Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
I think most of us have probably seen the picture of the ape, two human evolutionary transition that shows an ape on the left hand side, and then there's sort of a more upright, standing ape, and then there's sort of an apelike man standing, and then there are some more human like man standing, and then there's the human at the end. It's really an iconic picture. I mean, it would be in most evolutionary textbooks, if not all of them.
It's heavily promoted. The picture is so ionic, it's even used in advertising and for products and so forth. But really, there's no scientific basis for that picture.
But yet that picture clearly portrays, and we know the saying, a picture is worth 1000 words, the supposed transition, evolutionary transition from apes to humans. But it's quite fascinating that a lot of research has now been found about the various fossils that are represented in that picture. So on the left hand side, we have an ape, which is sometimes referred to as proconsul.
Then we have a representation of fossil species nicknamed Lucy. And then we have an artist's impression of another fossil, homo habilis. And then we have another one.
The next one is homo erectus. And then we have the neanderthal man, and then homosapiens, or modern humans, so called. But when we look at the evidence for this, it's just not there because, okay, we've got humans, we know humans.
We've now found that out. And a number of papers have found out recently that neanderthals, they made tools, they even made musical instruments. They wore jewellery or made jewellery.
And in actual fact, their brain size was bigger than ours. And so really, the neanderthal man was just a man. He was a human.
And similarly with Homo erectus, they've found out now that homo erectus also made tools. He had language, he even made boats and did art. And so, again, homo erectus was a man.
He was a human. When we come to homo habilis, a number of reports on this, it seems that this is where palaeontologists have put all the fossils that they haven't been able to link with. Well, not all the fossils, but fossils they haven't been able to link with, sort of the evolutionary progress.
And a number of commenters have essentially said that the fossils that are supposedly for this particular creature are just a mixture of human and ape bones. Because when we go to the next one down, which is commonly referred to Lucy the Afrikensis species, we know now that that was just a type of ape. So that's been clarified that she was an ape, and of course we have an ape.
So essentially the picture should just be apes and humans, the intermediate species, are not evolutionary species from apes to humans. And I know some of you might be saying, okay, well, that's the assertion. What's the evidence for this? I was actually watching recently a very good presentation on this that you can find on creation.com.
So if you google creation.com and go into their search engine and do a search on ape to human transition, or transition from ape to human, something like that, a little video will come up. It's only about three minutes long.
And if you play that video and you watch the screen carefully, they actually put up the references to the scientific literature, such as plus one and so forth, where the evidence for this is reported. So we have that really powerful evidence there. The other thing is, too, that one of the things that evolution depends on is these intermediate species.
And we've just shown, well, hang on, really, there aren't intermediate species between apes and humans, and it's the same for the whole supposed evolutionary tree. The intermediate fossils showing the transition are not there. There should be millions of them, but they're not there.
And so one of the things that evolutionists try to claim is, well, the fossil record isn't complete. Well, it's interesting. And as I said, ever since Darwin wrote the origin of species, evolutionists have regarded the fossil record as vastly incomplete.
And we know the fossil record is the actual record of the past life in which evolution had occurred. It should be obvious. And it's interesting that Darwin himself believed that the fossil record should be full of transitional fossils and he blamed the lack of such fossils on the imperfection of the fossil record. So what he said was, I guess we haven't exported everything. But actually there is a quote in Darwin's book, Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection; Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, in the 6th edition, published by mentor Books on pages 287 to 288, and this was a 1872 edition.
Darwin essentially wrote, or he did write, “But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous.” Okay, so he's saying that just if we got all these different types of species, the intermediate varieties should have been truly enormous. He then goes on, “Why then is it not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?” This is what Darwin wrote. “Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as, I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.”
So, did you get that? It's really fascinating. That's what Darwin wrote in his book, Origin of the Species. And I'll read it again, because it’s so important. “Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain.”
In other words, whole gradual change of organic entities slowly changing. And he admits that this perhaps is “the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.” The fascinating thing is that modern geologists say exactly the same thing in my book, Evolution Impossible – 12 Reasons Why Eevolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth. On page 88, I wrote that the sudden appearance of fully formed species in the fossil record, without apparent evolutionary ancestors of mutant intermediate species, is a major problem for evolutionists. For example, Dr. David M. Raup, curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and past president of the Palantological Society in the US, of course, observes that present day geologists do not actually find the gradual unfolding of life in the geological record. Instead, they find species appearing in the geological sequences very suddenly showing little or no change during their existence in the geological record, and then they are no longer found.
