DogmaHunter
Code Monkey
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According to the Darwin’s theory on how evolution occurs, this transformation proceeds gradually over millions of years. Very long lineages of descent with very gradual modification, producing innumerable generations of intermediate species, each diverting lineage undergoing the transformations of accumulating new organs and body plans that ancestors did not have, but very gradually over long periods of time.
If this were true, there had to be billions of such creatures that made up these evolutionary trends. More importantly, the remains of these creatures should be present in the fossil record, documenting the millions of the predicted gradual trends of morphological evolutionary transformations, also known as `phylogenies'.
And they are. Some of them were even found by prediction of location, like that one fossil from the whale lineage. Don't exactly remember which one it was... it was found in Pakistan, in any case.
Some examples:
etc etc
Not to mention the genetic record, where this is simply confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt.
This is the one solid real science prediction of evolution, that we would be able to see it in the fossil record if such broad-scale evolution is true.
The fossil record embarrassed Charles Darwin. It was suppose to provide and establish these innumerable phylogenies, but few could be found in his day, and these few were questionable. A contemporary of Darwin, a paleontologist, questioned Darwin's Theory by pointing that if Darwin's Theory be true, why do each successive layer of fossil beds merely have the same unchanged fossils of each type of animal or plant that are found at the different layers.
Darwin was well aware of this, and in his book, Charles Darwin attempts to explain this `unpleasant' fact away by appealing to the imperfection of the fossil record in his day. Darwin gambled the validity of his theory on his prediction that future generations of paleontologists will discover the phylogenies. For the next 100 and so years after Darwin, Paleontologists (and others) traveled the world hoping to make a name for themselves by finding these phylogenies that Darwin's Theory predicts, must exist.
They were never found in the geological record. They do not exist. Not even one.
Testimonies to this fact include:
Botanist and evolutionist Dr. Heribert Nilsson (From a 1953 Science Journal, as quoted in Arthur C Constance book: `The Earth Before Man', part 2, Doorway Publications, Ontario Canada, 1984):
"My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed. At least, I should hardly be accused of having started from a preconceived anti-Evolutionary standpoint. ... It may be firmly maintained that it is not even possible to make even a caricature of an Evolution out of paleo- biological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that it has
been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to the scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they never will be filled."
Confirming this view in 1960, Evolutionary paleontologist Neville George stated: "There is no reason to apologize any longer for the poverty of the Fossil record. In some ways it has become almost unmanageably rich."
Evolutionary paleontologist David Kitts, Ph.D. Zoology, Head Curator of the Department of Geology of the Stoval Museum, `Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory', Evolution, Vol. 28, Sept. 1974, p 467.
Writes: "Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides as a means of `seeing' Evolution, It has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of `gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them."
Evolutionist Dr. Edmund J. Ambrose, Emeritus Professor of Cell Biology at the University of London, writes:
"At the present stage of geological research, we have to admit that there is nothing in the geological record that runs contrary to the view of conservative creationists, that God created each species separately, presumably from the dust of the earth."
Right after the pounding of Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution presented by mathematicians at the 1966 Wistar Symposium that was held in Philadelphia and was titled, 'Mathematical Challenges to the
Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution'. A young Stephen Gould and Niles Eldredge published:
"Under the influence of phyletic gradualism, the rarity of transitional series remains our persistent bugbear. ... it has stood as the bulwark of anti-evolutionist arguments: "For evolution to be true, there had to be thousands, millions of transitional forms making an unbroken chain." (Anon., 1967- from a Jehovah's Witnesses pamphlet).
Thus, not only in Darwin's day, but throughout the Twentieth century the creationists were rightly rejecting Darwin's theory on this basis, as Gould and Eldredge pointed out.
