Tornado in a Junkyard

By James Perloff

ROBLEMS

ARVED

TONE

The prevailing explanation for life runs somethinglike this. About fifteen billion years ago, all theuniverse's matter and energy were compressedtogether, but for some reason exploded in a big bang.This was a hot process, but as things cooled, hydrogenand helium gas formed. The gas molecules collapsedon themselves to make stars and galaxies. Thus theuniverse came to be.Our solar system formed five billion years ago froma cloud of dust and gas, which condensed into the sunand planets. (In a popular older theory, the planetsspun off from the sun.) A long time ago, Earth wasmolten rock. As its heat dissipated, oceans of warmprimordial "soup" presented ideal conditions for theorigin of life.About three billion years ago, life began as simplecells. Eventually, these evolved into multicellular organisms, which then became invertebrates (crea-tures with no backbones, like jellyfish and clams).These in turn evolved into vertebrates and the first fish.After a while, some fish tired of the water andyearned to go on dry land. Over eons, as fish struggledto get ashore, they developed little legs and finallysucceeded, becoming amphibians (frogs, salamanders,etc.). Amphibians then evolved into reptiles and reptilesinto mammals and birds.The process by which this occurred is called"natural selection." Organisms best suited to their environment were able to survive, and passed their strengths on to the next generation. Thus, over time,creatures became more highly developed--in much thesame way, we are told, that breeders develop better fruits, flowers or racehorses. Less fit creatures becameextinct.Each organism resulted from adaptations to itsenvironmental niche. Giraffes, for example, livedaround high vegetation. Since giraffes with longer necks survived better, long necks became standard inthe species. In the tooth and claw struggle for existence, each animal has evolved survivalmechanisms. We see this illustrated everywhere:chameleons can change colors and so concealthemselves from predators; porcupines have needlesto fend off enemies, and so forth.Man, it is said, descended from ape-like creatures.As he evolved and became more intelligent, his brainand skull grew larger. He formerly swung from trees,but, after adapting to life on the ground, he lost his tailas it no longer served any purpose. Because mateswith less hair were more attractive, man eventually losthis ape-like hair as well. Later he reached the cavemanstage: still a brute, but able to use crude stone tools.Finally, he evolved to his modern state.That, more or less, is the explanation for life andthe universe that schools teach today. Until thenineteenth century, the Biblical view--that God hadcreated the world and man--was almost universal in theWest. But after publication of Darwin's

The Origin of Species

in 1859, evolutionary ideas began replacingreligious orthodoxy, until evolution itself becameorthodoxy.In recent years, however, Darwinism has beenchallenged--not on religious grounds, but oncompelling scientific ones. Books such as

Evolution: ATheory in Crisis

by molecular biologist Michael Behe,and

Darwin on Trial

by law professor Phillip Johnson,have shaken the evolutionary establishment.This book will examine the growing case againstevolution. That means we'll deal with "science stuff."But we'll try to keep it simple and interesting, like those

Dummies

books. We'll define scientific words, even atthe risk of annoying those well-versed in suchterminology.Speaking of definitions, what is science?

Webster'sNew World Dictionary

defines it as "systematizedknowledge derived from observation, study andexperimentation."Science depends on observations, not subjectiveopinions. What observations, then, support the theoryof evolution? How can we know that fish evolved intoland creatures and reptiles into birds, especially sincethis happened millions of years ago, before we werearound to see it?The only real way to know the past is to consultrecords--in this case, the fossil record. I quote Pierre-Paul Grassé, the most eminent French zoologist of hisday:Naturalists must remember that the process of evolution is revealed only through fossil forms. Aknowledge of paleontology [the study of fossils] is,therefore, a prerequisite; only paleontology canprovide them with the evidence of evolution andreveal its course or mechanisms. [Pierre-PaulGrassé,

Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidencefor a New Theory of Living Organisms

(New York:Academic Press, 1977), 4.]Yale paleontologist Carl Dunbar, a stout defender of evolution, agreed:Although the comparative study of livinganimals and plants may give very convincingcircumstantial evidence, fossils provide the onlyhistorical, documentary evidence that life hasevolved from simpler to more and more complexforms. [Carl O. Dunbar,

