Evolution Proponents - making preposterous claims 24 by 7 is their business!
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But what if you have a buggy whip? No, that is not a good analogy as there are actually a few buggies in use even now. Okay, a whalebone corset. Darwinism is the whalebone corset of science, completely preposterous and of no good use.
Darwinism is used to explain every possibility, with completely unproven hypotheses stated as facts, millions of years claimed with no conclusive evidence to back it up and great design credited to accidents that either make great changes in things or...not change them at all? They will tell you there was a Great Dying but call the Flood a fairy tale? Really...how much credibility can Darwinists have when every aspect of their hypothesis has been logically falsified or disproven by years of testing. Let's look at how they spin evidence:
Turning an Unevolved Horseshoe Crab Into a Darwin Showpiece
Horseshoe crabs are survivors by anyone’s measure; they have carried on their lives virtually unchanged, according to the standard evolutionary timeline, for 450 million years. This not only points to incredible stasis against alleged forces of evolution; it also means they have survived at least three global extinctions that evolutionary biologists and geologists say wiped out most other species. Not only that, the world has changed drastically since they allegedly evolved from who-knows-what arthropod ancestors – perhaps trilobites, that appeared in the Cambrian Explosion without ancestors. But the numerous, successful trilobites did not survive the global extinctions. Given these contradictory facts, how can the horseshoe crab possibly be an exhibit for evolution? A recent article shows how.
Horseshoe crabs are not crabs; they are arthropods, similar in some ways to scorpions. The UK Natural History Museum gave facts and fancies about these amazing, complex animals on the verge of a BBC News special TV program about them:
The Great Dying wiped out most of the Earth’s species. Some scientists have estimated 96% of marine species, 70% of terrestrial vertebrates and 57% of insect families became extinct. But the strange-looking horseshoe crab, with its armoured shell and long rigid pointed tail, lived on… These animals have survived 3 of Earth’s extinctions that wiped out most other species.
At the end of the article comes the evolutionary exhibit. Richard Fortey does his best to explain why an unevolved creature is really evidence for evolution:
Evolution not only brings about ‘improvements’ in body shapes and design that help a species adapt better to its surroundings. It also allows some species to remain basically the same.
“These creatures tell us that evolution does not move inevitably forwards towards new morphology and new designs,” comments Fortey.“Evidence for evolution is also found in past designs that endure to the present day. As long as the right habitat endures, then so will some of the creatures that inhabited the distant past.”
Articles like this are more evidence that once the level of public credulity is sufficiently reduced by accurate information about the logical tricks of evolutionists, people will laugh Darwin off the stage of history and wonder how on earth so many smart people fell for his view of the world.
Let’s review what we were just told.
• Complex designs just popped into existence without ancestors.
• These designs were not only complex, they were better at surviving than more than 90% of other animals that followed.
• They endured virtually unchanged for 450 million years.
• Evolution improves body designs, but it also allows them to remain basically the same.
• A past design that endures to the present day constitutes evidence for evolution.
If you are sufficiently dumbfounded at these shenanigans committed in the name of science, stop taking it. Fight back. Demand logic. Demand integrity. Call a spade a spade. This spadeful of nonsense calls for a ultrasaurus-size pooper scooper.
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Yes, Darwinism is basically a bunch of baloney that a great number of people promote because it is necessary for their worldview. If the world paid attention and thought critically about the Darwin story, they would cast it aside entirely. Most people are just going about their day and great numbers of them are working hard just to survive another day. Not many think critically about the continual stream of Darwinist propaganda being promoted all around us. But among scientists there is a trend of slowly backing away from the Darwinist table, because of evidence like this:
More Upsets for Darwin
For every hyped-up demonstration of evolution in action the media announces with gusto, there are setbacks that often do not get the splashy headlines. Here are three recent examples.
Treehopper evolution wasn’t: Recently a “spectacular” announcement that some bugs called treehoppers had evolved a new functional appendage has been found false. “Evidence for a spectacular evolutionary novelty was recently reported,” wrote nine scientists in PLoS ONE,1 claiming that the treehopper bugs evolved their odd-looking “helmet” as new thoracic appendages. Those evolutionists, publishing in Nature,2 were not at all modest in their pronouncement: “Here we show that the treehopper (Membracidae) ‘helmet’ is actually an appendage, a wing serial homologue on the first thoracic segment. This innovation in the insect body plan is an unprecedented situation in 250 Myr of insect evolution.”
Wrong, the new team reports. It’s not a novelty, but a common and widely-distributed feature among hemiptera (true bugs) – just an invagination of tissue, not a distinct limb. The new paper not only corrects the error but criticizes the evolutionists who proposed the wrong idea, telling them basically they should have consulted the insect experts (entomologists) before hopping to a Darwin-tree conclusion. “The treehopper pronotal wing hypothesis yields examples of misinterpretation that could have been avoided through updated best practices in phenotype knowledge representation and the broader development of anatomical references,” they said.
