Evidence from Fossils
Does paleontology -the study of fossils- validate evolution? Open a teenager's biology textbook, and you will probably see a "tree of life" from which all life forms branch out. At the tree's bottom is a Single-celled creature. According to Dar winism, this little organism gradually evolved into the first invertebrates (creatures without back bones, such as jellyfish).
Cambrian rock is the low geologic layer containing most of the oldest known invertebrate fossils. In it, we find literally billions of fossils of invertebrates: clams, snails, worms, sponges, jellyfish, sea urchins, swimming crustaceans, etc. But there are no fossils demonstrating how these creatures evolved, or that they developed from a common ancestor. (For this reason, we hear of the Cambrian "explosion.") The late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard acknowledged that "our more extensive labor has still failed to identify any creature that might serve as a plausible immediate ancestor for the Cambrian faunas [animals] ."23 In other words, the bottom of Darwin's great "tree of life" is merely a speculation unsupported by fossil evidence.
Supposedly, invertebrates evolved into the first fish. But despite billions of fossils from both groups, transitional fossils linking them are missing.
All through the evolutionary tree, the "missing links" are still missing. Insects, rodents, pterodactyls, palm trees and other life forms appear in the fossil record with no trace of how they evolved. Gareth J. Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History stated: "It is a mistake to believe that even one fossil species or fossil 'group' can be demonstrated to have been ancestral to another. "24 Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, wrote: "Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a paleontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of iden tifying ancestral forms in the fossil record . ..I will lay it on the line-there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. "25 Many other paleontologists have made equally strong affirmations (see Chapter 2 of my book Tornado in a Junkyard). Of course, this certainly does not mean that there are no transitional forms claimed today by evolutionists. Indeed, with the rising challenge to Darwin, fewer evolutionists seem to acknowledge the lack of transitional fossils, perhaps for fear of being quoted by creationists. Some have begun to more strongly assert the existence of such forms.
However, the vulnerability of such opinions to error is demonstrated by times when they have been conclusively proven wrong. Take, for exam ple, Piltdown Man. It was declared an ape-man, 500,000 years old. It was validated by many of Britain's leading scientists, including noted anatomist Sir Arthur Keith, brain specialist Sir Grafton Eliot Smith, and British Museum geologist Sir Arthur Smith Woodward. At the time the discovery was announced (1912), the New York Times ran this headline: "Darwin Theory Proved True. "26 For the next four decades, Piltdown Man was evolution's greatest showcase, featured in text books and encyclopedias. Meanwhile, clergymen who had denounced evolution were ridiculed; Pilt down, it was said, had proven them wrong.
But what did the Piltdown Man actually consist of? Just a very recent orangutan jaw, stained to look old, its teeth filed down to make them more human-looking, planted together with a human skullbone, also stained to create an appearance of age.
Those who think such mistakes no longer occur need only consider the Archaeoraptor, promoted in a 10-page color spread in the November 1999 National Geographic as a "true missing link" between dinosaurs and birds. The fossil was displayed at National Geographic's Explorers Hall and viewed by over 100,000 people. However, it too turned out to be a fake-someone had simply glued together a bird fossil with part of a dinosaur fossil.
Nor is it just fraud that can deceive. The coelacanth is a bony fish whose fossils can be seen in Jurassic rock (the age of the dinosaurs). Supposedly this creature had been extinct for some 70 million years. According to Darwin's theory, fish evolved into amphibians (animals that can go on land and water, such as frogs). For years, evolutionists called the coelacanth a forerunner of amphibians, its fossilized fins described as limb like.
Then, in 1938, fishermen caught a live one off the African coast. Since then, about 200 more have been caught. Besides proving the coelacanth was not extinct for 70 million years, examination revealed it was 100 percent fish, with no amphibian characteristics.
Why is it relatively easy to be misled by a fossil?
