Darwinism's Crumbling Myths and the Correct Definition of Science
If today's journalists, writers, philosophers, scientists, academics or university students were surveyed as to why they believe in the theory of evolution and what the evidence for it is, most of their answers would be unscientific myths. We can list the most common of these myths, together with why they are erroneous:
1. Proponents of evolution claim that scientific experiments have shown that life came into being spontaneously, as the result of chemical reactions. But in fact, no scientific experiment supports this claim and, moreover, it has been shown to be theoretically impossible.
2. They think that the fossil record proves that there has been a process of evolution on Earth. On the contrary, however, all fossils reveal a natural history completely at odds with Darwin's theory: Species did not come into existence by stages through any process of evolution, but were created in all their perfection in one instant.
3. They think that the celebrated Archaeopteryx fossil proves their thesis that birds evolved from reptiles. But it is now known that Archaeopteryx was a true bird, capable of flight, and no reptile ancestor has ever been found. Not a single piece of evidence remains to support the evolutionists' claim that birds evolved from reptiles.
4. For years, "the evolution of the horse" was portrayed as one of the best documented proofs of the theory of evolution. Four-legged mammals that had lived in different periods were set out in order of size, from small to large, and this "horse series" was exhibited in museums of natural history. Research in recent years, however, has shown that the creatures in the sequence are not one another's ancestors, that the sequencing is seriously flawed, and that creatures depicted as the ancestor of the horse actually emerged after it.
5. They believe that England's famous Industrial Revolution moths offer a proof of evolution by natural selection. However, the color change that occurred in moths during the Industrial Revolution has been proven not to be the result of natural selection. These butterflies did not change color; it was only that there were more pale moths at first but environmental conditions diminished their numbers, while the number of dark-colored moths increased. After this claim was realized to be a scientific fraud, evolutionists lost one more of their so-called proofs.
6. They claim that in fossil remains, there are traces of "ape men" proving that human beings are descended from a common ancestor with apes. However, all claims in this regard rest only on prejudiced assumptions, and even evolutionists are forced to admit that there is no fossil evidence for human evolution. For example, Richard Leakey, an evolutionist paleoanthropologist, writes:
David Pilbeam comments wryly, 'If you brought in a smart scientist from another discipline and showed him the meagre evidence we've got, he'd surely say, "Forget it: there isn't enough to go on".' Neither David nor others involved in the search for mankind can take this advice, of course, but we remain fully aware of the dangers of drawing conclusions from evidence that is so incomplete.2
David Pilbeam, whom Leakey quotes above, is also an evolutionist paleontologist. As he admits:
My reservations concern not so much this book [Richard Leakey's Origins] but the whole subject and methodology of paleoanthropology. . . . Perhaps generations of students of human evolution, including myself, have been flailing about in the dark; . . . our data base is too sparse, too slippery, for it to be able to mold our theories. 3
The fossils claimed to be those of human beings' so-called ancestors have been shown to belong to either an extinct species of ape, or a different race of human being. As a result, evolutionists are left without a single proof to substantiate their thesis that human beings and apes evolved from a single ancestor.
7. They claim that the embryos of human beings and other creatures undergo the same "process of evolution" in their mothers' womb or in the egg. They even say that a human embryo has gills that subsequently disappear. These claims have been shown to be completely unfounded and to rest on a major scientific fabrication. An evolutionist biologist by the name of Ernst Haeckel first made this claim; he deliberately made changes in his drawings to suggest that the embryos were similar to one another. Later, even evolutionist scientists came to accept that his claim was based on an unscientific fabrication.
8. They think that human beings and other living things have vestigial organs that have lost their function; and even believe that a great deal of DNA is "junk" with no particular function. But all these claims are known to be the result of scientific ignorance. Over time, as science advanced, it was discovered that all organs and genes are indeed functional. This shows that living creatures do not have organs that have ceased to function, through the so-called process of evolution, as a result of not being used. Rather, it shows that these creatures, with all their organs and component parts, are not the work of chance but of a perfect creation.
9. They think that the variation in a single species—for example, the differences in the size and shape of the bills of the Galapagos Islands' finches—is a strong proof of evolution. But this is known to be no proof of evolution: Micro-changes in the structure of a bird's bill cannot create new biological data, in the form of new organs, and so do not constitute evolution. As a result, even neo-Darwinists today realize that some variations within a species cannot result in evolution.
10. They believe that mutations in experiments with fruit flies have been able to produce new species. But these experiments produced only physically impaired or sterile individuals, and no "beneficial" mutation was observed. Even in the case of mutations produced under the control of knowledgeable scientists, no new species were formed; this proves that there is no such thing as evolution. Therefore, it is impossible to point to mutations as proof of evolution.
A large number of those interviewed, if asked why they believe in evolution, would actually know very few of the examples mentioned above, or know them only superficially. These myths they read about a few times or heard about from their high-school teachers have convinced them of evolution, and they see no reason to investigate further.
However, every one of the supposed proofs above is completely invalid. This is no groundless claim, but a fact proven with solid evidence by scientists critical of the theory of evolution—as we'll explore in the following pages.
In his criticism of Darwinism, a well-known American biologist, Jonathan Wells,4 refers to the myths of evolution as "the icons of evolution." By "icons," he means false and superstitious beliefs that every supporter of evolution knows by heart. The word "icon" describes objects of veneration that some false religions use to remind their members of what they regard as sacred. Some of the iconic symbols used to support the theory of evolution (which is actually an atheistic religion)5 for its devotees are drawings of the "ape man," "gills on a human embryo," and other such scientific fabrications. But each one of these depicts a groundless myth. Wells' book, Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution Is Wrong?, lists ten icons that correspond to the list we have given here and explains in detail why all have been rendered invalid.
Today these myths are all discredited, and evolutionists have proposed no new proofs to replace them. As a theory, Darwinism convinced some people in the 19th century, when scientific conditions were unsophisticated. But in the 21st century, Darwinism has been revealed as defunct, outmoded and invalid.
Religion and Science Never Conflict
Before we proceed to trace the demise of Darwinism's myths in the following pages, we must show the invalidity of another idea that binds supporters of evolutionary theory.
This is the false assumption that there exists a conflict between religion and science. Those who defend this assumption claim that the theory of evolution must be true because "scientists" unanimously accepted it as scientifically proven. They propose that Creation is a theory for "faith" only, but not for science. However, such assertions are not based on the facts. As an example, take the ongoing argument about how the theory of evolution should be taught in United States schools. This argument is carried on solely on a scientific level, but there are attempts to show it as the "disagreement between the churches and scientists." News broadcast by some media organizations, and articles in some newspapers on the matter, all suffer from the same superficial assumptions, which are wrong for the following reasons:
First, Creation is supported by scientific evidence. The present evolution-versus-Creation debate is not between scientists and the churches, but between scientists who stubbornly believe in the theory of evolution and other scientists who see that this theory is invalid. All the available evidence argues against evolution. On the strength of this evidence, the theory of evolution in the USA has declined since the second half of the 20th century, which decline has influenced the decision taken in states like Kansas, Georgia and Ohio that schools must also teach the evidence for the theory of evolution's invalidity. In the USA, a powerful opposition arose against the theory of evolution. All members of this movement are scientists from the country's notable universities. In the 1970s Professor Dean Kenyon wrote a thesis on the origin of life and chemical evolution that made him one of evolution's well-known proponents. Today, he is a representative of the opposition movement against the theory of evolution and believes that the origins of life cannot be explained by evolution, only by creation.
The Legacy of Dogmatism, from Epicurus to Darwinism
Benjamin Wiker teaches science and theology at Franciscan University. His book Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists gives a detailed account of Darwin's "theory of evolution" as a latter-day version of the materialist philosophy of the Greek thinker Epicurus and his Roman counterpart, Lucretius.
Darwin followed these two philosophers in writing in detail about such unscientific ideas as:
1 Nature is a system that regulates itself.
2 Among living creatures, there is a merciless struggle for life and this leads to evolution by means of natural selection.
3 It should be avoided to give a "teleological" (the idea that they came into being for a purpose) account of nature and living things.
What is striking is that these ideas are not scientific. Neither Epicurus nor Lucretius conducted scientific experiments or made observations; they just used logic completely in line with their own wishes. Moreover, their logic had an interesting starting point. Epicurus rejected the existence of a Creator, saying that it entailed belief in an afterlife, for which reason he felt himself circumscribed. He clearly stated that his whole philosophy developed from his unwillingness to accept this proposition. In other words, Epicurus chose atheism for his own psychological comfort and later, undertook to construct a worldview based on this choice. For this reason he endeavored to explain the order of the universe and the origins of life in terms of an atheist system and with this purpose in mind, adopted ideas that would later prove basic to evolution.
Benjamin Wiker gives this detailed interpretation of the relation between Epicurus and Darwin:
The first Darwinian was not Darwin, but a rather notorious Greek, Epicurus, born on the Island of Samos about 341 B.C. It was he who provided the philosophical underpinnings of Darwinism, because it was he who fashioned an entirely materialistic, [atheistic] cosmology, where the purposeless jostling of brute matter over infinite time yielded, by a series of fortunate accidents, not only the Earth, but all the myriad forms of life thereon. . . .
After stating that Epicurus fashioned the cosmology, not out of evidence but from his desire to abstract the world from the idea of a Creator, Wiker goes on to say:
. . . This common disdain for religion unites Epicureanism and modernity because we moderns [Darwinists] are the heirs of Epicurus. Through a long and winding path, a revived form of Epicurean materialism became the founding creed of modern scientific materialism—the very materialist cosmology that Darwin assumed in the Origin and that still grounds the materialist dismissal of design in nature.6
Today, those motivated to stubbornly defend the theory of evolution are not on the side of science, but on the side of atheism. Like their precursor Epicurus, their attachment to atheism stems from the awareness that accepting the existence of God would clash with their own selfish desires.
There is a verse in the Qur'an in which God completely describes the situation of non-believers: "And they repudiated them wrongly and haughtily, in spite of their own certainty about them." (Surat an-Naml: 14) And in another verse, He reveals, "Have you seen him who has taken his whims and desires to be his deity?" (Surat al-Furqan: 43)
The Epicurus-Darwinist "clan" rejects the existence of God only because His existence conflicts with their personal desires and passions; in this, they are very much like those described in the verse above. Therefore, it is very deceptive to regard the evolution-Creation argument as a conflict between science and religion.
Evolution and Creation, two different explanations of the origins of life and the universe, have existed from ancient times. In order to understand which of these explanations is scientifically correct, we have to consider the discoveries of science. Here, as in our other books, we will once again see how all findings prove that the theory of evolution is erroneous, and that Creation is true.
It is False that Science Must Be Atheistic
There is no compulsion for science to be atheistic, that is, to believe in and to maintain the dogma that the universe is composed of matter only, and that there is no consciousness apart from matter. Science must investigate its discoveries and go wherever true discoveries may lead.
Today various branches of science such as astrophysics, physics and biology clearly demonstrate the examples of creation in the universe and in nature, which are impossible to explain in terms of random events. All proofs point towards a Creator. This Creator is God Whose eternal power and intelligence has created the heavens, the Earth and all things animate and inanimate that lie between.
The unproven "faith" is atheism. The following pages will show that atheism's most important support—that is, Darwinism—has collapsed.
Once, Life Was Thought to be Simple
Darwinism claims that all living things on Earth came into being not through any purpose or plan, but as a result of random events. The first link in this chain of events is that the first living thing appeared within inanimate matter. To discuss whether or not there is a natural process of evolution, first it must be demonstrated that life could actually have arisen by chance from inanimate matter.
So, when we compare this "link" with scientific data, what comes to light? That is, can chance form a living organism from inanimate matter?
Once, it was thought that observation and experiment gave an affirmative answer to the above questions. That is, it was believed that living creatures could evolve spontaneously within inanimate matter. But these observations and experiments that seemed to prove those assertions were extremely primitive.
The ancient Egyptians living along the River Nile thought that the number of frogs increased during the rainy season because the river generated them out of the mud. They believed that not only frogs, but snakes, worms and mice were formed from the mud when the Nile flooded each summer. Superficial observations led the Egyptians into this superstition.
The boundary between animate and inanimate things was unclear not only in ancient Egypt. Many early pagan societies believed that this boundary could be easily crossed. In Hindu mythology, the world came into being out of a huge, round blob of matter called prakriti. From this material, all animate and inanimate things evolved and will return to it again. Anaximander, the ancient Greek philosopher Thales' pupil, wrote in his book On Nature that animals came to be from some mud steaming in the heat of the Sun.
The basis of all these superstitions was the belief that living things were simple structures. This belief was long maintained in Europe, where modern science began to develop in the 16th century. But the idea that the structure of life was simple held sway for at least another three hundred years, because scientists did not have the means to observe the minute details of living things, especially microscopic cells and tiny molecules.
A few superficial observations and experiments convinced scientists that life was simple. For example, the Belgian chemist Jan Baptista van Helmont (1577-1644), spread some wheat on a soiled shirt and, after a while, observed mice scurrying around the shirt. He concluded that the mice were produced from the combination of the wheat and the shirt. The German scientist Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680) did a similar experiment. He poured some honey over some dead flies and later saw other flies were zooming around the honey; he assumed that combining honey with dead flies produced living ones.
More careful scientists were able to see that all these ideas were wrong. The Italian scientist Francisco Redi (1626-1697) was the first to do controlled experiments in this regard. Using the isolation method, he discovered that maggots on meat did not come into being spontaneously, but developed from eggs deposited by flies. Redi proved that life could not come from inanimate matter, but only from other life—a view that came to be known as biogenesis. The name given to the spontaneous generation of life wasabiogenesis.
The scientific argument between supporters of biogenesis and abiogenesis was continued into the 18th century by John Needham (1713-1781) and Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799). Each of them boiled a piece of meat, then isolated it. Needham observed that maggots appeared on the meat and took this as proof for abiogenesis. Spallanzani repeated the same experiment, but boiled the meat for a longer time. In this way, all organic life forms on the meat were destroyed and as a result, no maggots appeared on it. So even though Spallanzani had invalidated the theory of abiogenesis, many people did not believe him; saying that Spallanzani had boiled the meat so long that he killed the "vital power" within it.
As Charles Darwin was developing his theory, the question of the origins of life was obfuscated by debates like these. Many people believed that inanimate matter could generate bacteria and other germs, if not visible creatures like maggots. In 1860, the famous French chemist Louis Pasteur disproved the age-old assertions of abiogenesis, though it continued to hold its place in the minds of many.
Darwin almost never considered how the first cell came into being. He never mentions this subject in his book The Origin of Species published in 1859. Even after Pasteur's experiments posed a major problem for him in this regard, he hardly dealt with the topic. His only explanation for the origin of life was that the first cell could have come into being in a "warm little pond."
In a letter to Joseph Hooker in 1871, Darwin wrote:
It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.7
In short, Darwin maintained that if a small, warm pond contained the chemical raw materials for life, they could form proteins which could then multiply, and combine to form a cell. Moreover, he asserted that such a formation was impossible under present world conditions, but could have occurred in an earlier period.
Both of Darwin's claims are pure speculation, without scientific foundation.
But they would inspire those evolutionists who came after him and launch them on a fruitless labor that would last for more than a century.
This hopeless effort rested on an error defended for centuries, and which also misled Darwin, that life is of pure chance and natural law.
Since that time, more than a century has passed, and thousands of scientists have tried to explain the origins of life in terms of evolution. Two scientists who cleared a new path in this search were Alexander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane—one Russian, the other English, but both Marxists. They advanced the theory known as "chemical evolution," and proposed, as Darwin had dreamed of doing, that molecules—the raw material of life—could, with the addition of energy, evolve spontaneously and form a living cell.
In the middle of the 20th century, Oparin's and Haldane's theory gained ground because the true complexity of life wasn't yet understood. And a young chemist by the name of Stanley Miller gave apparent scientific support for the "chemical evolution" thesis.
Once, There Was Miller's Experiment
If you were to look at today's evolutionist literature dealing with the origins of life, you would likely see evolution's proponents offering the "Miller experiment" as the greatest proof for their theses. Many biology textbooks in many countries tell students how important this experiment was, and how it cast light on the problem of the origins of life. Most often, the details of the experiment are disregarded. What it produced and to what extent the experiment "casts light" on the origins of life are also ignored.
To shed some light on this experiment, let us sum up the relevant facts that we have detailed in another book. In 1953, Stanley Miller, a graduate student in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago under the supervision of his teacher, Harold Urey, composed a mixture of gasses that, he supposed, resembled the atmosphere of the primordial Earth. Afterwards, he exposed this mixture to an electrical discharge for more than a week and, as a result, observed that some amino acids that are used in living things were synthesized, along with others that are not.
To shed some light on this experiment, let us sum up the relevant facts that we have detailed in another book. In 1953, Stanley Miller, a graduate student in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago under the supervision of his teacher, Harold Urey, composed a mixture of gasses that, he supposed, resembled the atmosphere of the primordial Earth. Afterwards, he exposed this mixture to an electrical discharge for more than a week and, as a result, observed that some amino acids that are used in living things were synthesized, along with others that are not.
Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, which in turn are the basic material of the body. Hundreds of amino acids join in a particular series within a cell to produce proteins. Cells are produced from a few thousand different kinds of proteins. In other words, amino acids are the smallest components of any living thing.
For this reason, Stanley Miller's synthesizing of amino acids caused great excitement among evolutionists. And so the legend of the "Miller Experiment" was born and was to last for decades.
However, it slowly emerged that the experiment was invalid. In the 1970s it was proved that the primordial Earth's atmosphere was mainly composed of nitrogen and carbon dioxide and did not contain the methane and ammonia gasses that Miller used in his experiment. This showed that Miller's scenario was untenable, since N and CO2 are not suitable for the formation of amino acids. A 1998 article in the geological magazine Earth, summed up the matter:
Today Miller's scenario is regarded with misgivings. One reason is that geologists now think that the primordial atmosphere consisted mainly of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, gases that are less reactive than those used in the 1953 experiment.8
That same year, National Geographic, another well-known scientific magazine, wrote as follows:
Many scientists now suspect that the early atmosphere was different from what Miller first supposed. They think it consisted of carbon dioxide and nitrogen rather than hydrogen, methane, and ammonia. That's bad news for chemists. When they try sparking carbon dioxide and nitrogen, they get a paltry amount of organic molecules.9
In 1995, Jon Cohen gave an enlightening interpretation in an historic article in Science magazine, saying that scientists researching the origins of life did not take the "Miller Experiment"' into account. He outlines the reasons for this as follows: "the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey simulation."10
Another fact that invalidated the Miller experiment was that the primordial atmosphere was ascertained to be rich in oxygen. This totally undermined both the Miller experiment and other chemical evolutionist scenarios, because oxygen has the special ability to oxidize—that is, burn—all organic molecules. In the body, this danger is averted by very special enzyme systems. In nature, it is impossible for a free organic molecule not to be oxidized.
