1. FOSSILS CONTRADICT EVOLUTION
The other type of exception to the geologic column is places where fossils of life thought by evolutionists to have lived millions of years apart are found together. Some of these fossils that are usually in layers by themselves are occasionally seen together in the same layer. These exceptions are multiple, undeniable and irrefutable. This cannot be explained based on evolution because the life forms that made these fossils which are found together did not live at the same time according to evolutionists.
These life forms did not live even close to the same time. We are told they lived millions of years apart, yet we see their fossils buried together. This is yet another example of physical evidence in the earth that contradicts evolution. How could these fossils ever be seen together? The fossils are permanently embedded inside of rocks. If they are seen as fossils together now then they lived at the same time when they became fossils together.
They could not have lived millions of years apart, they must have lived together. However, if they lived at the same time, one could not have evolved from another. This one fact alone, like each of the other 50 controversies alone is enough to make evolution not logically possible. If evolutionists cannot explain this fact of the geologic column then evolution cannot logically be believable.
Creation on the other hand has no problem at all explaining this. If all of life lived at the same time, life forms being buried together and forming fossils next to each other would be expected and not at all unusual, and is more evidence that the geologic column is the result of a global flood and not from evolution.
There are many examples of this problem for evolution where the fossils of life forms that are thought to have lived millions of years apart are found together. One example is human footprints found in ‘ancient’ strata. Man is believed to have evolved (in the late Tertiary period) about a million years ago. However there are footprints found in rocks (such as the Carboniferous Period) from what is thought by evolutionists to be 250 million years ago. These footprints have been found in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri and the Rocky Mountains. There are also human footprints next to dinosaur footprints (in Cretaceous strata) found in Texas even though dinosaurs are thought to have been extinct 70 million years before human evolved! How could this be? These are some of many examples of ‘young’ life forms found where there should only be ‘old’ life forms and the discrepancy in the evolutionary time line is off by millions and millions of years.
More examples of this are 432 different mammal species found in layers where the dinosaurs are. Mammals are thought to have evolved long after the dinosaurs so they could not have lived together, but their fossils are found together. The same is true of birds where the fossils of many modern birds have been found by paleontologists with dinosaur fossils. These should not be found together if evolution is true because they did not live together, but they are found together indicating that they did live together, which would be impossible if evolution were true.
There are also examples of life forms that were thought to be extinct having lived millions of years ago, but have been found alive today. You may remember some of these reports on the news. One of these is the reptile tuatara of New Zealand which lived 200 million years ago according to the evolutionary interpretation of the geologic column. Another is the coelecanths which are fish abundantly found in the fossil record (in the Devonian period) 400 million years ago when fish are thought to have evolved legs. The coelecanths were believed to be extinct of course, until they were found in 1938. Both the tuatara and the coelecanths are unchanged over these ‘millions’ of years and evolutionists cannot explain why they are not extinct or why they did not evolve. They never changed.
The problem of dating fossils and trying to making sense out of what is found and in what layer they are found has been going on for a very long time. The Proceedings of the Royal Society discusses this in the appropriately titled article, “Is evolutionary history repeatedly rewritten in light of new fossil discoveries?” Here we read that “Mismatches between the stratigraphic first occurrences of sister lineages are known as ghost lineages”. A ghost lineage is a term that was invented to mean an entire branch of an evolutionary tree for which there is no fossil record.
Evolutionists have resorted to using “entire branches” of an imaginary evolutionary tree where there are not any fossils. They literally make them up because there is no way to explain the fossils that are found in each of the layers. Since these fossils do not exist they are called ghost lineages. Evolutionists say they must have existed or else they could not explain the order of the fossils that we have found. However, since none have ever been found and these fossils do not exist, they are called ghosts. This article concludes that “Unfortunately, although the perceived completeness of the dinosaurian fossil record has improved greatly over the past 150 years, it is apparently now in a state of turmoil” and “our perception of dinosaurian evolutionary history remains in flux”.
