Fossil Evidence
Most people have been led to believe that the fossil record is the most compelling evidence for universal common descent, i.e. Darwinism.
While fossils provide excellent evidence for the appearance of endless variations within “kinds” of organisms (speciation), paleontologists line up similar looking fossils that create an illusion that variation produces unlimited change.
However, it is now clear that creating lineages and family trees (morphology) based on similar features (homology) has been proven to contradict empirical evidence:
- “Elephant shrews were originally classified as shrews (Soricidae) because of a superficial resemblance …
Instead, the elephant shrew twig sprang from an unexpected branch of the tree: the aardvark, manatee, and elephant lineage!” http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/080301_elephantshrew
- “Flying squirrels and sugar gliders are only distantly related. So why do they look so similar then?”
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/analogy_02
- “In line with our model, molecular evolution trees often do not fit a morphology-based evolution tree.”
http://www.machanaim.org/philosof/nauka-rel/universal_genome.htm
- "So can the disparities between molecular and morphological trees ever be resolved? Some proponents of the molecular approach claim there is no need. The solution, they say, is to throw out morphology, and accept their version of the truth.”
Trisha Gura, “Bones, Molecules or Both” Nature, Vol. 406, p. 230-233. July 20, 2000.
- "To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story - amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific."
Ardent Evolutionist, Dr. Henry Gee, Senior Editor, Biological Sciences for the journal Nature as written in his book, “In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life” New York, The Free Press, 1999, page 126-127.
- “When full DNA sequences opened the way to comparing many different genes in different organisms, the comparisons proved confounding. Rather than clarifying the tree that seeks to show how life evolved, they often produced new trees that differ from the traditional tree and conflict with each other as well.”
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/284/5418/1305
What is a transitional or intermediate fossil?
Here is the typical evolutionary definition:
“What a transitional fossil is, in keeping with what the theory of evolution predicts, is a fossil that shows a mosaic of features from an older and more recent organism.”
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC200.html
So, where do they draw the line when connecting all the millions of fossils to each other? Is one shared feature enough? How about two, or three, or four, five, six? Does it also pertain to internal organs?
The only criteria used is seeing a gap in the record and attempting to fill it with some sort of fossil. It’s as simple (and pathetic) as that. But the real question of fossil evidence remains to be answered:
Does the fossil record provide ANY evidence for evolution creating new features to appear in existing organisms?
Refer to the first two diagrams from “Fins to Limbs”:
http://www.devoniantimes.org/opportunity/tetrapodsAnswer.html
The author lines up a fanciful progression of fossils and adds new bones as needed, attributing the evolution of them to nothing other than “refinements and variations of the adaptations and features.”
Notice how new bones instantly appear in the drawings and how the author conveniently forgets to mention how the necessary muscles, tendons, nerves, etc. also evolve simultaneously with them.
Do you see any fossils in the diagrams that have a partial bone mass displaying an initial development of a humerus, mesomeres, radius, ulna, or ulnar? Why not?
What causes new features to instantly appear and be fully assembled, fully formed, and immediately functional?
Go to: http://www.whoisyourcreator.com/how_does_evolution_occur.html
Why are there NO examples of any partially formed feature found in an existing population or in the fossil record?
- “It is not necessarily easy to "see" macroevolutionary history; there are no firsthand accounts to be read."
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/_0_0/evoscales_05
- “In each of these pivotal nexuses in life's history, the principal "types" seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate "grades" or intermediate forms between different types are detectable.”
http://www.biology-direct.com/content/2/1/21
- “Most of the animal phyla that are represented in the fossil record first appear, ‘fully formed,’ in the Cambrian some 550 million years ago.”
Richard S K Barnes, Peter Calow, Peter J. W. Olive, David W. Golding and John Spicer, “The Invertebrates: A New Synthesis” (textbook), Updated 2000, Blackwell Publishing
Below are even more problems with the fossil record
Evolution predicts that life began as simple organisms, but complexity has been rule, not exception, in the earliest known fossils:
- “Our earliest animal ancestors, it appears, were sponges — multicellular animals that feed by passing seawater though a complex system of internal channels. And these earliest sponges may predate the Ediacarian period by as much as 80 million years, this new evidence shows …
And, after painstaking chemical analysis, they found sponge-derived steroids in abundance — and with them, strong new evidence that sponges, among the simplest forms of multicellular life, were indeed the first such organisms on Earth.”