For decades, despite all these facts, the Miller experiment, as we said, was touted as a very important explanation of the origins of life. In their textbooks, students were told that "Miller showed how organic compounds can be synthesized," or, "Miller showed how the first cells were formed."
As a result, many educated people are in error in this regard. For example, in some articles dealing with the theory of evolution, one can read such statements as, "Combining and boiling such organic matter as amino acids or proteins produce life." This is probably the superstition that the Miller experiment left in the minds of some. The truth is, such a thing has never been observed. As explained above, the Miller Experiment, which tried to explain the formation of amino acids, let alone the origin of life, is now shown to be outmoded and invalid. It has suffered the same fate as Jan Baptista van Helmont's so-called proof for abiogenesis on the basis of maggots in meat or Athanasius Kircher's experiment.
In his book Algeny: A New World—A New World, Jeremy Rifkin makes the same comparison saying that if scientists had taken the trouble to feel even the slightest suspicion, they would at once have seen that the Miller experiment consisted merely of a scientific fantasy tale, just like those scientists who previously claimed, on the basis of observations of maggots emerging from rubbish, that life emerged from inanimate matter.11
Those who believe that Miller's experiment produced important results fail to understand the important point that Miller conducted his experiment under artificial conditions produced by himself, having nothing to do with the atmosphere of the early Earth; so the experiment was carried out under invalid conditions. And most importantly, this experiment only synthesized amino acids. Formation of amino acids by some means does not indicate creation of life.
If we compare a living cell to a huge factory, amino acids are the factory's bricks. It's vitally important how these bricks are designed and arranged. So far, no experiment has shown how amino acids came into being spontaneously, or organized themselves by chance to produce a functional protein. To form a living cell, a complex mechanism must be wholly in place: hundreds of different proteins, DNA codes and the enzymes to read them, and a selectively permeable cell membrane. However, such a "chemical evolution" has never been shown to be possible. Moreover, to believe in such a possibility is to believe in the impossible. Paul Davies, the well-known physicist and science writer, makes an important comment on this matter:
Some scientists say, "Just throw energy at it, and it [life] will happen spontaneously." That is a little bit like saying: "Put a stick of dynamite under the pile of bricks, and bang, you've got a house!" Of course you won't have a house, you'll just have a mess. The difficulty in trying to explain the origin of life is in accounting for how the elaborate organizational structure of these complex molecules came into existence spontaneously from a random input of energy. How did these very specific complex molecules assemble themselves?12
Actually, Davies' example contains the correct solution to the problem of the origins of life. Is it reasonable to first suppose that a given house was formed by an explosion, and then theorize as to how it was possible? Or is it more reasonable to believe that the house was the result of a superior creation and organization? The answer is obvious.
Over the past 20 years, during which the complex details of life have been understood, many scientists have rejected the myth of chemical evolution and begun to give a new answer for the origins of life—the fact of Creation.
The Amazing Complexity of Life
The most important starting point that caused the fact of Creation to be clearly known by everyone is the complexity of life that could not even have been imagined in Darwin's time. In his 1996 book Darwin's Black Box, Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, writes about the discovery of the complexity of living things:
Since the mid-1950s biochemistry has painstakingly elucidated the workings of life at the molecular level. . . . Nineteenth century science could not even guess at the mechanism of vision, immunity, or movement, but modern biochemistry has identified the molecules that allow those and other functions. It was once expected that the basis of life would be exceedingly simple. That expectation has been smashed. Vision, motion and other biological functions have proven to be no less sophisticated than television cameras and automobiles. Science has made enormous progress in understanding how the chemistry of life works, but the elegance and complexity of biological systems at the molecular level have paralyzed science's attempt to explain their origins. . . Many scientists have gamely asserted that explanations are already in hand, or will be sooner or later, but no support for such assertions can be found in the professional science literature. More importantly, there are compelling reasons—based on the structure of the systems themselves—to think that a Darwinian explanation for the mechanisms of life will forever prove elusive. 13
So, what is so complex in a cell? Behe answers:
Shortly after 1950, science advanced to the point where it could determine the shapes and properties of a few of the molecules that make up living organisms. Slowly, painstakingly, the structures of more and more biological molecules were elucidated, and the way they work inferred from countless experiments. The cumulative results show with piercing clarity that life is based on machines—machines made of molecules! Molecular machines haul cargo from one place in the cell to another along "highways" made of other molecules, while still others act as cables, ropes, and pulleys to hold the cell in shape. Machines turn cellular switches on and off, sometimes killing the cell or causing it to grow. Solar-powered machines capture the energy of photons and store it in chemicals. Electrical machines allow current to flow through nerves. Manufacturing machines build other molecular machines, as well as themselves. Cells swim using machines, copy themselves with machinery, ingest food with machinery. In short, highly sophisticated molecular machines control every cellular process. Thus the details of life are finely calibrated, and the machinery of life enormously complex.14
Gerald Schroeder, an Israeli physicist and molecular biologist, emphasizes this extraordinary complexity:
. . . On average, each cell in your body, at this second and every second, is forming two thousand proteins. Every second! In every cell. Continuously. And they do it so modestly. For all that activity, we can't feel a bit of it. A protein is a string of several hundred amino acids, and an amino acid is a molecule having twenty or so atoms. Each cell, every cell in your body, is selecting right now approximately five hundred thousand amino acids, consisting of some ten million atoms, organizing them into pre-selected strings, joining them together, checking to be certain each string is folded into specific shapes, and then shipping each protein off to a site, some inside the cell, some outside, sites that somehow have signaled a need for these specific proteins. Every second. Every cell. Your body, and mine too, is a living wonder.15
As Paul Davies wrote, to claim that this extraordinarily complex system is a product of chance or natural laws is like asserting that a house could be built by blowing up bricks with dynamite. It is for these reasons that the complexity of life disarms Darwinists. Behe says that none of their scientific publications gives any evolutionist explanation for the origins of life:
If you search the scientific literature on evolution, and if you focus your search on the question of how molecular machines—the basis of life—developed, you find an eerie and complete silence. The complexity of life's foundation has paralyzed science's attempt to account for it; molecular machines raise an as-yet-impenetrable barrier to Darwinism's universal reach.16
In short, investigations into the origins of life have been one major development that has helped bring about the demise of the theory of evolution. So, why do evolutionists still cling to Darwinism?
Harold Urey, one of the authors of the Miller experiment, admits:
All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did.17
Bilim adamları DNA'nın yapısı, şifrelenmesi hakkında yaptıkları uzun yılları kapsayan araştırmalara, harcadıkları büyük servetlere karşın, daha yeni yeni kayda değer bilgiler edinmektedirler. Buna rağmen hücrenin genetik yapısındaki mükemmellik de halen büyük bir sır olma özelliğini korumaktadır. DNA'nın kompleks yapısı, içerdiği hayati ve yüksek kapasitedeki bilgiler, hayatın oluşumunu tesadüflerle açıklamak isteyenleri çaresizliğe sürükleyen konuların başında gelmektedir.
Urey states that he and many of his colleagues "believe" that the origin of life was a random event. So, actually, it was not science at the basis of this experiment, but faith. And the idea that nothing exists besides matter, that everything must be explained in terms of physical effects, is materialist philosophy.
Darwinism has collapsed scientifically and only blind belief in its philosophy is keeping it alive, but it can never revive it as a theory.
Once, the Fossil Record Was Thought to Prove Evolution
Paleontology, the study of fossils, developed long before Darwin. The founder of this science was the French naturalist, Baron Georges Cuvier (1769-1832). According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, he introduced fossils into zoological classification, showed the progressive relation between rock strata and their fossil remains, and demonstrated, in his comparative anatomy and reconstructions of fossil skeletons, the importance of functional and anatomical relationships.18
Cuvier was opposed to the theory of evolution proposed in his time by Lamarck. He insisted that genera of living things were created separately, stressed the detail and delicacy in animal anatomy and explained that its characteristics ruled out any idea of random alteration. Cuvier also argued that "each species is so well coordinated, functionally and structurally, that it could not survive significant change. He further maintained that each species was created for its own special purpose and each organ for its special function."19
But Charles Darwin interpreted fossils differently. He believed that various species descended in stages from a single, common ancestor in a process of evolution and that fossils were proof of this process.
But Darwin's interpretation rests on no proof. On the contrary, in his day, no extant fossils demonstrated evolution. The fossil remains of extinct creatures did not share the kind of family relationship and resemblance that Darwin's theory required. Every known fossil, like every known living thing, possessed its own unique features. As is the case with natural history today, species of the past have not been very similar and close to one another, but rather divided into groups that are very different from one another, with major structural differences between them.
For this reason, Darwin could not use fossils to prove his theory. On the contrary, his book proposed "fabricated explanations" to misrepresent this matter that posed such a serious problem for him. He dealt with this matter in the chapter entitled "Difficulties on Theory" and appended to the book another chapter titled "On the Imperfection of the Geological Record," that dealt with the absence of intermediate fossil forms.
But in both these chapters, Darwin's problem could be seen clearly. His theory was based on the claim that species came into being by a long series of incremental changes. If it were so, intermediate forms must have existed to link one species to another; but no trace of such creatures has been found in the fossil record.
Darwin was finally forced to leave this problem for future researchers. He thought the problem lay in the insufficiency of the fossil record; he was certain that, as new fossils were unearthed, specimens would come to light to prove his theory. He 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. 20
Darwin's prediction persuaded a growing number to carry out excavations in search of the supposed "lost" intermediate forms to extend the fossil record. They made some exciting finds, but over time, it was realized that their excitement was unfounded.
One of these "breakthroughs," discovered in 1860 near the German town of Solnhofen, was the fossil to which they gave the name Archaeopteryx, the Greek for "ancient wing." Despite the fact that it was clearly a bird, it had some peculiar features which were considered reptilian: teeth, a long tail and claws on its wings. This gave Darwinists a rare opportunity. One of Darwin's most avid defenders, Thomas Huxley, announced that Archaeopteryx was half-bird and half-reptile. The assumption that its wings weren't suitable for flying led to the conclusion that it was a primitive bird; this generated a lot of popular excitement and thus was born the Archaeopteryx myth that was to hold sway throughout the 20th century.
In time, it was realized that this creature was not a primitive bird; in fact, its skeleton and feather structure made it well adapted to flying. Its reptile-like features were also possessed by some birds of the past and of today.
As a result of these discoveries, evolutionist speculations about Archaeopteryxas the best candidate for an intermediate form are largely silenced today. Alan Feduccia, an expert ornithologist and professor from the Biology Department of the University of North Carolina, said that "most recent workers who have studied various anatomical features of Archaeopteryx have found the creature to be much more birdlike than previously imagined." Again according to Feduccia, "the resemblance of Archaeopteryx to theropod dinosaurs has been grossly overestimated."21 In short, it is now known that there is no vast difference between Archaeopteryx and other birds.
In the century and a half since Darwin, no intermediate forms—including Archaeopteryx—have been found. This fact has become undisputable, especially since the 1970s but it is still ignored by a few paleontologists who espouse the theory of evolution. Among these paleontologists, the best known are Stephen J. Gould and Niles Eldridge. These two have proposed a different model of evolution under the name of "punctuated equilibrium," in which they insist that the fossil record has refuted Darwinism's "gradualism." They have shown in detail that various genera of living things appeared suddenly in the fossil record and remained unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.
In a book written with Ian Tattersall, another evolutionist paleontologist, Eldredge made this important assessment:
That individual kinds of fossils remain recognizably the same throughout the length of their occurrence in the fossil record had been known to paleontologists long before Darwin published his Origin. Darwin himself . . . prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search. . . One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong.
The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor's new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin's predicted pattern, simply looked the other way.22
In a book written jointly in 1988 entitled Integrated Principles of Biology, three evolutionist biologists developed the same point:
Many species remain virtually unchanged for millions of years, then suddenly disappear to be replaced by a quite different . . . form. Moreover, most major groups of animals appear abruptly in the fossil record, fully formed, and with no fossils yet discovered that form a transition from their parent group.23
New discoveries have not changed the situation in favor of Darwinism; on the contrary, they've made it worse. In 1999 Tom Kemp, curator of the zoological collections of the Oxford University, wrote a book entitled, Fossils and Evolution in which he described the situation:
In virtually all cases, a new taxon appears for the first time in the fossil record with most definitive features already present, and practically no known stem-group forms.24
So, the fossil record which was once thought to corroborate Darwin's theory has become evidence against it. David Berlinsky, a mathematician from the Princeton University and an opponent of evolution, sums up the situation:
There are gaps in the fossil graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms, but where there is nothing whatsoever instead. No paleontologist writing in English, French or German denies that this is so. It is simply a fact. Darwin's theory and the fossil record are in conflict.25
One of the most striking examples of this contradiction is the collapse of Darwin's "tree of life."
Once, There was Thought to be an "Evolution Tree"
The most punishing blow that the fossil record dealt Darwinism was the scenario revealed by the fossils from the Cambrian period. Darwin imagined that the history of life on Earth could be represented as a tree starting from one trunk and slowly, gradually separating into various branches. A diagram in The Origin of the Species reflected this view. With the aid of this chart, the concept of the evolutionary "tree" was planted in people's minds, to finally become one of Darwinism's most important myths. Various versions of the evolutionary tree were published in textbooks, scientific treatises, magazines and newspapers. These diagrams etched in people's minds the idea that living things evolved by small chance changes from one common root of the evolutionary tree.
The truth was quite different, however. This was most clearly dramatized with the discovery of the Cambrian explosion at the beginning of the 20th century. In the year 1909, the paleontologist Charles D. Walcott began investigations in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. In the area of the Burgess Pass, he discovered very well-preserved strata of shale rock. He quickly realized that the Burgess Shale contained many fossils belonging to the Cambrian period. For the next four years, Walcott carefully collected between 60,000 and 80,000 fossils from the shale and made a note of the most subtle differences he discovered among them.
The most amazing thing about the Burgess Shale fossils was that they contained the remains of creatures belonging to all the phyla alive today. (A phylumis the largest taxonomic category used to classify creatures in the animal kingdom. Animals are divided into more than 50 phyla, and each phylum has its own body design. Among the best known phyla are the Chordata including the vertebrates, the Arthropoda containing all insects, and Mollusca containing all soft-bodied invertebrates with shells.)
Walcott was very surprised to see what phyla these fossils belonged to. No significant life had been discovered in much older strata; but the layer he discovered contained creatures belonging to nearly all known phyla, and fossils of hitherto unknown phyla as well. This showed that all the bodily characteristics in the animal kingdom came about at the same time, in the same geological period.
This dealt a fatal blow to Darwin's theory. He had proposed that creatures had developed slowly and gradually, like the twigs of a tree. According to Darwin's speculations, at first there must have been one single phylum in the world, and different phyla developed slowly, over the course of time. Now, however, this theory had to contend with Walcott's proof that all phyla came into being suddenly, at the same time.
But it would be 70 years before this blow turned the theory of the evolutionary tree upside down, because Walcott, at the end of four years of meticulous study, decided to keep his fossils a secret instead of revealing them to the scientific world. He was the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and a staunch Darwinist. Thinking—correctly—that the fossils he had discovered would pose a major problem for the theory of evolution, he kept them in the museum's archives rather than releasing them. The Burgess Shale fossils came to light only during an examination of the museum's archives in 1985. The Israeli scientist Gerald Schroeder makes the following comment:
Had Walcott wanted, he could have hired a phalanx of graduate students to work on the fossils. But he chose not to rock the boat of evolution. Today fossil representatives of the Cambrian era have been found in China, Africa, the British Isles, Sweden, Greenland. The explosion was worldwide. But before it became proper to discuss the extraordinary nature of the explosion, the data were simply not reported. 26
For more than 70 years, these fossils had remained hidden until they were found and analyzed by paleontologists Harry Whittington, Derek Briggs and Simon Conway Morris. These three scientists revealed that the fossils Walcott had found dated back to the Cambrian period, one of the oldest geological periods. The sudden appearance of such a wide variety of creatures during this period was termed the Cambrian explosion. In the 1980s, two new areas of fossil remains similar to the Burgess Shale fossils were discovered: one in Sirius Passet in northern Greenland, and the other in Chengjiang in southern China. In both these areas were found fossils of very different creatures that came into being during the Cambrian period. Among these the oldest and best preserved fossils were those found in Chenjiang, which also contained the first vertebrates. In addition, two 530-million-year-old fish fossils discovered in 1999 proved that all body structures, including the vertebrates, were already in existence during the Cambrian. Investigations showed that the Cambrian explosion occurred within a 10-million-year period, which in geological terms is quite a short time. And the creatures that suddenly appeared in this period all had very complicated organs and had no resemblance with the one-celled and a few multi-celled organisms that preceded them. Stephen J. Gould describes the Cambrian explosion as follows:
The most famous such burst, the Cambrian explosion, marks the inception of modern multicellular life. Within just a few million years, nearly every major kind of animal anatomy appears in the fossil record for the first time.27
Evolutionists have tried to explain away the Cambrian explosion in various ways, none of them convincing. All the theses put forward against the Cambrian problem are flawed, which is demonstrated by the arguments that evolutionists have among themselves. The February 1999 edition of the noted science magazine Trends in Genetics (TIG) says that the Burgess Shale fossil finds cannot at all be explained in terms of the theory of evolution, and that the theses proposed are not convincing:
It might seem odd that fossils from one small locality, no matter how exciting, should lie at the center of a fierce debate about such broad issues in evolutionary biology. The reason is that animals burst into the fossil record in astonishing profusion during the Cambrian, seemingly from nowhere. Increasingly precise radiometric dating and new fossil discoveries have only sharpened the suddenness and scope of this biological revolution. The magnitude of this change in Earth's biota demands an explanation. Although many hypotheses have been proposed, the general consensus is that none is wholly convincing.28
In Icons of Evolution, the American biologist Jonathan Wells sums up the matter in these words:
Of all the icons of evolution, the tree of life is the most pervasive, because descent from a common ancestor is the foundation of Darwin's theory. . . Yet Darwin knew—and scientists have recently confirmed—that the early fossil record turns the evolutionary tree of life upside down. Ten years ago it was hoped that molecular evidence might save the tree, but recent discoveries have dashed that hope. Although you would not learn it from reading biology textbooks, Darwin's tree of life has been uprooted.29
For this reason, we can safely say that once upon a time, there was a theory called Darwinism, which some people thought was supported by fossils. But the fossil record indicates just the opposite. Now, Darwinism is no more. Fossils—as we now understand—show that life appeared on Earth suddenly, not by evolution.