Historical Geology

(NewYork: John Wiley and Sons, 1949), 52.]Fossils are impressions or remains of plant andanimal life preserved in the earth. They are found indifferent media such as sedimentary rocks, volcanicash, coal or amber. A bone or shell can constitute afossil; so can a footprint.Of the 329 families of land vertebrates living today,79 percent are represented in the fossil record--88percent excluding birds (which don't readily fossilize).There are millions of fossils in museums, representingsome 250,000 species. National polls usually consider just 2,000 people enough to accurately sample our

entire nation. So we certainly have enough fossilspecimens to verify Darwinism.This is especially true since evolution is a gradualprocess, requiring millions of years. Darwin stated that"the number of intermediate and transitional links,between all living and extinct species, must have beeninconceivably great. But assuredly, if this theory betrue, such have lived upon the earth." [Charles Darwin,

The Origin of Species

(1872; reprint, New York:Random House, 1993), 408.] Thus the fossil recordshould depict evolution's history: organisms progressi-ng through their stages of development.As mentioned, Darwinism claims fish transformedinto land animals by evolving little arms and legs over eons. If true, there should be innumerable fossils of fishwith rudimentary arms and legs. Yet we do not findthem! In fact,

all

organisms appear in the fossil recordfully formed, without transitional stages.Darwin himself recognized this problem. He notedin

The Origin of Species:

Why then is not every geological formation andevery stratum full of such intermediate links?Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finelygraduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is themost obvious and serious objection which can beurged against the theory. The explanation lies, as Ibelieve, in the extreme imperfection of thegeological record. [Ibid., 408.]Interestingly, most of the nineteenth-centurycriticism of Darwinism came not from clergymen butscientists. French paleontologist François Jules Pictetcomplained:Why don't we find these gradations in the fossilrecord, and why, instead of collecting thousands of identical individuals, do we not find moreintermediary forms? To this Mr. Darwin replies thatwe have knowledge of such a small proportion of fossils that one cannot construct proofs. …Consequently, according to him, we have only afew incomplete pages to the great book of natureand the transitions have been in pages which welack. But why then and by what peculiar rules of probability does it happen that a species which wefind most frequently and most abundantly in all thenewly discovered beds are in the immense majorityof the cases species which we already have in our collections? [Richard Owen, "Darwin on the Originof Species,"

Edinburgh Review

11 (April 1860):487–532, quoted in David L. Hull,

Darwin and HisCritics

(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UniversityPress, 1973), 149–50.]Darwin hoped more time and excavations wouldyield fossils supporting his theory. He explained that"Only a small portion of the surface of the earth hasbeen geologically explored and no part with sufficientcare," and "We continually forget how large the worldis, compared with the area over which our geologicformations have been carefully examined." [Darwin,

Origin,

414, 433.]But in Darwin's lifetime nothing improved, and helamented: "When we descend to details, we can provethat no one species has changed (i.e., we cannot provethat a single species has changed)." [Charles Darwin,

Life and Letters,

ed. Francis Darwin, vol.3, (1888;reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint, 1969), 25.]Are things different now? Anthropologist EdmundR. Leach told the 1981 Annual Meeting of the BritishAssociation for the Advancement of Science: "Missinglinks in the sequence of fossil evidence were a worry toDarwin. He felt sure they would eventually turn up, butthey are still missing and seem likely to remain so."[Edmund R. Leach, "Men, Bishops and Apes,"

Nature

293, (3 September 1981): 20.]Let's hear from David Raup, curator of geology atthe Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, whichhouses the world's largest fossil collection:He [Darwin] was embarrassed by the fossilrecord because it didn't look the way he predicted itwould and, as a result, he devoted a long section of his

Origin of Species

to an attempt to explain andrationalize the differences…. Darwin's generalsolution to the incompatibility of fossil evidence andhis theory was to say that the fossil record is a veryincomplete one…. Well, we are now 120 yearsafter Darwin, and knowledge of the fossil recordhas been greatly expanded. We now have aquarter of a million fossil species but the situationhasn't changed much. The record of evolution isstill surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have evenfewer examples of evolutionary transition than wehad in Darwin's time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossilrecord, such as the evolution of the horse in NorthAmerica, have had to be discarded or modified as aresult of more detailed information--what appearedto be a nice simple progression when relatively fewdata were available now appears to be much morecomplex and much less gradualistic. [David M.Raup, "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleon-tology,"

Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin

50(January 1979): 22–23, 24–25]Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould,probably evolution's leading spokesperson today, hasacknowledged:The extreme rarity of transitional forms in thefossil 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. [StephenJay Gould, "Evolution's Erratic Pace,"

Natural History

86, (May 1977): 14.]Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the BritishMuseum of Natural History, wrote in a personal letter: