No Transitional Forms in the Fossil Record!!! But God is certainly perceived by the nature of the Universe itself!

"When philosophers such as Thomas Nagel dare to dispute "science" in any regard or to raise questions about its philosophical presuppositions, they are ridiculed as if they were boys speaking out of school or pitied as if they were men who have lost their minds. Yet, physicists, biologists, and other scientists commonly make pronouncements that are essentially philosophical, and their pronouncements are widely accepted as authoritative.

The usual trick is that the scientist declares any proposition that cannot conceivably be refuted in an experimental or observational setup to be a statement about nonexistent entities or to be meaningless or incoherent. In short, all metaphysical inquiry or belief is declared to be nonsense by assumption -- the assumption that no metaphysical realm exists, only a material realm. Thus does science dispose of religion, spirituality, and every other aspect of metaphysics -- by sheer declaration that what scientists do not know how to deal with does not exist! But what is this assumption if not a philosophical one? After all, what conceivable experiment or observation might show that it is false? In fact, this way of dismissing metaphysics amounts to both a gigantic instance of question begging and a huge category mistake." - Robert Higgs

There is a population of religious zealots who control the media and educational systems of the vast majority of Western nations.  Naturalism is their religion, they often call themselves Atheists, no matter, for the US Supreme Court declared their point of view to be a religion.  In the USA we have freedom of religion, so a man can believe in whatever he chooses, even the Flying Spaghetti Monster and form a house of worship as well.   Different strokes for different folks.

 However, the problem is that science has been hijacked by these religious zealots, who I have dubbed "Darwinists."   They try to hide or destroy or explain away evidence that the Earth is young, that organisms are designed and that God created the Universe.   They give organisms magic powers to "evolve and adapt" as if fish decided to become amphibians and then decided to be able to walk upon the land.   Oh, but some land animals later decided it would be better to get back into the water and they became whales.  Do we find any transitional forms?   Every single one Darwinists trumpet with triumph eventually proves to be a fully developed organism.   

 School children are taught this nonsense and taught it in such a way as to present it as proven science.   This despite the lack of any observed upward evolution in any organism or any transitional forms in the fossil record.   If the rocks and planets and organisms could speak to us?   The rocks cry out Global Flood!   Organisms declare that they are designed.  The planets would demand acknowledgement of their youth.  


There is a Great Designer, the Creator God,  and all the planets and stars and organisms on the planet are evidence for Him.    The odds of one simple organism ever happening by chance in all the Universe for all time are beyond belief statistically.   Yet we have millions of varieties of organisms found all over the globe, from high in the mountains to the deepest valleys of the ocean.  We have landscape that has evidence for the global flood everywhere you go.   Darwinists trip over themselves explaining away things they never imagined finding.  

 I doubt that Darwin, alive today, would support his own writings.   I think he was at least honest and was hoping to find a non-God explanation for all creation simply because he did not want there to be a God.   He could not comprehend a God that would allow for evil.  He did not understand that mankind invented evil ourselves.  God is a gentleman.  He did not make us robots with no choices.   We choose to sin and we have always done so from Adam and Eve until this day.  God gave us choices and He continues to do so.   He allows evil to exist for many reasons - evil provides a stark counterpoint to good,  evil is necessarily a choice a free human is allowed to make and most important of all, evil will be judged.    No injustice will be ignored.
Every man and woman will stand before the Judge.  

 My attorney is Jesus Christ and He has paid my price and taken my judgement upon Himself.   So I have been acquitted of my crimes and judged righteous because of Christ.   They say a man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.   Who is your attorney?

 Not one of us is perfect and just.   Jesus Christ came into the world to live a perfect and just life and be unjustly accused, tried, convicted and cursed by being hung on a cross.  While He was there, He accepted the sins of the entire history of mankind onto Himself.  This burden could only be born by the Son of God.  The perfect man lived in Judea, was crucified in Jerusalem, was raised back to life in three days and, having finished His mission, spent a few days teaching  his followers before ascending back up to Heaven.   He has paid the penalty for every sin ever committed.  But will you accept this gift?

