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Two Worldviews in Conflict
What do thousands of scientists believe about creation and evolution?
Fossils
- A fossil is a remnant, impression, or trace of an animal
or plant that has been preserved in the earth. Usually, a fossil
is simply the skeleton (or impression of the skeleton) of a dead
creature preserved or molded in hardened rock.
- It is agreed that the best and most likely way for a fossil
to be produced is by the sudden burial of a creature in sediment
or soil, at or soon after death.[] If dead creatures remain
on the surface of the ground or float in water, they will decay
quickly or be eaten by other animals. Once buried in suitable
soil, however, decay takes place very slowly leaving either the
bones themselves or impressions of where the bones have been.
- Paleontologists have recovered and studied the fossil remains
of many thousands of organisms that lived in the past.
The fossil record shows that many kinds of extinct organisms
were very different in form from any now living.
- According to evolutionary theory, the earliest fossils resemble
micro-organisms such as bacteria and blue-green algae;
the oldest ones appear in rocks 3,500,000,000 old. The
oldest animal fossils, about 700,000,000 years old, come from
small wormlike creatures with soft bodies. The first vertebrates,
animals with backbones, appeared about 400,000,000 years
ago, and the first mammals less than 200,000,000 years ago.
The Encyclopedia Britannica, from an evolutionary viewpoint,
states that “the history of life recorded by fossils presents compelling
evidence of evolution.”[]
- Now that 200 million fossil specimens have been catalogued
of over 250,000 fossil species, the fossil record allows for
meaningful analysis. If living things have in fact evolved from
other kinds of creatures, then many intermediate or transitional
forms of creatures, with halfway structures, should be evident
in the fossil record. However, if God created different kinds of
animals separately, as creationists believe, the fossil record should
show creatures appearing abruptly and fully formed.
-
Evolutionists point to a few transitional animal forms that
they believe show evolutionary transition in the fossil record.
However, such intermediates are often speculative and much
disputed, even amongst evolutionists themselves. For example,
one commonly used transitional form is the Ambulocetus natans
(“walking whale that swims”), discovered recently. It is believed
that whales evolved from some form of land mammal, and that
the Ambulocetus natans is transitional between the two, with
halfway structures between land mammal and whale. But when
reconstructed fossil drawings of Ambulocetus natans are compared
with the actual bones found, it is realized that the critical
skeletal elements necessary to establish the transition from
non-swimming land mammal to whale are missing![] See diagram (above).
- The media often sensationalize fossil “proofs” of evolution
reported in scientific journals. But when these journals
later report disproofs of the same fossils, the media rarely mention it. For example, in 1996 there were headlines like
“Feathered Fossil Proves Some Dinosaurs Evolved into Birds.”[] This was about a fossil called Sinosauropteryx prima. About a
year later, four leading paleontologists, including Yale
University’s John Ostrom, found that the “feathers” were not
really feathers at all — they were just a parallel array of fibers.[] Another example is when the cover of Time magazine [] illustrated a dino-bird link with feathers, although not the
slightest trace of feathers had actually been found![]
- The Encyclopedia Britannica contains an interesting article
on turtles which claims “the evolution of the turtle is one
of the most remarkable in the history of the vertebrates.”
However, in the next sentence it states, “Unfortunately the
origin of [the turtle] is obscured by the lack of early fossils,
although turtles leave more and better fossil remains than do
other vertebrates.”[] The article affirms that “intermediates
between turtles and cotylosaurs, the primitive reptiles from
which turtles probably sprang, are entirely lacking.”[]
- If turtles leave “more and better fossil remains than do
other vertebrates” but transitional forms are “entirely lacking,”
what can this say for intermediates between all other vertebrates?
- In reality, the fossil record seems to fit the creation model
well — the record is in fact characterized by abrupt appearances
of fully formed organisms, with large systematic gaps
(lacking transitional forms) between different types of creatures.
Geologist David Raup, curator at Chicago’s Field Museum
of Natural History, explains, “Instead of finding the
gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin’s time,
and geologists of the present day, actually find is a highly uneven
or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence
very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence
in the record, then abruptly go out of the record.”[]
- World-renowned evolutionary paleontologist Stephen
Jay Gould further acknowledged, “New species almost always appeared suddenly in the fossil record with no intermediate
links to ancestors in older rocks of the same region. . . . The
extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists
as the trade secret of paleontology. 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. . . . I regard the failure to find a
clear ‘vector of progress’ in life’s history as the most puzzling
fact of the fossil record.”[]
- Over a hundred years ago, Darwin pointed out the “fatal”
significance of abrupt appearances and systematic gaps in
the fossil record: “Why do we not find them [innumerable
transitional forms] embedded in countless numbers in the crust
of the earth? . . . If numerous species . . . have really started
into life all at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory [of
evolution]. . . . 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. The explanation
lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological
record.”[]
- But evolutionist Niles Eldredge[] of the American Museum
of Natural History said, “[Darwin] prophesied that future
generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by
diligent search. . . . One hundred and twenty years of paleontological
research later, it has become abundantly clear that
the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin’s predictions.
Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil
record simply shows that this prediction was wrong.”[]
- Geologist David Raup, supervisor of one of the largest
fossil collections in the world, said that today “we have even
fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in
Darwin’s time. . . . 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. . . . 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 the result of more detailed information.”[]
- Niles Eldredge, again commenting on the acclaimed exhibit
of horse evolution, states, “There have been an awful lot
of stories, some more imaginative than others, about what
the nature of that history [of life] really is. The most famous
example, still on exhibit downstairs, is the exhibit on horse
evolution prepared perhaps 50 years ago. That has been presented
as the literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I
think that that is lamentable, particularly when the people
who propose those kinds of stories may themselves be aware
of the speculative nature of some of that stuff.”[]
- A senior evolutionary paleontologist at the British Museum
of Natural History, Colin Patterson[] has also made some
surprising statements about transitional fossils: “Gould and
the American Museum people are hard to contradict when
they say there are no transitional fossils. . . . I will lay it on the
line — there is not one such fossil for which one could make
a watertight argument. . . . It is easy to make up stories of how
one form gave rise to another. . . . But such stories are not part
of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test.”[]
- One of the predictions made by Darwin regarding the
theory of evolution was that no species would remain the same
over a long period of time:[] “We may safely infer that not one
living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant
futurity.”[] But there are many examples of living organisms
that have not changed at all from the time when some of their
ancestors were fossilized. Consider the following examples:
- Bat fossils that are considered 50 million years old look
essentially the same as today’s bats of the same type.[]
- Turtle fossils dated to 200 million years ago look virtually
the same as today’s turtles. “Turtles . . . have plodded
a stolid and steady course through evolutionary time,
changing very little in basic structure.”[]
- The famous broadcaster and writer David Attenborough
described fossil sea pens, a type of jellyfish, in Australian
rocks that are considered 650 million years old, and noted
that sea pens are living in the sea less than 100 miles
away.[]
- The coelacanth is a bony fish that was known only from
fossils dating back at least 65 million years, until a live
specimen was caught in the Indian Ocean in 1938 —
and many more have been discovered since. Live specimens
are sold at Indonesian fish markets today.[]
- In many cases, it seems the controversy between creation
and evolution is merely the result of each side’s bias when interpreting
the data. As evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould acknowledged,
“We understand that biases, preferences, social values,
and psychological attitudes all play a strong role in the process
of discovery. . . . It is how we interpret these animals [in the
fossil record], and what we say they mean for the history of life
that is obviously subject to biased ways of thinking.”[]
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