This sudden appearance implies Creation. God has created all living things perfectly from nothing.
[God is] the Originator of the heavens and Earth. When He decides on something, He just says to it, "Be!" and it is. (Surat al-Baqara: 117)
Fossils of Complex Living Things that Existed Hundreds of Millions of Years Ago Refute Evolutionist .
Once, There Was a Search for the Missing Link
The last chapter showed how the fossil record removed all of Darwinism's underpinnings.
In The Origin of the Species, Darwin did not touch on the fossil record as it relates to human origins. But in The Descent of Man, published 12 years later, he proposed that human beings were the highest rung on the so-called evolutionary ladder, and that their nearest ancestors were primates resembling modern-day apes.
In proposing that human beings and apes were descended from a common ancestor, Darwin had no proof to back up these claims; he just imagined that there was a family relationship between human beings and apes, animals that, he thought, were physically best suited to being compared to human beings. In his book, he developed his racial arguments, claming that some of the world's supposedly "primitive races" were proof of evolution. (However, modern genetics has disproved these racial views shared by Darwin and other evolutionists of the time.)
From the last quarter of the 19th century, almost a whole science of paleoanthropology devoted itself to the task of finding fossils to prove this imaginary theory of evolution, and many who accepted Darwinism started digging to find the "missing link" between apes and human beings.
The great discovery they had hoped for was made in England in 1910. For the next 43 years, the skull of "Piltdown Man" was presented to the world as a major evidence of human evolution. The fossil was discovered by Charles Dawson, an amateur paleontologist who gave it the name Eoanthropus dawsoni. It was an odd fossil: the upper part was totally human in structure, while the lower jaw and teeth were like those of an ape. Within a short time, this discovery became famous; and the English were very proud that this fossil, discovered in their native soil, was an ancestor of their race. The considerable size of the cranium was interpreted as an indication that "English intelligence" had evolved very early. In the following years, hundreds of theses were written on Eoanthropus dawsoni, and the fossil was displayed in the British Museum, where hundreds of thousands of visitors were persuaded as to the "truth of human evolution."
They did not know that the "fossil" was a fake. Tests applied in 1953 showed that Piltdown Man was a combination of bones from a human being and an orangutan. The public was amazed when this fossil, once supposed to be the greatest proof of evolution, was removed from the British Museum exhibit where it had been highlighted for decades.
In 1922, another scandal occurred in the United States, smaller in scope but just as serious. A molar tooth found in the state of Nebraska was alleged to be an intermediate form between man and ape; and on the basis of this discovery, Nebraska Man was concocted. In 1927, however, it was determined that this tooth belonged neither to a human being nor to an ape, but to a wild pig.
In spite of fiascos like this, evolutionists continued their search for human origins. Later, they came to think that extinct apes of the genusAustralopithecus were the oldest human ancestors. It became an evolutionist cliché that, after Australopithecus, came species called Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus, with the series finally ending with Homo sapiens, modern-day man. This cliché, with its picture of apes gradually walking on two feet, was officially adopted by textbooks, science periodicals, magazines, daily newspapers, films and even commercials, and was used uncritically for decades.
In short, for a long period in the 20th century, the idea was widely accepted that the theory of evolution explained human origins.
However, the reality was quite different. Extant fossils do not harmonize with the evolutionist scheme. And the problem won't be solved by the discovery of more fossils; on the contrary, it will be complicated even further. Some authorities have begun to accept these facts. Among America's prominent paleontologists, Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History, make this important comment:
[It is a] . . . myth that the evolutionary histories of living things are essentially a matter of discovery. . . . But if this were really so, one could confidently expect that as more hominid fossils were found the story of human evolution would become clearer. Whereas if anything, the opposite has occurred.30
In his 1995 article, one of the well-known names in the theory of evolution, Harvard University professor Richard Lewontin, admits that Darwinism has fallen into a hopeless situation:
When we consider the remote past, before the origin of the actual species Homo sapiens, we are faced with a fragmentary and disconnected fossil record. Despite the excited and optimistic claims that have been made by some paleontologists, no fossil hominid species can be established as our direct ancestor.31
Many other evolutionist experts in this matter recently stated their pessimism about their theory. Henry Gee, for example, editor of the well-known magazine Nature, points out:
To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—-amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific. 32
The classic "human family tree" is being seriously criticized today. Scientists investigating the evidence without preconceptions assert that the line of descent from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens that evolutionists put forth is a total concoction, and the in-between species called Homo habilis and Homo erectus are imaginary.
In a 1999 article published in Science magazine, evolutionist paleontologists Bernard Wood and Mark Collard present their view that the H. habilis and H. rudolfensis are concocted categories and that fossils included in these categories should be transferred to the genus Australopithecus.33
Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan and the University of Canberra's Alan Thorne share the opinion that H. erectus is a fabricated category and fossils included in this classification are all variations of H. sapiens.34
This means that the fossils that evolutionists suggest represent the supposed evolutionary forebears of man belong either to extinct species of ape or else to human beings with different racial characteristics. None of these are half-human and half-ape; they are either ape or human.
According to some experts who acknowledge this reality, the myth of human evolution is nothing more than creative writing by a group of individuals who believe in materialist philosophy and represent natural history in terms of their own dogmatic ideas. At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Oxford historian John Durant commented on the matter:
Could it be that, like "primitive" myths, theories of human evolution reinforce the value-systems of their creators by reflecting historically their image of themselves and of the society in which they live?35
In a later publication, Durant says that it is worth asking whether ideas of so-called human evolution assumed similar functions both in pre-scientific and scientific societies, and goes on to say:
. . . Time and again, ideas about human origins turn out on closer examination to tell us as much about the present as about the past, as much about our own experiences as about those of our remote ancestors. . . [W]e are in urgent need of the de-mythologisation of science.36
In short, theories about human origins do nothing else than reflect the prejudices and philosophical beliefs of their authors. Another evolutionist who accepts this is Arizona State University anthropologist Geoffrey Clark, who wrote in a 1997 publication:
. . . paleoanthropology has the form but not the substance of a science . . . We select among alternative sets of research conclusions in accordance with our biases and preconceptions—a process that is, at once, both political and subjective.37
Inside Media Propaganda
As you see, claims about human evolution have been found to be baseless, even by those who played personal roles in their elaboration. The claims are not founded on science, but on the belief and prejudice that shaped the theory. Interestingly, none of these "admissions" from the world of paleontology has been reported in the media. On the contrary, a few media organizations carefully hide the dilemma that Darwinism has come up against and instill the deception that new proofs for evolution are discovered every day. Jonathan Wells, an American biologist, received two Ph.D.s, one from Yale University, and one from the University of California at Berkeley. In his 2000 book, Icons of Evolution, he outlines this propaganda mechanism:
The general public is rarely informed of the deep-seated uncertainty about human origins that is reflected in these statements by scientific experts. Instead, we are simply fed the latest version of somebody's theory, without being told that paleoanthropologists themselves cannot agree over it. And typically, the theory is illustrated with fanciful drawings of cave men, or human actors wearing heavy makeup... It seems that never in the field of science have so many based so much on so little. 38
Media organizations defending Darwinism claim in their headlines that "human evolution is now a proven fact." But who are the scientists writing in newspapers and appearing on television to make these groundless claims? Why do they disagree with those scientists who think that paleoanthropology is unfounded?
In a speech given at a meeting of the Biology Teachers Association of South Australia, evolutionist Greg Kirby explained their psychology:
If you were to spend your life picking up bones and finding little fragments of head and little fragments of jaw, there's a very strong desire there to exaggerate the importance of those fragments. . . 39
These are some of the factors that keep the myth of human evolution alive, even though it has evidently found no scientific support. And every new fossil discovered thrusts the evolutionist thesis about human origins deeper into doubt.
The Admission that There is no "Missing Link"
The latest example showing the impasse confronting evolutionist theses was a fossil skull discovered in the Central African country of Chad by the French scientist Michel Brunet, who called it Sahelanthropus tchadensis.
In the world of Darwinism, this fossil caused a division of opinion. The well-known magazine Nature admitted that "new-found skull could sink our current ideas about human evolution."40
Daniel Lieberman of Harvard University said that "this [discovery] will have the impact of a small nuclear bomb."41 The reason was that, although this fossil was 7 million years old, it had a more "human" structure (according to the evolutionist criteria) than Australopithecus, which lived only 5 million years ago and was claimed to be the "oldest human ancestor." This showed once again that the already battered human evolution scenario was untenable.
Bernard Wood, an evolutionist anthropologist from George Washington University in Washington, made an important explanation of the newly-discovered fossil. He said that the "ladder of evolution" myth impressed on people's minds throughout the 20th century had no validity, and that evolution could be compared to a bush:
When I went to medical school in 1963, human evolution looked like a ladder [that] stepped from monkey to man through a progression of intermediates, each slightly less ape-like than the last. Now human evolution looks like a bush. . . .
When I went to medical school in 1963, human evolution looked like a ladder [that] stepped from monkey to man through a progression of intermediates, each slightly less ape-like than the last. Now human evolution looks like a bush. . . .
How they are related to each other and which, if any of them, are human forebears is still debated.42
In an article for The Guardian newspaper, Henry Gee said this about arguments caused by the newly-found ape fossil:
Whatever the outcome, the skull shows, once and for all, that the old idea of a "missing link" [between apes and humans] is bunk. . . It should now be quite plain that the very idea of the missing link, always shaky, is now completely untenable.43
His important book In Search of Deep Time, published in 1999, explains that the myth of how human beings evolved, discussed for decades in the media and in so-called scientific evolutionist literature, was of no value:
. . . the evolution of Man is said to have been driven by improvements in posture, brain size, and the coordination between hand and eye, which led to technological achievements such as fire, the manufacture of tools, and the use of language. But such scenarios are subjective. They can never be tested by experiment, and so they are unscientific. They rely for their currency not on scientific test, but on assertion and the authority of their presentation. Given the ubiquitous chatter of journalists and headline writers about the search for ancestors, and the discovery of missing links, it may come as a surprise to learn that most professional palaeontologists do not think of the history of life in terms of scenarios or narratives, and that they rejected the storytelling mode of evolutionary history as unscientific more than thirty years ago.44
Gee states that no pattern of evolution can be extracted from the fossil record, and that there is only a number of unrelated fossils "floating around in an overwhelming sea of gaps":
New fossil discoveries are fitted into this preexisting story. We call these new discoveries "missing links", as if the chain of ancestry and descent were a real object for our contemplation, and not what it really is: a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices. . . . Each fossil represents an isolated point, with no knowable connection to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps.45
These very important admissions say that the theory of evolution, which for 150 years pretended to give a scientific answer to the question of our origins, was only a scenario imposed on science by a particular worldview. Gee refers to this saying "from our vantage point in the present, we arrange fossils in an order that reflects gradual acquisition of what we see in ourselves. We do not seek the truth; we create it after the fact, to suit our own prejudices."
Evolutionists have finally come to accept that the myth of the "tree of human evolution," impressed on people's minds for the past 150 years, was a human invention. In a 1996 article, the evolutionist biologist F. Clark Howell of UC Berkeley wrote: "There is no encompassing theory of [human] evolution. . . Alas, there never really has been."46
Evolutionists themselves explain that the "missing link," a popular theme for newspaper headlines, will always remain "missing" because there is no such thing. So, like other Darwinist myths, the myth of human evolution has been exposed.
As we will see in the next chapter, it has been replaced by "information" that proves that human beings were created by God.
Once, There Was no Knowledge of Biological Information
One of the most popular films of all time is the "Matrix." Those who have seen the second in the series, The Matrix Reloaded, will remember the sequence where all the characters were shown to be units of software, in an environment where every object was a unit of software. One scene shows a woman being given some pill, and in order to make the audience better understand that both she and the pill are software, her body and the pill are shown in silhouette composed of green digital numbers and letters. This visual effect, repeated in several scenes of the film, was designed to get the audience to understand that the characters they were seeing were actually the products of software.
Most of those watching The Matrix Reloaded were unaware that all the bodies in the real world are actually, in a sense, very complex pieces of software.
If you wanted to transpose its information to paper, you would have to build a library large enough to cover whole walls of a big room. If you compared it to other computer operating systems like Windows or Mac OS, you would see that your "software" is incomparably more complex and superior. Besides, the operating system in your computer often shuts down or freezes and you have to restart it. It even crashes, so that you lose all your information. However, nothing happens to your body's software as long as you are alive. If there is an error in this software, another part of the program corrects it and eliminates the problem.
But the software in your body is not composed of green digital numbers and letters as inThe Matrix Reloaded, but is made up of molecules—parts of a gigantic chain of molecules called DNA in the nucleus of each cell of the trillions that comprise your body.
Your DNA data bank contains all of your body's characteristics. This gigantic molecule is composed of a series of four different chemical units called bases. Like a four-letter alphabet, these bases store the information about all the organic molecules that will construct your body. That is, these chemical building blocks are not arranged randomly, but according to particular information, divided into "sentences" and "paragraphs" that scientists call genes. Each gene describes various details of your body—for example, the structure of your eye's transparent cornea, or the formula of the insulin hormone that lets your cells make use of the sugar you eat.
The discovery of DNA is acknowledged to be one of the most important in the history of science. In 1953, two young scientists by the name of Francis Crick and James Watson determined this molecule's existence and structure. In the half century since then, a significant part of the scientific world has tried to understand, decode, and read DNA, and put it to use. One of the greatest strides in this effort, the Human Genome Project, was begun in the 1990s and completed in 2001. The scientists directing this project sequenced the human genome—that is, the totality of all human genes—and took its flawless "inventory."
Of course, the Human Genome Project was to benefit not only medical and genetic engineers, but various professionals in all fields. But an equally, if not more important result was the insight it provided about the origins of DNA. In a news item headlined "Human Genome Map Has Scientists Talking About the Divine" in the San Francisco Chronicle, this was explained by Gene Myers, who worked for Celera Genomics, the producer company of the project:
We're deliciously complex at the molecular level. We don't understand ourselves yet, which is cool. There's still a metaphysical . . . element. What really astounds me is the architecture of life. The system is extremely complex. It's like it was designed. There's a huge intelligence there.47
The information contained in DNA invalidates Darwinism's view of life as the product of random chance and destroys its materialist "reductionist" foundation.
The End of Reductionism
As we know, materialist philosophy claims that everything is just matter; that matter always has been and always will be; and apart from it, there is nothing. In order to solidify their claims, materialists use a kind of logic they call "reductionism," which states that things that seem to be immaterial can be explained in terms of material influences.
For example, take the example of the human mind, which is not something that can be seen or touched. Moreover, there is no "mind center" in the brain. Inevitably, this leads us to conceive of the mind as something beyond matter. That is, what we call "I"—the thinking, loving personality able to feel pleasure and pain, that gets upset or happy is not a material object like a table or a stone.
However, materialists claim that mind can be reduced to matter. They claim that our ability to think, love, feel regret and all other mental activities are actually products of chemical reactions among the atoms in our brain. When we love someone, it is the influence of neurochemicals in certain cells in our brain; if we fear anything, that is due to another chemical reaction. Of this logic, the materialist philosopher Karl Vogt said, "the brain secretes thought just as the liver secretes bile."48 Bile is a material substance, but there is no proof that a thought is material.
Reductionism is a strictly logical operation. But any logical operation may rest on false foundations. One of the important methods in determining if this is so is by appealing to science. For this reason, we must pose the following question: Can reductionism—the basis of materialist logic—be substantiated in the light of scientific data?
In the 20th century, all scientific investigations, all observations, and the results of all experiments have given a resounding "No" to this question.
Dr. Werner Gitt, director at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology, says this:
A coding system always entails a nonmaterial intellectual process. A physical matter cannot produce an information code. All experiences show that every piece of creative information represents some mental effort and can be traced to a personal idea-giver who exercised his own free will, and who is endowed with an intelligent mind. . . There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter. . . 49
Gitt's words state the same conclusions arrived at by the so-called Information Theory, developed within the last few decades to investigate the origin and structure of information in the universe, and accepted as part of thermodynamics. After long research, it arrived at the conclusion that information is different from matter, that it can never be reduced to matter, and that the sources of information and matter must be investigated separately.
As we saw earlier, scientists who have investigated DNA's structure have stated that it contains a "magnificent" information. Since this information cannot be reduced to matter, it must originate in a source beyond matter.
George C. Williams, one of the proponents of the theory of evolution, admits that most materialists and evolutionists do not want to accept this result. Williams had been a strong advocate of materialism for many years, but states in an article written in 1995 that the materialist (reductionist) outlook that supposes that everything is matter is wrong:
Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter. . . These two domains will never be brought together in any kind of the sense usually implied by the term "reductionism." . . . The gene is a package of information, not an object. . . In biology, when you're talking about things like genes and genotypes and gene pools, you're talking about information, not physical objective reality. . . This dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains of existence, which have to be discussed separately, in their own terms.50
Reductionism is the product of the 18th and 19th centuries' unsophisticated science. This fundamental deception of Darwinism presupposed that life is so simple that its origins can be explained in terms of random occurrences. But 20th-century biology has shown that exactly the opposite is the case. Phillip Johnson, retired professor of the University of California at Berkeley and one of Darwinism's contemporary critics, explains that Darwinism has neglected information as the foundation of life and this has led it into error:
Post-Darwinian biology has been dominated by materialist dogma, the biologists have had to pretend that organisms are a lot simpler than they are. [According to them] Life itself must be merely chemistry. Assemble the right chemicals, and life emerges. DNA must likewise be a product of chemistry alone. As an exhibit in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History puts it, "volcanic gasses plus lightning equal DNA equals LIFE!" When queried about this fable, the museum spokesman acknowledged that it was simplified, but said it was basically true.51
However, these primitive and superficial suppositions all turned out to be without substance. As pointed out in this book's first chapter, even the cell, the most basic and the smallest form of life, is more complex than could ever have been imagined previously, and has been acknowledged to contain magnificent "information." It has been demonstrated how uninformed were the efforts to reduce information to matter (for example, the formula: volcanic gasses+lightening=DNA=life). Johnson explains the situation of those "reductionist" scientists who worked to reduce information to matter:
Reductionist biologists are not looking at reality, but only at life as it would have to be if the reductionist program is to succeed. It's the old story of the drunk who lost his car keys in the bushes, but was looking for them under the street lamp instead because "there's enough light to see them over here." 52
Today, more and more scientists have stopped looking for the key in the wrong place and chosen to go to the right address. Instead of vainly searching in random occurrences for the origins of life (and the magnificent information that constitutes it), they have accepted the evident truth that life is the result of a superior Creation. This knowledge has come to light especially in the 21st century, where computers and the Internet have become an important part of our lives. The outmoded 19th-century Darwinist idea that life is simple, with its lack of awareness of biological data, is an idea doomed to pass into the depths of history.
