say, "Well, I have a PhD in science, so you have to believe that
what I am saying to you is correct." These people can tell us what to believe,
they can define what truth is to the common populace such as you and I, since
they belong to an academic priesthood and have been initiated into the deep
mysteries of evolution. It's all a magnificent masquerade, a huge house of
cards that uses, or misuses genuine science to lend credence to their fraud.
Once you have been trained to spot this subterfuge it becomes incredible to realize
that such schemes have been presented in all of their audacity for years to the
public with a wink and a nod by the evolutionists with no evidence for their
claims at all.
In one sense, creationists and evolutionists are talking about the same thing. Both
would believe that all ants descended from some sort of a common ant ancestor.
Both would say that different geographic locales would favor different breeds
of ants over some other breeds, or species as evolutionists call them, through
natural selection. Where they differ is how this process works. The
evolutionist would postulate that the earliest ant would have less genetic
information, and that through chance and natural selection all of these other
species of ants evolved with new genetic information to suite their various
living situations.
The creationists, on the other hand, would postulate that the original ant ancestor
(actually ancestors, male and female) had a greater amount of genetic
information given to them by design, and that through natural selection various
breeds of ants through migration branched out into the different varieties that
we see today, with each different breed having a selection of the original
genetic gene pool suited for their mode of life according to their particular
geographic and climatic conditions.
The evolutionist believes that all the different families of organisms have
descended from some one common ancestor of all of life millions of years ago
through these fortuitous chance variations, while the creationist would
postulate that there are distinct barriers between the different families of
organisms that have never been crossed, that descent from an original ancestor
has limits, probably at the Family level of organisms, and that even this
descent is not evolution by the standard definition, since no new genetic material is produced.
Now, which of these two views lines up more with the actual evidence? Of the
200 different Families of living organisms, there are no intermediate links,
living or fossilized. All of them appear suddenly in the geologic column, fully
developed except for the different varieties that have come about through
geographic distribution, known as natural selection, which Edward Blyth
demonstrated works better within a creationist context, not an evolutionary
one.
Let us use for our case the very evidence provided by Mr. Schmidt. Go back to
the link to ant mandibles at the Tree of Life Project. Examine the site
carefully. Look at all of the complexity involved in the structure and function
of ant mandibles. They are remarkable, amazing tools that the ants depend on to
survive. Ask yourself how these formidable organs could have evolved through
chance evolution. Was there some kind of proto-ant somewhere back in time that
did not have these mandibles? The fossil record does not show it, but let us
give the evolutionist the benefit of a doubt.
So at first some ant-like creature evolved some kind of structure that didn't work,
unless you want to believe that the mandibles were created full blown at the
first try, on the very first genetic mutation. Thus there had to have been a
lot of mistakes, creatures evolving other things rather than mandibles - you
know, trial and error - perhaps an extra set of legs through mutation, or
another thorax, or something else besides mandibles. These creatures all
perished within one generation or so since they were burdened with this unnecessary
baggage that did not work right and thus they lost the battle for survival.
This must have gone on for quite awhile until finally one day one of these
ant-like creatures eventually produced a workable mandible, however not just
one, but two at the same time to function together as pincers, with all of the
cutting ability, the lifting muscles, the defensive and offensive power to fend
off enemies that most ant mandibles have today. And it must have been a male
and a female together at the same time that grew identical mandibles so that
their offspring would carry the gene and pass it on to its offspring lest it disappear
as a quirky recessive trait that gets lost in the gene pool. And from there all
of these other variations evolved with their marvelously configured variations
in the different ant species.
Evolution has no pre-set design, no purpose, no Designer. Remember, it was a
long, slow process.
That's all that Mr. Schmidt is asking us to believe on his site on ants and ant
mandibles. It makes a nice story, but none of this is going on for us to
observe today of course, it is all hypothesized to have happened in the far
distant, unobservable past, and we have no fossil evidence for it either.
The sheer improbability of this happening through chance staggers any kind of
logical approach to the subject. We have seen in Chapter Two that chance is an
inadequate explanation for any of this marvelous design that we see in nature;
even given the supposedly billions of years of time evolutionists need for
their theory. The chance evolution of even one species, the Bombardier Beetle,
is an impossible proposition. The numbers are against it.
Natural selection has occurred. Evolution has not occurred. The two are not
synonymous; they are not even compatible. Natural selection is the very
opposite of what evolution supposedly is. One is an observable fact of nature
that merely winnows down the existing gene pool; it is a gleaning process, not
an innovative one, while the other is a fantastic hypothesis devoid of any
evidence to show that it ever happened.