http://www.physorg.com/news152976776.html
- “Sponges are one of the most simple forms of multicellular animals. A sponge is mainly a mass of cells embedded in a porous protein skeleton. The size of sponges ranges from as small as a grain of sand to as big as a watermelon - some sponges are even 2m tall. In all cases their bodies have pores. Since sponges are immobile animals (they attach themselves to the edges of rocks or corals - that's another reason why people thought sponges are aquatic plants) they eat by filtering tiny organisms (eg, bacteria and plankton) from the surrounding water. For that reason sponges are sometimes referred to as 'filter feeders'. The outer pores, called ostia, serve as an intake socket. They lead to inner pores called oscula, which is where the suction and digestion takes place. There are basically three architectures of sponges: Small simple tube-like sponges (called asconoid sponges), thick tube-like sponges (called synconoid sponges) and big complex sponges (called leuconoid sponges). The tube-like sponges filter water from the inner part of the tube to the outside, whereas the leuconoid has complex channel architectures, with influx and outflux channels and voids comparable to compressor chambers. Such a sponge with a volume of one litre can filter up to 7,000 litres of water in one day.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A839144
- “Until now, the dominant paradigm in the field of paleobiology has been that the earliest multicellular animals were simple, and that strategies organisms use today to survive, reproduce and grow in numbers have arisen over time due to several factors …
'How Funisia appears in the fossils clearly shows that ecosystems were complex very early in the history of animals on Earth – '”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080320150025.htm
Evolution predicts that fossils can be accurately dated, but new research shows fundamental problem with the dating techniques:
- “The precise timing of the origin of life on Earth and the changes in life during the past 4.5 billion years has been a subject of great controversy for the past century. The principal indicator of the amount of organic carbon produced by biological activity traditionally used is the ratio of the less abundant isotope of carbon, 13C, to the more abundant isotope, 12C.
It appears that records related to carbonate platforms which are often used throughout the early history of the Earth are not good recorders of the 13C/12C ratio in the open oceans. Hence, the work presented suggests that assumptions made previously about changes in the 13C/12C ratios of carbonate sediments in the geological record are incorrect.”
http://www.physorg.com/news140266859.html
- “But in biological systems, there is a small bias in the use of each isotope (called "fractionation") which results in biological tissues having a different ratio of 12C to 13C than the 'wild' carbon floating around, say, in the atmosphere … It turns out that a study of these different depositional environments, in the paper by Swart, indicates that the two data sources behave differently and the non-ocean bottom deposits cannot be used as they previously were. As a result of this, our understanding of the history of the Earth's carbon cycle has gone all topsy-turvy and now needs to be re-examined.”
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2008/09/warning_will_robinson_warning.php
Is Dating Fossils by Their Position within Geological Layers Scientific?
- "A great deal has changed, however, and contemporary geologists and paleontologists now generally accept catastrophe as a 'way of life' although they may avoid the word catastrophe.”
David, M. Raup, Paleontologist, University of Chicago, quoted while curator and Dean of Science at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
- "I hope I have convinced you that the sedimentary record is largely a record of episodic events rather than being uniformly continuous. My message is that episodicity is the rule, not the exception…. We need to shed those lingering subconscious constraints of old uniformitarian thinking."
(Emeritus) Professor Robert Dott, Sedimentary Geology, UW Madison, "The Rule” Presidential Address To Society of Economic Paleontologists & Mineralogists, Geotimes, Nov. 1982, p.16 Dott is a co-author of a leading textbook of earth history, Evolution of the Earth (McGraw-Hill), which is now in its 7th edition. In 1995, he received the Geological Society of America's History of Geology Division Award.
- “Relative dating places fossils in a temporal sequence by noting their positions in layers of rocks, known as strata … Sometimes this method doesn't work, either because the layers weren't deposited horizontally to begin with, or because they have been overturned.”
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/lines_10
- “Earth movements over extremely long periods of earth's history can lift limestone miles into the air. The summit of Mount Everest is limestone that started out on an ocean floor.”
http://www.granitech.net/faq.htm
If evolution is true, why is it that evolutionists focus on the fossil record? Shouldn’t we be able to observe it occurring in real time?
“It is not necessarily easy to "see" macroevolutionary history; there are no firsthand accounts to be read. Instead, we reconstruct the history of life using multiple lines of evidence, including geology, fossils, and living organisms.”
University of California Museum of Paleontology and the National Center for Science Education
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/_0_0/evoscales_05
This is most incriminating evidence against all the tenets of evolution!
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“Scientists have discovered that the original statistical model used to
calculate dinosaur mass is flawed, suggesting dinosaurs have been oversized.
Widely cited estimates for the mass of Apatosaurus louisae, one of the largest of the dinosaurs, may be double that of its actual mass
(38 tonnes vs. 18 tonnes).
"Paleontologists have for 25 years used a published statistical model to estimate body weight of giant dinosaurs and other extraordinarily large animals in extinct lineages. By re-examining data in the original reference sample, we show that the statistical model is seriously flawed and that the giant dinosaurs probably were only about half as heavy as is generally believed" says Gary Packard from Colorado State University.”
“Dinosaurs May Have Been Smaller Than Previously Thought,” Zoological Society of London’s Journal of Zoology, June 21, 2009. ScienceDaily.com
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090621195620.htm
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“In each of these pivotal nexuses in life's history, the principal "types" seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization.
No intermediate "grades" or intermediate forms between different types
are detectable.”
—Eugene V. Koonin
“The Biological Big Bang model for the major transitions in evolution” National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Biology Direct 2007, 2:21
http://www.biology-
direct.com/content/2/1/21
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