Pay close attention because this is about as fundamental as it gets:
Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention. This justly-celebrated naturalist first published his views in 1801; he much enlarged them in 1809 in his "Philosophie Zoologique,' and subsequently, in 1815, in the Introduction to his "Hist. Nat. des Animaux sans Vertébres.' In these works he upholds the doctrine that species, including man, are descended from other species. He first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition. (Darwin, On the Origin of Species, preface)
Darwin attributed this philosophy of zoology to Lamarck. What Lamarck was insisting on is that all species, including man, are descended from other species and not the result of miracles. Now Malthus had observed that there is a tendency of living things to reproduce beyond the ability of resources to sustain them, the result is a struggle for existence. What Darwin popularized were the naturalistic assumptions, that's really all there is to it.
Just a couple of things here, first DNA always comes from the parents and they are loaded with molecular mechanisms that make proteins, there are housekeeping and repair genes and a vast array of functions and systems. They are not self organizing, DNA follows a specific series of highly detailed functions, the idea that they simply organized at random is contrary to everything science has discovered about how it works.
Now as far as the fossil record it is very clear, but the fossil record has been misrepresented. My focus has been human evolution, I focused mostly on hominid fossils and comparative DNA. This is what I found regarding the fossil record.
Perhaps the longest running demonstration was easily the Piltdown fraud. The Piltdown Hoax was the flagship transitional of Darwinism for nearly half a century and it was a hoax. A skull taken from a mass grave site used during the Black Plague matched up with an orangutan jawbone. Even Louis Leakey, the famous paleontologist, had said that jaw didn’t belong with that skull so people knew, long before it was exposed, that Piltdown was contrived.
Leakey mentions the Piltdown skull in his book 'Adam's Ancestors':
'If the lower jaw really belongs to the same individual as the skull, then the Piltdown man is unique in all humanity. . . It is tempting to argue that the skull, on the one hand, and the jaw, on the other, do not belong to the same creature. Indeed a number of anatomists maintain that the skull and jaw cannot belong to the same individual and they see in the jaw and canine tooth evidence of a contemporary anthropoid ape.'
He referred to the whole affair as an enigma: In
By the Evidence he says 'I admit . . . that I was foolish enough never to dream, even for a moment, that the true explanation lay in a deliberate forgery.' (
Leakey and Piltdown)
The problem was that there was nothing to replace it as a transitional from ape to man. Concurrent with the prominence of the Piltdown fossil Raymond Dart had reported on the skull of an ape that had filled with lime creating an endocast or a model of what the brain would have looked like. Everyone considered it a chimpanzee child since it’s cranial capacity was just over 400cc but with the demise of Piltdown, a new icon was needed in the Darwinian theater of the mind. Raymond Dart suggests to Louis Leakey that a small brained human ancestor might have been responsible for some of the supposed tools the Leaky family was finding in Africa. The myth of the stone age ape man was born.
Every time a chimpanzee fossil is dug up in Africa it's automatically one of our ancestors. There are two chimpanzee fossils I know of for sure that are being passed off as our ancestors. Darwinian evolution is a fraud and a myth.
Grace and peace,
Mark