Natural selection begins with an original type of organism for each Family
level of life or "kind" as described in the Bible; each one rich in
genetic information and potential which could only have come about through
intelligent design, and then as different descendants of those originally
created types migrated to different locales on the earth, through natural
selection they diversified and became the varieties that we see today, all
having a sampling of the original rich genetic pool in their particular
breeding colony.
This process does not go all the way back to an original ancestor for all life.
The differing Phyla of life on earth, and even narrowing it down to the
different Families within the Orders within the Classes of these different
Phyla, have always remained distinct and do not descend from a common
phylogenic ancestor. Phylogeny has its upper limits at the Family level of
species, and within these different Families God has created different Kinds,
some encompassing the entire Family level itself, and some Kinds being created
separately in smaller sub-groups within Families of organisms. Organisms appear
abruptly in the fossil record with no evidence for any kind of evolutionary
development.
The rest of the chapter will be devoted to proving this thesis.
Evolutionist Nicholas Hotton wrote a few years back:
Echinodermota are fascinating animals. Just as higher organisms, such as
vertebrates and insects, have bilateral symmetry (a left and a right matching
side) Echinodermota have a five-fold symmetry, such as we see with the star
fish.
Have we found any evidence of evolutionary transitional forms leading up to
this type of remarkable penta-lateral symmetry? Are there any evolutionary
"links" between Echinodermota and some early prototype evolving into
a five formed creature? The Tree of Life Web Project gives us the answer:
(Tree
of Life Web Project, 4/05/02)
This is a far cry from a starfish, and there are no intermediate forms
found linking them together.
(Tree of Life Web Project)
And I have every confidence that The Darwin Papers will stand the test
of time, and outlast many of its fiercest critics. Let the evolutionists show
facts to the contrary, which they have failed to do, instead of using such
worthless arguments as opining that some of the quotes here are older than MTV.
While revisions have been in progress from time to time as new facts emerge, to
constantly update a work with every new quote, unless it brings something new
to light that changes what was previously said, would be an endless task, and
one which I don't intend to waste my time with. The basic thesis for this work
holds true and will hold true throughout the rest of mankind's history. The
evidence stands firm. There has never been any evidence of any genuine missing
link or series of missing links in the manner and the amount necessary for
evolution to have been a fact of life on planet earth; they have not shown up,
and they never will show up, thus demonstrating that Darwin's claim that this
would be devastating to his theory remains as much a fact today as it was when
he originally wrote it.
So, beginning with the so-called earliest life forms, we have seen that the
Cambrian layer exploded with various creatures, with no fossil
evidence for their having evolved from any pre-existing forms. These sudden
explosions of different, distinct types of living creatures without any
intermediate links to creatures before or after them are known in the
literature as "explosive radiations," or simply
"radiations."
There is little direct evidence, however to support such a theory. Ideas about
evolutionary trends among bryophytes are also controversial. For example,
gametophytes are thought by adherents of the antithetic theory to have started
with flat, undifferentiated prostrate types, which subsequently evolved into
complex thallose forms like Marchantiaor leafy forms like Lophocolea. More
recent theories reverse these evolutionary schemes and postulate that thalloid
gametophytes evolved from leafy ones, becoming reduced to types like Marchantia
and Riccia."
Who would contest a quite obvious fact? Yet these types of statements are not
uncommon in the writings of evolutionists concerning the "fact" of
evolution.
It may be said that the reason that they make these statements is because
creationists are continually calling into question the so-called evidence of
evolution, but that is precisely the point. Anybody questioning the existence
of the Earth would be absolutely ignored, because the existence of the earth is
such an incontrovertible proposal.
Its existence doesn't even need to be defended with a remark like, "Now we
finally have proof after all these years that the Earth really exists.
Scientists have recently uncovered part of the earth itself in South
Africa"
Paleontologists often make extravagant claims for the supposed proof that
Darwin gave for evolution, and then they later completely contradict themselves
and reveal that Darwin actually offered no proof at all for the
"fact" of evolution.
(Wallace, King and Sanders, pp.387-388.)
Michael Denton wrote:
evidence
of any "common ancestor" for either of these, in fact there is no
evidence for any kind of ancestor at all for them. All the ancient fossil
remains show quite distinct and fully developed species. When we do
find an ancient oyster or clam or hydra, except for some extinct exotic
varieties, they are identical to the oysters and clams of today, only differing
in size in most cases.