 I feared that, if I did truly give my life to Christ, I would become an automaton.   When I considered the possibility that Jesus Christ really was the Messiah I shuddered at the thought of losing myself.  Yet on the night I was convinced He really was Savior and the God of the Bible really was God, I did not hesitate for one second to put my faith in Him.   Suddenly I knew Truth and, with a life seeking it in between the constant partying and sports and the normal life of a young man in the 1970's, Truth was far too good to ignore!  The instant I knew God was real I was a believer and I was changed.  Yet I was still me.  On the inside there was a new peace and also a desire to know this God better.   He called me into ministry and I followed.  But I was not someone else, I was just me with God inside.  It was something I did not understand until it was done.   I began to want different things and care about different things and I began to put aside childish and foolish habits.

 Those of you new to this blog should know I was a committed believer in evolution, had studied to be a paleontologist for a time in college and had been a long-time fossil hunter and outdoorsman.    Yes, I played all kinds of sports and l loved to read and as I got older I loved to party and get buzzed and chase women.   God did not ask me to change or give up anything when He made me His child.    It was me who began to change after I was "born again."   It was me who became a Christian fully believing in evolution.   It was after salvation that I decided I should investigate evolution to discover how it could be true.   There seemed to be a dichotomy of thought here - If God created the world and there was original sin, where did evolution fit into the scenario?   When I began to look into the matter, I did not know what I would find.

 But I found that the evidence actually pointed to Creation rather than millions of years of evolution and now, with every new discovery, the Darwinists fall over themselves trying to paint it Darwin black when it is actually God white!    The latest "discovery" that the Universe inflated in size rapidly after formation is actually in agreement with the Bible, because God said He stretched and is stretching out the Universe.    Trust me on this, and do your research, and you will find all Big Bang equations are almost entirely made up of undetected matter and energy that they, by faith, believe is there because it MUST be there to allow for their Big Bang that they cannot explain.  They have no explanation for where existence came from, what exploded, why it exploded or how an explosion could create everything with logical laws.  

 "If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."
C. S. Lewis 
 
The blog I introduced yesterday,  God Evidence, has a great post on the problems of cosmology mixing with philosophy and why what we know about the Cosmos leads us right back to God!
   

Is There A God? (What is the chance that our world is the result of chance?)


