Lazarus, Pakicetus, Rabbitfish and T-Rex? Why do these words threaten Darwinism?

Lazarus was brother to a pair of sisters (Mary and Martha) who were followers of Jesus Christ and was himself a friend of Jesus.   He fell ill and the sisters sent word asking Jesus to come and heal their brother.   But Jesus tarried, Lazarus died and was entombed.   The story is found here in the Bible:  John 11.  Jesus was able to raise a man from the dead who had been dead for four days by ordering him to appear...excerpt:

32 When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
 33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. 34 “Where have you laid him?” he asked.
   “Come and see, Lord,” they replied.
 35 Jesus wept.
 36 Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”
 37 But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
Jesus Raises Lazarus From the Dead
 38 Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. 39 “Take away the stone,” he said.
   “But, Lord,” said Martha, the sister of the dead man, “by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.”
 40 Then Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?”
 41 So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. 42 I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.”
 43 When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44 The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.
   Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”

This obvious and amazing miracle caused many more people to believe in Jesus, but it moved the Pharisees to plot to kill Jesus:

45 Therefore many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him. 46 But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. 47 Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.
   “What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. 48 If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”

Funny how the Pharisees of days passed by and the Darwinists of today sound a bit the same.   Darwinists fear creation science, not because it is untrue, but because IT IS TRUE and if the public comes to believe it, then Darwinists and their just-so stories and ridiculous assertions would be forced to admit that they were wrong and possibly lose their place in whatever their field of endeavor.   Once you visualize Richard Dawkins as a Pharisee seeking to keep his fame and fortune and reputation it all becomes quite clear.   Thus the delicious irony of the recent influx of Lazarus Taxa into the realm of public knowledge.   Such revelations are the beginning of the end of Darwinism, along with the discovery of remains rather than fossils and then soon the public will realize all the fables about the fossil rock records pushed upon them by Darwinists were fables, not facts.   This house of cards will fall from the overwhelming burden of evidence!

"Darwin was partially right about natural selection explaining the origin of species. But because he didn’t pay attention to the Bible (but rather rejected it because of his rebellion against his Creator), he didn’t understand that speciation is simply the God-designed way for the original supernaturally created kinds to produce wonderful variety and perpetuate themselves in the changing environments of a sin-cursed world that would be radically changed by a global year-long Flood at the time of Noah." - Dr. Terry Mortenson

As the last post pointed out, there are fossils found in all sorts of layers of sedimentary rock from Cambrian on up that contain the fossils of creatures that have remained apparently either little changed or entirely unchanged from then to now.   The Coelecanth is a famous example of such a fossil.  Another way to view living fossils is to examine the living organisms rather than simply identifying the fossil first...Now scientists who find "new" organisms will compare them to fossils that have been previously indexed and often find, to their surprise, that the living organism is also found in the fossil record.   The Wollemi Pine, for instance, or the Gladiator Fly. These organisms are commonly known as Lazarus Taxa.   The Lazarus Rat of Southeast Asia, for instance, was thought to be long extinct until an expert named Robert Timmons got a look at one of the common local rats.   Often Lazarus organisms have been found in Asian fish markets, organisms that the Western Scientists thought were long extinct, but that local fishermen knew quite well.  At times this has proven embarrassing to Darwinists as an animal or plant listed as a kind of intermediate form turns out to be extant.   Thus, they have to do the old soft shoe and explain how things evolved from that organism and yet the organism remains.

One commenter suggested that Dr. Werner's article had several flaws.  Here is an excerpt:

"Carl Werner claimed: "A scientist found a fossil sea urchin in Cretaceous rock that looks nearly identical to a modern Purple Heart sea urchin, but assigned it to a completely new genus (Holaster). If you saw that creature alive in the ocean you would recognize it as a Purple Heart sea urchin (genus Spatangus)."

You would, probably I would -- but you and I aren't experts in Echinoidea, the group to which sea-urchins belong. Actually, to my eye there are differences between the two pictured animals, the most obvious one being in the pattern of pores within the five 'arms' of the star shape. Echinoid classification makes a great deal of the size, shape, and placement of various openings and pores in the exoskeleton. If an echinoid expert looked at those and said 'they are different genera,' he'd have reasons to back up that classification."

Those photos I used were of a living and a fossil urchin but were not necessarily the specific type discussed in the article.   They were properly labeled as "fossil sea urchin" and "living sea urchin."  Neither were specified as being the Purple Heart urchin.

Beyond that, my problem with commenters of the Darwinist persuasion making such arguments is this; that they are entirely unreliable as witnesses or analysts when it comes to fossil identification.   Their blunders and/or hoaxes over the years have made them worthless for the purposes of this discussion.  Darwinists made up Nebraska Man from one pig's tooth, they invented a water-based predator that was supposed to be a land animal turning into a whale - Pakicetus!  Pakicetus was invented by Phil Gingerich after finding a skull that, when more fossil remains revealed that it was a land animal and in no way a whale or even related to a whale, tried to hide his mistake (clumsily) as revealed below!   This same "expert", Gingerich, was the one that dragged a Lemur out of the basement from long-term storage, pretended it was a new impressive find just in time for a Darwin anniversary, naming it "Ida."   Turned out Ida was an Idaho-ho-ho...a joke...not in any way a "missing link" but simply a variety of lemur.   For that reason it had been catalogued and ignored until Gingerich decided he needed some kind of a "find" and so produced the sizzle for a non-existent steak.   Darwinists do not scrutinize themselves, so I am not going to trust them to scrutinize others.

The basic Gingerich-and-Pakicetus fiasco is revealed within the article headlined below.   Then below the National Geographic article is the entire Rabbitfish article.   Both articles speak to the deception and outright hoaxes and wishful thinking that comprise the Darwinist side of the argument about origins...


National Geographic is wrong and so was Darwin

by Dr. Terry Mortenson, AiG–USA
6 November 2004

The 33-page cover story of the November issue of National Geographic asks the question, “Was Darwin wrong?” The magazine surprised no one with their confident answer, “No!” But scientifically informed and careful thinking readers will want to analyze the “overwhelming evidence” (p. 4) before concluding that they are correct. We invite you to consider the following article as food for thought … there is another explanation!

National Geographic (hereafter simply NG) reflects on the fact that nearly half of Americans don’t believe in evolution, due in part to “Scriptural literalism” [really, it’s simply believing God’s plain word] and the “proselytizing” work of young-earth creationist and intelligent design proponents (p. 6) [one might consider that NG is also proselytizing for their perspective]. They also suggest the disbelief is based on “honest confusion and ignorance”; but given that the popular science magazines, the mass media and the educational establishment are controlled by evolutionists, it would seem that evolutionists have no one to blame but themselves for this alleged confusion and ignorance.

For instance, please consider that only about five years ago, NG promoted “Archaeoraptor” as “proof’ that “We can now say that birds are theropods just as confidently as we say that humans are mammals.”1 

However, this turned out to be a hoax—a Piltdown Bird—see Archaeoraptor—Phony “feathered” fossil. NG published an embarrassing recantation. However, it seems that their open honesty may have been shortlived.
The NG article begins with an attempt to refute the “evolution is just a theory” claim. As we have attempted to show in many previous articles, this belief is simply not valid and we have long discouraged people from saying this very thing. This section also points out that we should be very careful to not elevate evolution with a word like “theory,” and put the “amoeba-to-man” conjecture on the same level as the theory of relativity and theories of electricity. Rather, these theories that NG confidently compares with evolution are based on repeatable observations in the present, while evolution is a claim about the unobserved past.
The article says that “two big ideas are at issue here: the historical phenomenon of the evolution of all species (descended from a common ancestor) and natural selection as ‘the main mechanism causing that phenomenon’” (p. 8).

The fundamental points of debate: Information

To understand the following brief analysis of this article, we invite you to consider some important facts about life and the creationist view. All living things contain in their cells the DNA molecule that carries the information (genetic instructions) for making all aspects of that creature and all this information is in the first fertilized cell of each kind of creature. Amoeba DNA has no information for making hooves, hair, tails and eyes, but horse DNA does. Alligator DNA has no genetic information for producing feathers, hollow bones and one-way lung systems, but eagles do (as did Archaeopteryx). Some DNA information is common to many different kinds of creatures, but there are also differences.

So the key questions related to evolution are these. One, how did this information come into existence in the evolutionist’s supposed first living microscopic creature? And, second, how did the information in that “simple” creature get changed and augmented to produce all the different kinds of plants and animals that we see living and in the fossil record?

