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An Evolutionist Debate

>> Saturday, November 6, 2010

At least one Evolutionist can admit that transitional fossils are rare even thought lately, the Evolutionist make it them seem so common with their Ida and Ardi fossils.

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. (Gould)

Though later he changed his mind and said that they are one of the best evidence for the theory of Evolution.

Described recently as "the most important evolutionary event during the entire history of the Metazoa," the Cambrian explosion established virtually all the major animal body forms -- Bauplane or phyla -- that would exist thereafter, including many that were 'weeded out' and became extinct. Compared with the 30 or so extant phyla, some people estimate that the Cambrian explosion may have generated as many as 100. The evolutionary innovation of the Precambrian/Cambrian boundary had clearly been extremely broad: "unprecedented and unsurpassed," as James Valentine of the University of California, Santa Barbara, recently put it. (Lewin)

The gaps in the fossil record are real, however. The absence of a record of any important branching is quite phenomenal. Species are usually static, or nearly so, for long periods, species seldom and genera never show evolution into new species or genera but replacement of one by another, and change is more or less abrupt. (Wesson)
Source

The Age of the Earth: Thousands vs. Billions of Years
Prediction: The earth will be demonstrated to be billions of years old: If the earth is less than 3 billion years old, there would not be enough time for biological evolution to occur.	Prediction: The earth will be discovered to be relatively young (e.g. more than 6,000 years, but less than 100,000,000). (Note: Intelligent Design thinking does not require a young earth, but the Young Earth/Cataclysm model, by definition, does.)
Astrophysical Dating: Light from distant objects in the universe suggests 10,000,000,000 light years as a possible age (and consequent size) for the expansion of the known universe from the Big Bang. The same light suggests that some of these distant objects contain chemical elements such as carbon, iron and uranium requiring multiple billions of years under current theory for these elements to form in second-generation stars. Thus, these second generation galaxies would require more than 16,000,000,000 years to mature and allow the light to reach the earth. By that time, the sun would have burned out and gone cold. The reality is that no one really knows how big the universe is, or from what distance light might really come, or even whether the speed of light has always been constant. Today, most science textbooks state that the solar system including the earth is 4.6 billion years old. There is no evidence for this arbitrary age. The likely reason for science to propose this age is that it allows enough time for evolution to happen. As to the universe, the age printed in textbooks has doubled every twenty years over the last 140 years. In the late 1920’s it was estimated that the universe was only 2,000,000,000 years old. While at the time of Darwin half a billion years was accepted. Now, with the observations of the Hubble telescope, some are proposing 16,000,000,000 years or more. (Therefore 2 billion, plus or minus 14 billion years, or 16 billion plus or minus 14 billion!) These disparate ages indicate a lack of precision in the measuring processes. Coupling these disparities with contradictory measurements from other dating systems caused one well known Darwinian astronomer to state: “There is no evidence based solely on solar observations that the Sun is 4.5-5.0 x 109 years old. I suspect that the sun is 4.5 billion years old. However, given some new and unexpected results to the contrary, and some time for frantic recalculation and theoretical readjustment, I suspect that we could live with Bishop Ussher’s value for the age of the earth and sun. I don’t think we have much in the way of observational evidence in astronomy to conflict with that. Solar physics now looks to paleontology for data on solar chronology.” From a speech by John Eddy at an astronomy conference Quoted by Kazmann in Geotimes 1978. The theory that the sun is fueled by fusion, burning hydrogen into helium, has some experimental support. This allows for the possibility, but does not prove that the sun is billions of years old. Predictions stated that the sun would give off neutrinos as a by-product of the fusion process. The quantities of neutrinos measured on the earth coming from the sun, however, are fewer than predicted to produce the sun’s temperature. Another theory originally proposed by Sir Isaac Newton is that the sun is heated by friction through gravitational collapse. This theory, too, has experimental support since measurements over several hundred years have indicated a slow reduction in the diameter of the sun. Sir Isaac Newton’s theory has been discarded only because it does not allow for the sun to be billions of years old, thus making evolution impossible. One explanation for the missing neutrinos is that the sun is young and that its energy is produced from a combination of both nuclear fusion and heat caused by gravitational collapse. If heat from the sun is caused by a combination of these two processes, then the sun is not billions of years old. Besides the question about how long the sun has been burning, there are a number of other astrophysical phenomena, which give maximum ages for the universe and the solar system that are much lower then the often-quoted 4.6 billion years. Some examples: Spiral galaxy arms cannot continue to maintain form after billions of years. Spiral galaxies, therefore, appear to be too young for evolutionary timescales. Venus, Uranus & Pluto spin backwards. Gravity would not allow this to happen for billions of years. In the Solar System, at least 8 moons rotate backwards in a reverse spin from what would be predicted from the laws of physics. This reverse spin implies a designed, relatively young universe. There is no current naturalistic explanation for a reverse spin. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, & Neptune each have moons orbiting in opposite directions. Physical laws cannot explain how reverse orbits originated, nor can they explain how these orbits would be maintained for billions of years. Gravity should have caused the orbiting moons to slow each other down. Evolutionary time frames would have required that the moons crash into the mother planets a long time ago. The moon’s interior is still hot. There seems to be no other explanation for the fact that the interior of the moon is still hot except that it appears not to have cooled off yet! It must therefore be very young! The earth’s interior is still hot! So are a number of the other planets. These planets are thus still cooling off. There is no other hypothetical explanation for heat in the interior of the planets unless the solar system is not billions of years old! The moon is moving away from the earth at measurable rates. Assuming a 4.6 billion year old earth, it should have escaped the earth’s orbit several billion years ago. There is no explanation as to how the Earth, or any other of the planets captured their moons into orbit. Nor is their any accepted scientific solution for the Sun to have captured the planets. The earth’s magnetic field has decayed by 6% in the last 150 years. Some scientists have proposed a maximum age of 20,000 years using a geometric decay profile for the magnetic field.