Another article with this same message is the article, “Uncertainty in the age of fossils and the stratigraphic fit to phylogenies” published in the journal Systematic Biology. The title accurately describes the fact that the stratigraphic fit (the layers) and the fossils do not fit, so there is ongoing uncertainty. This is reported as “The ages of first appearance of fossil taxa in the stratigraphic record are inherently associated to an interval of error or uncertainty”
“Give up the ghost” is an idiom that means to stop trying to do something because you know that you will not succeed. It is time for evolutionists to ‘give up the ghost’ of ghost lineages. They have been unable to succeed in explaining the layers and the fossils found in the layers using ghost lineages.
It is a published fact in peer reviewed scientific journals that “ghost lineages” have been invented to try to explain the ‘mismatches” in the layers and the fossils that are found in each of the layers.
Stratigraphy is a branch of geology which studies rock layers (strata) and layering (stratification). You do not need to be a stratigraphologist to grasp:
If the fossils of life forms which evolution teaches lived millions of years apart and are found together in the geologic column are not the result of evolution, then evolution logically cannot be possible.
2. LACK OF TRANSITIONAL FOSSILS
If the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record is not the result of evolution,
then evolution is not logically possible.
The geologic column has been discussed as it relates to the age of the earth. The fossil evidence is part of the geologic column and both topics can be understood together since they were formed together. However, there are other separate problems with the fossil record that contradicts evolution. This is that there is a lack of transitional forms in the fossil record. This is a fact that can be very surprising to many that are learning about creation science. All the museums and evolution text books make it sound like the fossils prove evolution is true. However, the lack of transitional forms is exactly what is expected for creationists, and is a big problem for evolutionists. Evolutionists must be able to explain this for evolution to be possible.
A transitional form would be a fossil that shows one form ‘transitioning’ or evolving into another. The process of fossilization results in mineralization of the skeleton of vertebrates and the exoskeleton of invertebrates. We can essentially see the shape of organisms that have lived in the past. If evolution is true we would expect to see these transitional forms showing life forms evolving into more complex life forms. These transitional forms are commonly called missing links. The term “link” is used because it would link or transition from one species to another. The term “missing” is used because the fossils that were thought would be found have not been found and now they are ‘missing’.
Darwin noted what he called “the extreme imperfection of the geologic record”. He was aware there was no fossil evidence during his lifetime that supported his theory. He assumed that as more fossils were discovered that these transitional forms would be found to confirm his theory. After over 150 years of worldwide exploration the fossil record is considered complete. No one expects to find any additional forms in the fossil record. There are only a very few fossils that even evolutionists consider to be a transitional form, and all of these are highly controversial. Many creationists would say there are none, while others will recognize that evolutionists say they have a few, then disagree with them and give all the reasons why. There certainly is no fossil that has ever been found that would confirm evolution.
Evolutionists now have to talk about “significant steps” in a series they claim shows evolution because they cannot show a transitional series. What the fossil record shows is that all of the life forms have what is called “abrupt appearance” and then they never change. Evolutionists explain this as “The Cambrian explosion” where most major groups of animals suddenly appear in the fossil record, and then there is “stasis” where there are no changes. Things suddenly appear and then they never change, there is abrupt appearance and then stasis. This is the fact of the fossil record that needs to be explained. Of course this is what is expected with creation and a global flood.
Evolution says that a vast number of life forms developed from nonlife in the ancient oceans. The concept of one change at a time giving a survival advantage would be expected to be seen in the shapes of all of the organisms that we now have as fossils. But since there is no convincing evidence of transitional forms, evolution has to explain why. The number of species that exist is staggering and nearly incomprehensible. The total number of life forms that have lived over all of time is so large it is not even known. The number of transitions from one life form to another would be astronomically large. If evolution were true we would expect so many transitional forms in the fossil record that it wouldn’t even be a question. There should be so many that it would be obvious. There should be so many that you would not need to be a paleontologist to see these transitions.
The failed attempts to find the “missing link”.