The NG article doesn’t even attempt to address the first question, with good reason. As the world famous astrobiologist, Paul Davies, says:
It's a shame that there are precious few hard facts when it comes to the origin of life. We have a rough idea when it began on Earth, and some interesting theories about where, but the how part has everybody stumped. Nobody knows how a mixture of lifeless chemicals spontaneously organised themselves into the first living cell.2
This is not surprising, given the problems with chemical evolution to explain life’s origin, and the key role of genetic information in the making of living creatures. Dr Werner Gitt is a leading German scientist and young-earth creationist who is an expert on information theory. In his powerful, tightly reasoned book, In the Beginning was Information, he argues, “There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter.”3

So the evolution hypothesis is in big trouble right from the beginning. But it gets worse, because, as creationists have repeatedly argued, and as we review below, natural selection and mutations (either alone or together) do not produce the increase of new genetic information needed to support the goo-to-you-via-the-zoo theory of evolution.

Creationists believe, based on the clear teaching of Genesis, that God supernaturally made different “kinds” of plants and animals during the first six literal days of history and that He endowed those creatures with the genetic information to produce enormous varieties within the original kinds but not the ability to change into a different kind. In case you are reading material like this for the first time, please read on and consider what is reviewed below. We believe this to be of vital importance in the overall discussion of life on this earth. 

Creation scientists (with PhDs earned at secular, evolution-dominated universities) are involved in ongoing scientific research to try to define the genetic boundaries of the original kinds, but most seem to agree that, generally speaking, the Genesis kinds are in most cases at the genus or family level, not the species level of modern taxonomic classification.

So the contrast between evolution and creation is clear. Evolutionists believe in the tree of life—that all living things are descended from one common ancestor. That is, they believe in vertical change from one kind of creature to another. Creationists believe in the forest of life—horizontal variation within the original created kind, but not one kind changing into another. Which view really fits the scientific evidence? 

Concerning natural selection, NG gets it wrong at the start when it says that “Wallace and Darwin share the kudos for having discovered natural selection” (p. 8). Actually, a respected creationist British scientist, Edward Blyth, discussed the concept (without using the term) 25 years before Darwin published his famous book. Blyth attributed variation within the original created kinds to changes in environment or food supply.4

 NG describes natural selection as the “natural culling” of “useless or negative variations” (p. 8), but this reveals the fatal flaw in Darwin’s theory. As creationists have continually pointed out, natural selection doesn’t create anything new, it only selects from the existing genetic information from which the varieties are produced. The result is either the preservation of some of that information in a variety well suited to a particular environment or the complete loss of some of the information through extinction of a variety. But what never results is the increase or creation of new genetic information.

NG misleads its readers and evades this information argument when it showcases losses of information as “proof” of goo-to-you evolution, which would involve massive increases of information. For example, NG asks, “Why do certain species of flightless beetles have wings that never open?” (pp. 12–13). We have long ago pointed out that such beetles did arise from beetles with fully functional wings because of a mutation that crippled the power of flight. But in some environments, such a mutation may be beneficial, i.e. benefiting the organism. For example, on a windy island, a beetle that flew into the air may be blown into the sea, while flightless ones will avoid that peril. But the bottom line is the beetle has lost something; this doesn’t explain how beetles or flight could have arisen in the first place.

The evidence for evolution is presented by NG in four categories: biogeography (the study of the geographical distribution of living creatures), paleontology (the study of fossils), embryology (the study of the development of embryos to birth) and morphology (the study of the shape and design of creatures). Darwin used all these arguments, and so do modern evolutionists.

Biogeography

Evolutionists say that only evolution can explain why there are certain creatures in one location, say kangaroos in Australia, but not in another location. However, Darwin claimed that evolution explained the pattern of life on fixed continents, while now evolution is supposed to explain the pattern of life on continents that moved apart from one big one. If evolution is so flexible that it can explain such mutually incompatible distributions, then it explains nothing at all.

Also, there are many puzzles to the observed distribution of living and fossil creatures. For example, kangaroos are not mainly in Australia “because they evolved there.” And evolutionists have to admit that marsupials once lived in Europe, Asia and North America (in profusion in the latter), but now are largely absent (except for opossums in the Americas). Here is a revealing admission from two evolutionists:
Living marsupials are restricted to Australia and South America (which were part of the supercontinent Gondwana); North American opossums are recent immigrants to the continent. In contrast, metatherian fossils from the Late Cretaceous are exclusively from Eurasia and North America (which formed the supercontinent Laurasia). This geographical switch remains unexplained.5
But creationists contend that there are much better explanations of the biogeographic evidence, which flow from understanding the changes in climate and sea level after the global catastrophic Flood at the time of Noah and the fact that post-Flood people would have intentionally (and sometimes unknowingly) taken plants and animals to different parts of the world as they repopulated the earth. See How Did Animals Spread All Over the World from Where the Ark Landed? and chapter 1 of Woodmorrappe’s book, Studies in Flood Geology.