Wish Ida known: Remember Ida, the extinct lemur that briefly made a splash in the science headlines as being a possible human ancestor? (5/19/2009, 3/03/2010). The discoverer even paid homage to Darwin by naming it Darwinius masillae, and it became the star of a TV documentary. Live Science reported this month that new evidence is casting doubt on it having anything to do with the human line. Another similar lemur fossil from Wyoming shows a grooming claw characteristic of mammals on other branches of the assumed evolutionary line of primates. “After examining the data, both with and without information about the grooming claw,” therefore, “it appeared both these ancient primates were more closely related to lemurs than to monkeys, apes and humans.”
(Radar note: Ida was yet another Phil Gingerich special. Guess he is the modern-day Haeckel? Not that there are not many candidates!)
Darwin wouldn’t like this: Biologists can’t conjure up gradualism out of the data. Charles Darwin’s theory depended on the slow accumulation of gradual changes over long periods of time. In Current Biology last month,3 Douglas Erwin tried hard to put a happy face on the ugly problem of “punctuated equilibria” that causes mismatches between molecular methods of tracing the unfolding tree of evolution, and the fossil record that shows stasis and explosive diversification. Factoring in the ad hoc method of “rate heterogeneity” (something like artist Salvador Dali’s stretchy clocks in The Persistence of Memory) still doesn’t get the data in sync.
Erwin recalled the long-standing “tension between microevolutionists and macroevolutionists” – the former looking for processes they can tweak in the lab, the latter looking at the fossils. It’s a tension that has lasted for over a century. Even though Erwin grinned like a hungry flashlight salesman that “Several recent papers now shed new light on macroevolutionary processes,” his light was lacking batteries in the body of his Dispatch.
First, the darkness: “The discrepancy between plots of the diversity of taxa through time as inferred from molecular phylogenies and those based on counts documented by the fossil record has long been troubling,” he said, “largely because molecular phylogenies appear to underestimate the frequency of extinction.” In hopes of mitigating the damage, he presented three recent papers. One team of evolutionists found additional ways to tweak their models to get a better fit, particularly with dolphins and whales. But the next subtitle states, “Punctuations Are Not Passé.” The second study, this one more extensive, covering 40 species from fish to mammals, was not so gradual: “Their analysis supports a model of rare bursts of extensive evolutionary change in a sea of shorter-term fluctuations.” At the end of the section, Erwin lists three possible explanations for this:
The bursts of evolutionary change over longer timescales remain to be explained but could reflect episodic changes in the optimal adaptive phenotype as the environment changes, as the authors suggest, the construction of new ecological environments, or the longer waiting time for significant developmental innovations.
In each of these papers [2,3,4] the results document a greater range of evolutionary processes, including great differences in origin and extinction rates in different clades through time, bursts of phenotypic change interrupting intervals of greater phenotypic quiescence, and a structuring of the developmental sources of evolutionary change.
1. Mikó I , Friedrich F , Yoder MJ , Hines HM , Deitz LL , et al. 2012 On Dorsal Prothoracic Appendages in Treehoppers (Hemiptera: Membracidae) and the Nature of Morphological Evidence. PLoS ONE 7(1): e30137. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0030137.
2. Prud’homme et al., “Body plan innovation in treehoppers through the evolution of an extra wing-like appendage,” Nature 473 (05 May 2011), pp. 83–86, doi:10.1038/nature09977.
3. Douglas H. Erwin, “Macroevolution: Dynamics of Diversity,” Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 24, R1000-R1001, 20 December 2011, 10.1016/j.cub.2011.11.007.
What do we have here? (1) Treehoppers are out as evidence for evolution. (2) Ida is out as evidence for human evolution. And (3) punctuated equilibria, completely contrary to what Darwin envisioned, is a gremlin in the Darwin camp that cannot be escaped with prodigious exercise in hand-waving, ad hoc models and gobbledygook.
Erwin’s statement above is classic Darwinian obfuscational confability. Let’s parse it with our Baloney Detectors on:
The bursts of evolutionary change…. [He acknowledges the evidence is bursty, but then embeds his own evolutionary assumptions into the phrase “evolutionary change” here. What if it is not evolutionary (i.e., gradual) change? What if it is creationary change?]
over longer timescales… [Longer timescales embeds more of his evolutionary assumptions of slow, gradual change over millions of years.]
remain to be explained… [Notice the subtle use of passive voice infinitive here; some nebulous entity will have to explain it someday over the rainbow. He should fess up and write in active voice, declarative sentences: “We can’t explain it. They can’t explain it. I can’t explain it. We are all clueless. I can only wish upon a star that someday, somebody will explain it.”]
