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Tornado in a Junkyard
By James Perloff
(Arlington, Mass; Refuge Books, 1999)
Science depends on observations, not subjective opinions. Whatobservations, then, support the theory of evolution? How can we knowthat fish evolved into land creatures and reptiles into birds,especially since this happened millions of years ago, before we werearound to see it?The only real way to know the past is to consult records--in this case,the fossil record. Fossils are impressions or remains of plant andanimal life preserved in the earth. Of the land vertebrates livingtoday, 79 percent are represented in the fossil record. There aremillions of fossils in museums, representing some 250,000 species.Darwin stated that "the number of intermediate and transitional links,between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivablygreat. "
[Charles Darwin, “The Origin of Species” ]
Thus the fossil recordshould depict evolution's history: organisms progressing through theirstages of development.Darwinism claims fish transformed into land animals by evolving littlearms and legs over eons. If true, there should be innumerable fossilsof fish with rudimentary arms and legs. Yet we do not find them! Allorganisms appear in the fossil record fully formed, withouttransitional stages.Darwin himself recognized this problem. He noted in The Origin ofSpecies:"Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full ofsuch intermediate links? This, perhaps, is the most obvious and seriousobjection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies,as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record."Darwin hoped more time and excavations would yield fossils supportinghis theory. He explained that "Only a small portion of the surface ofthe earth has been geologically explored ..."But in Darwin's lifetime nothing improved, and he lamented: "When wedescend to details, we cannot prove that a single species haschanged."
[Charles Darwin, “Life and Letters”]
Are things different now? "Missing links ... are still missing and seemlikely to remain so."
[Edmund R. Leach, "Men, Bishops and Apes," ]
"We are now 120 years after Darwin, and ... the situation hasn'tchanged... "
[David M. Raup, "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," ]
Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum :"There are no transitional fossils. ...There is not one such fossil...
[Colin Patterson quoted in Luther D. Sunderland, Darwin's Enigma: “Fossils and OtherProblems” (San Diego: Master Books, 1988)]
David B. Kitts of the School of Geology and Geophysics at theUniversity of Oklahoma wrote:"Evolution requires intermediate forms between species, andpaleontology does not provide them.
[David B. Kitts, "Paleontology andEvolutionary Theory," Evolution 28 (September 1974)]
"The lack of transitional series cannot be explained ."
[HeribertNilsson, Synthetische Artbildung]
"The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms betweenspecies, the more they have been frustrated.
["Is Man a Subtle Accident?"Newsweek, 3 November
1980]
The fossil record does not support evolution. Supposedly,invertebrates evolved into vertebrates--surely a very long process. Yetdespite countless fossils from both groups, there is not one specimen
intermediate between them!Where did the first fish come from? There are billions of fish fossils,but as J.R. Norman of the British Museum of Natural History stated:"The geological record has so far provided no evidence as to the originof the fishes...."
[J.R. Norman, “A History of Fishes” ( 1963)]
The next group, amphibians, also appears suddenly in the fossil record.For years, evolutionists claimed that the coelacanth, a bony fossilfish, was a forerunner of the amphibians, its fins described as limb-like. The coelacanth had supposedly been extinct for 70 million years.Then, in 1938, fishermen caught a live one off the African coast. Sincethen, about 200 more have been caught. This embarrassed evolutionists,for besides proving the coelacanth was not extinct for 70 millionyears, examination revealed it was 100 percent fish, with no amphibiancharacteristics.Amphibians supposedly evolved into reptiles. But as paleontologistRobert L. Carroll noted in Biological Reviews of the CambridgePhilosophical Society:"Unfortunately, not a single specimen of an appropriate reptilianancestor is known prior to the appearance of true reptiles. The absenceof such ancestral forms leaves many problems of the amphibian-reptiletransition unanswered."