So that's why I wrote in my book, published back in 2012, and it's interesting that that reference was by David Raup, and it was in an article, conflicts between Darwin and palaeontology, Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin 50, 1979, pages 22 to 29. And it's interesting that a number of other top palaeontologists are noted by other scientists. For example, on page 89 of my book Evolution Impossible, I write.
For example, Dr. Raup's observations were also noted by other scientists. For example, flying organisms fall into four main groups.
Insects, flying reptiles and pudosaurs. Pyotosaurs, now extinct, of course, birds and bats. Flying is a highly specialised function, requiring many features besides wings.
So we would expect gradual evolution of flight to leave some evidence in the fossil record. However, insect authority Dr. Robert Wooden from the University of Exeter notes that when fossils, insects first appear in the geological column, flying is fully developed.
And of course, I point out this requires a huge amount of new purposeful genetic code to somehow suddenly arise as a result of random mutations. And this was cited from an article by Robin Wooden called Flight Arthropods in Paleobiology, a synthesis which is book published by Oxford back in 1990, pages 72 to 75. So here again, another University of Michigan trained zoologist Dr. Ariel Roth, who served as the editor of the journal origins for more than 20 years, points out that flying predators, birds and bats also suddenly appear as fully developed flying creatures in the fossil strata. And I argue a large number of major anatomical changes are needed to develop flight. For example, in birds, we have hollow bones reinforced with cross members to reduce rate, yet retain sufficient strength.
They have a specialised respiratory system that enables air to be directly fed into air sacs connecting the heart, lungs and stomach. And I point out that these changes would have all required huge amounts of new information in the genetic code to somehow arise from random mutations. But again, there's no evidence in the fossil record of the transitional mutants that should have formed.
And so here in my book, I have a whole chapter discussing these missing fossils and their significance. And, of course, I reference it to the secular, published scientific literature. It's interesting that Darwin's argument that the fossil record is therefore incomplete continues to be used as an excuse.
For instance, the renowned evolutionist Stephen J Gould wrote, all palaeontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate form, that is, transitions between major groups that are characteristically abrupt.
Gradualists usually extract themselves from this dilemma by invoking the extreme imperfection of the fossil record. So this is the argument that they have to have.
It's fascinating that Gould and wrote that, of course, in his book The Panda's Thumb, on page 189. But it's interesting. Another top palaeontologist, current palaeontologist S M Holland, writing in the Journal of Palaeontology back in 2017, it was volume 91, number six, pages 1315 to 1317.
And Holland is a recognised world authority. This, he writes, “Our exaggerated emphasis on the imperfection of the fossil record feeds the perception among scientists in general that the fossil record is an unusually poor data set. It isn't. … We already know much about the structure of the record.” And it's interesting that Holland recommends that palaeontologists should not emphasise the incompleteness of the fossil record, because really, when you think about it, we've been digging up, mining and drilling holes since Darwin's time for 160 years. And it's interesting that Holland, who published a major paper on this, wrote in another place, through her incomplete examinations of live dead comparisons, Susan Kidwell showed the fossil record contains a high fidelity record of species richness and especially abundance of pattern, of both unexpected abundance, a pattern both unexpected and both welcome.
And he also writes, “As palaeontologists, we have an extraordinary data set at our disposal, and we have the expertise to understand it. We have something that no other field of biology has—time, deep time”. Well, they believe they have deep time, and we need to play to that strength. “We have access to worlds far different from our own” and so forth.
But it's quite clear that Holland is essentially saying, look, we've got all this data there. The major problem is that the intermediates aren't there. And creationist geologist Michael Oard recently wrote, scientists have had more than 160 years to collect fossils.
Evolution should be obvious within the fossil record by now. Stephen Holland points out that the fossil record is imperfect in a sense, but really nearly complete. So it is imperfect in that it did not record every organism that ever lived.
So all data sets are incomplete. And he believes we need to take a different path. Aud goes on to quote more of Holland, and he says, Holland contends that instead of concluding, as do many, that the fossil record is not worth considering, scientists should embrace it along with the sedimentary record and work with it.
The fossil record is better than most scientists recognise. Since quoting Holland again, we know much about the structure of the fossil record. And so, aud points out, not only do palaeontologists know the structure of the fossil record, but also that it provides a good record of species richness.
When we look at it, the fossil record, we can't say that the fossil record is really incomplete. I mean, it's incomplete that we haven't discovered all the fossils, as they point out. But it's not incomplete that we don't have a picture of what those fossils are trying to tell us.