Closely related species in an area, such as the thirteen species of finches in the Galápagos Islands that Darwin explored, have indeed arisen from a common ancestor. But finches changing into finches don’t tell us where finches came from in the first place. Rather, they are a classic example of sorting out genetic information, not generating new information, and far more quickly than evolutionists expected but just what the creation model predicted. Also, recent work shows that many of the changes are really the result of a built-in capacity to respond to cyclically changing climates. For example, while a drought resulted in a slight increase in beak size, the change was reversed when the rains returned. 

This argument applies to the other NG examples of anoles, mole rats, ants, pigeons and fruit flies. It’s also important to note that Darwin’s argument was against a compromising view similar to that of progressive creationists such as Hugh Ross: namely, that God created individual species where they are now living.
Contrary to what the NG article implies, informed creationists do indeed believe that new species can arise. But these are the result of the reshuffling or loss of the genetic information in the original created kinds. As explained earlier, creationist scientists do not believe that the original created “kinds” (mentioned in Genesis 1) are equivalent to the modern man-made taxonomic classification of “species,” but more likely approximates the “family” level. Much recent evidence has accumulated to show that speciation can happen rapidly, which has surprised evolutionists but fits perfectly with the Bible’s teachings.

Paleontology

NG leads readers to believe that Darwin thought the fossil record supported his theory. But actually he admitted more than once in his famous book6 that the fossil record is an embarrassment to his theory of descent from a common ancestor. He knew that if his theory was true, there should be countless numbers of transitional forms (e.g., 100% reptile, 75% reptile-25% bird, 50% reptile-50%bird, 25% reptile-75%bird, 100% bird and many transitional forms between each of those). Darwin attributed the lack of evidence to our ignorance of the fossil record. But today our museums are loaded with fossils and the missing links are still missing. 

As the late Harvard evolutionary geologist, Stephen Gould, put it:
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.7
In a 1979 letter responding to the late creationist, Luther Sunderland, Colin Patterson, then Senior Palaeontologist at the British Museum of Natural History in London, concurred:
I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualize such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader? ... You say that I should at least “show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.” I will lay it on the line — there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.8
Richard Dawkins’ evolutionist disciple at Oxford University, Mark Ridley, is emphatic:
However, the gradual change of fossil species has never been part of the evidence for evolution. In the chapters on the fossil record in the Origin of Species Darwin showed that the record was useless for testing between evolution and special creation because it has great gaps in it. The same argument still applies. ... In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation.9 [emphasis in the original]
So I guess the folks at NG are not real evolutionists, or at least not very informed. They certainly offer nothing in this article to negate these statements. Incredibly, NG even admits that “illuminating but spotty, the fossil record is like a film of evolution from which 999 out of every 1000 frames have been lost on the cutting-room floor” (p. 25). So there you have it. Evolution is 99.9% imagination! NG quickly reassures us that “dozens of intermediate forms” have been found, but they only give two examples: horses and whales. 

Creationists have exposed the flaws in the supposed horse evolution story for years. The story told by the fossils in South America is backwards compared to the story told by the fossils in North America—see What’s happened to the horse? Rather, the horse “tree” is really a bush, and comprises merely variants within the horse kind, and most likely a non-horse at the bottom—see pages 189–97 in Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No! A previous flawed attempt by NG (in 1981) to use horse fossils to support evolution is exposed in Horse find defies evolution.

Pakicetus reconstruction v reality
Top left: Gingerich’s first reconstruction12
Bottom left: what he had actually found12
Top right: more complete skeleton13
Bottom right: more reasonable reconstruction14
As for whale evolution, NG refers to the work of paleontologist Philip Gingerich. It discusses his research on Pakicetus (“whale from Pakistan”), but doesn’t reveal the real story. In 1994 Gingerich claimed Pakicetus was a creature “perfectly intermediate” between a land animal and a whale.10 The fossil evidence at the time only consisted of parts of the skull, yet Gingerich’s artist drew the creature swimming in the ocean with front legs like a land animal but the mouth and a rear end looking like a sea creature as it was trying to eat fish. But by 2001 more fossils had been found11 and it was concluded that Pakicetus was “no more amphibious than a tapir.”13 Yet NG misleadingly tells us that Gingerich “discovered Pakicetus, a terrestrial mammal” (p. 31). That’s not what he called it when he discovered it and wrote about it in the scientific literature! 