"The evolutionary origin of coelenterates is largely unknown."(Biology
Today, pp. 764,CRM Books, Del Mar, California, 1972)
(Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 24, pp. 319)
we also have no idea where they "evolved" from either, except
other horseshoe crabs.
Here are some more quotes on the horseshoe crab:
"Horseshoe crabs, common along the Delaware coast, have evolved little in
the last 250 million years." http://www.beach-net.com/horseshoe/Bayhorsecrab.html
04/05/02):
"Horseshoe Crabs are considered to be living fossils because their
appearance has not changed since their origin over 300 million years ago. There
are 4 species which survive today: 3 range along the shores of Southeast Asia;
the other species populate the Atlantic coast from Maine to the Gulf of
Mexico." (Mystic
Aquarium,)
"The horseshoe crab evolved 100 million years before the dinosaurs and is
closely related to spiders and scorpions. This ancient creature is important to
the medical community, commercial fishermen and the environment." (Ocean
News, 6/21/99)
Is it possible that Ms. Sturtevant is doing a little taxonomical reshuffling in
response to creationists who are (rightly) pointing out that in over three
hundred million years the horseshoe crab has shown no sign of evolution? (And
the above quotes of hundreds of millions of years with no change refer
distinctly to Limulus polyphemus, the same species that Ms. Sturtevant
refers to)
G) Diplopoda: Millipedes, 20-100 trunk segments, each with a double
pair of appendages. As with the centipede, there is no information at all in
the literature on where they evolved from. 
evolutionary
years ago, near the late Devonian and early Carboniferous periods. In Vertebrate
History: Problems in Evolution, Barbara Stahl wrote:"...None
of the known fishes is thought to be directly ancestral to the earliest land
vertebrates. Most of them lived after the first amphibians appeared, and those
that came before show no evidence of developing the stout limbs and ribs that
characterized the primitive tetrapod." (28)
Paleontology
at the University of California stated that for the evolution of the reptiles, (32)"There is no direct proof from the
fossil record, but we can readily hypothesize [guess at] the conditions under
which it came about."
Thus no evidence of evolution at all among the sharks. They have not changed in
the supposed three hundred million years of their existence, but have remained
quite like the sharks that we still have swimming around us today. (38)
spiration,
and seven vertebrate in the neck.
Wilhelm His, Sr. (Unsere Koperform und das Physiologische Problem Ihrer Entstehung)
and Albert Fleischmann (Die Descenddztheoried, 1901, pp. 101-152). were
two other prominent German scientists who exposed the fraudulent nature of his
work.
His drawings that were supposed to demonstrate human features common to
hypothetical ancestors were found to be falsified, yet for years afterward his
name and his theory were presented unashamedly in biology texts as
"Haeckel's Law of Recapitulation."
Regnery Gateway Publishers, 1990
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1996), p. 113; Creation
Digest, www.CreationDigest.com , 6/20/2002; as cited by Jonathan Sarfati, PhD, Refuting
Evolution (Brisbane, Australia: Answers in Genesis, 1999), p. 64.
Analogy may be used as an argument in proving a point, but not exclusive of any
facts for scientific proof! You need true, genuine data to formulate a case to
arrive at a scientific proof. No one would use analogy alone, apart from the
facts, in a murder case, or in charging someone with grand theft! Note the line
of his reasoning where he wrote further: "Therefore, on the principle of
natural selection with divergence of character, it does not seem incredible
that from such low and intermediate form, both animals and plants may
have developed; and if we admit this, we must likewise admit
that all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth may be descended
from some one primordial form. But this inference is chiefly grounded on analogy,
and it is immaterial whether or not it is accepted." Origin, pp.241,
Recapitulation and Conclusion. Again, all supposition, no substance.
Thus it is all based on the presumption of evolution, known as circular
reasoning, i.e. attempting to prove something by using the conclusion itself as
proof. Evolutionists again and again commit this error, while criticizing
Christians for believing blindly in dogma.
Even Richardson has stated on the origin of the chameleon: "How did this
slow-moving, highly specialized arboreal form with its unique features evolve
from the agamids which are, with this one exception, all fast-moving,
thrusting, darting lizards? We do not know. All we can do is to speculate
and make tautologous statements such as 'chameleons are specially adapted for
living among vegetation on a diet of insects." (Ibid, pp. 62)