Inbreeding: How fertile are the offspring?
The Naturalistic Evolutionary Model:	An Intelligent Design - Young Earth/Cataclysm Model:
Prediction: Inbreeding in domestic and other plants & animals will demonstrate a high percentage of strong and fertile offspring.	Prediction: Inbreeding in domestic and other plants &animals will show limits to variation and lead to weak and less fertile offspring.
If speciation is to occur, extreme inbreeding, when repeated geographic isolation occurs, is required. Such inbreeding will allow for differentiation to persist and not be diluted and lost into the greater population. Inbreeding, however, leads to inherited genetic defects, which would overrule any potential inherited benefits to possible “positive mutations”. It is “the almost universal belief of breeders…(of) plants and animals…that close interbreeding diminishes vigor and fertility.” Darwin, The Origin of the Species p.86 Extreme inbreeding of dogs, for example, leads to defects inherited by all descendent members of that breed of dogs. When the inbred dogs return to crossbreed, then the defects are sublimated producing stronger offspring. This is an indication that there are limits to genetic variation. Zea Maiz, (American corn) has been bred for millennia. New varieties have been developed over the centuries through selection and hybridization. Breeding experiments, however, seem to have stayed within the limits of genetic variation. New organs were not developed, rather desirable traits inherent to genetic variability of size, color, flavor, resistance to disease or weather, etc. have been bred into seed stock, while undesirable traits have been bred out. Man seems to have encountered limits to genetic breeding. Genetic engineering may allow for further development. However, at this juncture, if left in the wild, hybridized corn seed quickly looses its specialized combination of desirable traits. Some suggest that corn is so inbred; it may not retain the ability to survive in the wild. By the second generation what was once hybridized corn seed quickly degenerates reverting to less productive, more wild and irregular stock. If evolutionary expectations were met, the differentiated sub-species might continue to evolve into something new as opposed to reverting to old form.