The truth is, God has created every creature on the face of the Earth and ordered everything perfectly in the flawless artistry of His Creation. He created the human body wonderfully and afterwards breathed His spirit into it. All the characteristics of human consciousness—the senses of sight and hearing, thought, feeling and emotion—did not result from the interaction of unconscious atoms, but are faculties of the spirit that God has given to human beings. In the Qur'an, He reminds people of the faculties He has given them:
Say: "It is He Who brought you into being and gave you hearing, sight and hearts. What little thanks you show!" (Surat al-Mulk: 23)
Everyone has the spirit given to him by God; and every individual is responsible to our Lord Who has created everything from nothing. In the Qur'an, God reveals the creation to those who think they have no purpose and tells them that after they die, they will rise again:
Does man reckon he will be left to go on unchecked? Was he not a drop of ejaculated sperm, then a blood-clot which He created and shaped, making from it both sexes, male and female? Is He Who does this not able to bring the dead to life? (Surat al-Qiyama: 36-40)
To understand this fact stressed by Professor Denton but unnoticed by Dawkins, we must first recognize that the retina's photoreceptor cells need a high level of energy and oxygen. While our eyes are open to perceive light, these cells are the locus of very complex chemical reactions every second. Photons, the smallest particles of light, are perceived by the cells and, as a result of the highly detailed chemical reactions begun by the photons, perception occurs and is repeated every instant. This reaction is so complex and rapid that, in Denton's words, "the photoreceptor layer has one of the highest metabolic rates of any known tissue."69
To keep up this high rate of metabolism, of course, the retina cells need a great deal of energy. A human being's retinal cells consume 150% as much oxygen as renal cells, three times as much as ones in the cerebral cortex and six times as much as the cells that make up the cardiac muscle. Moreover, this comparison is made on the basis of the entire retina layer; the photoreceptor cells, which make up less than half of this layer, actually need more energy than the whole layer estimates. In his encyclopedic book, The Vertebrate Eye, G. L. Walls, describes the photoreceptors as "greedy'' for both nutrients and oxygen.70
How do these cells, that enable us to see, meet their extraordinary need for nourishment and oxygen?
Through the blood, of course, like the rest of the body.
Where, then, does the blood come from?
At this point, we see why the inverted retina is a perfect sign of Creation. Right external to the retina layer lies a very important tissue of veins that envelop it like a net. Denton writes:
The oxygen and nutrients for the voracious metabolic appetite of the photoreceptors are provided by a unique capillary bed, called the choriocapillaris, which is an anatomizing network of large and flattened capillaries which form a rich vascular layer situated immediately external to the photoreceptors, separated from them only by the retinal cell epithelial cell layer (RPE) and a special membrane—Bruch's membrane—which together form a highly selective barrier which only allows passage into the retina of metabolites and nutrients required for the function of the RPE and photoreceptor cells. These capillaries are much larger than standard capillaries being between 18–50 microns in diameter. This unique network of blood channels gives every impression of being specially adapted to provide the photoreceptor layer with copious quantities of blood.71
In his book, An Introduction to the Biology of Vision, Professor James T. McIlwain writes, "Because of the great metabolic needs of the photoreceptors, the eye seems to have adopted the strategy of 'swamping' the choroid with blood to ensure that supply is never a problem."72
It is for this reason that the photoreceptors are "inverted." Clearly, there is a strategy here. The inverted arrangement of the retina is not faulty as Dawkins claimed, but is proof of Creation for a specific purpose.
In a relevant article, Denton examines whether the retina could have been formed in a different way. His conclusion was that it could not. Dawkins' suggestion that the retina should be flat, with the receptor cells facing the light, would distance them from the capillaries that nourish them and in great measure, would rob them of oxygen and nutrients they need. Extending the capillaries into the retina layer would not solve the problem, because this would produce many blind spots and reduce the eye's ability to see.
Denton comments:
The more deeply the design of the vertebrate retina is considered, the more it appears that virtually every feature is necessary and that in redesigning from first principles an eye capable of the highest possible resolution and of the highest possible sensitivity (capable of detecting an individual photon of light) we would end up recreating the vertebrate eye—complete with an inverted retina. . . 73
In short, the arguments of Dawkins and other evolutionists that "the vertebrate retina is faulty" derive from ignorance. Their conclusions have been vitiated by more informed and knowledgeable investigations of the minutiae of living creatures. Actually, in the history of Darwinism there have been many other arguments arising from ignorance. One is the myth of the "vestigial" organs.
The Myth of Vestigial Organs
You may have read that the human appendix and coccyx, or tail bone, are vestigial organs that once had important functions in our supposed evolutionary ancestors, but lost those functions over the course of time.
Lots of people have, because ever since Darwin, the myth of the vestigial organs has been the evolutionists' favorite propaganda material.
Lots of people have, because ever since Darwin, the myth of the vestigial organs has been the evolutionists' favorite propaganda material.
The myth started with The Origin of the Species' mention of organs whose functions were lost or reduced. Darwin described these organs as "rudimentary" and compared them with "the letters in a word, still retained in the spelling, but become useless in the pronunciation."74
In 1895, the German anatomist R. Wiedersheim proposed a list of about 100 human "vestigial organs," including the appendix and the tail bone.
But like other Darwinist claims, this too was a myth that thrived because of the unsophisticated level of science at the time. As research advanced, slowly it came to light that the organs that Darwin and his followers thought to be vestigial actually had important functions, as yet not been determined. With the development of science, it was discovered that Wiedersheim's list of organs had very important functions in the body. As their functions were discovered, the long list of "vestigial" organs grew steadily shorter. For example, it was discovered that the appendix, long regarded as vestigial, was a very important part of the lymphatic system that fights germs when they enter the body. An article titled "Examples of Bad Design Gone Bad," referring to some of the basic literature on anatomy, explains:
An examination of the appendix microscopically, shows that it contains a significant amount of lymphoid tissue. Similar aggregates of lymphoid tissue (known as gut-associated lymphoid tissues, GALT) occur in other areas of the gastrointestinal system. The GALT are involved in the body's ability to recognize foreign antigens in ingested material. My own research, in particular, is focused on examining the immunological functions of the intestine.
Experiments in rabbits demonstrate that neonatal appendectomy impairs the development of mucosal immunity. Morphological and functional studies of the rabbit appendix indicate that it is probably the equivalent of the avian bursa in mammals. The bursa plays a critical role in the development of humoral immunity in birds. The histological and immunohistochemical similarity of the rabbit and human appendix suggest that the human appendix has a similar function to that of the rabbit appendix. The human appendix may be particularly important early in life because it achieves its greatest development shortly after birth and then regresses with age, eventually resembling such other regions of GALT as the Peyer's patches in the small intestine. These recent studies demonstrate that the human appendix is not a vestigial organ, as originally claimed.75
In short, the reason why the appendix was famously thought to be vestigial was the dogmatism of Darwin and his followers, thanks in turn to the unsophisticated level of science of their time. With the primitive microscopes at their disposal, they could not observe the lymphatic tissue of the appendix; and because they could not understand its structure, they regarded it as useless and included it on their list of functionless vestigial organs. Once more, Darwinism was abetted by the unsophisticated level of 19th-century science.
This situation also pertained to all the other organs on Wiedersheim's list. As years went on, the tonsils that were thought to be vestigial were discovered to have an important role in protecting the throat from infection, especially before adulthood. It became known that the tail bone at the base of the spinal column supported the bones around the pelvis and therefore, if it were not for it, an individual could not sit comfortably. In addition, this bone was understood to be the point at which the organs and muscles of the pelvic region were held together.
In subsequent years, it was found that the thymus, thought to be vestigial, activates the T-cells and sets the body's immune system into operation; that the pineal gland is responsible for the secretion of essential hormones such as melatonin that controls production of the luteinizing hormone; that the thyroid gland ensures a balanced development of the infant and plays a role in setting the body's metabolic rate; and that the pituitary gland ensures the correct functioning of several hormonal glands such as the thyroid, the adrenals and the reproductive glands, as well as controlling the skeletal development.
The semi-lunar fold in the corner of the eye that Darwin called vestigial was shown to help clean and lubricate the eye.
Today, it has been determined that the organs claimed to be vestigial in past years all have definite functions. In their book titled "Vestigial Organs" Are Fully Functional, Dr. Jerry Bergman and Dr. George Howe set out this fact in detail.
Accordingly, it is accepted that the myth of vestigial organs subscribed to by so many evolutionists is an argument based on ignorance. In "Do 'Vestigial Organs' Provide Evidence for Evolution?," an article in the magazine Evolutionary Theory, the evolutionist biologist S.R. Scadding writes:
As our knowledge has increased, the list of vestigial structures has decreased. . . Since it is not possible to unambiguously identify useless structures, and since the structure of the argument used is not scientifically valid, I conclude that "vestigial organs" provide no special evidence for the theory of evolution.76
Even though it has taken evolutionists about one and a half century to reach this conclusion, another myth of Darwinism has evaporated.
The Panda's Thumb
The beginning of this chapter invalidated Richard Dawkins' claim that the vertebrate retina is faulty. Another evolutionist, supporting the same ideas, is the late Stephen J. Gould, a paleontologist at Harvard University. Before his death in 2002, he had become one of America's leading evolutionists.
Like Dawkins, Gould also wrote about an example of "faulty" characteristics—the thumb of the panda.
Unlike a human hand, a panda does not have an opposable thumb apart from its other four fingers that lets it hold objects easily. Its five digits extend out side by side. But besides these five parallel digits, there is also a projection in its wrist called the "radial sesamoid bone." The panda sometimes uses this bone as a finger, and so biologists call it the panda's thumb.
Gould claimed that this bone in the panda's hand was non-functional. Gould was so convinced of the importance of his thesis that in 1980, he published a book on the subject.
Like Dawkins' claim, however, Gould's thesis of faulty characteristic was also wrong. Gould's error lay in comparing the panda's hand with that of a human, assuming that the panda's thumb had the same function. On this matter, Paul Nelson makes the following comment:
Although the panda's thumb may be suboptimal for many tasks (such as typing), it does seem suited for what appears to be its usual function, stripping bamboo.77
The authors of The Giant Pandas of Wolong comment as follows:
The panda can handle bamboo stems with great precision, by holding them as if with forceps in the hairless groove connecting the pad of the first digit and pseudothumb. . . When watching a panda eat leaves. . . we were always impressed by its dexterity. Forepaws and mouth work together with great precision, with great economy of motion. . . 78
In a research published in 1999 by the magazine Nature showed that in its natural environment, the panda's thumb was extremely useful. This joint project conducted by four Japanese researchers employed computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging techniques and found that the panda's thumb is "one of the most extraordinary manipulation systems"79 in the world of mammals. This following comment comes from the same article, titled "Role of the Giant Panda's Pseudo-thumb":
We have shown that the hand of the giant panda has a much more refined grasping mechanism than has been suggested in previous morphological models. 80
In short, the claims made by evolutionists over the past 150 years of "vestigial organs" and "faulty" biological characteristics have all been proved false by closer investigations of the structures in question.
In short, the claims made by evolutionists over the past 150 years of "vestigial organs" and "faulty" biological characteristics have all been proved false by closer investigations of the structures in question.
Evolutionists cannot account for the origins of any biological structure in nature, and their objections to explaining these structures in terms of the fact of Creation have been shown to be invalid.
For that reason we can say that there was once such a thing as Darwinism, which claimed that living things were full of "faulty" or "vestigial" organs.
Today, this theory has been discredited by scientific evidence.
Once, It Was Believed that There Was "Embryological Evidence for Evolution"
In his most popular book The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin explained the proofs he thought he had found to support his theory of human origins. The only illustration in this book, right in the first chapter, is a drawing of two embryos: one of a human being and the other of a dog. In the chapter, "The Evidence of the Descent of Man from Some Lower Form," Darwin writes:
Embryonic Development: Man is developed from an ovule, about the 125th of an inch in diameter, which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals. The embryo itself at a very early period can hardly be distinguished from that of other members of the vertebrate kingdom. At this period . . . the slits on the sides of the neck [of human's embryo] still remain. . . 53After this, he states that his observations indicate that a human embryo closely resembles that of an ape, a dog or another vertebrate but that, in later stages of development in the womb, a differentiation occurs. In a letter to his friend, Asa Gray, Darwin considered the evidence from embryology to be "by far the strongest single class of facts in favor of" his theory.54
But Darwin was no embryologist. Never once did he investigate embryos in a comprehensive way. Therefore, in developing his arguments, he quoted individuals whom he regarded as authorities on this matter. In his footnotes, one name was particularly noticeable: the German biologist, Ernst Haeckel, whose book Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte (The Natural History of Creation) contained various drawings of embryos, together with his comments on them.
A short time later, Haeckel was to go down in history as the original author of evolutionist interpretation of embryology. He read The Origin of the Species (1859) with great excitement, accepted what Darwin wrote, and became a more avid evolutionist than Darwin himself. To make his own contribution to the theory, he conducted a series of experiments and publishedNaturliche Schopfungsgeschichte in 1868. In it, he advanced his theory of embryology that was to win him fame. From the beginning, he proposed that the embryos of human beings and certain animals developed in the same way. The drawings of the embryos of a human being, an ape and a dog on page 242 were proof of this. The drawings were apparently identical and, according to Haeckel, these creatures came from a common root.
In fact, it was the drawings, not these creatures, that came from a common root. Haeckel made a drawing of one embryo and then, after making slight changes to it, presented them together as embryos of a human being, an ape and a dog. When the same drawings were printed side by side, naturally they looked the same.55
This was the "work" that Darwin used as a source inThe Descent of Man.However, even before Darwin wrote his book, some noticed a major distortion in Haeckel's "work" and wrote about it. In 1868, L. Rutimeyer published an article in the science periodical Archiv für Anthropologie (Archives of Anthropology) that revealed Haeckel's falsifications. Rutimeyer, professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at Basle University, examined the embryo drawings in Naturlische Schopfungsgeschichteand Über die Entstehung und den Stammbaum des Menschengeschlechts and demonstrated that the drawings in both books had nothing to do with reality. As Rutimeyer wrote:
Haeckel claims these works to be easy for the scientific layman to follow, as well as scientific and scholarly. No one will quarrel with the first evaluation of the author, but the second quality is not one that he seriously can claim. These works are clothed in medieval formalistic garb. There is considerable manufacturing of scientific evidence. Yet the author has been very careful not to let the reader become aware of this state of affairs.56
Despite this, Darwin and other biologists who supported him continued to accept Haeckel's drawings as a reference. And this encouraged Haeckel to try to make embryology a strong support for Darwinism. His observations produced no such support, but he regarded his drawings as more important than his observations. In following years, he made a series of comparative drawings of embryos and composed charts comparing the embryos of fish, salamanders, frogs, chickens, rabbits and human beings. The interesting thing about these side-by-side charts was that the embryos of these various creatures closely resembled one another, at first, but slowly began to differentiate in the course of their development. Particularly striking was the similarity between the embryos of a fish and a human being; so much so that in the drawings, the human embryo had what looked like gills. On the so-called scientific basis of these drawings, Haeckel proclaimed his theory that "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." This slogan represented his belief that in the course of its development, either in the egg or in its mother's womb, every creature repeats the history of its own species, from the beginning. For example, a human embryo first resembles a fish, in later weeks a salamander, then it passes through the reptilian and mammalian stages before "evolving" into a recognizable human being.
The concept conveyed in the slogan "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" quickly became known as the "recapitulation theory," and in a very short time this myth became one of the most important proofs for evolution. Throughout the 20th century, countless students saw the chart of the human embryo's imaginary progress from fish, through salamander, chicken and rabbit; and the myth that the human embryo had gills for a while became an accepted fact. Even today, many supporters of the theory of evolution, if asked, would cite this as one of its proofs.
However, this is pure fabrication. In fact, the embryos of various creatures did not at all resemble one another. Haeckel's drawings made all sorts of misrepresentations. To some embryos, he added imaginary organs, removed organs from others, and showed larger and smaller embryos as all the same size.
In the human embryo, the slits that Haeckel represented as gills were really the beginning of the middle ear canal, the parathyroid, and the thymus glands. Haeckel's other comparisons are also now known to be deceptions; what he made look like a "yolk sac" in the embryo is actually a sac that produces blood for the baby. The structure that Haeckel and his followers called the "tail" was actually the human spine, which resembled a tail only because it formed before the legs did.
At the beginning of the 20th century, it came to light that Haeckel had falsified his drawings and he openly confessed to this, saying:
After this compromising confession of "forgery" I should be obliged to consider myself condemned and annihilated if I had not the consolation of seeing side by side with me in the prisoner's dock hundreds of fellow-culprits, among them many of the most trusted observers and most esteemed biologists. The great majority of all the diagrams in the best biological textbooks, treatises and journals would incur in the same degree the charge of "forgery," for all of them are inexact, and are more or less doctored, schematized and constructed. 57
But despite his avowal, Darwinists liked his propaganda material and refused to give up using it. They ignored the fact that the drawings were false and for decades, textbooks and much evolutionist literature presented them as authentic.