By the 1970's there came a big rumble against the two Darwinian Theories of evolution emanating from the Field of Paleontology, led by the Evolutionary Paleontologists: Stephen Gould, Niles Eldredge, Steven Stanley, and Colin Patterson. Gould and Eldredge believed they were saving The General Theory of Evolution, by casting out Darwin Theory, and the Neo-Darwinian Theory called `The Modern Synthesis'.
Gould and Eldredge believed that their new theory for the mechanism of evolution (Punctuated Equilibrium) would replace the false Darwinian Paradigm and thereby preserve the Academic credibility of the General Theory of Evolution (i.e. Common Ancestry). P.E. basically states that evolution occurs in small populations and in too short a time period, and therefore is not recorded in the fossil record. This did not at all sit well with the evolutionary biologists (e.g. Dobzhansky, Mayr, Maynard Smith, Dawkins etc.)
Perhaps unwittingly, in one of his earlier books, Ernst Mayr laid the groundwork for G&E's Theory of Punctuated Equilibria. Mayr went against the Modern Synthesis in proposing that rapid speciation
occurred in geographical isolated areas and that this may account for the abrupt appearance of species and the lack of evidence of transition found in the fossil record. However, according to Paleontologist Steven Stanley: "Little attention was paid to the punctuational elements of his work until the 1970's. This paradox was partly the result of the diffuse, but ever present, counter pressure supplied by the field of genetics, in which Mayr was not a specialist. This gradualistic march of the geneticist had gathered
too much momentum to be diverted by peripheral activities."
(Steven Stanley, "The New Evolutionary Timetable", 1981, p.78).
Now, back to Darwin's prediction:
Gould (Natural History, May 1977) writes of Darwin's gradualism:
"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. Yet Darwin was so wedded to
gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record: "The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps. He who rejects these views on the nature of the geologic records, will rightly reject my whole theory."
"We have all heard the traditional response so often that it has become imprinted as a catechism that brooks no analysis: the fossil record is extremely imperfect. ... This traditional approach to morphological breaks merely underscores what Feyerabend meant ... in comparing theories to party lines, for it renders the picture of phyletic gradualism virtually unfalsifiable." (G&E, 1972).
Gould & Eldredge, explaining PE's departure from the Modern Synthesis:
"To Darwin... speciation entailed the same expectation as phyletic evolution: a long and insensibly graded chain of intermediate forms. Our present texts have not abandoned this view, although modern biology has." (G&E, 1972).
By 1981 The Biologists and powers that be in Academia were very upset with the `Punctuation scientists' and forced them to tone down their theory, particularly because it is a theory not based on observing evolution in action, but rather, it was based on the inability to see evolution in action in the geological fossil record. They were forced to say their theory of PE was complementary to the Modern Synthesis (even though Gould and Eldredge already called the Modern Synthesis `dead'). They were also coerced into putting out ad hominem attacks on creationary scientists, who used the punctuationists admissions as confirmation of what they had been saying all along.
Return of: THE MYTH OF THE INCOMPLETE FOSSIL RECORD! 1991.
One evolutionist that recently argued forcibly for the incompleteness of the fossil record is geologist Tjeered H. van Andel (Nature, 294; 1991,397-398; Consider the Incompleteness of the Fossil Record). Van Andel points out that rates at which sediment is deposited in the Gulf of Mexico is well known. He applies this rate to the Wyoming marine strata that was once submerged under water similar to the Gulf of Mexico. He concludes that the Wyoming strata could have been deposited in 100,000 years using uniformitarian assumptions and the known rate of deposition from the Gulf of Mexico. He then points out that paleontologists have that strata pegged at occurring over 6 million years. Tjeered H. van Andel, like the good evolutionists he is, ignores the possibility that the strata in question most likely had been deposited over a period that could be not more than 100,000 years. Instead, he keeps the evolutionary timetable of the paleontologists and concludes that 5.9 million years of deposition is missing from the geological record and that "key elements of the evolutionary record may be forever out of reach."