Since 99 percent of an organism's biology resides in its soft anatomy, there is a limit to how much one can deduce from a bone. This makes fossils easy to invest with subjective opinions. As Jerold Lowenstein and Adrienne lihlman noted in New Scientist, in reference to human ancestry:
The subjective element in this approach to building evolutionary trees , which many palaeontologists advocate with almost religious fervor, is demonstrated by the outcome: there is no single family tree on which they agree.27 There is no conclusive way to test the interpretation of the fossil of an extinct creature. Science cannot observe the past with the same authority as it observes the present. Paleontology, therefore, is not a science on the level of physics or chemistry, whose laws can be demonstrated in a laboratory. It relies heavily on opinion and might even better be described as an art than a science.
On the 25th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's death, a national magazine asked me to write an in-depth article on the assassination. In researching it, I was astonished at the variety of opinions about what had occurred-the identity of the assassin(s), number of assassins, locations from which they had fired, etc. These debates raged despite a wealth of evidence: hundreds of eyewitnesses interviewed by the Warren Commission; the Zapruder film which caught the actual slaying; fingerprints; ballistics tests. Even the autopsy results on Kennedy's body were disputed in a best-selling book.
If this much debate can occur over an incident that happened only 40 years ago, how then can an evolutionist pick up a bone fragment, supposedly millions of years old, and assert with a high degree of certainty that it is the ancestor of such-and-such a species? Unlike the Kennedy assassination, there are no eyewitnesses who saw this creature; there is no Zapruder movie of it; there are no soft tissues to examine.
Darwin stated 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."28 He admitted these creatures' fossils had not been found in his day, but hoped future excavations would turn them up. They haven't.
If evolutionary theory is true, the geologic record should reveal the innumerable transitional forms Darwin spoke of. We shouldn't find just a handful of questionable fossils, but billions of intermediates validating his theory. Instead, the fossil record shows animals complete-not in developmental stages-the very first time they are seen. This is just what we would expect if animals were created, instead of evolved.
This is another strike on Darwin, but since the subjectivity of the fossil record makes it a more debatable issue, we'll call it another foul ball strike. Darwin can stay at the plate.
Evidence from Taxonomy
What about living transitional forms? Taxonomy is the science that classiffies plants and animals, grouping them by characteristics they share.
Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus pioneered the field, assigning organisms by class, order, genus and species. His system won universal acceptance.
Linnaeus strongly opposed evolution. He saw that the larger divisions of living things-contrary to what evolution would predict-were distinctly divided without overlaps.
A rainbow may have many colors, but one doesn't see solid red jump to solid orange. Rather, gradations exist between them. Similarly, if all creatures have a common ancestor, we should not see distinctly divided groups, but living interme diates between those groups. Evolutionists acknowledge that the intermediates are missing, but say they must have become extinct. But if so, where are their fossils? Canadian biologist W. R. Thompson noted:
Taking the taxonomic system as a whole, it appears as an orderly arrangement of clear-cut entities, which are clear-cut because they are separated by gaps . . . . The general tendency to eliminate, by means of unverifiable speculations, the limits of the categories nature presents to us, is the inheritance of biology from the Origin of Species. To establish the continuity required by the theory , historical arguments are invoked, even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypotheses based on hypotheses, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable conffsion.29
Little has changed since 1930, when Austin H. Clark, the Smithsonian Insitution's eminent zoologist, declared:
The complete absence of any intermediate forms between the major groups of animals, which is one of the most striking and most signifcant phenomena brought out by the study of zoology, has hitherto been overlooked, or at least ignored . . . .
No matter how far back we go in the fossil record of previous animal life upon the earth we find no trace of any animals forms which are intermediate between the various major groups or phyla.
This can only mean one thing. There can be only one interpretation of this entire lack of any intermediates between the major groups of animals-as for ins tance between the back boned animals or vertebretes, the echinoderms, the mollusks and the arthopods.
If we are willing to accept the facts we must believe that there never were such intermediates, or in other words that these major groups have from the very first borne the same relation to each other that they bear today. ³⁰
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