You need to go to read the article, but let me share some quotations from it:
“Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth.  And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover….  That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.”
–Astronomer, physicist and founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies Robert Jastrow.  Please also see Jastrow’s book God and the Astronomers.  Jastrow’s observations regarding the evidence for a divine act of creation are especially poignant when one considers that he is a self-described agnostic.  In other words, Jastrow’s research have led him to theistic conclusions despitehaving an ideological basis against theism.
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“I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos.  There has to be some organizing principle.  God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.”
–Astronomer Allan Sandage, winner of the Crafoord Prize in astronomy (which is equivalent to the Nobel Prize).  Sandage is considered to be one of the founders of modern astronomy, and the greatest living cosmologist.
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“There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. . . It seems as though somebody has fine tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe. . . The impression of design is overwhelming.”
“It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God than religion.”
–Physicist Paul Davies, winner of the 2001 Kelvin Medal issued by the Institute of Physics and the winner of the 2002 Faraday Prize issued by the Royal Society (amongst other awards).
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“It is relatively unusual that a physical scientist is truly an atheist. Why is this true? Some point to the anthropic constraints, the remarkable fine tuning of the universe. For example, Freeman Dyson, a Princeton faculty member, has said, ‘Nature has been kinder to us that we had any right to expect.’”
–Physical scientist Henry F. Schaefer III, five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize, as quoted in his essay Stephen Hawking, the Big Bang, and God.
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“A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
–Cambridge University astrophysicist and mathematician Fred Hoyle commenting on the incredible fine-tuning necessary for life to exist (as quoted in The Creator and the Cosmos by Hugh Ross).
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“Fred Hoyle and I differ on lots of questions, but on this we agree:  a common sense and satisfying interpretation of our world suggests the designing hand of a superintelligence.”
Former Harvard University Research Professor of Astronomy and the History of Science Owen Gingerich, who is also the senior astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.  Gingerich is here reflecting on Fred Hoyle’s above comment.
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“Had the original energy of the Big Bang explosion been less, the universe would have fallen back onto itself long before there had been time to build the elements required for life and to produce from them intelligent, sentient beings.  Had the energy been more, it is quite possible that the density would have dropped too swiftly for stars and galaxies to form.  These and many other details were so extraordinarily right that it seemed the universe had been expressly designed for humankind.”
–Owen Gingerich, as above.
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“Had the resonance level in the carbon been 4 percent lower, there would be essentially no carbon.  Had that level in the oxygen been only half a percent higher, virtually all of the carbon would have been converted to oxygen.  Without the carbon abundance, neither you nor I would be here now.”
“I am told that Fred Hoyle, who together with Willy Fowler found this remarkable nuclear arrangement, has said that nothing has shaken his atheism as much as this discovery.”
–Owen Gingerich, as above.
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“Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life.  In the absence of an absurdly improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan.”
–Nobel Prize winning physicist Arno Penzias.
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“Here is the cosmological proof of the existence of God – the design argument of Paley – updated and refurbished. The fine tuning of the universe provides prima facie evidence of deistic design. Take your choice: blind chance that requires multitudes of universes or design that requires only one…. Many scientists, when they admit their views, incline toward the teleological or design argument.”
–Cosmologist and astronomer Edward Robert Harrison
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“The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine.”
–MIT physicist Vera Kistiakowsky
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“As to the cause of the Universe, in context of expansion, that is left for the reader to insert, but our picture is incomplete without Him [God].”
–Astrophysicist and mathematician Edward Milne (winner of the Royal Society’s Royal Medal, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the Bruce Medal).
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“What is the ultimate solution to the origin of the Universe?  The answers provided by the astronomers are disconcerting and remarkable.  Most remarkable of all is the fact that in science, as in the Bible, the world begins with an act of creation.”
–Astronomer Robert Jastrow from Until the Sun Dies
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“Not only did the Big Bang model seem to give in to the Judeo-Christian idea of a beginning of the world, but it also seemed to have to call for an act of supernatural creation…”
–J.M. Wersinger, Assoc. Professor of Physics, Auburn University
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“Then,  last week, American scientists announced the discovery of radiation patterns in space that may mark the beginning of time itself.  Said astrophysicist George Smoot, leader of the research team: ‘If you’re religious, it’s like looking at God.  The order is so beautiful and the symmetry so beautiful that you think there is some design behind it.”
“Whatever caused the rapid expansion of the universe following the Big Bang—the same forces caused tiny ripples.  Because if you try to do something too fast, you shake a little.  God might be the designer.”
–Maclean’s, May 4 1992 (the two above quotes are by astrophysicist and cosmologist George Smoot).
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“It is increasingly clear to modern science that the universe was exquisitely fine-tuned to enable human life.”
–Nobel Prize winning chemist Richard Smalley
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“The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural.”
–The great astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington
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“There is no doubt that a parallel exists between the Big Bang as an event and the Christian notion of creation from nothing.”
–Astrophysicist and cosmologist George Smoot, as above.
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“The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural “constants” were off even slightly. You see, even if you dismiss man as a chance happening, the fact remains that the universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life — almost contrived — you might say a ‘put-up job”.
Physicist Paul Davies, as above.
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“The fact that the universe exhibits many features that foster organic life — such as precisely those physical constants that result in planets and long-lived stars — also has led some scientists to speculate that some divine influence may be present.”
–Science Magazine (The most respected peer reviewed scientific publication in the United States) from an Aug ’97 article entitled Science and God: A Warming Trend?
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“As we survey all the evidence, the thought instantly arises that some supernatural agency–or, rather, Agency–must be involved.  Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being?  Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?”
–Astronomer George Greenstein, as quoted in his book The Symbiotic Universe.
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A Creator must exist.  The Big Bang ripples and subsequent scientific findings are clearly pointing to an ex nihilo creation consistent with the first few verses of the book of Genesis.
–Quantum chemist Henry F. Schaefer III, five time nominee for the Nobel Prize, as above.
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“Perhaps the best argument…that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists.  At times this has led to scientific ideas…being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his or her theory.”
–Imperial College of London astrophysicist C.J. Isham.
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“There is no ground for supposing that matter and energy existed before [the Big Bang] and were suddenly galvanized into action.  For what could distinguish that moment from all other moments in eternity?  It is simpler to postulate creation ex nihilo—Divine will constituting nature from nothingness.”
–English mathematical physicist Edmund T. Whittaker, winner of the Copley Medal, which is the most prestigious award in British science.
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“If the universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence.  It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in.”
–Harvard educated NASA astrophysicist John A. O’Keefe.
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“I am not a religious person, but I could say this universe is designed very well for the existence of life.  The basic forces in the universe are tailor-made for the production of . . . carbon-based life.”
–Austrian physicist Heinz Oberhummer, professor emeritus from the Vienna University of Technology. 