Next, Van Andel tackles the question: Shouldn't the lack or erosion forces present on land continental land masses be absent at the sea bottom result in a more complete record at the sea bottom sediments missing the same logic as above, he points to the South Atlantic and concludes that of the 125 million years of sediment deposition, half of it is missing.
Mr. Van Andel, is it possible, even most probable, that the missing sediments are missing because the evolutionary assumptions of some evolutionary biologists and geologists are wrong and that the alleged missing sediments and the associated presumed evolutionary time never existed in the first place. Of course evolutionists cannot accept this possibility, they know evolution is a fact and, therefore the sacred evolutionary timetable must be upheld and the sediments must have existed but are now missing.
This was similar to Paleontologist J. Wyatt Durham ("The Incompleteness of our Knowledge of the Fossil Record"; Journal of Paleontology, 41: 599-565, 1967) Wherein he points out that according to evolutionary theory, 4.1 million fossilizable marine species have existed since the Cambrian and only 93,000 have been discovered. Like Van Andel, Durham argument for the incompleteness relies solely on the assumption that evolution is a fact and this many are needed to fill the evolutionary gaps. His evolutionist assumptions led him to conclude that only one out of every 100 fossil species of Cambrian invertebrates with hard parts are being found. The situation has worsened since he wrote this, fossils of every Phylum (unique bodies) are found within a 10 million year span of the Cambrian ERA.
Problems With The Evolutionary Time Table:
Getting back to the Wyoming Strata. Kvale, Mickelson et. al. have discovered mega track dinosaur sites (Palois, 16:233-254, 2001). Previously, Dinosaur tracks were rare in Wyoming and it was considered to be mostly marine prior to this find. In fact, the tracks were found in Carbonate units that were believed to be totally marine. This caused the evolutionists to conveniently 'reinterpret' the paleoenvironment of the sedimentary rock deposits. Evolutionists now see "... previously unrecognized intertidal to supratidal carbonate units once thought to be totally marine in origin." Also, since Van Andel 1987 paper, a shoreline was invented to account for the presence of dinosaurs. [This find of buried land Dinosaurs in what scientists previously observed to be marine deposits may well be a strong evidence for Noah's flood, but evolutionists, the media, and academia will never let that fly.]
Now it gets much worse for the evolutionists, the Dinosaur tracks appear in different strata, using the established paleontologists time scale, the lower strata tracks and the upper level tracks are separated by over 3 million years. Furthermore the tracks are all similar (tridactyl, small to medium size of bipedal dinosaurs), no other tracks of other types of dinosaurs were found. All the upper layer tracks are headed in a southerly direction and fossilized egg sites and baby dinos have been found just to the north. Absent in the mega tracks are any juvenile or baby forms of tracks. The tracks are made in flood sediments. As a whole, the 3 million years for these sediment layers on the paleontological chart seems to have been laid in days by bipedal, tridactyl dinosaurs fleeing a catastrophic flood.
The lower strata tracks laid at the beginning of a great flood that quickly left many strata of sediments, followed by the water receding and the adult dinosaurs fleeing south abandoning their young and eggs
as the next wave of flooding rapidly covered and preserved the second set of tracks at the allegedly presumed 3 million year younger higher strata. This scenario is further evidenced by a wet substrate, swim tracks in the lower strata, and ripple marks formed at the same time as the tracks. These events had to occur rapidly in order to cover up and preserve the large quantities of tracks. These strata may have been formed in a day, or perhaps weeks, but not the 3 million years the evolutionists assign to it.
The answer to the question, is the fossil record vastly incomplete? : Is NO!!!
The real problem is that the fossil record is not at all as Darwin and Neo Darwinists predict it ought to be. It looks like Creation, not Evolution. The old argument by evolutionists for dismissing the fossil evidence against Evolution is the claim; the fossil record is very incomplete. The fossil is not very incomplete, it simply looks like special Creation, created by a very capable and intelligent being or beings. Secular Humanists whom run our education systems and control our science programs, simply refuse to give up their unsupported ideology of Secular Humanism, of which Evolution is the necessary component of the atheists creation myth.