NG goes on to say that Gingerich now believes that whales are related to antelope based on a “single piece of fossil” found in 2000. It was part of the anklebone of a “new species of whale,” they said. But later they found the other part and realized that it was “an anklebone, from a four-legged whale.” Hold on! When was the last time you saw a “four-legged whale”? Evolutionists are playing language games to call the fins and tail of a whale “legs.” But if, as NG says, the fossil “closely resembled” the anklebone in artiodactyls (hoofed land animals, such as antelopes), then how on earth could this “single piece of fossil evidence” be interpreted as being in any way related to whales? In evolution theory, imagination is king! NG says at this point “this is how science is supposed to work” (p. 31). Really?

For more refutation of the supposed fossil evidence for evolution, readers should consult Darwin’s Enigma, Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No! and chapter 5 of Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics.

Embryology and Morphology

Similarity of shape or design can just as well, if not more so, point to a common designer, rather than a common ancestor. Roller skates, bikes, cars, trucks, busses and trains all have wheels, but one is not the ancestor of the other. They are similar because intelligent human designers have all thought that wheels are a good way to move things on land. So too living creatures that share the same planet and are interdependently linked in a complex ecosystem will have many similarities and those which live in very similar environments on earth (e.g., in water or air or on land) will share even more similarities. Our infinitely wise Creator is smarter than all the engineers put together. Good designs can be, and are, easily modified for different applications.
But when we take into account the differences in creatures that share common features, the common ancestor argument becomes even more unbelievable. For example, humans and frogs have five digits on their hands, but the developmental patterns in them are vastly different. In humans the fingers develop by programmed cell death in between the digits, whereas in frogs it is by outward growth as cells divide.

As for embryos, the development is programmed by the information in the DNA molecule in the fertilized egg. So again the question is where did this information come from for the different kinds of plants and animals? It didn’t come from time and chance and the laws of nature. And we must never lose sight of the evolutionists continued use of Ernst Haeckel’s fraudulent drawings—see Something fishy about gill slits! Yet, like Darwin and many science textbooks15 and evolutionist books for laymen,16 NG endorses embryonic recapitulation (p. 13).

NG claims vestigial characteristics or organs as proof of evolution. These are aspects of the body that are claimed to be useless leftovers from our animal ancestry. There are two problems with this argument. One, the loss of function (through the loss of genetic information) cannot be evidence of the ascendance from a lowly kind of creature up to a higher form (which would require an increase of information). Secondly, nearly all of the 180 “vestigial organs” in man cited by evolutionists as proof of evolution at the turn of the 20th century are now known (because of medical research) to have at least one function. See Vestigial Organs Are Fully Functional. In fact, NG ludicrously uses male nipples as proof of evolution (pp. 12–13)—do they think males evolved from a race entirely comprised of breasted-female humans?

NG makes a big deal about plants, animals, bacteria and viruses changing to resist herbicides, insecticides and antibiotics. In fact, the article says that “there’s no better or more immediate evidence supporting the Darwinian theory than this process of forced transformation among our inimical germs” (p. 21).

But in each cited example we have a certain kind of creature changing into another variety of that same kind of creature. One flu strain changing into another flu strain, or one staph bacterium changing into a different staph bacterium, or one variety of house fly turning into another variety of house fly is not an explanation of where the information to make the flu, staph or house fly came from in the first place. And we always find that the change is actually going in the opposite direction to what evolution requires—see Are mutations part of the “engine” of evolution?