Now, a brief overview of transitional fossils and the lack thereof in the fossil record.   You see, what Darwin realized was missing is still missing.   If evolution were to be true, fossils would be a continuum of ever-evolving organisms with the record of all the in-between forms and limbs and etc.  What we have is a record of fully-formed organisms buried catastrophically and preserved by anoxic means by being sealed under sediments and within tons of sediments laid down by myriad flood flows, tidal flows and the overall dynamic aspects of a planet becoming radically remade.   The probable one original continent effectively was pulled apart into the puzzle-pieces of the continents we see now.  Rapid plate subduction, hydraulic action, volcanoes, earthquakes and forty days of continual rain eventually led to the complete submersion of the planet under water.   The sedimentary layers attest to this event and the post-Flood era in which an Ice Age was begun and then more landscaping was done by the movement of the ice and then, as it melted, the dike breaks that further landscaped the Earth.  

 All of these things have been explained in detail in previous posts.   We are turning our attention back to the fossil record now and a look at transitional forms is warranted!


Refuting Evolution

A handbook for students, parents, and teachers countering the latest arguments for evolution
by , Ph.D., F.M.

The links are missing

First published in Refuting Evolution, Chapter 3
Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science discusses the fossil record in several places. Creationists and evolutionists, with their different assumptions, predict different things about the fossil record. If living things had really evolved from other kinds of creatures, then there would have been many intermediate or transitional forms, with halfway structures. However, if different kinds had been created separately, the fossil record should show creatures appearing abruptly and fully formed.

The transitional fossils problem

Charles Darwin was worried that the fossil record did not show what his theory predicted:
Why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.1
Is it any different today? The late Dr Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, wrote a book, Evolution. In reply to a questioner who asked why he had not included any pictures of transitional forms, he wrote:
I fully agree with your comments about 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 … . I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.2
The renowned evolutionist (and Marxist — see documentation) Stephen Jay Gould wrote:
The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.3
And:
I regard the failure to find a clear ‘vector of progress’ in life’s history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record.4
As Sunderland points out:
It of course would be no puzzle at all if he [Gould] had not decided before he examined the evidence that common-ancestry evolution was a fact, ‘like apples falling from a tree,’ and that we can only permit ourselves to discuss possible mechanisms to explain that assumed fact.5

The gaps are huge

Palaeochiropteryx tupaiodon
Palaeochiropteryx tupaiodon— one of the ‘oldest’ (by evolutionary reckoning) fossil bats. It was found in the Messel oil shale pit near Darmstadt, Germany, and is ‘dated’ between 48 and 54 million years old. It clearly had fully developed wings, and its inner ear had the same construction as those of modern bats, showing that it had full sonar equipment (see chapter 9 for more details of this exquisitely designed system).
Teaching about Evolution avoids discussing the vast gulf between non-living matter and the first living cell, single-celled and multicelled creatures, and invertebrates and vertebrates. The gaps between these groups should be enough to show that molecules-to-man evolution is without foundation.
There are many other examples of different organisms appearing abruptly and fully formed in the fossil record. For example, the first bats, pterosaurs, and birds were fully fledged flyers. The photograph to the right shows that bats have always been bats.6
Turtles are a well designed and specialized group of reptiles, with a distinctive shell protecting the body’s vital organs. However, evolutionists admit ‘Intermediates between turtles and cotylosaurs, the primitive reptiles from which [evolutionists believe] turtles probably sprang, are entirely lacking.’ They can’t plead an incomplete fossil record because ‘turtles leave more and better fossil remains than do other vertebrates.’7 The ‘oldest known sea turtle’ was a fully formed turtle, not at all transitional. It had a fully developed system for excreting salt, without which a marine reptile would quickly dehydrate. This is shown by skull cavities which would have held large salt-excreting glands around the eyes.8
All 32 mammal orders appear abruptly and fully formed in the fossil record. The evolutionist paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson wrote in 1944:
The earliest and most primitive members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous series from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed.10
There is little to overturn that today.11