The new argument by evolutionists for dismissing the fossil evidence against evolution is the claim by Gould/Eldredge that Evolution occurs in spurts and happens to occur too rapidly to be preserved by the fossil record (i.e. Punctuated Equilibria. Gould, Eldredge, Stanley, Patterson and many other paleontologists and geologists recognized that the fossil record looks very unlike Evolution and that this is not at all due to a poor incomplete fossil record, that the true fossil record is a tale of the abrupt appearance of the species followed by stasis for their duration in the fossil record.
Thus they invented the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria to save Evolution as a materialistic explanation of life on Earth. They were forced to tone down their claim when it became apparent that a lack of evidence is not evidence for a theory. In any case P.E. put the paleontologists and geologists at odds with the biologists who had been suppressing the true fossil record with their claims that the record was very imperfect and incomplete.
The correct observation, derived from an extensive and exhaustive review of the fossil record, is that there are no known transitional series clearly linking any of the natural groups of animals or plants above the species level.
Today leading evolutionary scientists, though not talked about publicly, know that the gaps in the fossil record are huge, and not a question of filling in a few minor speciation events .
Further, the trend has been that the more fossils found, the more fossils species discovered, the clearer the gaps and the inconsistencies become. This is contrary to the prevailing rumor that new fossil finds are closing the gaps in the fossil record. Rather, fossil finds are clarifying the gaps in the fossil record.
For example, with a few fossils, evolutionists were able to fill the gaps with their imagination. Evolutionist Niles Eldredge once wrote of what appeared to be a significant transition in lineage. The fossil record had recorded a certain trilobite species as lasting for millions of years and then becoming extinct, only to be replaced in higher strata by a similar, but significantly different, trilobite species of the same family. Is this Evolution in action? Well not quite. Professor Eldredge pointed out that - As more fossils were found, these two species turned out to be contemporaries at their point of origin in the geological strata.
Though it is true that rocks containing fossils do erode and some fossils end up in private collections, these are lame excuses for explaining away why the fossil record has not provided any of the
millions of transitional series that must have existed if large scale Evolution truly occurred.
The truth of the matter is that the Fossil record is abundantly rich. Over a quarter billion fossils have been catalogued of over 300,000 species. The gaps can no longer be rationalized away with appeals to the imperfection of the fossil record.
"All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; Transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt." Stephen J. Gould, `Return of the Hopeful Monster' Natural History, Vol. 86, 1977, p. 22)
"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persist as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes on their branches, the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils." Stephen J. Gould, `Evolutions Erratic Pace' Natural History, 1979. Paleontologists Steven Stanley (1979) points out:
"In part, the role of paleontology in evolutionary research has been defined narrowly because of a false belief, tracing back to Darwin and his early followers, that the fossil record is woefully incomplete. Actually, the record is of sufficiently high quality to allow us to undertake certain kinds of meaningful analysis at the level of the species."
In the same book ('Macro-evolution: Pattern and Process', p.38), Professor Steven Stanley points out: "The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition."
Dr. Steven Stanley repeats this fact in his 1981 book "The New Evolutionary Time Table:
"Since the time of Darwin, paleontologists have found themselves confronted with evidence that conflicts with gradualism, yet the message of the fossil record has been ignored. This strange circumstance constitutes a remarkable chapter in the history of science, and one that gives students of the fossil record cause for concern,."
Dr. David Raup, curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, stated in a lecture at his Museum in 1979:
"Darwin's' theory of natural selection has always been closely linked to evidence from fossils, and probably most people assume that the fossils provide a very important part of the general argument that is
made in favor of Darwinian interpretations of the history of life. Unfortunately this is not strictly true. ... The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with Darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be. Darwin was completely aware of this. He was embarrassed by the fossil record, because it didn't look the way he predicted it would, and, as a result, he devoted a long section of the 'Origin of the Species' to an attempt to explain and rationalize the differences. ... Darwin's general solution to the incompatibility of fossil evidence and his theory was to say the fossil record was a very incomplete one. ... Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin, and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter million fossil species, but the situation has not changed much. The record of evolution is surprisingly jerky, and, ironically, we have fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse, in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information - that what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic. So Darwin's problem has not been alleviated. ..."
