Thursday, February 16, 2012

Why the Fossil Record is so Damning of the Theory of Evolution


 


(This relief of a stegasaurus rex was photographed on a 10th century AD temple at Angkor Wat. Seems like flesh-and-blood Dinosaurs were known to the Khmers.)
People ask me, “How do the evolutionists respond to the quotations you provide from other evolutionists claiming that the fossil record fails to provide evidence of macro-evolution?” Many call me a “liar” or claim that I am taking the quotes out of context – I’m “quote-mining.” However, never once have any of my opponents provided a context that undermines the weight of the quotation.

The more civilized challenge usually comes in this form: “Well, even if the fossil record fails to prove evolution, there are other lines of evidence that do!” However, this retort fails to grapple with the seriousness of their problem. It is not simply that the fossil record fails to support the claims of evolution, this evidence actually undermines these claims.

Let me give an example. If I claim that I went to Walmart on Saturday and bought a set of kitchen furniture, but there is not record of such a purchase, I don’t appear on their security system cameras, and Walmart claims that they don’t even sell such a set, my claims not only fail to receive the necessary support. They are actually contradicted by the evidence. My claim, then, that I have other supporting evidences becomes highly doubtful. Besides, it is contradicted by the Walmart evidence.

Evolutionary biologist Donald Prothero (Occidental College) also admitted this problem:

·        For the first decade after [Stephen Jay Gould’s] paper [on punctuated equilibrium] was published, it was the most controversial and hotly argued idea in all of paleontology. Soon the great debate among paleontologists boiled down to just a few central points, which Gould and Eldredge (1977) nicely summarized on the fifth anniversary of the paper’s release. The first major discovery was that stasis [species remaining unchanged], was much more prevalent in the fossil record than had been previously supposed. Many paleontologists came forward and pointed out that the geological literature was one vast monument to stasis with relatively few cases where anyone had observed gradual evolution…As Gould put it, it was the “dirty little secret” hidden in the paleontological closet. Most paleontologists were trained to focus on gradual evolution as the only pattern of interest, and ignored stasis as “not evolutionary change” and therefore uninteresting, to be overlooked or minimized. Once Eldredge and Gould had pointed out that stasis was equally important (“stasis is data” in Gould’s words), paleontologists all over the world saw that stasis was the general pattern, and that gradualism was rare—and that is still the consensus 40 years later. – (“Darwin’s Legacy,” eSkeptic , February 15, 2012)

Precisely where the fossil record should have revealed evidence for Darwinian gradualism, it failed to do so, according to Prothero:

·        In four of the biggest climatic-vegetational events of the last 50 million years, the mammals and birds show no noticeable change in response to changing climates. No matter how many presentations I give where I show these data, no one (including myself) has a good explanation yet for such widespread stasis despite the obvious selective pressures of changing climate. Rather than answers, we have more questions.

In light of this now common-place revelation, we have to remain skeptical of claims that evidence for evolution is to be found in other fields. My claim of a purchase should have been found in Walmart’s record of sales.

Now add to this the embarrassment that the fossil record repeatedly shows us that thousands of fully formed species suddenly appeared in the record without any antecedent (ancestral) forms. It’s as if I claimed that I just bought my kitchen set from a Walmarts, which had burned down ten years earlier.

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