EVOLUTION OR CREATION? WHAT DOES THE FOSSIL RECORD SUPPORT? In the middle of the 19th century, at a time when a religious awakening was giving birth to new religious movements, a Unitarian Christian, Charles Darwin, published the book, The Origin of Species, in which he proposed that all life on Earth may not be the handy work of a Creator God, but the result of an evolutionary process, by natural selection. But even Darwin realized that the validity of his radical and unproven theory would ultimately rest with the evidence of the fossil record. The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, (must) be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. (Darwin) More than a century after Darwin published his controversial work, renown anthropologist Edmund Ronald Leach stated: Missing links in the sequence of fossil evidence were a worry to Darwin. He felt they would eventually turn up, but they are still missing and seem likely to remain so. (Leach) Many other respected anthropologists and geologists have expressed concerns about the lack of evidence to support the theory of evolution in the fossil record. D.M. Raup, the curator of geology at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, which holds the world’s largest fossil collection, stated in his 1979 article entitled, Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology: The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically. We have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwins time. By this I mean that the classic cases of darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be modified or discarded as a result of more detailed information. What appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and less gradualistic. (Raup) Even one of the world’s most famous proponents of evolution, noted Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould admitted the challenge that scientists face in proving the theory of evolution using scientific methods: The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection, we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study... The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. (Gould) Contrary to the impression given by evolutionary books and magazines, evidence of transition in the fossil record is very rare and limited to variation within species which could be interpreted as merely adaptation. Dr. Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, following the publishing of his work on the subject, was confronted about the lack of evidence of transitional fossils in his book. In response Patterson stated: 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. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualize such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it… Gradualism is a concept I believe in, not just because of Darwins authority, but because my understanding of genetics seems to demand it. Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils… It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favored by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test. (Patterson in correspondence to W. Sunderland) In evolutionary theory an ancestral species may give rise to numerous living species (different branches of the evolutionary tree) as well as numerous species that have since gone extinct. A true transition form would be on the central branch of this evolutionary lineage, between the presumed ancestral species and modern life. If extinct life is highly specialized and distinct, experts believe the fossils in question are a side branch and not the transitions they are seeking. This is particularly true when it has different features from those shared by all purported descendants of the proposed ancestor. It is dishonest to fudge these purported side branches and present them to the public as if they were true transition forms, when the experts believe otherwise. From a creationists perspective such distinct extinct life forms were unique, unrelated creatures. Harvard professor, Stephen J. Gould, is famous for declaring that since transition fossils are lacking, evolution must have occurred in rapid spurts (by mysterious genetic mechanisms) separated by long periods of stasis. He called this concept punctuated equilibrium which is his attempt to cope with the absence of transitions above the level of created kinds. Within scientific circles Gould drove home the point that transition fossils are lacking (as demonstrated in the Patterson quote above). Yet in speeches to the public in the last few years he has directly contradicted himself, boldly claiming that transition fossils are one of the three best arguments for evolution! (Blievernicht) His prize example? Whale evolution. Yet scholars such as Ashby Camp and Dr. Duane Gish have documented that the transition fossils Gould mentions in his whale evolution model are recognized to be specialized side branches, unique creatures distinct from whales and one another. (Gish, Camp) Nor do they appear in the proper order in the geologic strata. Evolutionary lineages do not flow from the fossil evidence; rather Darwinian beliefs must be imposed on (selectively cited) fossil evidence, with many assumptions, to see a Darwinian transformation. Gould’s prize example involved fudging to create transition forms, which begs the question – why are the trunk and main branches of the evolutionary tree perpetually missing from the fossil record? The best answer is that they never existed. Evolutionism teaches the appearance of life from non-life, followed by patterns of innovation and diversification from a single-celled ancestor to the great diversity of life we see around us today. The prediction is falsified, even when interpreted according to uniformitarian (old earth) belief. The gaps in the fossil record are real, however. The absence of a record of any important branching is quite phenomenal. Species are usually static, or nearly so, for long periods, species seldom and generally never show evolution into new species or genera but replacement of one by another, and change is more or less abrupt. (Wesson) There are over one hundred million identified and catalogued fossils currently in the world’s museums. If all life on Earth has descended from a single common ancestor then there should be countless “transitional forms” in the fossil record that show the gradual transformation of organisms. Compared to the number of living and fossil organisms, transitional forms are conspicuously absent and often referred to as “missing links”. Evolutionist Michael Denton stated: It is still, as it was in Darwin’s day, overwhelmingly true that the first representatives of all the major classes of organisms known to biology are already highly characteristic of their class when they make their initial appearance in the fossil record. This phenomenon is particularly obvious in the case of the invertebrate fossil record. At its first appearance in the ancient paleozoic seas, invertebrate life was already divided into practically all the major groups with which we are familiar today. (Denton) As previously stated, Darwin’s theory of evolution required that transitional forms exist. As Charles Darwin became older, however, he became increasingly concerned about this lack of evidence in regards to the fossil record. Darwin wrote, When we descend to details, we cannot prove that a single species has changed, or can we prove that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the groundwork of the theory. (Darwin) If Biblical young earth creationism is true then this is precisely what should be found. The creationist view predicts the presence of distinct kinds of animals with no transitional fossils between; or at best a handful of disputed forms. Evolutionists have spent more than 140 years trying to find transitional fossils and nothing approaching a conclusive form has ever been found – only a handful of doubtful and/or disproven examples exist. In summary, the fossil record contradicts Darwinism and supports the biblical teaching that God created all life in their distinct kinds, even when the fossil record is interpreted improperly from a uniformitarian perspective. Sources & Further Study creationwiki.org/Transitional_form rae.org/pdf/FAQ01.pdf (Revolution against Evolution) id-ucsb.edu/fscf/library/origins/graphics-captions/HOME.html (Courtesy of Access Research Network.) id-ucsb.edu/fscf/library/origins/quotes/cambrian.html id-ucsb.edu/fscf/library/origins/quotes/Discontinuties.html Blievernicht, E.J., personal notes at lecture by S.J. Gould at presidential inauguration ceremony, Wayne State University, 1998. (Others have reported similar content in other speeches he has given in his ‘circuit-riding’ in defense of Darwinian fundamentalism.) Camp, Ashby, The Overselling of Whale Evolution, Creation Matters May/June 1998. (trueorigin.org/whales.htm) Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species (1st edition) (New York: Avenel Books, Crown Publishers, 1979) p. 292. Gish, D.T., When is a whale a whale? Impact #250, Institute for Creation Research. (icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-250.htm) Gould, S.J., Evolutions Erratic Pace Natural History, (1977) vol. 86, May. Lewin, R., Science, 15 July (1988), 241:291. Raup, D.M., Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology, Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin 50:22, 1979. Sarfati, Jonathan, The Non-evolution of the Horse, Creation Ex Nihilo, 21(3):28-31. (answersingenesis.org/docs/4117.asp) Sunderland, Luther, Darwin’s Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems (El Cajon, CA: Master Books, 1988), p. 88-89. Wesson, R., Beyond Natural Selection (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) p. 45.
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 07:09:06 +0000