The fact that Haeckel's drawings were falsifications was loudly expressed only in the second half of the 1990s. The September 5, 1997 edition of the Sciencemagazine published "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered," an article by Elizabeth Pennisi explaining that his drawings were fabrications. As she wrote:
The impression they [Haeckel's drawings] give, that the embryos are exactly alike, is wrong, says Michael Richardson, an embryologist at St. George's Hospital Medical School in London. . . So he and his colleagues did their own comparative study, reexamining and photographing embryos roughly matched by species and age with those Haeckel drew. Lo and behold, the embryos "often looked surprisingly different," Richardson reports in the August issue ofAnatomy and Embryology. 58
The impression they [Haeckel's drawings] give, that the embryos are exactly alike, is wrong, says Michael Richardson, an embryologist at St. George's Hospital Medical School in London. . . So he and his colleagues did their own comparative study, reexamining and photographing embryos roughly matched by species and age with those Haeckel drew. Lo and behold, the embryos "often looked surprisingly different," Richardson reports in the August issue ofAnatomy and Embryology. 58
Science reported that, in order to show the similarity among the embryos, Haeckel deliberately removed some organs from the drawings or added imaginary ones. The article continues:
Not only did Haeckel add or omit features, Richardson and his colleagues report, but he also fudged the scale to exaggerate similarities among species, even when there were 10-fold differences in size. Haeckel further blurred differences by neglecting to name the species in most cases, as if one representative was accurate for an entire group of animals. In reality, Richardson and his colleagues note, even closely related embryos such as those of fish vary quite a bit in their appearance and developmental pathway. "It looks like it's turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology," Richardson concludes. 59
The article says that somehow, Haeckel's admissions were kept under cover since the beginning of this century and his drawings continued to be studied in textbooks as if they were authentic. The magazine says:
Haeckel's confession got lost after his drawings were subsequently used in a 1901 book called Darwin and After Darwin and reproduced widely in English-language biology texts.60
An article in the October 16, 1999 edition of New Scientist brought Haeckel's embryology myth completely out into the open:
[Haeckel] called this the biogenetic law, and the idea became popularly known as recapitulation. In fact Haeckel's strict law was soon shown to be incorrect. For instance, the early human embryo never has functioning gills like a fish, and never passes through stages that look like an adult reptile or monkey.61
Thus, what could be called the most popular supposed proof of all time for evolution—the "recapitulation" theory—was invalidated.
But even while Haeckel's fabrications came to light, another falsification close to that of Haeckel continued to go unnoticed: namely, Darwinism.
As we saw earlier, Darwin discounted other scientists' negative views of Haeckel's interpretative drawings at the time and used them to bolster his own theory. But this was not the only point where Darwinism diverged from the truth. Much more striking is that he presented the views of Karl Ernst von Baer—reputedly the most noted embryologist of the time—as distorted. Jonathan Wells' Icons of Evolution explains in detail that von Baer did not accept Darwin's theory and harshly refuted it. He was also firmly against evolutionist interpretations of embryology, formulating the rule that "the embryo of a higher form never resembles any other form, but only its embryo."62 He also said that Darwinists dogmatically "accepted the Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis as true before they set to the task of observing embryos."63 But, after the third edition of The Origin of the Species, Darwin distorted von Baer's interpretations and conclusions and used them to bolster his own theory. As Wells explains:
Darwin cited von Baer as the source of his embryological evidence, but at the crucial point, Darwin distorted that evidence to make it fit his theory. Von Baer lived long enough to object to Darwin's misuse of his observations, and he was a strong critic of Darwinian evolution until his death in 1876. But Darwin persisted in citing him anyway, making him look like a supporter of the very doctrine of evolutionary parallelism he explicitly rejected.64
In short, Darwin exploited his time's primitive scientific conditions to make false and prejudiced deductions; and took advantage of the limitations in communications in order to distort other scientists' findings.
This fact's coming to light—late though it is—is doubtlessly a major blow to Darwinism. Darwin received help from Haeckel's falsifications and portrayed embryology as in favor of his theory.65 Many people were deceived by this myth and in their naïve ignorance, accepted that they once had gills.
But that was then. Now it is known that embryology does not prove Darwinism. Now the same slogan must be reiterated in the field of embryology.
Once upon a time, there was Darwinism!
Once, There Was the Myth of Faulty Characteristics
Oxford University zoology professor Richard Dawkins is one of the well-known evolutionists in the world today. He is known not by his work on zoology, but by his avid championing of Darwinism and atheism.
In 1986, he published his book entitled The Blind Watchmaker, in which he tried to persuade readers that living creatures' complex characteristics were the result of natural selection. His attempts were mostly based on speculation, faulty comparisons and wrong calculations that various scientists and writers have since exposed in detail.66
One of Dawkins' arguments was that of "faulty" or "bad" characteristics in living things. He stated that some structures in living creatures were useless and that, therefore, they were faulty, trying to do away with the fact that a flawless creation reigns. The foremost example he gave was the inverted retina in the vertebrate eyes, including the human eye.
An inverted retina in the vertebrate eye means that photoreceptors are located in the eye backwards, not frontwards where the light enters. The sensory ends of these light-perceiving cells face the back, and the retinal nerves coming out from them form a layer between light and the cells. These nerves converge to a certain point on the retina where they exit the eye. Because there are no photoreceptors at this point, it is the eye's "blind spot," where there is no vision.
Darwinists have adopted this inversion and the blind point as flaws; that the eye came to be through natural selection and that such oddities are to be expected. As said earlier, Richard Dawkins is the well-known proponent of this argument. In The Blind Watchmaker he writes:
Any engineer would naturally assume that the photocells would point towards the light, with their wires leading backwards towards the brain. He would laugh at any suggestion that the photocells might point away from the light, with their wires departing on the side nearest the light. Yet this is exactly what happens in all vertebrate eyes.67
However, Dawkins and those who accept what he says are wrong because of Dawkins's ignorance of the eye's anatomy and physiology.
A scientist who gives a detailed account of this matter is molecular biologist Michael Denton of the University of Otago who is also one of the most prominent critics of Darwinism today. In "The Inverted Retina: Maladaption or Pre-adaptation?," published in Origins and Design magazine, he explains how the inverted retina that Dawkins presented as faulty is actually created in the most efficient manner possible for the vertebrate eye:
To understand this fact stressed by Professor Denton but unnoticed by Dawkins, we must first recognize that the retina's photoreceptor cells need a high level of energy and oxygen. While our eyes are open to perceive light, these cells are the locus of very complex chemical reactions every second. Photons, the smallest particles of light, are perceived by the cells and, as a result of the highly detailed chemical reactions begun by the photons, perception occurs and is repeated every instant. This reaction is so complex and rapid that, in Denton's words, "the photoreceptor layer has one of the highest metabolic rates of any known tissue."69. . . consideration of the very high energy demands of the photoreceptor cells in the vertebrate retina suggests that rather than being a challenge to teleology, the curious inverted design of the vertebrate retina may in fact represent a unique solution to the problem of providing the highly active photoreceptor cells of higher vertebrates with copious quantities of oxygen and nutrients.68
To keep up this high rate of metabolism, of course, the retina cells need a great deal of energy. A human being's retinal cells consume 150% as much oxygen as renal cells, three times as much as ones in the cerebral cortex and six times as much as the cells that make up the cardiac muscle. Moreover, this comparison is made on the basis of the entire retina layer; the photoreceptor cells, which make up less than half of this layer, actually need more energy than the whole layer estimates. In his encyclopedic book, The Vertebrate Eye, G. L. Walls, describes the photoreceptors as "greedy'' for both nutrients and oxygen.70
How do these cells, that enable us to see, meet their extraordinary need for nourishment and oxygen?
Through the blood, of course, like the rest of the body.
Where, then, does the blood come from?
At this point, we see why the inverted retina is a perfect sign of Creation. Right external to the retina layer lies a very important tissue of veins that envelop it like a net. Denton writes:
The oxygen and nutrients for the voracious metabolic appetite of the photoreceptors are provided by a unique capillary bed, called the choriocapillaris, which is an anatomizing network of large and flattened capillaries which form a rich vascular layer situated immediately external to the photoreceptors, separated from them only by the retinal cell epithelial cell layer (RPE) and a special membrane—Bruch's membrane—which together form a highly selective barrier which only allows passage into the retina of metabolites and nutrients required for the function of the RPE and photoreceptor cells. These capillaries are much larger than standard capillaries being between 18–50 microns in diameter. This unique network of blood channels gives every impression of being specially adapted to provide the photoreceptor layer with copious quantities of blood.71
In his book, An Introduction to the Biology of Vision, Professor James T. McIlwain writes, "Because of the great metabolic needs of the photoreceptors, the eye seems to have adopted the strategy of 'swamping' the choroid with blood to ensure that supply is never a problem."72
It is for this reason that the photoreceptors are "inverted." Clearly, there is a strategy here. The inverted arrangement of the retina is not faulty as Dawkins claimed, but is proof of Creation for a specific purpose.
In a relevant article, Denton examines whether the retina could have been formed in a different way. His conclusion was that it could not. Dawkins' suggestion that the retina should be flat, with the receptor cells facing the light, would distance them from the capillaries that nourish them and in great measure, would rob them of oxygen and nutrients they need. Extending the capillaries into the retina layer would not solve the problem, because this would produce many blind spots and reduce the eye's ability to see.
Denton comments:
The more deeply the design of the vertebrate retina is considered, the more it appears that virtually every feature is necessary and that in redesigning from first principles an eye capable of the highest possible resolution and of the highest possible sensitivity (capable of detecting an individual photon of light) we would end up recreating the vertebrate eye—complete with an inverted retina. . . 73
In short, the arguments of Dawkins and other evolutionists that "the vertebrate retina is faulty" derive from ignorance. Their conclusions have been vitiated by more informed and knowledgeable investigations of the minutiae of living creatures. Actually, in the history of Darwinism there have been many other arguments arising from ignorance. One is the myth of the "vestigial" organs.
The Myth of Vestigial Organs
You may have read that the human appendix and coccyx, or tail bone, are vestigial organs that once had important functions in our supposed evolutionary ancestors, but lost those functions over the course of time.
Lots of people have, because ever since Darwin, the myth of the vestigial organs has been the evolutionists' favorite propaganda material.
Lots of people have, because ever since Darwin, the myth of the vestigial organs has been the evolutionists' favorite propaganda material.
The myth started with The Origin of the Species' mention of organs whose functions were lost or reduced. Darwin described these organs as "rudimentary" and compared them with "the letters in a word, still retained in the spelling, but become useless in the pronunciation."74
In 1895, the German anatomist R. Wiedersheim proposed a list of about 100 human "vestigial organs," including the appendix and the tail bone.
But like other Darwinist claims, this too was a myth that thrived because of the unsophisticated level of science at the time. As research advanced, slowly it came to light that the organs that Darwin and his followers thought to be vestigial actually had important functions, as yet not been determined. With the development of science, it was discovered that Wiedersheim's list of organs had very important functions in the body. As their functions were discovered, the long list of "vestigial" organs grew steadily shorter. For example, it was discovered that the appendix, long regarded as vestigial, was a very important part of the lymphatic system that fights germs when they enter the body. An article titled "Examples of Bad Design Gone Bad," referring to some of the basic literature on anatomy, explains:
An examination of the appendix microscopically, shows that it contains a significant amount of lymphoid tissue. Similar aggregates of lymphoid tissue (known as gut-associated lymphoid tissues, GALT) occur in other areas of the gastrointestinal system. The GALT are involved in the body's ability to recognize foreign antigens in ingested material. My own research, in particular, is focused on examining the immunological functions of the intestine.
Experiments in rabbits demonstrate that neonatal appendectomy impairs the development of mucosal immunity. Morphological and functional studies of the rabbit appendix indicate that it is probably the equivalent of the avian bursa in mammals. The bursa plays a critical role in the development of humoral immunity in birds. The histological and immunohistochemical similarity of the rabbit and human appendix suggest that the human appendix has a similar function to that of the rabbit appendix. The human appendix may be particularly important early in life because it achieves its greatest development shortly after birth and then regresses with age, eventually resembling such other regions of GALT as the Peyer's patches in the small intestine. These recent studies demonstrate that the human appendix is not a vestigial organ, as originally claimed.75
In short, the reason why the appendix was famously thought to be vestigial was the dogmatism of Darwin and his followers, thanks in turn to the unsophisticated level of science of their time. With the primitive microscopes at their disposal, they could not observe the lymphatic tissue of the appendix; and because they could not understand its structure, they regarded it as useless and included it on their list of functionless vestigial organs. Once more, Darwinism was abetted by the unsophisticated level of 19th-century science.
This situation also pertained to all the other organs on Wiedersheim's list. As years went on, the tonsils that were thought to be vestigial were discovered to have an important role in protecting the throat from infection, especially before adulthood. It became known that the tail bone at the base of the spinal column supported the bones around the pelvis and therefore, if it were not for it, an individual could not sit comfortably. In addition, this bone was understood to be the point at which the organs and muscles of the pelvic region were held together.
In subsequent years, it was found that the thymus, thought to be vestigial, activates the T-cells and sets the body's immune system into operation; that the pineal gland is responsible for the secretion of essential hormones such as melatonin that controls production of the luteinizing hormone; that the thyroid gland ensures a balanced development of the infant and plays a role in setting the body's metabolic rate; and that the pituitary gland ensures the correct functioning of several hormonal glands such as the thyroid, the adrenals and the reproductive glands, as well as controlling the skeletal development.
The semi-lunar fold in the corner of the eye that Darwin called vestigial was shown to help clean and lubricate the eye.
Today, it has been determined that the organs claimed to be vestigial in past years all have definite functions. In their book titled "Vestigial Organs" Are Fully Functional, Dr. Jerry Bergman and Dr. George Howe set out this fact in detail.
Accordingly, it is accepted that the myth of vestigial organs subscribed to by so many evolutionists is an argument based on ignorance. In "Do 'Vestigial Organs' Provide Evidence for Evolution?," an article in the magazine Evolutionary Theory, the evolutionist biologist S.R. Scadding writes:
As our knowledge has increased, the list of vestigial structures has decreased. . . Since it is not possible to unambiguously identify useless structures, and since the structure of the argument used is not scientifically valid, I conclude that "vestigial organs" provide no special evidence for the theory of evolution.76
Even though it has taken evolutionists about one and a half century to reach this conclusion, another myth of Darwinism has evaporated.
The Panda's Thumb
The beginning of this chapter invalidated Richard Dawkins' claim that the vertebrate retina is faulty. Another evolutionist, supporting the same ideas, is the late Stephen J. Gould, a paleontologist at Harvard University. Before his death in 2002, he had become one of America's leading evolutionists.
Like Dawkins, Gould also wrote about an example of "faulty" characteristics—the thumb of the panda.
Unlike a human hand, a panda does not have an opposable thumb apart from its other four fingers that lets it hold objects easily. Its five digits extend out side by side. But besides these five parallel digits, there is also a projection in its wrist called the "radial sesamoid bone." The panda sometimes uses this bone as a finger, and so biologists call it the panda's thumb.
Gould claimed that this bone in the panda's hand was non-functional. Gould was so convinced of the importance of his thesis that in 1980, he published a book on the subject.
Like Dawkins' claim, however, Gould's thesis of faulty characteristic was also wrong. Gould's error lay in comparing the panda's hand with that of a human, assuming that the panda's thumb had the same function. On this matter, Paul Nelson makes the following comment:
Although the panda's thumb may be suboptimal for many tasks (such as typing), it does seem suited for what appears to be its usual function, stripping bamboo.77
The authors of The Giant Pandas of Wolong comment as follows:
The panda can handle bamboo stems with great precision, by holding them as if with forceps in the hairless groove connecting the pad of the first digit and pseudothumb. . . When watching a panda eat leaves. . . we were always impressed by its dexterity. Forepaws and mouth work together with great precision, with great economy of motion. . . 78
In a research published in 1999 by the magazine Nature showed that in its natural environment, the panda's thumb was extremely useful. This joint project conducted by four Japanese researchers employed computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging techniques and found that the panda's thumb is "one of the most extraordinary manipulation systems"79 in the world of mammals. This following comment comes from the same article, titled "Role of the Giant Panda's Pseudo-thumb":
We have shown that the hand of the giant panda has a much more refined grasping mechanism than has been suggested in previous morphological models. 80
In short, the claims made by evolutionists over the past 150 years of "vestigial organs" and "faulty" biological characteristics have all been proved false by closer investigations of the structures in question.
In short, the claims made by evolutionists over the past 150 years of "vestigial organs" and "faulty" biological characteristics have all been proved false by closer investigations of the structures in question.
Evolutionists cannot account for the origins of any biological structure in nature, and their objections to explaining these structures in terms of the fact of Creation have been shown to be invalid.
For that reason we can say that there was once such a thing as Darwinism, which claimed that living things were full of "faulty" or "vestigial" organs.
Today, this theory has been discredited by scientific evidence.
Once, There Was the Myth of "Junk" DNA
The last support for faulty or vestigial structures discussed in the last chapter is the new—but recently discredited—concept of "junk" DNA.
In the second half of the 20th century, as we saw in the last chapter, the myth of vestigial organs began to collapse. Organs formerly thought to be useless turned out to have important functions, and the myth became untenable. But evolutionists, not wanting to do without the propaganda this myth afforded, embraced a new version of it, which claimed that some of the genes containing the organs' genetic code but not the organs themselves—were vestigial. The new concept that replaced "vestigial" organs was "junk" DNA.
This term "junk" referred to some sections of the huge DNA molecule in which is encoded all of a living creature's genetic data. According to evolutionist claims, a large part of DNA is now non-functional. These parts did have a function in the so-called past, but in time, after the alleged evolutionary changes, they became vestigial—in short, "junk." The parallel with Darwinism was quite clear, and in a short time, the concept of junk DNA became one of the most repeated terms in scientific literature. But this new version of the myth did not have a long lifespan. Especially with the announcement of the results of the Human Genome Project in 2001, it was more and more loudly proclaimed in the scientific world that the whole concept was wrong, because the functions of so-called junk DNA were slowly being understood. Evan Eichler, an evolutionist scientist from the University of Washington, admitted that "The term 'junk DNA' is a reflection of our ignorance."81
Now, let's examine how the myth of junk DNA was born and how it was discredited.
The Misconception that Non-Coding DNA is Useless
To better understand this evolutionist error, we must know something about the structure of the DNA molecule.
This giant molecular chain within the cells of living creatures is often referred to as a data bank, because of the genetic information it contains. At the same time, this molecule contains a genetic code that directs how this data is employed in the body's activities. As detailed in the previous chapters, every evolutionist's attempt to explain the origin of the DNA molecule has been unsuccessful, and it's been established that the data it contains could not have come into existence at random. The DNA molecule is clearly an example of a superior Creation.
The special parts of DNA encoding our physical characteristics and physiological activities are called genes, which play a role in the synthesis of various proteins and ensure that we survive. But the totality of our genes makes up only about 10% of our DNA. The remaining 90% is known as "non-coding DNA" because it does not direct the production of any proteins.