Fossils: What Kind of Fossils are found and in what order?
The Naturalistic Evolutionary Model:	An Intelligent Design - Young Earth/Cataclysm Model:
Predictions: Fossils will be relatively rare. Most fossils will be of great antiquity. The fossil record, though incomplete, will reveal abundant evidence of intermediate extinct species and lineages found in bottom to top chronological order in the earth’s strata. Modern species will be quite distinct from primitive species.	Predictions: The fossil record will show that all manner of plants & animals were buried quickly, together, in mud. Groupings of fossils will be hodge-podge with some evidence of habitat and/or water-sorting by body density. Numerous extinctions will be discovered of unusual, apparently unrelatable living species. Plant and animal fossils from different strata will be relatively unchanged and will appear of recent origin. Modern species will distinctly match buried species.
Billions of fossils have been uncovered; hundreds of thousands of these have been catalogued. Millions of tons of fossils are abundantly found around the world. Coal and oil deposits are massive layers of organic fossil material. These often contain not only carbon products from plants, but also animal products including bones, even complete skeletons. New evidence indicates that these hydrocarbon strata were layered quickly. Almost all fossils are known to have been buried in mud. Mass graves with thousands upon thousands of fossils including hundreds of mixed species in one site are not uncommon. Even very fragile species such as jellyfish, leaves and bacteria have been preserved. The famous evolutionary scientist, Stephen Jay Gould, for example in It’s a Wonderful Life catalogues a whole series of previously unknown and unrelated species that were buried catastrophically in the Burgess Shale. No consensus exists among evolutionary scientists on any intermediary fossils. Archaeopteryx, the most sited “intermediary”, is now claimed by some evolutionists to have had fully developed feathers with wings that were capable of flight and is dated at around 135 million years. If these facts are true, then how could Archaeopteryx be an intermediary? It would have been a full-fledged bird that preceded the appearance of many dinosaur species. Unfossilized Tyrannosaurus Rex bones were recently found in China. They had the appearance of being recently buried! The interior of these bones still had flexible tissue intact. Yet, on the prejudice of evolutionary thinking, the bones were “dated” at 65,000,000 years. Fresh, flexible tissue after sixty five million years? Miners and well diggers come across fossils so frequently that these are systematically discarded. One well digger stated to me that he regularly drills into a layer of fresh wood 300 ft down from the surface along the coast of Delaware and Maryland. Museums are so full of fossils that many are warehoused without being catalogued. Marble and granite fossils are so common that we walk on them in our hallways and cut our vegetables on them on our kitchen counters. No known fossil sequence has ever been demonstrated. Only a few have even been proposed. How about Carl Sagan’s preposterous pictorial evolution of the bear into a whale! How many intermediary steps would this require? The most cited sequence, that of the horse, is contested by scientists, and even contradicted in the fossil record with a South American sequence in reverse of that claimed in the North American fossil record. Virtually identical fossils of many living species have been found in all layers of the geologic column including some highly differentiated species. Bat fossils, for example, have been found in the Cambrian layer at the bottom of the geologic strata. Life does not appear in slow incremental stages in the fossil record. Rather, life forms appear so suddenly and so abundantly that evolutionary scientists have dubbed this phenomenon, the “Cambrian explosion”. Hundreds of modern species are so common in the “early layers” that they have been called “living fossils” including: dragonflies, sharks, ginkgo trees, cockroaches, opossums, crawdads and protozoa. Stasis of kinds is the reality of fossil finds. Species appear abruptly and disappear abruptly in the fossil record even over discontinuous strata, over “tens” and even “hundreds of millions” of years with no significant change. “Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of … 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.” Darwin: Origin of the Species p.227. Note: The fossil evidence against evolution has only increased since Darwin penned this statement.