But how does this variation occur? Prominent evolutionist, Francisco Ayala tell us:
Insect resistance to a pesticide was first reported in 1947 for the Housefly (Musca domestica) with respect to DDT. Since then resistance to one or more pesticides has been reported in at least 225 species of insects and other arthropods. The genetic variants required for resistance to the most diverse kinds of pesticides were apparently present in every one of the populations exposed to these man-made compounds.17
Research shows that the same can apply to antibiotic resistance.
Scientists at the University of Alberta have revived bacteria from members of the historic Franklin expedition who mysteriously perished in the Arctic nearly 150 years ago. Not only are the six strains of bacteria almost certainly the oldest ever revived, says medical microbiologist Dr. Kinga Kowalewska-Grochowska, three of them also happen to be resistant to antibiotics. In this case, the antibiotics clindamycin and cefoxitin, both of which were developed more than a century after the men died, were among those used.18
But many times the changes are due to mutations, which are copying mistakes in the DNA molecule in the process of reproduction. What NG doesn’t tell the readers is that mutations result in a loss of genetic information in the creature. Most mutations are deleterious, if not fatal, to the organism. It is not on the way up (evolving), but on the way down (devolving). Sometimes, the mutation does improve the chance of survival, but it always involves a loss of genetic information. 

For example, the bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, is troublesome to humans, but doctors can destroy it with an antibiotic. After the patient takes the antibiotic, it is absorbed through the cell wall of the bacterium. It has the genetic information to make an enzyme which reacts with the antibiotic converting it into a poison, killing the bacterium. But due to a mutation, some H. pylori cannot make the enzyme and so cannot convert the antibiotic and so do not die but reproduce, giving the patient and doctor a new problem. The mutant survived through a loss of information, which is not a process that will eventually lead to an increase of information to change a bacterium over millions of years into a biologist.

As Dr. Lee Spetner, a Jewish scientist and expert on mutations, has stated in his excellent book, Not by Chance: Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution, pp. 159–60:
But all these mutations reduce the information in the gene by making a protein less specific. They add no information and they add no new molecular capability. Indeed, all mutations studied destroy information. None of them can serve as an example of a mutation that can lead to the large changes of macroevolution. ... Whoever thinks macroevolution can be made by mutations that lose information is like the merchant who lost a little money on every sale but thought he could make it up on volume.
So much for mutations being any help to the evolutionist. Just like natural selection, they don’t produce the new genetic information that the theory requires. But like natural selection, mutations fit perfectly with what the Bible teaches. They are the result of the curse of God on creation when Adam and Eve sinned (Genesis 3:20, Romans 8:20–22).

NG is simply “hurling elephants” at their readers when it says that additional evidence for evolution comes from “population genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and ... genomics” (p. 20). Readers will see the insurmountable problems for evolution from biochemistry in Michael Behe’s (Ph.D. university biochemist) Darwin’s Black Box. For an agnostic, university molecular biologist’s strictly scientific evaluation of evolution, see Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (particularly chapter 10).

Darwinism and religion

NG wraps things up by asserting that “no one needs to, and no one should, accept evolution merely as a matter of faith” (p. 8). But that is precisely what most of the world, including most scientists (who are just laymen outside their own field of expertise), have done. Evolution is believed because it appears to be scientific due to “smoke and mirrors” arguments and because it gives people an excuse for not submitting to their Creator. As Romans 1:18–20 says, people suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

But what is Darwin’s theory’s relationship to religion? Certainly, a person can believe in a vaguely defined “religion” and in evolution at the same time (see Is evolution “anti-religion”? It depends). NG claims the compatibility of evolution with papal pronouncements and Roman Catholic dogma (p. 6). However, as far as the likes of NG are concerned, when the Pope says you can believe in evolution, he’s an enlightened religious leader who should be heeded. But when he speaks on the sanctity of human life from conception and marriage, and thus opposes abortion and homosexual behavior, then he’s just an old bigot who should keep his religion to himself.

But even the NG’s premise can be debated. There are Roman Catholics who don’t believe evolution or millions of years is compatible with their faith (or true science). For example, most of the scientists in the video Evolution ... Fact or Belief? and in the geology video Experiments in Stratification are Catholic. But the real issue is whether the theory of millions of years of evolution is compatible with the Creator’s Word, the Bible. For two centuries, young-earth creationists have shown clearly that it is not. See The Great Turning Point, Creation and Change, and these articles: Two histories of death, Two world-views in conflict and The god of an old earth.

Conclusion

NG is wrong that scientific evidence proves goo-to-you-via-the-zoo evolution. The evidence has never supported Darwin’s theory, which is why an increasing number of Ph.D. scientists and well-informed laymen and students are rejecting what they have been taught (brainwashed) in schools, museums, TV science programs and in National Geographic all their lives. 