Non-coding DNA can be categorized into some sub-groups. Sometimes, it's found squeezed between genes and is called an intron. Another kind, called repetitive DNA, is formed by repeated nucleotide sequences extending the length of the chain. If the nucleotides on non-coding DNA were arranged in a way similar to the complex series in a gene, instead of in a repetitive series, they would be called a pseudogene.
Evolutionists have lumped these non-protein-coding segments of DNA under the general heading of "junk DNA" and asserted that they are unnecessary leftovers in the so-called process of evolution. However, this endeavor has clearly been illogical: Just because these DNA segments do not code for proteins does not imply that they have no function. In order to determine these functions, we have to await the results of scientific experiments to be done on them. But evolutionist prejudice, with its longstanding misleading claims about junk DNA, has kept this logic from becoming disseminated in the public domain. In the past 10 years especially, research has shown that evolutionists are wrong and their claims imaginary. The non-coding part of DNA is not "junk" as the evolutionists claim, but on the contrary, is now accepted as a "genomic treasure." 82
Paul Nelson, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, is one of the leading exponents of the anti-evolutionist movement. In an article titled "The Junk Dealer Ain't Selling That No More," he describes the collapse of the evolutionists' theory of junk DNA:
Carl Sagan [one of the proponents of atheism] argued that "genetic junk," the "redundancies, stutters, [and] untranscribable nonsense" in DNA, proved that there are "deep imperfections at the heart of life". Such comments are commonplace in the biological literature—although perhaps less common than they were a few years ago. The reason? Geneticists are discovering functions for what used to be apparent genetic debris.83
But how did they discover that "junk DNA" is not junk after all?
1. Coding criteria relative to linguistic ability were discovered in the non-coding nucleotide sequence.
In 1994, the joint experiments on non-coding DNA carried out by molecular biologists of Harvard Medical School and physicists of Boston University revealed some striking results. Researchers studied 37 DNA sequences from various organisms and having at least 50,000 base pairs, to determine if there were any particular patterns in the nucleotide arrangement. This study showed that 90% of human DNA, which was previously supposed to be junk, actually possessed structural similarities to natural languages!84 That is, a common coding criterion found in every spoken language in the world was discovered to exist in the arrangement of nucleotides in DNA. This discovery provided no support for the thesis that the data in the so-called junk DNA was assembled by chance; on the contrary, it supported a superior Creation as the basis of life.
2. Repetitive heterochromatin shows an amazing functionality: Nucleotides that appear meaningless by themselves perform important functions together and play a role in the meiotic division.
Recently, scientists have discovered the functions of heterochromatin, one of the chromosome materials formerly thought to be junk. This code is often repeated in DNA, and since its role in the production of any protein could not be determined, it was long defined as meaningless.
Hubert Renauld and Susan Gasser of the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research comment that despite heterochromatin's significant representation in the genome (up to 15% in human cells and roughly 30% in flies), it has often been considered as "junk DNA," of no utility to the cell.85
But the latest studies have revealed that heterochromatin has some important functions. Emile Zuckerkandl of the Institute of Molecular Medical Sciences has this to say:
. . . [I]f one adds together nucleotides [DNA base pairs] that are individually nonfunctional, one may end up with a sum of nucleotides that are collectively functional. Nucleotides belonging to chromatin are an example. Despite all arguments made in the past in favor of considering heterochromatin as junk, many people active in the field no longer doubt that it plays functional roles. . . . Nucleotides may individually be junk, and collectively, gold. 86
One of these "collective" functions of heterochromatin can be seen in meiotic pairing. At the same time, studies of artificial chromosomes show that these segments of DNA have various functions.87
3. Researchers have shown a relationship between non-coding DNA and the cell nucleus—a development that spells the end of the "junk DNA" concept.
A 1999 study examining the genomes of the single-celled photosynthetic organisms known as Cryptomonads discovered that eukaryotic non-coding DNA (also called secondary DNA) was functional in the nucleus.
Characteristically, these organisms show a wide variation in size. But even if they are of varying dimensions, there always remains a direct proportion between the size of their nucleus and that of the overall cell.
Seeing the proportion between the amount of non-coding DNA and the size of the nucleus, researchers concluded that more non-coding DNA was a structural necessity required in larger nuclei. This new research was a major blow to such concepts as junk DNA and Dawkins' "selfish" DNA that dismiss the fact of Creation.88 The researchers concluded their report by saying:
Furthermore, the present lack of significant amounts of nucleomorph secondary DNA . . . refut[es] "selfish" and "junk" theories of secondary DNA.89
4. Non-coding DNA was discovered to be necessary for the chromosome structure.
In the past few years, another important role played by non-coding DNA has been discovered: It is absolutely necessary for the structure and functioning of chromosomes. Studies have shown that non-coding DNA provides the structure that lets DNA perform various functions—which it cannot in the absence of a formed structure. Scientists observed that elimination of a telomere (the DNA-protein complexes at both ends of chromosomes that grow smaller after cell division) from a yeast chromosome caused a cell cycle arrest.90 This indicates that telomeres help the cell distinguish between intact chromosomes and damaged DNA. In those cells which recovered from the arrest without repairing the damaged chromosome, the chromosome was eventually lost. This also demonstrates that telomeres belonging to non-coding DNA are necessary to maintain chromosome stability.
5. The discovery of non-coding DNA's role in the development of an embryo
There is proof that during development, non-coding DNA plays a major role in regulating the gene expression (the process by which a gene's coded information is converted into the structures present and operating in the cell).91 Various studies have shown that non-coding DNA plays a role in the development of photoreceptor cells92, of the reproductive tract93, and the central nervous system.94 All this shows that non-coding DNA plays vital roles in embryogenesis, or embryonic development.
6. Introns (considered as junk DNA segments) have been shown to play a vital role in cell functioning.
For years, evolutionists thought introns, which are squeezed between functional genes and are spliced out in the process of producing proteins, to be junk DNA, but only later discovered their importance.
At first, evolutionists thought that introns had no role in the production of proteins and regarded them as merely junk. However, research has proven that they play a vitally important role and today, introns are recognized as "a complex mix of different DNA, much of which are vital to the life of the cell."95
A short but interesting article in the science column of The New York Times exposed the errors of evolutionists with regard to introns. In "DNA: Junk or Not?," C. Claiborne Ray sums up the results of research on introns:
For years, more and more research has, in fact, suggested that introns are not junk but influence how genes work. . . introns do have active roles. 96
This article emphasizes that in the light of the latest scientific developments, supposedly "junk DNA" like introns really do play a useful role in the life of organisms.
All these developments not only reveal new information about non-coding DNA, but also clearly point to the very important fact that the evolutionist concept of junk DNA was based on lack of knowledge and "ignorance" as Evan Eichler admitted.97
The Last Support for the Myth of Junk DNA has Fallen: A Pseudogene has been Shown to be Functional
Since the 1990s, important developments have all shown that the concept of junk DNA was an evolutionist error based on lack of knowledge. Non-coding DNA, like introns interrupting the sequence of genes and repetitive DNA found as longer sequences, have been shown to be functional. There was only one kind of non-coding DNA left whose functionality was unknown: pseudogenes.
The prefix pseudo means "false, deceptive." Evolutionists gave the name "pseudogene" to a DNA segment produced by a functional gene that had apparently undergone a mutation and lost its functionality. Pseudogenes have a special significance for evolutionists, who covertly acknowledge that mutations cannot bring about evolution and have resorted to pseudogenes as a means to deceive people.
Countless experiments on living things have shown that mutations always result in a loss of genetic data. Just as a few random blows with a hammer will not lead to improvements in the running of a clock, mutations have never led to the development of new organisms, or cause existing ones to evolve. Although the theory of evolution requires an increase in genetic data, mutations always reduce and destroy them.
Evolutionists, lacking even a single demonstrable mechanism to support their theory, presented pseudogenes as by-products of a phantom mechanism functioning in an imaginary evolutionary process. They claimed that these allegedly useless DNA segments were molecular "fossils" of so-called evolution. Their only support for this claim was the lack of knowledge as to whether these genes had any real function.
That is, up until May 1, 2003.
That was when Nature magazine published a study showing the functionality of pseudogenes. In a letter titled "An expressed pseudogene regulates the messenger-RNA stability of its homologous coding gene," researchers told of their observations in mice prepared for an experiment.98 According to the information they gave, fatal mutations occurred in a line of transgenic mice as a result of genetic changes in pseudogenes called Makorin1-p1. They observed in the mice polycystic kidneys and bone deformity.
It became evident why a change in the arrangement of the pseudogene would have such a disastrous effect on the mice's organs: A pseudogene is not just functional, but necessary.
An article in Nature evaluating this research stated that this discovery challenged the popular belief of evolutionists that pseudogenes were simply "molecular fossils."99 And so, one more evolutionist myth collapsed.
Just three weeks after pseudogenes were revealed to have a biological function after all, a study in the May 23, 2003 issue of Science dealt another severe blow to the idea of junk DNA100 revealing yet another function of the non-coding DNA. Evolutionists apprised of all these developments had no other choice but to accept that the time had come to "junk" their concept of junk DNA. The title of an article by Wojciech Makalowski of Pennsylvania State University shows the change: "Not Junk After All." Makalowski sums up the situation in these words:
. . . [T]he view of junk DNA, especially repetitive elements, began to change in the early 1990s. Now, more and more biologists regard repetitive elements as a genomic treasure. . . These two papers demonstrate that repetitive elements are not useless junk DNA but rather are important, integral components of eukaryotic genomes. . . Therefore, repetitive DNA should be called not junk DNA. . . 101
Once upon a time, you may have heard a lot about the idea of junk DNA and the evolutionist speculations connected with it.
But as outlined here, Darwinism's last assertion of "vestigiality"—junk DNA—has passed into history, and this last flutter of Darwinism has also been discredited.
Once, the Origin of Species Was Thought to Lie in "Speciation"
On June 14, 2003, an article entitled "How Are New Species Formed?" appeared in New Scientist, noted for its avid support of Darwinism. The author, George Turner, made this important admission:
Not long ago, we thought we knew how species formed. We believed that the process almost always started with complete isolation of populations. It often occurred after a population had gone through a severe "genetic bottleneck", as might happen after a pregnant female was swept off to a remote island and her offspring mated with each other. The beauty of this so-called "founder effect" model was that it could be tested in the lab. In reality, it just didn't hold up. Despite evolutionary biologists' best efforts, nobody has even got close to creating a new species from a founder population. What's more, as far as we know, no new species has formed as a result of humans releasing small numbers of organisms into alien environments.102
Actually, this admission is not new. In the century and a half since Darwin, no speciation such as he proposed has ever been observed, and no satisfactory explanation has ever been provided for the origin of species.
To explain this, it will be useful to examine what sort of "speciation" Darwin envisioned.
His theory depended on the observation of variations in the animal populations. Some of these observations were made by individuals who bred animals, raising quality breeds of dogs, cows or pigeons. From among the population, they selected ones with a desirable characteristic (for example, dogs that could run fast, cows that produced good milk or "smart" pigeons), and bred them. Within a few generations, their resulting offspring had a high proportion of the selected qualities. For example, the cows produced much more milk than ordinary cows.
This kind of "limited variation" made Darwin think that modification is continual in nature, and when it is extended over a long enough period of time, it produces a radical change, that is, evolution.
Darwin's second observation along these lines was that the various breeds of finches he saw in the Galapagos Islands had differently-shaped bills than finches on the mainland. In the islands, long-billed, short-billed, curved-billed and straight-billed strains of finches developed in the same population. Darwin concluded that these varieties turned into separate species by mating among themselves.
When Darwin assembled all these instances of variation, he was led to think that unlimited modification occurred in nature and that to develop brand-new species, orders and classes, only a long period of time was required. But Darwin was wrong.
When individuals with a given dominant characteristic are selected and bred, only better and stronger members of that species are produced. But this selective breeding can't possibly produce a different species. For example, a horse cannot descend from a cat, nor a giraffe from a gazelle, or a plum from a pear. Peaches do not turn into bananas nor do carnations turn into roses. In short, under no conditions can one species arise from another. The following pages will detail how Darwin was wrong on this matter.
The Natural Limits of Biological Change
Darwin supposed that the variations he observed in nature were never-ending. He thought that if only a few generations could show a change in cows, dogs and pigeons, then their entire structure could undergo alteration if given enough time. But in the 150 years that have passed since then, countless different experiments and observations have proven this supposition to be utterly false.
All 20th-century attempts to breed animals and produce hybrid plants have revealed limits that can never be crossed in the processes of natural variation. One of the most famous names in this field is Luther Burbank, who believed that there is a hidden law in species that limits their variation:
I know from my experience that I can develop a plum half an inch long or one two and a half inches long, with every possible length in between, but I am willing to admit that it is hopeless to try to get a plum the size of a small pea, or one as big as a grapefruit. . . In short, there are limits to the development possible, and these limits follow a law. . . Experiments carried on extensively have given us scientific proof of what we had already guessed by observation; namely that plants and animals all tend to revert, in successive generations, toward a given mean or average. . . In short, there is undoubtedly a pull toward the mean which keeps all living things within some more or less fixed limitations.103
Today, artificial means can make a few genetic changes in the biological structure of animals and agricultural products. Stronger horses and bigger cabbages can be produced. But Darwin clearly drew the wrong deductions from these instances. Loren Eisley, one of the world's most prominent anthropologists, explains:
It would appear that careful domestic breeding, whatever it may do to improve the quality of race horses or cabbages, is not actually in itself the road to the endless biological deviation which is evolution. There is great irony in this situation, for more than almost any other single factor, domestic breeding has been used as an argument for . . . evolution.104
And Edward S. Deevey, a biologist and ecologist at the University of Florida, points out that there is a limitation to variation in nature: "Wheat is still wheat, and not, for instance, grapefruit; and we can no more grow wings on pigs than hens can make cylindrical eggs." 105
Experiments conducted on fruit flies also struck the wall of "genetic limitation." In all of these experiments, fruit flies underwent changes to a certain extent, but beyond that limit, no change was observed. Ernst Mayr, a well-known neo-Darwinist, reports from two experiments done on fruit flies:
In the starting stock, the combined average bristle number of males and females on these segments was about 36. Selection for low bristle number was able to lower this average after 30 generations to 25 chaetae, after which the line soon died out owing to sterility. . . In the "high line" (selection for high bristle number), progress was at first rapid and steady. Within 20 generations bristle number had risen from 36 to an average 56, without marked spurts or plateaus. At this stage sterility became severe.106
After these experiments, Mayr reached the following conclusion:
Obviously any drastic improvement under selection must seriously deplete the store of genetic variability. . . The most frequent correlated response of one-sided selection is a drop in general fitness. This plagues virtually every breeding experiment.107
One of the most important texts dealing with this subject is Natural Limits to Biological Change written by biology professor Lane P. Lester and molecular biologist Raymond G. Bohlin. In their book's introduction, they write:
That populations of living organisms may change in their anatomy, physiology, genetic structure, etc., over a period of time is beyond question. What remains elusive is the answer to the question, How much change is possible, and by what genetic mechanism will these changes take place? Plant and animal breeders can marshal an impressive array of examples to demonstrate the extent to which living systems can be altered. But when a breeder begins with a dog, he ends up with a dog—a rather strange looking one perhaps, but a dog nonetheless. A fruit fly remains a fruit fly; a rose, a rose, and so on.108
The authors studied this subject with scientific observations and experiments and arrived at two basic conclusions:
The authors studied this subject with scientific observations and experiments and arrived at two basic conclusions:
1) No new genetic data can be obtained without external interference in the genes of organisms. Without such interference, new biological data cannot appear in nature. That is, new species, new organs, and new structures cannot come into being. It is only "genetic variation" that occurs naturally in a given species. These limited alterations include the development of, for example, shorter, larger, short-haired or long-haired breeds of dogs. Even given a million years, these variations will never produce new species or higher taxa (genera, families, orders, classes, phyla).
2) In nature, external interference with the genes of organisms comes about only through mutations. But these mutations are never beneficial nor produce new genetic data; they only destroy the existing one.
Therefore, it is impossible to explain the "origin of species" in terms of natural selection, as Darwin thought to do. No matter how much "selection" dogs are subjected to, they will always remain dogs; there is no sense in asserting that they were actually fish or bacteria in the past.
So, what of the "external interference" in the genes, or mutations?
Since the 1930s the Darwinist theory has relied on this alternative, and for this reason, the theory's name was changed to "neo-Darwinism." However, mutations were not able to rescue the theory—an important topic to examine separately.
Galapagos Creatures Refute Evolution
The various finches that Darwin observed in the Galapagos were an example of variation and, as with other examples, offered no definite proof for evolution. Observations made in the last few years have shown that finches have not undergone the kind of limitless alteration that Darwin's theory supposed. Moreover, most of the different types of finches, which Darwin thought to represent 14 separate species, were actually variations of the same species, able to mate with one another. Scientific observations have shown that the example of the finch's bill, cited by almost all evolutionist literature, is actually an example of variation which affords no proof for the theory of evolution. Peter and Rosemary Grant went to the Galapagos to look for proof for the so-called Darwinian evolution and spent years observing the finches on the islands; in their well-known study, they managed only to document the fact that evolution had not occurred.109
What Good are Mutations?
The data contained in the gene is highly complex, as are the molecular "machines" that code it, read it and perform their productive functions accordingly. No random event that can affect this system, and no "accident" can bring about any increase in the amount of genetic data.
Imagine a computer programmer engaged in writing a software when on computer and a book falls on his keyboard, striking a few keys and inserting random letters and numbers into the text. A mutation is something like this. Just as such an accident would contribute nothing to the computer program—in fact, it would ruin it—so mutations vandalize the genetic code. In Natural Limits to Biological Change, Lester and Bohlin write that "mutations are mistakes, errors in the precise machinery of DNA replication" which means "mutations, genetic variation, and recombination by themselves will not generate major evolutionary change." 110
This logically expected result was proven by observations and experiments in the 20th century. No mutation was observed to improve the genetic data of an organism so as to cause a radical change.
For this reason, despite the fact that he accepts the theory of evolution, Pierre-Paul Grassé, former president of the French Academy of Sciences, says that mutations are "merely hereditary fluctuations around a median position; a swing to the right, a swing to the left, but no final evolutionary effect. . . They modify what preexists." 111
Dr. Grassé says that in the case of evolution, the problem is that "some contemporary biologists, as soon as they observe a mutation, talk about evolution."In his view, this opinion does not agree with the facts because "no matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution." 112
The best evidence that mutations do not produce new genetic data is that of the fruit fly. Mutations done to fruit flies show that in nature, balance, not change, dominates organisms. Due to the fast gestation period of fruit flies, which lasts only 12 days, for years they have been the favorite subject of mutation experiments. In order to increase the mutation rate by 15,000 percent, X-rays were used in these experiments. Scientists could observe fruit flies that, in a short time, were subjected to the number of mutations they would be exposed to for millions of years under natural conditions. But even such rapid mutations produced no new species. Scientists were not able to obtain any new genetic data.