Geology: Eons of time, or a great flood?
The Naturalistic Evolutionary Model:	An Intelligent Design - Young Earth/Cataclysm Model:
Prediction: Uniformitarian geological structures will be found all over the earth in coherent, time-sequenced patterns.	Prediction: Cataclysmic non-uniformitarian geological structures will dominate the earth’s surface.
Evolutionary theorists consistently interpret geological layers in terms of hundreds of millions of years. Their model of geological strata presupposes chronological layering. It is divided (from oldest to youngest) into Pre-Cambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras with each of these subdivided into Eons or Periods. Young Earth scientists, on the other hand, site the lack of chronological coherence to the kinds of rocks and fossils found in the supposed layers to be an indicator of a single massive cataclysmic flood. These scientists propose that massive multiple layers thousands of feet thick were quickly formed settling onto all of the great plains of the earth’s crust with chasms being cut during one major drainage event which would have naturally followed the flood. The drainage event would thus explain the great canyons of the earth’s plains. These scientists would propose that there was one ice age subsequent to the flood. They would propose that there is no evidence for the currently held uniformitarian geological frame. The evolutionary model has significant trouble explaining the following anomalies that can easily be explained with a worldwide flood: 1. The model of the geological column in science textbooks is not found complete anywhere on the earth. For example, the Grand Canyon is missing 150 million years of strata. For this model to be true, there must be unknown geologic activity that nicely erases periods of earth’s history by wiping away seemingly random strata allowing for subsequent layers to sit undisturbed in neat pancake fashion on top of others. Missing strata vary from geographical location to geographical location and cover vast areas of the earth’s surface. 2.The determination of a layer is not dependant upon the kind of rocks found in it, nor by any dating technique, much less by the order of the layering with the most recent being on top. No! Rather the age of a stratum is determined by the kind of “trace” fossils found in it. This would be great if there were any validity to the age of the “trace” fossils! 3. Layers are often out of order with the wrong layers on top. In other words often “older” layers are found on top of “younger” ones. In most cases these bizarre reversals show no evidence that the younger layer slipped somehow under the one above it. The layers sit nicely one on top of another sometimes covering many thousands of square miles. The theory of “subduction” was invented to try to explain away the existence of these impossible strata inversions. 4. Strata all over the earth’s surface are found neatly parallel to each other with little indication of millions of years of erosion, of mountain formation, of earth shifting, of earthquake, or of volcanic activity between layers. 5. Polystrate fossils such as tree trunks are neatly found in upright positions on every continent. Evolutionary theory requires that these fossils were positioned across multiple layers through “hundreds of thousands of years” of geologic strata deposition. More realistically these fossils (which are sometimes found upside down) were stuck in deep mud that stratified while the logs were in vertical positions. In other words, all the layers covering these polystrate fossils were layered in a single catastrophic event. 6. Shells, and other ocean fossils are found on the tops of all major mountains. 7. Strata hundreds or even thousands of feet thick are neatly folded together indicating that these were layered together and bent while still plastic like clay. Had they been dry, they would have crumbled in the folding. 8. The dating of layers involves circular reasoning. Trace fossils are used to supply ages for strata. The presumed ages of strata are used to confirm the ages of the trace fossils. Radiometric dating has been found useless to independently date the strata. No other independent measurements are used to confirm these supposed ages. (See sections on radiometric dating, and on fossil evidence.) 9. Even evolutionists indicate that the evidence points to catastrophic events in contradiction to the prediction of uniformitarianism. For example, most evolutionists agree that the dinosaurs died in a catastrophic event when a meteor hit the earth. Neo-evolutionists propose at least 4 worldwide catastrophic events. Such events, however, would cause mass extinction accompanied by severe and radical changes to the global environment alternatively causing: tsunamis; deluge; earthquakes; volcanic activity; heating; atmospheric shading; freezing; the release of toxic gas over the whole earth; greenhouse effects; ice ages, etc. Each geologic catastrophe would set evolution back tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of years and require efficient evolutionary processes to re-establish newly derived species from the poorly adapted survivors. 10. Under such conditions, it is hard to explain the stasis of species. How is it that certain species show virtually no change over hundreds of millions of years in light of the dramatic changes to the earth’s environment?

The Naturalistic Evolutionary Model:	An Intelligent Design-Young Earth/Cataclysm Model:
Prediction: A mechanism for positive mutations that increases information to the genetic code must be discovered.	Prediction: Mutations will not be capable of enriching the gene pool, but will lead to degeneration and information loss.
No mechanism that increases information to the genetic code has as yet been described or experimentally demonstrated. Three thousand generations of radiated fruit flies gave many mutations leading to death or detriment to the species. None were positive. If there are zero positive mutations in 3000 generations, how many will there be in 100,000 generations? How about in 1,000,000? The only supposedly positive mutations have been those, which cause loss of information to the genetic structure of a living being. There is the reported example of a species of beetle that lost the ability to fly due to mutation. The resulting sub-species was able to survive better then its peers due to changes in the environment. The pictorial example given in the November 2004 edition of National Geographic in its defense of evolution showed an albino salamander as evidence for a mutated species. Is the loss of pigment capacity an indicator of a possible improvement in the gene structure? Does albinism improve viability of a species?

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