This was an area of huge interest historically because it was thought that someone would find the missing link and that would prove that evolution was true. The main effort was to try to find fossil evidence of the missing links of a transition from monkeys to man. However, the cave men and “prehistoric man” that we have all heard of are actually fully human as we are. Neanderthal man is a famous one which came from a discovery of skeletons found in the Neander Valley in Germany in 1856. He was reported to be a ‘caveman’ and was pictured as being bent over, stupid and hairy. Of course these pictures are artists conceptions based on nothing because all of these features are from soft tissues that were no longer there after being decomposed. All that remained was the bones of the skeleton. There is no way to tell the pattern of the hair or stupid looking facial features. It was noticed that the ends of the long bones in the legs were eroded and from this they assumed Neanderthal Man walked bent over. The bones were eventually examined by Rudolf Virchow, a world famous pathologist at the time, and whose ideas are still taught in medical schools today. Dr Virchow examined the bones and concluded that they had crippling diseases such as rickets and chronic arthritis. It has been later shown that their posture was identical to ours and that they lived at the same time as ‘modern’ humans. Neanderthal man is now classified as Homo sapiens, completely human!
Another ‘cave man’ was Cro-Magnon Man. These bones were discovered in the Cro Magnon cave at Dordogne, France in 1868. These have also been determined to be fully human. The Oxford Companion to Archaeology states, “The term ‘Cro-Magnon has no formal taxonomic status, since it refers neither to a species or subspecies nor to an archaeological phase or culture. The name is not commonly encountered in modern professional literature in English, since authors prefer to talk more generally of anatomically modern humans”. The Cro-Magnon man is also Homo sapiens, fully human.
The next fossil to discuss is Piltdown Man. This was presented in school textbooks as the missing link for 40 years. This was based on a find in a gravel pit in 1912. There was a human skull found next to an orangutan jaw. The teeth appeared to have the pattern of a monkey which is different from the human pattern since monkeys chew their food differently than us. It was later discovered that the teeth had been intentionally altered. This is all the evidence that was used to report a missing link and even put it in textbooks. It was further examined with fluorine stains and is now known to have been a complete fraud and hoax.
Nebraska Man was named in 1922 from a single tooth found by a rancher in Nebraska. The tooth was sent to the president of the American Museum of Natural History who published a paper identifying a new species, which he named Hesperopithecus haroldcookii. The tooth is now known to be from a peccary, an animal similar to a pig. The scientific community, even at that time was skeptical, but it did lead to a published paper. The Illustrated London News then published an illustration of Nebraska Man and of his family. Of course you cannot reconstruct a human from a tooth, particularly a pigs tooth, but the drawing was described as “an artist’s brilliant imaginative genius.” Nebraska Man has been fully discredited as fossil evidence of evolution.
This search for the missing link missed the main point. It implies there is only one missing link, as if there is only one link between a monkey and a man. Each of a countless number of these ‘links’ would have to be the result of only one mutation of DNA. With all of man’s intellectual ability and reasoning skills there would be innumerable changes in the DNA to make one into the other. The word “the” in ‘the missing link’ implies there is a single link. It implies there is only one link missing which is far from the truth. Belief in evolution is more than believing we evolved from monkeys, we would have had to evolve from fish and from microbes before that.
More On the Lack of Transitional forms
Darwin predicted and evolutionists expected to find in the fossil record numerous transitional fossils. After all these years the fossil record is complete. We will not find any more. Nearly every single fossil is agreed to certainly not be a transitional fossil. Evolutionists have a very, very few that they say are transitional fossils. These are highly disputed and there is no clear evidence. If these few really are transitional fossils it should be so obvious and there should be so many of them that it would not be controversial. This is all we have and all we will ever have.
How many transitional forms should there be? There could be transitional forms from every species. There are so many species that the exact number is not even known. There are one and a half million species named but there are up to 100 million species alive today, not including the 200 to 2,000 species that become extinct every year as estimated by the World Wildlife Fund. We don’t know how many are becoming extinct because we don’t even how many there are. Remember, the Center for Biologic Diversity states that “literally dozens (of species are) going extinct everyday”. There are so many species that we cannot even count them. There are so many they are not even named. There are so many we are not certain how many there are. This is a fact that has led many to no longer believe in evolution. This is a valid argument. Where are the transitional forms? Evolution is a theory without sufficient evidence in the fossil record. Since there could be millions and millions (or billions and billions) of transitional forms where are they?