In fruit flies, the classic case of supposed "beneficial mutation" is the instance of the four-winged mutant. Normally, fruit flies have two wings, but some with four wings have hatched occasionally. Darwinist literature offers this example as a "development," but as Jonathan Wells has shown in detail in his Icons of Evolution, this interpretation is wrong. These extra wings have no muscles for flying and so are actually disadvantages to the fruit fly. And not one of these mutants has survived outside a laboratory.113
Despite all this, evolutionists assert that beneficial instances of mutation do occur, even if rarely; and that through natural selection, new biological structures come into being. However, this is a major error. A mutation certainly brings about no increase in genetic data and, therefore, does not foster evolution. As Lester and Bohlin explain:
Mutations will be capable only of modifying what already exists, usually in a meaningless or deleterious way. That is not to say that beneficial mutation is prohibited; unexpected maybe, but not impossible. A beneficial mutation is simply one that makes it possible for its possessors to contribute more offspring to future generations than do those creatures that lack the mutation. . . But these mutations have nothing to do with changing one kind of organism into another. . .
In this regard, Darwin called attention to the wingless beetles of Madeira. For a beetle living on a windy island, wings can be a definite disadvantage. Mutations causing the loss of flight are definitely beneficial. Similar would be the case of sightless cavefish. Eyes are quite vulnerable to injury, and a creature that lives in total darkness would benefit from mutations reducing their vulnerability. While these mutations produce a drastic and beneficial change, it is important to notice that they always involve loss, never gain. One never observes wings or eyes being produced in species that did not previously possess them.114
Therefore, Lester and Bohlin conclude that overall, mutations are always a cause of genetic impairment and degeneration.
Mutations always cause a loss of genetic data; to believe that they produced the extraordinarily complex genetic codes of the millions of different species is like believing that books falling randomly onto a computer keyboard have written millions of encyclopedias. It is unthinkable nonsense. Dr. Merle d'Aubigne, head of the Orthopedic Department at the University of Paris, makes this important comment:
I cannot be satisfied by the idea that fortuitous mutation . . . can explain the complex and rational organization of the brain, but also of lungs, heart, kidneys, and even joints and muscles. How is it possible to escape the idea of some intelligent and organizing force?115
In short, mutations do not explain Darwin's "origin of species." The Austrian evolutionist biologist Gerhard Müller, in a book review he wrote for the winter 2006 issue of the Biological Theory journal, admits the inability of the neo-Darwinian synthetic theory to account for the origin of morphological novelty.
Neo-Darwinism cannot explain the origin of living creatures in terms of its two mechanisms, natural selection and mutation. No genetic data can be yielded through natural selection; only the existing data is selected. Nor do mutations produce new genetic data; they rarely do not affect the existing data but usually destroy it. Clearly the origins of genetic data—and therefore, life—have none of these mindless natural mechanisms.
As Dr. Merle d'Aubigne stated, this origin is an "intelligent and organizing force." This power is Almighty God with His endless intelligence, knowledge and might. In the Qur'an, God says:
It is He Who originated creation and then regenerates it. That is very easy for Him. His is the most exalted designation in the heavens and the Earth. He is the Almighty, the All-Wise. (Surat ar-Rum: 27)
Darwinism has tried to deny this reality, but has not succeeded; it has become an outmoded theory buried in history.
The End of "Just-So Stories"
The attempt to explain the origin of species in terms of evolution has come to an impasse, as has been openly admitted by evolutionists over the past few years. The situation is summed up in a 1996 article by evolutionist biologists Gilbert, Opitz and Raff in the magazine, Developmental Biology. They write: "the origin of species—Darwin's problem—remains unsolved."116
But the man in the street is not aware of this situation. The Darwinist system prefers not to let the public know that in Darwin's terms, the question of the origin of species is unanswerable. Instead, through media and textbooks, it repeats the myths of evolution. In the world of science, these myths are called "just-so stories" and constitute the main source of motivation for those who accept the theory.
You will find one of the most familiar of these stories—about how humans came to walk on two feet—in almost every evolutionist text, with slight variations: Humanoid primates that were the ancestors of human beings lived among the trees in the African jungles. Their spines were stooped, and their hands and feet ideally shaped for clinging onto branches. Africa's jungle expanses later shrank, and humanoids migrated to the savannah. In order to be able to see above the savannah's tall grasses, they needed to stand upright, in other words on their feet. Thus it was that our ancestors came to stand and walk erect. Their hands were now off the ground; and as a result they began using their hands to make tools. The more they used their hands, the more their intelligence grew. They thus turned into human beings.
You can often find stories like this in evolutionist newspapers and magazines. Reporters who accept the theory of evolution, or whose knowledge of it is limited or superficial, relate these stories to their readers as if they were factual. However, more and more scientists proclaim that they have no scientific value. Dr. Collin Patterson, for years the senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History in London, writes:
It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favored by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test. 117
And in his book Fossils and Evolution (1999), the evolutionist paleontologist T.S. Kemp takes up the lack of scientific value in what has been written about the supposed evolution of birds:
A scenario for the origin of birds might be that during the Late Jurassic there was a selection pressure favouring the adoption of increasingly arboreal [tree-dwelling] habits acting on a group of small, lightly built bipedal dinosaurs. Arboreality increased their ability to escape predators and find new food sources. Subsequent selection forces promoted leaping, then gliding, and eventually powered flight from branch to branch and tree to tree. Absolutely none of these suppositions about the intermediate forms, the ecological conditions they lived in, or the selective forces to which they were subjected could be tested empirically. The outcome is the evolutionary scenario or, rather more pejoratively, the "Just-so Story".118
The subject that Patterson and Kemp deal with—that "just-so stories" cannot be tested and therefore have no scientific value—is only one aspect of the problem. A second, perhaps more important, aspect is that apart from the fact that these stories have no scientific support, they are impossible nonsense.
To explain why, let us return to the story of the "hominoids that started to walk on two feet."
To explain why, let us return to the story of the "hominoids that started to walk on two feet."
Jean Baptiste Lamarck invented this myth in the unsophisticated scientific world of 150 years ago. However, modern genetics has shown that a characteristic acquired over a lifetime is not passed down to the next generation. The relevance of this lies in the supposition that the so-called ancestors of human beings evolved with characteristics they had acquired during their lifetime. This scenario claims that hominoids stood up on their hind feet to see above the vegetation, freeing their hands for use, and as a result, their intelligence developed. Nothing of this sort ever happened. Besides, it is not possible for a creature to acquire characteristics simply by trying to stand up straight and by using hand tools. Even if we accept the possibility of such acquisition (which is scientifically impossible), these skills cannot be passed on to the next generation. Therefore, even if the impossible did take place and one ape could force its skeleton into an upright position, it could not pass on this habit to its offspring, and evolution would not occur.
So, why is this Lamarckian idea, discredited for more than a century, still trying to impose itself on society?
Evolutionists say that these "just-so stories" encapsulate an actual process of biological evolution. They do not believe that necessity gives birth to evolution, but that necessity guides natural selection in a particular direction. They also believe that it causes the selection of the mutations that will bring about results in that direction. That is, when they maintain that hominoids stood up on two feet, they are actually saying that it would have been advantageous for them to stand on two feet. Some stood up straight, with a skeleton that had mutated at just the right time; and those that stood up straight were chosen by natural selection.
In other words, the scientific explanations relevant to the mutation are completely ignored, because if these details are examined, it will appear that they are merely unscientific superstitions.
The evolutionists' just-so stories suppose that mutations will appear to supply whatever an organism needs and to ensure whatever advantages would suit it best.
Moreover, no mutation has been observed so far that develops genetic data.
To believe in this scenario is like believing in a magic wand that supplies a creature's every need. It is superstition.
Even though the French zoologist Pierre-Paul Grassé theoretically accepts evolution, he is aware of the reality of the situation and has come out strongly against Darwinism in describing its strange belief about mutations:
The opportune appearance of mutations permitting animals and plants to meet their needs seems hard to believe. Yet the Darwinian theory is even more demanding. A single plant, a single animal would require thousands and thousands of . . . appropriate events. Thus, miracles would become the rule: events with an infinitesimal probability could not fail to occur. . . There is no law against daydreaming, but science must not indulge in it.119
In short, Darwinism is a figment of the imagination with nothing to do with science. And the just-so stories presented as scientific fact have not the slightest scientific support.
All these myths have in common the supposition that living things' special needs are first determined and then supplied by mutations. Evolutionists call this need "evolutionary pressure." (For example, the need to stand up on two feet in the high grass of the savannah is a so-called "evolutionary pressure.")
Only those who blindly accept Darwinism can possibly suppose that the necessary mutations are ready at hand. Everyone not caught up in such blind dogmatism can see that just-so stories are inventions with no relation to science.
Indeed, the nature of such conjectures is now openly admitted by evolutionist scientists. A new example is the comment by Ian Tattersall, curator in the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, on an article in The New York Times, titled "Why Humans and Their Fur Parted Ways." The answer proposed was the scenario of having various advantages. Tattersall said, "There are all kinds of notions as to the advantage of hair loss, but they are all just-so stories." 120
In his 1999 book, evolutionist Henry Gee, science editor of Nature magazine, wrote that it is wrong to attempt to explain an organ's origin in terms of what is advantageous for it:
. . . our noses were made to carry spectacles, so we have spectacles. Yet evolutionary biologists do much the same thing when they interpret any structure in terms of adaptation to current utility while failing to acknowledge that current utility needs tell us nothing about how structure evolved, or indeed how the evolutionary history of a structure might itself have influenced the shape and properties of that structure. 121
These statements are very important because in future, you will probably encounter such "just-so stories" in evolutionist literature and especially in the media. Remember, these vain stories rest on no scientific proof. The same method is always used in their production. First, the advantage of a creature's particular characteristic or aspect is described, then a scenario is invented to show how this advantage could have evolved. In practice, of course, there's no limit to the evolutionist theses that could be produced in this way: "The trunk gives the elephant the ability to gather food from the ground, so it must have evolved for that purpose," or "The giraffe's neck enables it to reach higher branches so it must have evolved to let the animal do so." To accept this is to believe that nature looks after the needs of its every creature. That is, it is the same as believing a myth.
The nature of this myth is becoming clearer and clearer every day.
Reviewing what we've examined since the beginning of this chapter, claiming that the origin of species is a random evolutionary process was the result of wrong deductions Darwin made in the scientifically unsophisticated 19th century. Every 20th-century observation and experiment shows that no mechanism in nature produces new species, much less higher taxa of living things.
Now that science has destroyed the Darwinist error, it has come to light that the true origin of species lies in Creation. Almighty God, with His supreme knowledge, has created every living creature.
Once, There Was the "Horse Series" Scenario
When Darwin was proposing his theory, there were no intermediate forms to support it, but he hoped that some would be discovered in the future. To remedy this vital deficiency, paleontologists who believed in Darwinism put together a set of horse fossils found in North America to form a sequence. Despite the fact that there appeared to be no intermediate forms in the fossil record, the Darwinists thought that they had come up with a great success.
One of the most important pieces of this sequence had already been discovered before Darwinism. In 1841, the English paleontologist Sir Richard Owen found a fossil belonging to a small mammal and, inspired by its similarity to the hyrax, a small fox-like creature found in Africa, he called it Hyracotherium. The hyrax's skeleton was almost identical to Owen's finding, except for its skull and the tail.
As they did with other fossils, paleontologists who adopted Darwinism began to evaluate Hyracotherium from an evolutionist point of view. In 1874, the Russian paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky tried to establish a relationship between Hyracotherium and horses. In 1879, two well-known evolutionists of the time carried this enterprise further and compiled the horse series which was to remain on the Darwinist agenda for years to come. The American paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh, together with Thomas Huxley (known as Darwin's bulldog), devised a chart by arranging some hoofed fossils according to tooth structure and the number of toes in foreleg and hind leg. In the process, to stress the idea of evolution, Owen's Hyracotherium was renamed eohippuswhich means "dawn horse." Their claims together with their charts were published in the American Journal of Science and laid the foundation of the sequence that would be displayed for years in museums and textbooks as supposed proof of the evolution of today's horse.122 Some of the genera displayed as the stages of this sequence included Eohippus, Orohippus, Miohippus, Hipparion and finally the modern-day horse, Equus.
In the next century, this sequence was taken to be proof for the so-called evolution of the horse. The decrease in the number of toes and the animal's gradual increase in size were enough to convince evolutionists, who for some decades hoped to assemble similar fossil sequences for other creatures. But their hopes were never fulfilled: They were never able to assemble a sequence for other creatures, as they supposedly had for the horse.
Moreover, some contradictions became evident, with the attempt to insert newly-excavated fossils into the horse series. Characteristics of the new finds—where they were discovered, their age, the number of toes—were incompatible with the sequence and began to undo it. They were inconsistent with the horse series and turned it into a meaningless assortment of fossils.
Gordon Rattray Taylor, former chief science advisor to BBC Television described the situation:
Perhaps the most serious weakness of Darwinism is the failure of paleontologists to find convincing phylogenies or sequences of organisms demonstrating major evolutionary change. . . The horse is often cited as the only fully worked-out example. But the fact is that the line fromEohippus to Equus is very erratic. It is alleged to show a continual increase in size, but the truth is that some of the variants were smaller thanEohippus, not larger. Specimens from different sources can be brought together in a convincing-looking sequence, but there is no evidence that they were actually ranged in this order in time.123
He openly admitted that the horse series was based on no proof. Heribert Nilsson, another researcher, made the same statement, writing that the horse series was "very artificial":
The family tree of the horse is beautiful and continuous only in the textbooks. In the reality provided by the results of research it is put together from three parts, of which only the last can be described as including horses. The forms of the first part are just as much little horses as the present day damans are horses. The construction of the horse is therefore a very artificial one, since it is put together from non-equivalent parts, and cannot therefore be a continuous transformation series. 124
Today, even many evolutionists reject the thesis that horses went through a gradual evolution. In November, 1980, a four-day symposium was held at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago attended by 150 evolutionists. It dealt with the problems associated with the theory of a gradual evolution. A speaker, the evolutionist Boyce Rensberger, told that there was no proof in the fossil record for the scenario of the gradual evolution of the horse, and that there never was any such process:
The popularly told example of horse evolution, suggesting a gradual sequence of changes from four-toed, or fox-like creatures, living nearly 50 million years ago, to today's much larger one-toe horse, has long been known to be wrong. Instead of gradual change, fossils of each intermediate species appear fully distinct, persist unchanged, and then become extinct. Transitional forms are unknown.125
From the statements of Taylor, Nilsson and Rensberger, we can understand that there is no scientific support for the supposed evolution of horses, and that the sequence is full of contradictions. So, if there is no proof for the horse series, what is it based on? The answer is evident: As with all other Darwinist scenarios, the horse series is imaginary; evolutionists assembled some fossils according to their own preconceptions and gave the public the impression that the creatures had evolved from one another.
Marsh can be called the architect of the horse series, and there is no doubt that he played a role on creating this impression. Almost a century later, Marsh's "technique" was described by the evolutionist Robert Milner, who said that "Marsh arranged his fossils to 'lead up' to the one surviving species, blithely ignoring many inconsistencies and any contradictory evidence."126
In short, Marsh created a scenario of his own and later assembled the fossils according to it as if arranging screwdrivers in his toolbox according to their size. But contrary to expectations, the new fossils upset Marsh's scenario. The ecologist Garret Hardin says:
There was a time when the existing fossils of the horses seemed to indicate a straight-line evolution from small to large. . . As more fossils were uncovered . . . it was all too apparent that evolution had not been in a straight line at all.127
The fossils could not be arranged to show a gradual evolution, such as Darwin had envisioned. The evolutionist, Francis Hitching, explains:
Even when all possible fossils are included, there appear to be major jumps in size of horses from one genus to the next, without transitional examples.128
Today, the horse series gives evolutionists nothing to hope for. It has been discovered that horses lived at the same time as their supposed ancestors and even side by side with them, and so evidently there is no way to establish an ancestral lineage among them. Besides, many characteristics discovered in the tooth and bone structure of horses invalidate this sequence. All this points to one evident fact: There was never any evolutionary relationship among these sequenced creatures. As with all others, these genera in their fossil layers appeared all at once. Despite all their efforts, evolutionists have not been able to demonstrate transitional characteristics among these genera, and it's worth a closer look at the horse series that Darwinists once defended so intently.
Inconsistency and Admissions by Evolutionists
Contrary to the evolutionist scenario displayed in museums and textbooks, the horse series is inconsistent in terms of various criteria. First of all, evolutionists have not been able to establish any connection between Eohippus (or Hyracotherium), which they claim begins the sequence, and condylarths, supposedly the ancestors of ungulates.129
In addition, there are inconsistencies within the horse series. Some of the creatures included in the sequence are proven to have lived at the same time as one another. In January, 1981, National Geographic published the surprising report that researchers in Nebraska, USA came across thousands of 10-million-year-old fossils that had been preserved after a sudden volcanic eruption. This news dealt a severe blow to the scenario of horse evolution, because the published photographs of these fossils showed both three-toed and one-toed horses,130 refuting the claim that genera in the horse series evolved from one another. These creatures, claimed to have an ancestral connection, actually lived at the same time and in the same place, and demonstrated no transitional characteristics that could prove evolution. This discovery demonstrated that the evolutionist propaganda of the horse series, long disseminated in museums and textbooks, was completely imaginary and assembled on the basis of preconceptions.
A greater inconsistency committed in the name of Darwinism was Mesohippus and its supposed ancestors. Jonathan Wells, noted for his criticism of Darwinism in his Icons of Evolution, writes that although Miohippus actually appeared in the fossil record before Mesohippus, it persists after it.131
Interestingly, O.C. Marsh himself mentioned the existence of three-toed horses living in southwestern America at that time and that in this respect, they resembled the extinct Protohippus.132 The inconsistency of the horse series lies not only in the fact that a genera existed in the same time and place as the so-called "ancestor" from which it claimed linear descent. No isolated area of the world can be taken by itself as evidence that horses came to be through an evolutionary process. Evolutionists have assembled fragments of fossils from different continents according to their preconceptions and used to corroborate their claims. However, this methodology does not accord with objective science.