[Robert L. Carroll, "Problems of the Origin of Reptiles,"Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 44 (July 1969)]
From Barney to Jurassic Park, dinosaurs have become a hot item. But howmany dinosaur ancestors occur in the fossil record? Not one, eventhough they supposedly roamed Earth for 165 million years.Reptiles allegedly became mammals. There are fossils that have beenlabeled "mammal-like reptiles," but since they are all extinct, wecannot examine their soft tissues.To account for the oddity of oceanic mammals (whales, sea cows anddolphins), evolutionists say they evolved from fish to land creatures,then went back to the sea again. But British author Douglas Dewar, afellow of the Zoological Society, noted:"Both whales and sea cows swim by the up and down movement of the greatflattened tail. Such movement is impossible in a land animal that has apelvis, but a well-developed pelvis is essential to every land animalwhich uses its hind legs for walking. ... I have repeatedly askedevolutionists to describe or draw the skeleton of a creature of whichthe pelvis and hind legs are anatomically midway between the state thatprevails in whales and sea cows on the one hand and a land quadruped onthe other. No one has accepted the challenge, and of course a fossil ofsuch a creature has not been found and never will be.
[Douglas Dewar, "TheCase Against Organic Evolution," ]
Reptiles supposedly became birds as well, their scales turning intofeathers. W.E. Swinton of the British Museum of Natural History stated:"There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkablechange from reptile to bird was achieved." Barbara J. Stahl, inVertebrate History: Problems in Evolution, wrote: "No fossil structuretransitional between scale and feather is known, and recentinvestigators are unwilling to found a theory on pure speculation."What about insects? Peter Farb, author of the Life Nature Library'sbook The Insects, observed:"There are no fossils known that show what the primitive ancestralinsects looked like. ... Animals of such complexity do not come intobeing suddenly; they must have been evolving for tens of millions ofyears before. Until fossils of these ancestors are discovered, however,the early history of the insect can only be inferred.
[Peter Farb, “TheInsects”]
Likewise, plants lack fossil evidence for their evolution. They have noancestral forms in the geologic layers.The famous "horse sequence" is discredited. It is quite easy toarrange some fossils from smallest to largest, and claim this provesevolution. Even today, horses vary greatly, from miniatures and poniesup to work horses.Boyce Rensberger, senior editor of
Science 80
wrote:"The popularly told example of horse evolution...has long been known tobe wrong. Transitional forms are unknown.
[Boyce Rensberger, "Ideas onEvolution Going Through a Revolution among Scientists,"]
The extinct bird Archaeopteryx, found in the same geologic strata asdinosaurs, was considered ancestral to modern birds. Evolutionistsoften equate similarities to relationships. New discoveries havedemonstrated that Archaeopteryx was a true bird. Only birds havefeathers. It had claws on its wings, but so does the ostrich.Archaeopteryx had teeth, but so did some other fossil birds, and itsteeth differed distinctly from those of reptiles. Furthermore, somereptiles, such as turtles, have no teeth--they aren't a distinctreptilian trademark. As to Archaeopteryx's tail, further inspection hasshown it strongly resembles a swan's.Throughout the geologic layers--which supposedly formed over eons--thevarious kinds of fossils remain essentially unchanged in appearance.Boyce Rensberger, reporting comments by Niles Eldredge, noted: "Speciessimply appear at a given point in geologic time, persist largelyunchanged,... and then disappear."As Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould put it:"Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure onearth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as whenthey disappear; morphological change is usually limited anddirectionless
."[Gould, "Evolution's Erratic Pace,"]
Creation scientist Duane Gish commented:"Evolutionists would have us believe that while some chordate evolvedinto a fish, which evolved into amphibians, which evolved intoreptiles, which evolved into birds and mammals, and lower mammalsevolved on up the ladder to humans, all under compelling changes in theenvironment, chordates have remained unchanged."
[Duane T. Gish, Evolution:“The Fossils Still Say No!” ]
If, as Darwinism proposes, bacteria evolved all the way into man, thenadoptive changes should have been constantly ongoing. Why, then, dofossils stay the same?
Marvelous Mutations
Besides a near-total lack of fossil evidence, another problem confrontsDarwin's thesis: Fish could not develop those little arms and legsunless they first had genes for arms and legs. Where'd the genes comefrom?Not until the twentieth century was genetics established as a science.The field was unknown to Darwin, who simply thought creatures adaptedto environments, unaware that no change occurs without appropriategenes.The discovery of genetics thrust a brick wall before evolution. Howdoes a microbe (single cell) turn into a clam, into a fish, into afrog, into a lizard, into an ape, into a man? These transformationscouldn't happen unless the organism first had the innumerable genesrequired for them.Modern evolutionists came up with an answer: mutations. Mutations, ofcourse, are abrupt alterations in genes or chromosomes. Estimates of
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