Dr. Kenneth Hsu, geologist at the Geological Institute of Zurich, ('Darwin's Three Mistakes' Geology, Vol. 14 1986) - Shows that the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record cannot be blamed on the
inadequacy of the Fossil record:
"We know that Lyell and Darwin were wrong on their insistence on the imperfection of the geologic record. ... The Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary falls within magnetostratigraphic Chron C29R, which was is less than 500 years in duration (Kent, 1977). The boundary is recorded by precision stratigraphy, which has a resolution power to recognize events in thousands, if not hundreds, of years duration."
"Paleontology is now looking at what it actually finds in the fossil record. Not what it is told by that it supposed to find. As is now well known, most fossil species appear instantaneously in the fossil record, persist for millions of years virtually unchanged, only to disappear abruptly - The Punctuated Equilibrium Pattern of Eldredge and Gould." Tom Kemp, Curator of the University Museum at Oxford
University, `A Fresh Look at the Fossil Record', New Scientist, Vol 108, No: 1485, Dec. 5, 1985, p. 66)
And what they were definitely not finding were the evolutionary transistions, the phylogenies, predicted by the Theory of Evolution.
As is often the case in evolution theory, hopeful confirmations along new lines of inquiry often end up to be bitter disappointments for the evolutionists. Evolutionists N. Macbeth and E. Saif give yet another example.
" A. The Commitment in Theory: Darwinian theory asserts the physical descent with modification has been universal, which means that every modern species is the latest link in a phylogeny. There must
therefore have been hundreds of thousands of phylogenies, and it was Darwin's' expectation that these would be found. His followers, sharing his expectation, felt a duty to seek and find the phylogenies. ...
B. Another Miserable Failure: The expectations were in vain. In the 125 years since the Origin was published, nothing has been accomplished. No phylogenies have been established and the pursuit of them has fallen into disrepute." Evolutionists E. Saiff and Norman Macbeth. Evolution, 1985.
The above, and other evidences that the Fossil records fails to support the Theory of Common Ancestry because it is a record abrupt appearance the species followed stasis (no change) and with all major transformations of Bauplanes (i.e. Body plans) undocumented.
Yet even more peculiar, the whole fossil record is backwards from what evolution Theories predicted. It supposed to start with a single species - first life, which evolves into a 2nd species, which evolves into genus, which evolves into a family. And family members spread out and evolve separately into new species, genus’s, and families - until new orders become distinguished, and the process continues with many major transitions occurring over very long periods of time, eventually causing all the different Phyla to evolve into existence.
But the fossil record truly starts with the Burgess explosion of life, immediately followed by the totally unconnected Cambrian Explosion of life, where all Phyla known today are found in a very short geologic span of less than 10 million years. All major body plans appear in a very short geologic time. It is impossible for them to have evolved in that time period. The only life observed before these explosions of life are four bacteria that go back billion years, plus one unrelated type whose name I can't remember at this time, totally different from the bacteria. These 5 are alive and well today, and completely unchanged.
Gish gallop and misinformation, which is already exposed by the 3 pictures above.
Conclusion, the fossil record does not look at all like Evolution
False. It looks exactly like what we would expect if evolution happened.
but it does resemble special creation: i.e. sudden appearance of each Kind of creature followed by stasis (no bodily change in physical form) for its' duration in the fossil record.
Newsflash: a fossil is the remnant of an individual of a certain population.
Shocker: that individual belonged to a species that roamed the planet for a certain amount of time.
What did you expect otherwise? Crockoducks?
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