but could reflect episodic changes in the optimal adaptive phenotype as the environment changes,… [Stop right there! We put you under citizen’s arrest for impersonating a scientist (9/30/2007 commentary). That’s miracle talk. Erwin is assuming that if a landslide occurs, or the sea level changes, or a volcano blows its top, the Goddess of Evolution will produce an “optimal adaptive phenotype” on demand. How? By snapping her fingers? By waving her Tinker Bell Mutation Wand? This is crazy! Don’t let them get away with obfuscation like this.]
as the authors suggest,… [You know, we’re really not interested in your suggestions. We want our scientists to do real science – observable, testable, repeatable science.]
the construction of new ecological environments,… [More hand-waving and gobbledygook. This is an offhand reference to “niche construction” theory, that organisms not only adapt to environments but construct them. Such notions personify evolution and beg the question of how adaptation occurs.]
or the longer waiting time for significant developmental innovations…. [Aaagh! Stop it. This is more miracle-talk assuming the Stuff Happens Law. Wait long enough and “significant developmental innovations” will just occur. How? Will they just arise? Will they just emerge? Will they somehow develop? When the “waiting time” is up, will they pop into existence, like the Pop-Eye theory of evolution? Stop the funnies. We thought we were watching The Science Channel, not the Cartoon Network.]Learn how to slice, dice and analyze these baloney tales from the evolutionists. Learn how to blow away the fogma* and get to the evidence. We naturally tend to defer to “scientists” because they are supposedly so smart. Their jargon sounds intimidating. The list of references to other baloney-generating scientists in science journals presents an aura of credibility. But it’s all aura and no substance, aurora with no charged particles of data, a roar a minute with no teeth.
Understand that the structure in which Erwin and the evolutionists act with rhetorical flourish is just a façade like a movie set, with the script already written. Darwin’s script is being directed by ideologues that care less about the facts of nature than preserving their epic tale. Charlie’s Angles is one script so implausible, so out of touch with reality, it deserves to be left on the cutting room floor.
*Fogma (n.), dogma so thick you can’t see through it unless you are outside of it (5/14/2007 commentary).
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More Evidence Cambrian Explosion was Un-Darwinian
The Cambrian Explosion (the abrupt appearance of animal phyla in the earliest fossil layers bearing multicellular body plans) remains unmuffled. Known by Darwin as a problem for his theory, it has become more problematic to his followers over time. There are now many more Cambrian fossils than Darwin knew of, and they continue the pattern: sudden appearance of complex animals, complete with legs, digestive systems, eyes, and nervous systems. Discoveries of Precambrian fossils have not helped: the ones that are more than microbial appear to be mere colonies of cells with no relationship to animals. Here are more discoveries that fit this pattern.
Burgess shale tulip animals: A new species of filter-feeding marine animal that resembles a tulip has been found on Mt. Stephen in British Columbia, Canada, site of the internationally famous Burgess Shale fossil bed. Pictures of the fossils and an artist reconstruction can be found on PhysOrg. Named Siphusauctum gregarium, the animal is about 8” high and lived in colonies. The Burgess Shale is dated Middle Cambrian, but the existence of this fully-formed animal, complete with gut, foot anchor and pump to drive water through its “unusual filter-feeding system” implies a very short fuse between the Precambrian and its abrupt appearance.
Crustaceans with modern aspect: Like lobster? Think of the complexity of this animal with eyes, antennae, claws, legs, mouth parts equipped with mandibles, and internal organ systems, including a digestive tract and sexual organs. Crustaceans are a highly diverse group of arthropods that include lobsters, crayfish, and crabs. Among the crustacean subphylum are the branchiopods (which includes the fairy shrimp and water flea), ostracods (small shelled crustaceans; see diagram of complex internal organs on the Lake Biwa Museum site), and copepods (“oar-foot” swimmers; see Smithsonian for description).
At another site in western Canada called the Deadwood Formation, a trio of scientists from Cambridge, Hawaii and Canada found exquisitely-preserved crustaceans “of surprisingly modern aspect” in mudstone, a type of rock that was thought to form very slowly (12/14/2007). The abstract of their paper in PNAS says it best:1
The early history of crustaceans is obscured by strong biases in fossil preservation, but a previously overlooked taphonomic mode yields important complementary insights. Here we describe diverse crustacean appendages of Middle and Late Cambrian age from shallow marine mudstones of the Deadwood Formation in western Canada. The fossils occur as flattened and fragmentary carbonaceous cuticles but provide a suite of phylogenetic and ecological data by virtue of their detailed preservation. In addition to an unprecedented range of complex, largely articulated filtering limbs, we identify at least four distinct types of mandible. Together, these fossils provide the earliest evidence for crown-group branchiopods and total-group copepods and ostracods, extending the respective ranges of these clades back from the Devonian, Pennsylvanian, and Ordovician. Detailed similarities with living forms demonstrate the early origins and subsequent conservation of various complex food-handling adaptations, including a directional mandibular asymmetry that has persisted through half a billion years of evolution. At the same time, the Deadwood fossils indicate profound secular changes in crustacean ecology in terms of body size and environmental distribution. The earliest radiation of crustaceans is largely cryptic in the fossil record, but “small carbonaceous fossils” reveal organisms of surprisingly modern aspect operating in an unfamiliar biosphere.