Darwin was partially right about natural selection explaining the origin of species. But because he didn’t pay attention to the Bible (but rather rejected it because of his rebellion against his Creator), he didn’t understand that speciation is simply the God-designed way for the original supernaturally created kinds to produce wonderful variety and perpetuate themselves in the changing environments of a sin-cursed world that would be radically changed by a global year-long Flood at the time of Noah.

The Bible fits the facts, which explains why an increasing number of Ph.D. scientists are creationists—see In Six Days, On the Seventh Day, and our website section Creation scientists and other biographies of interest. Evolution doesn’t agree with the scientific evidence. It cannot stand careful scrutiny, which is why evolutionists have to use political and academic power and legal intimidation to keep criticisms of evolution out of public schools. In fact, the atheistic anti-creationist Eugenie Scott tacitly admitted that if students were presented such criticisms, they might end up not believing it!
In my opinion, using creation and evolution as topics for critical-thinking exercises in primary and secondary schools is virtually guaranteed to confuse students about evolution and may lead them to reject one of the major themes in science.19
It is sad to see that Philip Gingerich is an evolutionist, and not a Bible-believing Christian, today because his church didn’t teach him correctly. He said, “I grew up in a conservative church in the Midwest and was not taught anything about evolution. The subject was clearly skirted.” (p. 31)

Churches that don’t equip their youth and adults to deal with the myth of evolution are likely to see them deceived by articles like this one in NG and many of them will drift away from the truth of God’s Word.

References and notes

  1. Sloan, C.P., Feathers for T. Rex?, National Geographic 196(5):98–107, November 1999. 
  2. Paul Davies (Australian Centre for Astrobiology, Macquarie Univ.), Born Lucky, New Scientist, Vol. 179(2403):32, 12 July 2003. 
  3. Werner Gitt, In the Beginning was Information, p. 107, CLV, Bielefeld, Germany, 1997.
  4. Edward Blyth, An attempt to classify the “varieties” of animals with observations on the marked seasonal and other changes which naturally take place in various British species and which do not constitute varieties, Magazine of Natural History, VIII:40–53, 1835. See also my book, The Great Turning Point (pp. 92–93 and 187–189) for the similar reasoning of two of the “scriptural geologists,” George Bugg (a pastor) and William Rhind (a scientist), writing just before and after Blyth in 1826 and 1838 respectively. Evolutionists are discovering this also. See Environment contributes to evolution, too, 29 Oct. 2004. 
  5. Cifelli, R.L. and Davis, B.M., Marsupial origins, Science 302:1899–2, 2003. 
  6. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, pp. 206, 292 and 307, Penguin Books, London, 1982; reprint of 1859 edition. 
  7. Stephen J. Gould, Evolution’s Erratic Pace, Natural History, 86(5):14, May 1977. 
  8. Luther D. Sunderland, Darwin’s Enigma, p. 89, Master Books, Santee, CA, 1988. 
  9. Mark Ridley (zoologist, Oxford University), Who doubts evolution? New Scientist, 90:830–1, 25 June 1981. 
  10. “In time and in its morphology, Pakicetus is perfectly intermediate, a missing link between earlier land mammals and later, full-fledged whales.” Phil Gingerich, The Whales of Tethys, Natural History, April 1994, p. 86. 
  11. This was after Jonathan Sarfati’s analysis of Pakicetus in chapter 5 of the original 1999 Refuting Evolution. Later-discovered fossils confirmed Sarfati’s prediction that this was a strictly terrestrial creature (as per the updated version of chapter 5). 
  12. P.D. Gingerich, N.A. Wells, D.E. Russell, and S.M.I. Shah, Science 220(4595):403–6, 22 April 1983; P.D. Gingerich, Journal of Geological Education. 31:140–144, 1983. 
  13. J.G.M. Thewissen, E.M. Williams, L.J. Roe, and S.T. Hussain, Skeletons of terrestrial cetaceans and the relationship of whales to artiodactyls, Nature 413:277–281, 20 Sept. 2001. (see PDF file). 
  14. Pakicetus … eight years on. Illustration: Carl Buell
     
