Darwin’s Tree of Life Says it All

Darwin had constructed his “tree of life” to demonstrate how one phylum (category) of creatures had evolved from a morphologically similar, but simpler grouping. Consequently, it illustrated how amphibians descended from morphologically similar fish and how reptiles then descended from amphibians. However, there was a problem. The evidence – the fossil record – couldn’t be coaxed into agreeing with this construction. Even today, the problem has become so serious, that many evolutionists have abandoned trying to prove evolution using the fossil record. Palaeontologist David Raup of the Field Museum of Natural History said,

“We are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time.”

Eldredge [American Museum of Natural History] makes an astonishing admission:

“We palaeontologists have said that the history of life supports [the story of gradual adaptive change] knowing all the while it does not…I tried in vain to document examples of the kind of slow directional change we all thought ought to be there every since Darwin told us that natural selection should leave precisely such a tell-tale signal…I found instead that once species appear in the fossil record they tend not to change very much at all. Species remain imperturbably, implacably resistant to change as a matter of course – often for millions of years.”

As a result of this embarrassment, new lines of evidence have been sought and promoted to support evolution. Evolutionists are now trying to reconstruct Darwin’s “tree” based upon molecular or genetic inter-phyla similarities. However, their “tree” remains a dishevelled mess according to the New Scientist:

“Congruence between molecular phylogenies is as elusive as in morphology…Congruence between morphological phylogenies is the exception rather than the rule. With molecular phylogenies, all generated within he last couple of decades, the situation is little better.”

This failure argues persuasively against a common descent among the various species. Instead, the findings paint the picture of a mosaic or patchwork quilt, where we find qualities, like flight or luminescence, sprinkled among admittedly unrelated species. This tends to point to a common Designer and not to a common descent. Based upon this evidence, Thomas and Sherwin write:

“The almost universal phenomenon – that experts can find no objective basis to link one kind of creature to another – is not yet widely acknowledged in the scientific community. General biology texts still often depict phylogenies with smooth progressions of creations evolving into ‘higher’ forms, but these largely ignore the rampant disagreement found at every level in the technical literature. Perhaps this is because many scientists are unwilling to face the broad implication of all these studies: If agreement on what has evolved into what cannot be reached within closely ‘related’ creatures, then what confidence is there that objective evolutionary lineages will ever be found between totally different creatures? And if there are no such lineages, then there never was any Darwinian evolution.” (ICR, May 2009)

However, who cares about the facts when so many other more important things are at stake like lifestyle choices, career and prestige!