Previous “cryptic” fossils hinted at the presence of crustaceans in the Early Cambrian, but now, the new discovery shows them alive and well in the Middle Cambrian: “the Deadwood fossils provide crucial phylogenetic and ecologic datapoints for charting a major Cambrian radiation of crustaceans.” The Deadwood Formation extends from western Canada to the Black Hills of South Dakota, they noted.
After showing an array of beautifully detailed fossils and discussing them, the authors concluded that their discovery pushes back the date of branchiopods 80–100 million years (Lower Devonian to Middle Cambrian), ostracods 70 million, and copepods 190–210 million years. They did their best to maintain their evolutionary belief, pointing to differences between the fossil forms and modern or later fossil forms, for example, “In any case, they offer clear potential for reconciling the Orsten forms with adults and larger bodied relatives for a new, high-definition narrative of early mandibulate evolution.” Nevertheless, these fossils show “direct evidence for sophisticated particle-handling” and represent “the acme of Cambrian differentiation within appendages,” they said.
It’s hard to see evolution in the picture of “early origination and subsequent conservation in crustacean form and function” these fossils illustrate, especially when the fossil copepods are larger than modern ones. To reconcile that with evolution, they postulated that the presence of fish with predatory eyes would drive crustacean size down. Maybe they forgot that the Chinese found fish fossils in the early Cambrian (8/21/2002, 1/30/2003), but that seems the least of their worries. The complex body parts represented in these fossils begs for explanation how a gradual, unguided Darwinian process would lead to such high levels of functional complexity in short order, abruptly, with no fossil pathway evident, much earlier than expected.
Up periscope! Sea spider eyes: Did you know there are spiders at the bottom of the sea? A paper in PLoS ONE talked about them.2 They are called pycnogonids, and they have unusual eyes on stalks that look like periscopes. The authors of the paper did not find Cambrian fossils of sea spiders. Instead, they tried to infer their evolutionary origins, and placed them in the Cambrian as the oldest arthropods. “Recently it was suggested that arthropod eyes originated from simple ocelli similar to larval eyes,” they said. “Hence, pycnogonid eyes would be one of the early offshoots among the wealth of more sophisticated arthropod eyes.”
Putting puzzle pieces together in some kind of evolutionary arrangement, though, seems the least of their worries. They found that these eyes had nerves from the stalks down to the brains of these eight-legged creatures. How eyes popped into existence suddenly in the earliest layers bearing animal fossils is the “elephant in the room” that most evolutionists dodge. They ended with an “if-then” statement of doubtful premise: “If arthropod eyes originated from simple ocelli similar to larval eyes, pycnogonid eyes could be one of their early offshoots, which date back at least 500 Myr to the Cambrian, and be older than the appearance of distinct lateral and median eyes.” Notice that they are not saying sea spiders have “simple” ocelli (light-sensitive organs, as in dragonflies; see 8/13/2004), just that they were a later offshoot of a presumed ancestor, “if” arthropod eyes “originated” by evolution.
1. Harvey, Vélez and Butterfield, “Exceptionally preserved crustaceans from western Canada reveal a cryptic Cambrian radiation,” PNAS, Published online January 17, 2012, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1115244109.
2. Lehmann T , Heß M , Melzer RR , 2012 Wiring a Periscope – Ocelli, Retinula Axons, Visual Neuropils and the Ancestrality of Sea Spiders. PLoS ONE 7(1): e30474. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0030474.
The Cambrian Explosion is not a problem for special creation; it is a problem for evolution. Why do evolutionists get over 150 years of leadership in science for clinging to a belief that has been falsified by the evidence? This is like giving astrologers hegemony in a day of modern astronomy. Charlie’s little Victorian myth needs to go to the dumpster with phrenology, mesmerism and table-turning. We need to look at the fossil record anew, without the black-tinted glasses of evolutionary assumptions. That will “shed light on evolution,” all right; it will take the dark glasses off so that the pre-existing light that was ignored can reveal it for what it is, a chosen world view that demands all evidence be interpreted within its dark world of imaginary light.
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In fact, some of the most advanced eyes known amongst organisms were found on trilobites, Cambrian fossils which were buried by the Flood and apparently unable to survive. Cambrian translates as "bottom layer of the Flood sediments."