Evolutionists try to account for this glaring fault by explaining that there are not enough fossils. It is not that they expect to find more fossils; they know the fossil record is complete. They say the conditions to make a fossil do not happen frequently enough to have enough fossils to confirm an undisputed transitional fossil. The dead organism would have to be buried quickly and there would need to be enough minerals in the ground water to make a fossil. This argument is not convincing. It is true that fossilization is an infrequent event because life forms that are not suddenly buried will not become a fossil. The bodies of dead fish and land animals are usually scavenged and decomposed, not fossilized. The fossil record is really scientific support of a global flood when all the fossils were formed all at one time by rapid burial. This is the explanation of the formation of the geologic column as well.
The lack of transitional fossils cannot be explained by the infrequent conditions to form a fossil. Since there are billions of fossils, if evolution were true we would expect there to be at least one that is not controversial. It is not that most people believe this explanation of evolutionists; it is that people have never heard of the problem.
Let’s be clear about the problem. It is not that evolutionists present a series of fossils that they state represent a transitional series and creationists disagree with the interpretation of a set of fossils. No, there are not any fossils that anyone presents as a transitional series. The research for one book included a survey of the best museums in the world and after visits to all these countries and discussions with the museum personnel, not a single transitional series is on display in any museum in the entire world! That is rather shocking. Most of us have grown up with the impression that fossils are the proof of evolution. How far this is from the truth, there is no proof.
This has led to the theory of punctuated equilibrium. This was added to the theory of evolution after they were aware of this problem with the fossil record. The lack of transitional forms is described as a result of long periods of stability separated by periods of rapid evolution. This theory states that there are periods where evolution happens so fast that it was not be captured in the fossil record. But we are also told that evolution happens so slowly that we cannot see it now. We must then believe that evolution happens so slowly that we cannot observe it, but when it does happen it is so fast that there is no fossil evidence.
Punctuated equilibrium was presented by Steven Gould, a Harvard professor. It is not intended to be a comprehensive explanation of the lack of transitional fossil evidence. Not even the evolutionist’s believe that. Punctuated equilibrium is only meant to explain the ‘jumps’ in certain geographically isolated areas. Dr. Gould, like Darwin was well aware of the fossil evidence problem. Dr. Gould is one of the world’s leading authorities on evolution and here is his statement concerning transitional forms:
“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbook have data only at the tips and branches; the rest in inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.” He is to be applauded for the intellectual honesty. Evolution truly is “not the evidence of fossils”.
Evolutionists are certain of something that they cannot see. There are literally millions of species, so there should be multiplied millions of transitional fossils. There would not be just one transition from any two of the species we have now. There would be hundreds if not thousands of transitions between any two of the species, so with literally a countless number of species, and expected hundreds of transitions between each of these, there could be hundreds of millions or billions of transitional forms. Adding to this, there would have been hundreds of thousands, or millions, if not billions of individuals in each of these ‘transitional species’ before they ‘evolved’ into another species. Each of these individuals could have become a fossil, so the number of possible transitional fossils can be estimated by millions of individuals in each transitional species times hundreds or thousands of transitions between the current millions of species. This number is so big we don’t even have a word for it. It is bigger than millions. It is bigger than billions. It is bigger than trillions. It is bigger than quadrillions. This is how many possible transitional fossils could be present if evolution is true. But we do not have a single one that is not highly controversial among the very, very few that evolutionists say might represent a transition.
Evolutionists have tried to explain the fact that they never found in the fossil record what they expected to find. Now we all agree that nothing new will ever be found. There is not a single fossil of all of the fossils ever found in the entire earth that can be agreed upon as a transitional form. There is also not a transitional series anywhere on earth, and this is undisputed. The evolutionary explanation for the lack of transitional fossils is unproven and this continues to be a controversy.
You do not need to be a Harvard professor or world renowned paleontologist to know:
If the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record is not the result of evolution,
then evolution is not logically possible.
