Creation & EvolutionForum for the discussion of this important topic. This forum is open to non-believers. There is a Christians-only forum in the Christians-only section too.
Fossils, of course, are the remains or traces of plants or animals preserved in sedimentary deposits. They represent the closest we can come to historical evidence in this matter of origins, so they are of prime importance in descussing creation and evolution. When the modern version of creation-evolution dialogue got started in the middle of the last century, creationists and evolutionists had radically different ideas of the kinds of life they expected to find as fossils.
The evolutionist, of course, expected to find fossils that showed stages through which one kind of animal or plant changed into a different kind. According to evolution, the boundaries between kinds should blur as we look back at their fossil history. IT should get more and more difficult, for example, to tell cats from dogs and then mammals from reptiles, land animals from water animals, and finally life from nonlife. They expected also that the criteria we useto classify plants and animals today would be less and less useful as older and older fossils show the in-between characteristics of presumed common ancestors for different groups.
But if the different kinds of life we see today are the descendants of kinds especially created at the beginning, as the creationist says,then all we ought to find as fossils are just variations of these kinds, with the possiblity also of extinction. The same kind of criteria we use to classify plants and animals today ought to work just as well with fossils. Fossils should be easy to classify as modern forms (when evidence is complete enough), and each kind should represent a mosaic of complete traits.
Certainly the evolutionist and creationist hsd radically different concepts of what would be found as the systematic study of fossils began in earnest in the middle of the last century.Which concept does it support--evolution or creation. (exerpt taken from GARY PARKERS book Creation the facts of life.)
This is an important matter and i would like to see evidence from both sides of the controversy. Thanks for your time. Rob a young earth creatonist.
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The fossil record supports the theory of evolution.
It clearly does not support creationism because of the stratification of the fossils in the record by age and transitional progressions observed therein.
If the fossil record supported creationism then you would expect to find two things:
1) Lack of patterns of organisms evolving from one to another; in other words, transitional forms should not exist at all.
2) Lack of patterns showing that organisms existed on the planet at different times (since, according to more popular versions of creationism, all the different animals appeared at roughly the same time).
Now, patterns of organisms evolving from one form to another have and continue to be found. And, the fossil record also demonstrates that organisms have existed at different time periods in the Earth's history (for example, we don't find modern human skeletons mixed in with dinosaur skeletons). Creationists sometimes use hydrological sorting as a method to explain the apparent "order" in the fossil record, but it's pretty easy to demonstrate that hydrological sorting is not responsible for the fossil record.
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It does get more and more difficult to tell bears from dogs as you go back through the fossil record.
It also gets more and more difficult to tell whales from terrestrial or semi aquatic animals as you go back through the fossil record.
It gets more and more difficult to tell birds from dinosaurs as you go back through the fossil record
It gets more and more difficult to tell mammals from reptiles as you go back throught the fossil record
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OK, Rob, let's look at the fossil record and predictions.
First, for YEC, since all organisms were created within 144 hours less than 20,000 years ago, all organisms should be in each and every layer of sediment. Is that the case? Absolutely not. Instead, we find organisms are confined to certain areas of the geological record but not found in others.
Second, evolution would predict that, as we go further into the past, the organisms would be less and less like contemporary organisms. Creationism, OTOH, predicts that past organisms would be very similar to contemporary organisms -- after all, they all were created in the recent past. What we find fits the evolutionary prediction. In general, as we go into the past in any "kind", the organisms look less and less like contemporary organisms.
1st April 2003 at 06:48 PM Freedom777 said this in Post #1
The evolutionist, of course, expected to find fossils that showed stages through which one kind of animal or plant changed into a different kind. According to evolution, the boundaries between kinds should blur as we look back at their fossil history. IT should get more and more difficult, for example, to tell cats from dogs and then mammals from reptiles, land animals from water animals, and finally life from nonlife. They expected also that the criteria we useto classify plants and animals today would be less and less useful as older and older fossils show the in-between characteristics of presumed common ancestors for different groups.
The first prediction is accurate. However, the last sentence is a strawman. It depends on what you call "criteria". If you look, you see that there are different species, genera, family, and orders as you go into the past. Also, there are some different classes. For instance, trilobites are a class and there is no contemporary class of trilobites. However, at the phyla level you would expect to have the same phyla. This is because all these taxa are simply collections of species. Since phyla is a very general classification of species with characteristics that are very general. So it is going to be possible to fit species that are still unlike contemporary species into a phyla.
Fossils should be easy to classify as modern forms (when evidence is complete enough), and each kind should represent a mosaic of complete traits.
That didn't happen, did it? Trilobites are just one example. A. afarensis can't be classified as Homo, can it? Paranthropus isn't a modern species, nor is it similar to any modern ape.