It's interesting that Jerry Bergman, another creationist, in his book Fossil Forensics, Separating fact from Fantasy and palaeontology, which was published in 2017, Bergman writes, I agree that palaeontologists and scientists in general need to embrace the fossil record and accept the fossil record for what it is saying today. But doing so raises a conundrum for the evolutionist. The higher the fidelity of the record of the fossil species richness is, the less evolutionist can appeal to the incompleteness of the fossil record to explain away the morphological gaps between the fossil taxa.
If the fossil record is so good, why have these gaps not been filled after 160 years or more of collecting fossils? If evolution is really true, the lack of intermediates, the gaps are not only real and universal, but they are even more glaring after so many years of digging up fossils. And this is a very important point that Dr. Jerry Bergman is making, that we've been digging up fossils for a long, long time, and in particular, evolutionists have been on their eye out to find any intermediate species they can.
It's so important to them. And there's a handful of fossils that possibly could be argued as being intermediate. But that's a pittance.
There should be millions of intermediate fossils. Matter of fact, the intermediate fossils should be almost as abundant, if not more abundant, than the fossils of the fully formed animals. When you think about it in terms of the evolutionary processes, through lots and lots and lots and lots of mutations to produce the changes.
You know, it's interesting that another scientist who doesn't claim to be a creationist, Dr. Michael Denton, documented that 100,000 taxon defining novelties, that's little changes, are not led up too gradually from some antecedent form and which remains invariant after their actualization for vast periods of time. So what he's saying there is that although we do see some changes, these changes actually don't lead gradually up to some new form from some earlier form.
They might make small changes, but the basic change stays the same. And of course, Denton wrote that in his book that was published in 2016 called Evolution still a Theory and Crisis. Of course, his original book, Evolution a Theory and Crisis, published, I think, back in the, maybe I haven't got the date quite, but it's a famous book, Evolution a Theory and Crisis, by Michael Denton. But he put out another book in 2016, and on page 53, he points out the same problem still exists today. So we have these glaring universal gaps in the fossil record that should easily be enough to reject evolution.
But palaeontologists and many other scientists rarely draw this conclusion. Why? Because they have to cling to evolution. They need it.
It's interesting, though, that the fossil recorders are nearly complete due to the flood burial. I mean, the reason why we don't have these intermediates is that there weren't any. Evolution didn't occur, and the flood buried the pre flood world.
And we would expect the sudden appearance of fossils followed by Stacius, unlike what is expected for evolution. Therefore, we'd expect the fossil record to be complete. This is what Michael Oard writes, except for a small number of new fossils being discovered every year.
And these fossils do not change the nature of the fossil record. It contains the universal gaps between these species that can be explained by creation. In fact, the fossil record is just what is to be expected from the creation of kinds in Genesis one and the other.
Interesting thing is, of course, that scientists don't really know, really haven't got an explanation for the massive extinction events, Holland writes in his paper in the discussion of a major paper that he wrote looking at mechanisms to explain how fossils form. He writes, with the exception of the N Cretaceous extinction, all of the big five mass extinctions, as well as the cambrian and sonomian tillurian extinction, have similar stratigraphical expressions where only depositionally up dip sections are available. All are characterised by a single major cluster of large occurrences that is closely associated with a major flooding surface.
So we know that evolutionists claim that there were five major extinction events, but really, this all fits in with just the picture of the flood. And it's interesting that in his paper, the stratigraphy of mass extinction, Holland, which was published in July 2015 in the journal Paleoontology in 21st July 2015, he goes through a number of possible scenarios to explain how the fossils could form. And this is something else to understand, that paleontologists have major problems with explaining how the fossils formed and how they were buried. Major problems. And he presents a number of scenarios in this major review paper that was only published a few years ago. And so we need to remember that, that the flood explains it all beautifully.
Scientists are struggling, and let's not forget there are no intermediates. The top geologists in the world recognise that the fossil record is not a record of evolution, and yet our textbooks put that up as the main evidence that we have for evolution. And so we need to be aware of that.
That in our education system, we've got major things being taught to our students, to our young people, to the public in general, that aren't standing up to scientific scrutiny. But instead, the evidence for the biblical account is standing more and more up to scientific scrutiny. Well, you've been listening to Faith and Science.
And remember, if you want to relisten to this programme and the references, just Google 3abnaustralia.org.au all one word au and click on the listen button or radio and then on the listen button. And of course, if you've enjoyed these programmes, please put the links up on your social media page and mention it to your friends so that more people can become aware of the major fallacies about the origin of life that are being taught in our education system today.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio and found the answers I was looking for. Do you want answers? Are you looking for a greater relationship with Jesus?
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