Evolution Defanged (page 2)

Darwin was aware that his conclusions in The Origin still lacked support from the fossil record, but he confidently predicted that as more of the earth’s crust was scoured for evidence of the past, the proofs he needed would turn up somewhere. A hundred years later, the vital links and transitional forms Darwin longed to find are still eloquently missing.

Francis Hitching, a science writer known best for his televised documentaries on unexplained natural phenomena, examined this problem in detail in his book The Neck of the Giraffe. He states emphatically in the first chapter that he believes evolution to be fact; however, this does not blind him to its problems, and the first of these to be addressed is the fossil record. He notes, “The curious thing is that there is a consistency to the fossil gaps: the fossils go missing in all the important places.” To begin with, there is the oft-avoided issue of the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian is the oldest layer of rocks containing any significant amount of fossils. It contains no fossils of land-dwelling animals, but it has produced millions of fossilized sea creatures, including starfish, snails, sea urchins, octopuses, and sea lilies. So what lies beneath the Cambrian layer? A host of transitional forms that document the rise of these creatures from more primitive organisms? The curtain of geologic history rises to reveal: a few specimens of fossilized algae. To put it simply, the sea creatures of the Cambrian period appeared all at once (relatively speaking) and in mass—one might almost imagine that Someone spoke and it just happened. (My inference, not Hitching’s.)

            Of course, the pre-Cambrian layer is only the beginning of the missing evidence. Hitching also notes the total lack of fossils to mark the transition from fish to amphibians, from reptiles to mammals, and from reptiles to birds. “What do you mean, no transition from reptiles to birds?” interjects the Darwinist at this point. “Haven’t you ever heard of the Archaeopteryx?” Indeed, Hitching has—but he points out that a true, “modern” bird has been found in Colorado that dates from the same time as Archaeopteryx, which disposes of the idea that birds are descended from it. Also, re-examinations of Archaeopteryx have shown that it had excellent wings and probably flew quite well. It was an odd sort of bird, to be sure, but no more a link between birds and reptiles, says Hitching, than the penguin is a link between birds and fish.

And how have evolutionists fared in their search for transitional links in human history? So far, all they have to show is an almost farcical series of hoaxes and disappointments. Piltdown man caused a huge stir when it was first unearthed, with scientists loudly trumpeting that the first link between apes and men had been discovered. But when the skeleton finally received a thorough examination, it was revealed to be that of a modern ape, whose teeth had been sawed and stained to appear human and old. It was also found that the “primitive tool” discovered near the skeleton bore a remarkable resemblance to a cricket bat.

Nebraska man was an astounding exercise in wishful thinking: an entire skeleton “reconstructed” from a single tooth! Another Darwinist bubble was burst when the tooth was finally found to belong to an extinct pig.

“Lucy”, the skeleton discovered by Don Johanson in Ethiopia, seemed to represent a real hope in finding the missing link: for one thing, it was nearly a complete skeleton, instead of the usual handful of bone fragments. Alan Hayward captures the excitement before the disappointment: “Much was made of Lucy by her finder…[who] claimed that she represented the earliest known ancestors of the human race. Books and magazines began to publish imaginative drawings of Lucy and her family, looking almost as human as the nudists on Brighton beach.

            Then in 1983 two American anthropologists, Stern and Susman, rather spoiled the artists’ fun. They published the results of a re-examination of Lucy’s skeleton, which had led them to very different conclusions. Many of her bones were more like chimpanzee bones than those of a human. She probably did not walk upright like a human, but in a slouched position like an ape. And she probably spent much of her time climbing trees, since her skeleton was better suited to that than to walking.”[1]

Of course, this is perhaps what would be expected of the first link in the chain of transitions between apes and man, but if you were not committed to an evolutionary viewpoint, you might more easily believe that Lucy belonged to an extinct species of ape. Anthropologist John Reader admits, “Ever since Darwin’s work inspired the notion that fossils linking modern man and extinct ancestor would provide the most convincing proof of human evolution, preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man.”[2]

            The many difficulties experienced by anthropologists trying to find evidence for human descent have provoked even the most avid Darwinists to dismay. In 1982, the hard-line Darwinist publication New Scientist lamented, “The main problem in reconstructing the origins of man is lack of fossil evidence: all there is could be displayed on a dinner table.”[3]

            It seems that the fossil record has not been able to produce what Darwin had counted on. As many evolutionists now admit, instead of long periods of gradual change, the fossil record reveals long periods of no change interspersed with short periods of rapid change. It was this realization, coupled with the results of their own research that led Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould to propose the “punctuated equilibrium” model of evolution in 1972. This model allows that evolution seems to occur in short, creative bursts (for instance, two chimps giving birth to a litter of humans). This seems to confirm nothing but the charge that the “theory of evolution” is really “the evolutionary theory”; as it changes its tenets each time it is on the verge of being discredited. But the possibility that evolution occurs in sudden spurts had actually been set forth during Darwin’s time. In fact, Darwin’s friend Thomas Huxley warned him against his off-handed dismissal of this trend in the fossil record. But Darwin thought that such large-scale jumps were more likely to be attributed to a Creator than a natural law, for natural laws tend to operate continually and at a steady pace. Punctuated equilibrium was a door through which some might glimpse the Creator’s hand, and Darwin wanted it shut. Now that the fossils have let him down, the door is beginning to open again.

We have examined the problems for Darwinism present in both natural selection and the fossil record. Now we will see how much of Darwin’s scientific theory actually rests on Darwinistic notions about God.

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