Excuses

Like most evolutionary propaganda, Teaching about Evolution makes assertions that there are many transitional forms, and gives a few ‘examples.’ A box on page 15 contains the gleeful article by the evolutionist (and atheist) E.O. Wilson, ‘Discovery of a Missing Link.’ He claimed to have studied ‘nearly exact intermediates between solitary wasps and the highly social modern ants.’ But another atheistic evolutionist, W.B. Provine, says that Wilson’s ‘assertions are explicitly denied by the text … . Wilson’s comments are misleading at best.’12
Teaching about Evolution emphasizes Archaeopteryx and an alleged land mammal-to-whale transition series, so they are covered in chapters 4 and 5 of this book. Teaching about Evolution also makes the following excuse on page 57:
Some changes in populations might occur too rapidly to leave many transitional fossils. Also, many organisms were very unlikely to leave fossils because of their habitats or because they had no body parts that could easily be fossilized.
Darwin also excused the lack of transitional fossils by ‘the extreme imperfection of the fossil record.’ But as we have seen, even organisms that leave excellent fossils, like turtles, are lacking in intermediates. Michael Denton points out that 97.7 percent of living orders of land vertebrates are represented as fossils and 79.1 percent of living families of land vertebrates—87.8 percent if birds are excluded, as they are less likely to become fossilized.13
living horseshoe bat
Artist’s impression of a living horseshoe bat.9
It’s true that fossilization requires specific conditions. Normally, when a fish dies, it floats to the top and rots and is eaten by scavengers. Even if some parts reach the bottom, the scavengers take care of them. Scuba divers don’t find the sea floor covered with dead animals being slowly fossilized. The same applies to land animals. Millions of buffaloes (bison) were killed in North America last century, but there are very few fossils.
In nature, a well-preserved fossil generally requires rapid burial (so scavengers don’t obliterate the carcass), and cementing agents to harden the fossil quickly. Teaching about Evolution has some good photos of a fossil fish with well-preserved features (p. 3) and a jellyfish (p. 36). Such fossils certainly could not have formed gradually—how long do dead jellyfish normally retain their features? If you wanted to form such fossils, the best way might be to dump a load of concrete on top of the creature! Only catastrophic conditions can explain most fossils—for example, a global flood and its aftermath of widespread regional catastrophism.
Teaching about Evolution goes on to assert after the previous quote:
However, in many cases, such as between primitive fish and amphibians, amphibians and reptiles, reptiles and mammals, and reptiles and birds, there are excellent transitional fossils.
But Teaching about Evolution provides no evidence for this! We can briefly examine some of the usual evolutionary claims below (for reptile-to-bird, see the next chapter on birds):
  • Fish to amphibian: Some evolutionists believe that amphibians evolved from a Rhipidistian fish, something like the coelacanth. It was believed that they used their fleshy, lobed fins for walking on the sea-floor before emerging on the land. This speculation seemed impossible to disprove, since according to evolutionary/long-age interpretations of the fossil record, the last coelacanth lived about 70 million years ago. But a living coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) was discovered in 1938. And it was found that the fins were not used for walking but for deft maneuvering when swimming. Its soft parts were also totally fish-like, not transitional. It also has some unique features—it gives birth to live young after about a year’s gestation, it has a small second tail to help its swimming, and a gland that detects electrical signals.14 The earliest amphibian, Ichthyostega (mentioned on p. 39 of Teaching about Evolution), is hardly transitional, but has fully formed legs and shoulder and pelvic girdles, while there is no trace of these in the Rhipidistians.
  • Amphibian to reptile: Seymouria is a commonly touted intermediate between amphibians and reptiles. But this creature is dated (by evolutionary dating methods) at 280 million years ago, about 30 million years younger than the ‘earliest’ true reptiles Hylonomus and Paleothyris. That is, reptiles are allegedly millions of years older than their alleged ancestors! Also, there is no good reason for thinking it was not completely amphibian in its reproduction. The jump from amphibian to reptile eggs requires the development of a number of new structures and a change in biochemistry—see the section below on soft part changes.
  • Reptile to mammal: The ‘mammal-like reptiles’ are commonly asserted to be transitional. But according to a specialist on these creatures:
    Each species of mammal-like reptile that has been found appears suddenly in the fossil record and is not preceded by the species that is directly ancestral to it. It disappears some time later, equally abruptly, without leaving a directly descended species.15
    Evolutionists believe that the earbones of mammals evolved from some jawbones of reptiles. But Patterson recognized that there was no clear-cut connection between the jawbones of ‘mammal-like reptiles’ and the earbones of mammals. In fact, evolutionists have argued about which bones relate to which.16

The function of possible intermediates

The inability to imagine functional intermediates is a real problem. If a bat or bird evolved from a land animal, the transitional forms would have forelimbs that were neither good legs nor good wings. So how would such things be selected? The fragile long limbs of hypothetical halfway stages of bats and pterosaurs would seem more like a hindrance than a help.