As you say, "kinds" should have characteristics that belong to no other organisms and, since kinds can't change to other kinds, there never should be a fossil organism with traits of two different "kinds". So, when in 1865 Archeopteryx was found, that really did in creationism. Here we have a fossil organism with a mosaic of traits from two kinds -- reptiles and birds. Of course, the situation kept getting worse. By 1877 we have:
Marsh, O C. 1877. Introduction and succession of vertebrate life in America. American Journal of Science and Arts 3rd Series XIV(83):337-378.
"It is now generally admitted by biologists who have made a study of the vertebrates, that Birds have come down to us through the Dinosaurs, and the close affinity of the latter with recent Struthious Birds will hardly be questioned. The case amounts almost to a demonstration, if we compare, with Dinosaurs, their contemporaries, the Mesazoic Birds. The classes of Birds and Reptiles, as now living, are seperated by a gulf so profound that a few years since it was cited by the opponents of evolution as the most important break in the animal series, and one which that doctrine could not bridge over. Since then, as Huxley has clearly shown, this gap has been virtually filled by the discovery of bird-like Reptiles and reptilian Birds. Compsognathus and Archaeopteryx of the Old World, and Ichthyornis and Hesperornis of the New, are the stepping stones by which the evolutionists of to-day leads the doubting brother across the shallow remnant of the gulf, once thought impassable"
And transitional series began piling up. Hundreds are now documented, some leading across species to different genera and then different families, orders, and even to new classes.
As a recent example of going into the past and finding fossils that are difficult to tell "cats from dogs" we have:
Toads to tapirs, turtles to turtle-doves, the diversity of land vertebrates, or tetrapods, seems enormous. Human beings are tetrapods, as are most of the animals with which we are familiar: we are descendants of lobe-finned fishes that evolved legs and subsequently came ashore, more than 360 million years ago.
This wide range of form conceals a deceptively simple tale of evolution. All modern tetrapods can be placed at the end-points of one or other of two lineages that diverged from each other long ago, not long after tetrapods first invaded the land – or even, as a few have claimed, before that.
One lineage includes the amphibians: frogs, toads, salamanders and the obscure, legless, tropical forms called caecilians. The amphibians we see today are the somewhat specialized remnants of a once large and diverse group of creatures. Of these, modern amphibians are perhaps most closely related to a large, extinct group called temnospondyls, which included large, land-faring creatures as well as aquatic animals reminiscent more of alligators than newts.
The other lineage includes the amniotes – what we would (in everyday parlance) call reptiles, as well as birds and mammals, and extinct forms such as dinosaurs and pterosaurs. The roots of the amniotes lie among another extinct group, the anthracosaurs.
Jennifer Clack of the University of Cambridge, UK, paints a picture of the tetrapod past in the 2 July 1998 issue of Nature. She describes fossils of a strange, salamander-like animal found in rocks at a place called East Kirkton, in southern Scotland, that were laid down close to a tropical lake, around 335 million years ago. There was active volcanoes in the area then, and there might even have been hydrothermal activity in the lake itself.
Yet animals and plants thronged on the lakeshore. The earliest-known anthracosaurs and temnospondyls, as well as the earliest-known amniote (Westlothiana lizziae, or "Lizzie") come from East Kirkton, as well as a good crop of giant scorpions, millipede-like animals and other creepy-crawlies. The picture must have been quite horrific – these primeval monsters patrolling the boiling sulphurous scenery. Clack has given a fitting name to her subject: Eucritta melanolimnetes, the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Eucritta is strange because it combines, in the same animal, features of the skull and skeleton that we would separately associate with temnospondyls, or with anthracosaurs. It seems to belong to a rather enigmatic, shadowy group of animals called the baphetids, until recently only known from skulls whose eye-sockets had a curious shape like an old-fashioned keyhole. It seems as if baphetids were tetrapods of the third kind: not temnospondyls, not anthracosaurs, but something different again.
Although it is simple to tell the difference between amniotes and amphibians nowadays, the members of these two lineages have had more than 340 million years of separate evolutionary history to call on. But when Eucritta was alive, the split between amniotes and amphibians was still quite new. Their evolutionary courses were yet to be written, and anthracosaurs, temnospondyls and baphetics looked very similar – adopting a rather generalized, salamandrine form.
While it was the destiny of amphibians and anthracosaurs to thrive and diversify, baphetids became extinct, perhaps before their full potential was realized. One can only guess at the forms that evolution would have wrought from their frames, had they, too, survived to the present day."
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And after all THAT, recognize that the fossil record is infact one of the weakest (or, more properly - most incomplete) lines of evidence for evolutionary theory. Biogeography, comparitive anatomy, genetics all provide much stronger evidence.
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The Fossil Record. Creation? Evolution? 
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