  15. E.g., George B. Johnson and Peter H. Raven, Biology: Principles and Explorations, p. 257, Holt, Rinehard and Winston, 1998. This widely used high school text gives the student no hint in the discussion around this diagram that the pictures are fraudulent. 
  16. Ernst Mayr (100-year old Harvard University biologist and leading evolutionist), What Evolution Is, pp. 27–30, Basic Books, New York, 2001. On page 28 Mayr uses Haeckel’s original drawings with no mention that they are fraudulent. 
  17. Francisco J. Ayala, The Mechanisms of Evolution, Scientific American 239(3):65, Sept. 1978. 
  18. Ed Struzik, Ancient bacteria revived, Sunday Herald (Calgary, Alberta, Canada), 16 Sept. 1990, A1. 
  19. Cited in Larry Witham, Where Darwin Meets the Bible, p. 23, Oxford University Press, 2002. 
How Darwinists depicted Pakicetus:



How Pakicetus actually must have looked:



What’s the rabbitfish–T.rex connection?

by David Catchpoole

Rabbitfish
For copyright reasons we are unable to display here the original images published in Creation magazine.

Brazilian scientists have discovered a new species of rabbitfish (alternatively known as ratfish, chimaera, or ghost shark), Hydrolagus matallanasi, living in the sea off southern Brazil.1–3

The scientists were first alerted to its existence from photographs taken on a commercial fishing boat in 2001. Dredging the ocean floor, they collected 21 rabbitfish at depths of 416–736 metres (1,364–2,414 ft).
This fish with a cartilage skeleton can grow up to about two metres (6½ ft) long, has large wing-like fins, and a whip-like tail. But what grabbed the media’s attention were comments by lead researcher Jules Soto linking the fish to the time of the dinosaurs.

“The species that we found has fossil records that are 150, 180 million years old,” he said. “That’s very rare. It’s like if we had an animal as old as the Tyrannosaurus rex still alive.”

The rabbitfish–T. rex connection

There’s really no difference between finding a live rabbitfish, coelacanth, Wollemi pine—or dinosaur.

Actually, it’s not the first time that the discovery of an “ancient” or “prehistoric” species has been equated with finding a living dinosaur. After a marine biologist spotted a live coelacanth (earlier presumed extinct for 65 million years) in an Indonesian fish market, he said, “It’s kind of like finding a dinosaur back in the forest.”4 The Wollemi pine, for similar reasons, is popularly known as the “dinosaur tree”, its discovery like finding a ‘live dinosaur’.5

But herein lie a number of challenges to evolutionists. For example, why are “living fossils”6 like the coelacanth absent from the upper layers of the fossil record—(supposedly) representing millions of years? Also, the living and fossil forms are much the same—this latest rabbitfish species, according to Soto, is unchanged in 180 million years—why no evolution in all that (supposed) time?

The answer, and a much better explanation of the facts, is that the fossil “record” is not a record of millions of years of evolution and extinction. The oldest fossils likely date back only to the global Flood of Noah’s day, around 4,500 years ago.

So if those species haven’t become extinct in the meantime, they’re still reproducing “according to their kind” just as programmed during Creation Week around 6,000 years ago. Hence today’s rabbitfish, coelacanth and Wollemi pine are essentially the same as their fossil counterparts.

And while dinosaurs might well have gone the way of the dodo, it wasn’t millions of years ago—T. rex bones have been found to contain “soft cellular tissues” and red blood cell structures.7,8 So perhaps there might still be a living dinosaur? Well, if a modern-day sighting9 of a dinosaur-like creature is ever confirmed, it ought not be a surprise to Christians. Because from a biblical perspective, there’s really no difference between finding a live rabbitfish, coelacanth, Wollemi pine—or dinosaur.

Related articles

References and notes

  1. Soto, J.M.R., and Vooren, C.M., Hydrolagus matallanasi sp. nov. (Holocephali, Chimaeridae) a new species of rabbitfish from southern Brazil, Zootaxa 687:1–10, 2004. 
  2. Brazil becomes fresh haunt for ghost shark, Nature 429(6994):796, 2004.
  3. Scientists discover prehistoric ratfish, ABC News, , 18 June 2004.
  4. Living fossil fish turns up again, Creation 21(2):8, 1999; .
  5. Sensational Australian tree like finding a live dinosaur, Creation 17(2):13, 1995; . 
  6. Catchpoole, D., Living fossils enigma, Creation 22(2):56, 2000; .
  7. Dino soft tissue find, Creation 27(4):7, 2005; .
  8. Wieland, C., Sensational dinosaur blood report! Creation 19(4):42–43, 1997; .
  9. See, e.g., Irwin, B., Theropod and sauropod dinosaurs sighted in PNG? , 1 July 2008.
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