Soft part changes

Of course, the soft parts of many creatures would also have needed to change drastically, and there is little chance of preserving them in the fossil record. For example, the development of the amniotic egg would have required many different innovations, including:
  • The shell.
  • The two new membranes—the amnion and allantois.
  • Excretion of water-insoluble uric acid rather than urea (urea would poison the embryo).
  • Albumen together with a special acid to yield its water.
  • Yolk for food.
  • A change in the genital system allowing the fertilization of the egg before the shell hardens.17
Another example is the mammals—they have many soft-part differences from reptiles, for example:
  • Mammals have a different circulatory system, including red blood cells without nuclei, a heart with four chambers instead of three and one aorta instead of two, and a fundamentally different system of blood supply to the eye.
  • Mammals produce milk, to feed their young.
  • Mammalian skin has two extra layers, hair and sweat glands.
  • Mammals have a diaphragm, a fibrous, muscular partition between the thorax and abdomen, which is vital for breathing. Reptiles breathe in a different way.
  • Mammals keep their body temperature constant (warm-bloodedness), requiring a complex temperature control mechanism.
  • The mammalian ear has the complex organ of Corti, absent from all reptile ears.18
  • Mammalian kidneys have a ‘very high ultrafiltration rate of the blood.’ This means the heart must be able to produce the required high blood pressure. Mammalian kidneys excrete urea instead of uric acid, which requires different chemistry. They are also finely regulated to maintain constant levels of substances in the blood, which requires a complex endocrine system.19

References and notes

  1. C.R. Darwin, Origin of Species, 6th edition, 1872 (London: John Murray, 1902), p. 413.
  2. C. Patterson, letter to Luther D. Sunderland, 10 April 1979, as published in Darwin’s Enigma (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 4th ed. 1988), p. 89. Patterson later tried to backtrack somewhat from this clear statement, apparently alarmed that creationists would utilize this truth.
  3. S.J. Gould, in Evolution Now: A Century After Darwin, ed. John Maynard Smith, (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1982), p. 140. Teaching about Evolutionpages 56–57 publishes a complaint by Gould about creationists quoting him about the rarity of transitional forms. He accuses creationists of representing him as denying evolution itself. This complaint is unjustified. Creationists make it very clear that he is a staunch evolutionist the whole point is that he is a ‘hostile witness.’
  4. S.J. Gould, The Ediacaran Experiment, Natural History 93(2):14–23, Feb. 1984.
  5. L. Sunderland, ref. 2, p. 47–48.
  6. Photograph and information courtesy of Dr Joachim Scheven of the Lebendige Vorwelt Museum in Germany.
  7. Reptiles, Encyclopedia Britannica 26:704–705, 15th ed., 1992.
  8. Ren Hirayama, Oldest Known Sea Turtle, Nature 392(6678):705–708, 16 April 1998; comment by Henry Gee, p. 651, same issue.
  9. Courtesy of Steve Cardno, 1998.
  10. G.G. Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution (NY: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 105–106.
  11. A useful book on the fossil record is D.T. Gish, Evolution: The Fossils STILL Say NO! (El Cahon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1995).
  12. Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science, A Review by Dr Will B. Provine. Available from , 18 February 1999.
  13. M. Denton, Evolution, a Theory in Crisis (Chevy Chase, MD: Adler & Adler, 1985), p. 190.
  14. M. Denton, footnote 13, p. 157, 178–180; see also W. Roush, ‘Living Fossil’ Is Dethroned, Science 277(5331):1436, 5 September 1997, and No Stinking Fish in My Tail, Discover, March 1985, p. 40.
  15. T.S. Kemp, The Reptiles that Became Mammals, New Scientist 92:583, 4 March 1982.
  16. C. Patterson, Morphological Characters and Homology; in K.A. Joysey and A.E. Friday (eds.), Problems of Phylogenetic Reconstruction, Proceedings of an International Symposium held in Cambridge, The Systematics Association Special Volume 21 (Academic Press, 1982), 21–74.
  17. M. Denton, footnote 13, p. 218–219.
  18. D. Dewar, The Transformist Illusion, 2nd edition, (Ghent, NY: Sophia Perennis et Universalis, 1995), p. 223–232.
  19. T.S. Kemp, Mammal-like Reptiles and the Origin of Mammals (New York: Academic Press, 1982), p. 309–310.
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