(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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