FURTHER STUDY
The journal Evolutionary Bioinformatics confirms the lack or transitional fossils in the article, “Expected Anomalies in the Fossil Record”. Everyone is aware that “The problem of intermediates in the fossil record has been frequently discussed ever since Darwin. The extent of ‘gaps’ (missing transitional stages) has been used to argue against gradual evolution from a common ancestor.” The language has not changed. They say the “improbability of fossilization or of finding existing fossils was put forward as the standard answer to the question of why there are so many ‘gaps’ in the fossil record. Such gaps have become popularly referred to as ‘missing links’, i.e. missing intermediates between taxa existing either today or as fossils.”
These researchers took “an analytical approach and demonstrate why, under certain sampling conditions, we may not expect intermediates to be found”. They are attempting to use sampling probability to say that there is no surprise that intermediates are not found. Everyone has always known transitional forms are missing in the fossil record. It has now been so long that no one is expecting to find them. Now we see articles trying to explain what they thought they would find was never found, and is now is never expected to be found.
It is a published fact in peer reviewed scientific journals that we do “not expect intermediates to be found” in the fossil record.
3. T-Rex AND DINO COLLAGEN
If the collagen found in a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil is not the result of evolution,
then evolution is not logically possible.
In April of 2007 it was published in the journal Science that collagen was found in the bone of a “68 million year old” Tyrannosaurus rex fossil. Collagen is the most abundant protein in mammals and is part of connective tissue. This is a protein which is made of amino acids and could never be present 68 million years later. This is evidence that dinosaurs are not millions of years old! This could not be explained by the scientists since no other protein had ever been found in very old material because it gets decomposed. The amino acid sequence was analyzed and found to ‘most closely’ match sequences of modern day chickens, leading to the amusing comment that dinosaurs tasted like chicken. Evolutionists then claim this evidence means that dinosaurs and chickens evolved from a common ancestor. This is not logical.
All proteins degrade with time and are decomposed. Collagen is a protein and decays and is decomposed like all other proteins. How could collagen possibly be in the bones of T-rex? We all know collagen degrades. We all know how long this takes. It simply cannot take millions of years. This is such a huge contradiction to evolutionary teaching that this report was further discussed in scientific journals. They thought something must be wrong and it wasn’t really collagen. So, a different team of scientists performed a “Reanalysis of Tyrannosaurus rex Mass Spectra” using Mass spectra as the laboratory technique. This was published 2 years later and reported “we find nothing obviously wrong with the Tyrannosaurus rex mass spectra”.
Evolutionists are fully aware that this result in their own evolutionary journals is a big problem for them, so some have claimed that the original T-rex collagen was just contaminated, and the result was not real. That was why this second analysis was done but nothing was found to be wrong with the original work. Then there was another publication where more protein was found in another dinosaur called ‘Campanian hadrosaur Brachylophosaurus canadensis’ which was “80 million year(s) old”. This was also published in the journal Science and used “multiple lines of evidence” to confirm “that molecular preservation in Cretaceous dinosaurs is not a unique event”.
The more obvious interpretation of these results consistent with this evidence is that dinosaurs did not evolve because they are not that old. These scientists who were previously convinced that evolution is true make the evidence ‘fit’ their belief system, even when the evidence directly contradicts their beliefs. This is just another of thousands of facts that contradict evolution. Evolution cannot be possible unless it can explain everything that is seen in the earth. It is a necessary condition.
It is a published fact in peer reviewed scientific journals that dinosaur fossils contain protein and connective tissue, and it is a scientific fact that protein and connective tissue cannot be millions of years old. The evolutionary explanation for the presence of protein and collagen in dinosaur fossils is unproven and this continues to be a controversy.
The science which studies decomposition is called taphonomy. Professionals who see this decomposition every day are medical coroners or funeral home morticians. We do not need a taphonomer, coroner or mortician to put collagen in a fossil and wait millions of years to see if it is still there to be certain that:
If the collagen found in a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil is not the result of evolution,
then evolution is not logically possible.