While assembling the horse series, evolutionists relied on the fossils' number of toes and the size and structure of the teeth—but this procedure turned against them. In arranging their sequence, they claimed that the horse's supposed ancestors went from feeding on bushes to feeding on grass, and that their teeth evolved accordingly. But from studies made on 5-million-year-old teeth belonging to six different species of horses, Bruce MacFadden demonstrated that these creatures' teeth did not really undergo any change.133
On the other hand, an up-and-down variation can be seen in the number of ribs and lumbar vertebrae in the sequence, which is the exact opposite of what evolution would predict. For example, in the supposed evolutionary horse series, the number of ribs increased from 15 to 19, and later decreased to 18. In the so-called ancestors, the number of lumbar vertebrae went from six to eight, then back to six. These structures have a critical influence on these animals' movement and even their lives. Logically, a species whose vital structures undergo random variations clearly cannot perpetuate itself.
A final inconsistency in the horse series is the evolutionist assumption that an observed increase in a creature's size represents evolutionary "progress." Looking at the size of modern-day horses, we can see that this makes no sense. The largest modern-day horse is the Clydesdale, and the smallest is theFallabella, only 43 centimeters high.134 Despite the large variations in size in today's horses, evolutionists' past attempts to sequence horses according to their size was foolish indeed.
In short, the whole horse series is clearly an evolutionist myth based on prejudice. It has been left to the evolutionist paleontologists—the silent witnesses of Darwinism's collapse—to make this known. Since Darwin's time, they have known that there were no fossil layers of intermediate forms. In 2001, Ernst Mayr said, "Nothing has more impressed the paleontologists than the discontinuous nature of the fossil record," 135 expressing the longstanding disappointment among paleontologists that the countless intermediate forms that Darwin envisioned have never been found.
Perhaps for this reason, paleontologists have been speaking for decades about the invalidity of the horse series, even though other evolutionists continue to defend it avidly. In 1979, for example, David Raup said that the horse series was totally meaningless and invalid:
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. By this I mean that the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be modified or discarded as a result of more detailed information. What appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and less gradualistic. So Darwin's problem has not been alleviated.136
About 20 years ago, an evolutionist paleontologist Dr. Niles Eldredge from one of the world's most famous museums, the American Museum of Natural History, confessed that evolutionist claims about the horse series diagrams displayed in his own museum were imaginary. Eldredge criticized assertions that this speculative series was valid enough to be included in textbooks.
I admit that an awful lot of that has gotten into the textbooks as though it were true. For instance, the most famous example still on exhibit downstairs is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps 50 years ago. That has been presented as literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I think that is lamentable, particularly because the people who propose these kinds of stories themselves may be aware of the speculative nature of some of the stuff. 137
These comments from experts clearly show that assertions about the horse series are unsubstantiated. Even today, however, museums around the world exhibit the horse series and tell visitors the tale that horses are an evolved species. Ironically, one of the gravest errors in scientific history is displayed in buildings intended to acquaint people with real science and raise their appreciation of its accuracy. What visitors see there is just a Darwinist myth that was discredited decades ago.
These comments from experts clearly show that assertions about the horse series are unsubstantiated. Even today, however, museums around the world exhibit the horse series and tell visitors the tale that horses are an evolved species. Ironically, one of the gravest errors in scientific history is displayed in buildings intended to acquaint people with real science and raise their appreciation of its accuracy. What visitors see there is just a Darwinist myth that was discredited decades ago.
Claims of Vestigiality in a Horse's Legs and the Facts
Evolutionists aver that the number of horse's toes decreased over time, basing this claim on splint bones found in modern-day horses' forelegs. In the so-called process of evolution, they say, horses' three toes receded to form the splint bones. However, splint bones are not the useless vestiges that evolutionists claim them to be. They strengthen the leg for running and are known to play a role in reducing the stress caused by galloping. They provide attachment points for various muscles. Also, they form a protective groove housing the suspensory ligament, a vital elastic brace that supports the animal's weight as it moves.138
A horse's leg is evidence of Creation. Pierre-Paul Grassé explains the characteristics of a horse's hoof in technical language, then goes on to show that this continuity could not have been brought about by any random process. The excellence of the structure in the leg joints, its pressure-absorbing cushions, its lubricating liquid to facilitate movement, its ligaments and structure are all amazing:
Such a hoof, which is fitted to the limb like a die protecting the third phalanx, can without rubber or springs buffer impacts which sometimes exceed one ton. It could not have formed by mere chance: a close examination of the structure of the hoof reveals that it is a storehouse of coaptations and of organic novelties. The horny wall, by its vertical keratophyl laminae, is fused with the podophyl laminae of the keratogenous layer. The respective lengths of the bones, their mode of articulation, the curves and shapes of the articular surfaces, the structure of bones (orientation, arrangement of the bony layers), the presence of ligaments, tendons sliding with sheaths, buffer cushions, navicular bone, synovial membranes with their serous lubricating liquid, all imply a continuity in the construction which random events, necessarily chaotic and incomplete, could not have produced and maintained. This description does not go into the detail of the ultrastructure where the adaptations are even more remarkable; they provide solutions to the problems of mechanics involved in rapid locomotion on monodactyl limbs.139
Grassé's statements clearly show the perfect structure of a horse's leg. Even more is known today about it, as a recent study reveals.
1- A Shetland pony, the smallest British horse breed.
2- A mountain pony raised on the western Scottish islands.
3- A Timor pony of Australian origin.
4- A wild Asian horse of Mongolian origin.
5- A Breton horse raised in Western Brittany.
6- A Percheron horse from Normandy.
7- A breed of the Ardennais living in Eastern France.
2- A mountain pony raised on the western Scottish islands.
3- A Timor pony of Australian origin.
4- A wild Asian horse of Mongolian origin.
5- A Breton horse raised in Western Brittany.
6- A Percheron horse from Normandy.
7- A breed of the Ardennais living in Eastern France.
In a 2002 study, researchers from the University of Florida discovered that one particular bone in a horse's leg (the third metacarpus bone) had unique properties. As revealed by this study, there was a hole, the size of a pea through which blood vessels could enter, on one side of the bone. Naturally holes cause weaknessess. In laboratory stress tests, however, contrary to ordinary expectations, the bone didn't break near the hole. Further analysis showed that the bone was arranged in such a way as to push stress into a stronger region, preventing the horse's leg from breaking at that point. This structure attracted so many admirers that NASA financed Andrew Rapoff, an assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, to imitate it in the aircrafts near the holes for wiring.140
The structure of a horse's leg surpasses the inventiveness of engineers trained in the most advanced technology; and is now mimicked by the aircraft industry. As Grassé pointed out, such special structures cannot be explained in terms of random occurrences. Plainly, the horse's leg has superior characteristics that cannot come into being by coincidence; that is, horses came into being with all their characteristics by God's superior Creation. In conclusion, the horse series presented as fact in the 20th-century evolutionist literature has been discredited. Horses show no evidence of evolution, but their complex anatomy is an important example of the fact of Creation.
So, Darwinism's myth of horse evolution, like its other myths, has been discredited.
Once, There Was the Story of Peppered Moths
Biston betularia, a moth species of the family Geometridae, is perhaps one of the most celebrated species of the insect world, and its fame is due to the fact that it was the main so-called "observed example" of evolution since Darwin.
There are two known variants of Biston betularia. The widespread light-colored type called Biston betularia f. typica is a light gray color, with small dark spots that lends it its common name, "the peppered moth." In the mid-19th century, a second variant was observed: dark in color, almost black, it was named Biston betularia carbonaria. The Latin word carbonaria means coal-colored. The same type is also called "melanic," which means dark-colored.
In 19th-century England, the dark moths became prevalent, and this coloration was given the name melanism. Based on this, Darwinists composed a myth that they would use consistently for at least a century, claiming that it was a most important proof of evolution at work. This myth found its place in nearly all biology textbooks, encyclopedia articles, museums, media coverage and documentary films about Darwinism.
The myth's narrative can be summed up as follows: At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, in Manchester and other predominantly industrial areas, the bark on the trees was light in color. For this reason, darker, melanic moths landed on these trees could easily be seen by the birds that preyed on them, so that their life expectancy was very short. But 50 years later, as a result of industrial pollution, the light-colored lichens that lived on bark died off and the bark itself became blackened by soot. Now predators could easily spot the light-colored moths. As a result, the number of light-colored moths decreased, while the dark-colored melanic forms, harder to notice on the trees, survived to reproduce.
Evolutionists resorted to the deception that this process was a major proof for their theory; and that over time, light-colored moths had "evolved" into a darker-colored type. According to Darwinist literature, this was evolution in action.
Today, however, like the other classic Darwinist myths, this one has been discredited. In order to understand why, we must look at how the story developed.
Kettlewell's Glued Moths
The thesis that the melanic form of peppered moths appeared and multiplied in England because of the Industrial Revolution began to be discussed even while Darwin was alive. In the first half of the 20th century, it remained current only as an opinion, because there was not a single scientific experiment or observation to prove it. In 1953, H.B.D. Kettlewell, a Darwinist medical doctor and amateur biologist, decided to conduct a series of experiments to supply the missing proof, and went out into the English countryside, the habitat of peppered moths. He released a similar number of light and dark peppered moths and observed how many of each type the birds preyed. He determined that more dark-colored moths were taken by predators from the light lichen-covered trees.
In 1959, Kettlewell published his findings in an article entitled "Darwin's Missing Evidence" in the evolutionist magazine Scientific American. The article caused a great stir in the world of Darwinism. Biologists congratulated Kettlewell for substantiating so-called "evolution in action." Photographs showing Kettlewell's moths on tree trunks were published everywhere. At the beginning of the 1960s, Kettlewell's story was written into every textbook and would influence the minds of biology students for four decades.141
The strangeness of his assertion was first noticed in 1985 when a young American biologist and educator, Craig Holdrege, decided to do a little more research concerning the story of the peppered moths, which he had been teaching his students for years. He came across an interesting statement in the notes of Sir Cyril Clarke, Kettlewell's close friend, who participated in his experiments. Clarke wrote:
The strangeness of his assertion was first noticed in 1985 when a young American biologist and educator, Craig Holdrege, decided to do a little more research concerning the story of the peppered moths, which he had been teaching his students for years. He came across an interesting statement in the notes of Sir Cyril Clarke, Kettlewell's close friend, who participated in his experiments. Clarke wrote:
All we have observed is where the moths do not spend the day. In 25 years, we have only found two betularia on the tree trunks or walls adjacent to our traps. . . 142
This was a striking admission. Judith Hooper, an American journalist and writer for The Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times Book Review, reported on Holdrege's reaction in her 2002 book, Of Moths and Men: The Untold Story of Science and the Peppered Moth:
"What is going on here?" Holdrege asked himself. He had been displaying photographs of moths on tree trunks, telling his students about birds selectively picking off the conspicuous ones. . . "And now someone who has researched the moth for 25 years reports having seen only two moths" sitting on tree trunks. What about the lichens, the soot, the camouflage, the birds? What about the grand story of industrial melanism? Didn't it depend on moths habitually resting on tree trunks?143This strangeness, first noticed and expressed by Holdrege, soon revealed the true story of the peppered moth. As Judith Hooper went on, "As it turned out, Holdrege was not the only one to notice the cracks in the icon. Before long the peppered moth had kindled a smoldering scientific feud."144
So, in the scientific argument, what facts became clear?
Another American writer and biologist, Jonathan Wells, has written on this subject in detail. His bookIcons of Evolution devotes a special chapter to this myth. He says that Bernard Kettlewell's study, regarded as experimental proof, is basically a scientific scandal. Here are some of its basic elements:
Many studies made after Kettlewell's experiments showed that only one type of these moths rested on tree trunks; all the other types preferred the underside of horizontal branches. Since the 1980s, it has become widely accepted that moths rarely rest on tree trunks. Cyril Clarke and Rory Howlett, Michael Majerus, Tony Liebert, Paul Brakefield, as well as other scientists have studied this subject over 25 years. They conclude that in Kettlewell's experiment, moths were forced to act atypically, therefore, the test results could not be accepted as scientific.
Researchers who tested Kettlewell's experiment came to an even more striking conclusion: In less polluted areas of England, one would have expected more light-colored moths, but the dark ones were four times as many as the light ones. In other words, contrary to what Kettlewell claimed and nearly all evolutionist literature repeated, there was no correlation between the ratio in the moth population and the tree trunks.
As the research deepened, the dimensions of the scandal grew: The moths on tree trunks photographed by Kettlewell were actually dead. He glued or pinned the dead moths to tree trunks, then photographed them. In truth, because moths actually rested underneath the branches, it was not possible to obtain a real photo of moths on tree trunks.145
Only in the late 1990s, the scientific world was able to learn these facts. When the myth of the Industrial Melanism that had been a feature in biology courses for decades came to such an end, evolutionists were disappointed. One of them, Jerry Coyne, said he felt very dismayed when he learned of the fabrications with regard to the peppered moths.146
Rise and Fall of the Myth
How was this myth invented? Judith Hooper explains that Kettlewell, and other Darwinists who made up the evolutionist story of the peppered moths with him, distorted the evidence in their desire to find proof for Darwinism (and become famous in the process). In so doing, they deceived themselves:They conceived the evidence that would carry the vital intellectual argument, but at its core lay flawed science, dubious methodology, and wishful thinking. Clustered around the peppered moth is a swarm of human ambitions, and self-delusions shared among some of the most renowned evolutionary biologists of our era.147
Greatly contributing to the myth's collapse were experiments that a few other scientists did on the subject after it became known that Kettlewell's experiments had been distorted. An evolutionist biologist who recently studied the story of the peppered moth and found it to be without substance was Bruce Grant, professor of biology at the College of William and Mary. Hooper reports Grant's interpretation of conclusions reached by other scientists who repeated Kettlewell's experiments:
"It doesn't happen," says Bruce Grant, of Kettlewell's dominance breakdown/buildup studies [on moths]. "David West tried it. Cyril Clarke tried it. I tried it. Everybody tried it. No one gets it." As for the background matching experiments, Mikola, Grant and Sargent, among others, repeated what Kettlewell did and got results contrary to his. "I am careful not to call Kettlewell a fraud," says Bruce Grant after a discreet pause. "He was just a very careless scientist." 148
Other evidence that the evolutionist story of the peppered moths is completely wrong lies in North America's population of Biston betularia. The evolutionist thesis is that during the Industrial Revolution, air pollution turned the moth population black. Kettlewell's experiments and observations done in England were regarded as evidence of this. However, the same moth lives in North America, where no melanism has been observed despite the Industrial Revolution and the air pollution. Hooper explains this situation referring to the findings of Theodore David Sargent, an American scientist who studied the question:
[Evolutionists] . . . also ignored the studies on the North American continent that raised legitimate questions about the classical story of dark backgrounds, lichens, air pollution, and so on. Melanics are equally common in Maine, southern Canada, Pittsburgh, and around New York City . . . and in Sargent's view, the North American data falsify the classical industrial melanism hypothesis. This hypothesis predicts a strong positive correlation between industry (air pollution, darkened backgrounds) and the incidence of melanism. "But this was not true," Sargent points out, "in Denis Owen's original surveys—which showed the same extent of melanism wherever sampled, whether city or rural area—and hasn't been found by anyone since. 149
With the discovery of all these facts, it came to light that the story of peppered moths was a giant hoax. For decades people all over the world were misled by photographs of dead moths pinned to a tree bark, intended to supply Darwin's missing evidence, and the constant repetition of an old-fashioned story. The evidence Darwin needed to find is still missing, because there's no such evidence.
A 1999 article published in The Daily Telegraph, a London newspaper, sums up how the myth was finally discredited:
Evolution experts are quietly admitting that one of their most cherished examples of Darwin's theory, the rise and fall of the peppered moth, is based on a series of scientific blunders. Experiments using the moth in the Fifties and long believed to prove the truth of natural selection are now thought to be worthless, having been designed to come up with the "right" answer. Scientists now admit that they do not know the real explanation for the fate of Biston betularia, whose story is recounted in almost every textbook on evolution.150
In short, the myth of industrial melanism—like other supposed proofs for evolution, avidly defended by many evolutionists—crumbled.
Once, because of conservatism and lack of knowledge, the scientific world could be duped by tales like that of the peppered moths. But now, all such Darwinist myths have been discredited.
Until Recently, There Were Stories of the Dino-Bird
Within the last ten years, dinosaurs with avian feathers, or imaginary "dino-birds," have been one of the Darwinist media's favorite pieces of propaganda. A series of headlines about dino-birds, reconstruction drawings, and persistent explanations from evolutionist "experts" persuaded many that half-bird, half-dinosaur creatures once existed.
The last, most exhaustive defense of this premise was undertaken by Richard O. Prum and Alan Brush, both well-known ornithologists, in the March 2003 issue of Scientific American. In their article, "The Feather or the Bird? Which Came First?", Prum and Brush were assertive, as if to finally put an end to the on-going arguments as to the origin of birds. They claimed that their findings had led them to a supposedly amazing conclusion: Feathers had evolved in dinosaurs, before birds came into existence. Feathers, they proposed, had evolved not for the purpose of flying, but for insulation, impermeability to water, to attract the opposite gender, camouflage, and defense. Only later were they used for flight.
However, this thesis in fact consisted of speculation devoid of any scientific evidence. The new thesis, developed by Prum and Brush and adopted by Scientific American, was nothing more than a new, but hollow, version of the "birds are dinosaurs" theory, furiously defended with a blind fanaticism in recent decades. In fact, like the other icons of evolution, this was also completely rotten.
One person whose views may be consulted on this matter is one of the recognized authorities in the world on the origin of birds: Dr. Alan Feduccia of the Biology Department of the University of North Carolina. He accepts the theory that birds came into existence through evolution, but he differs from Prum and Brush and other proponents of the "dino-bird" in thinking that the theory of evolution is not clear on this matter. He refuses to give any credence to the hype over the dino-bird, deliberately presented as a fact, without evidence.
He wrote an article in the October 2002 issue of The Auk, a periodical published by the American Ornithologists' Union and which serves as a forum for highly technical discussions of ornithology. His article, "Birds are Dinosaurs: Simple Answer to a Complex Problem," explains that the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs, avidly supported ever since John Ostrom first proposed it in the 1970s, rested on no scientific evidence. Feduccia also gave a detailed account of how such a theory was impossible, and explained a very important fact concerning the dino-birds said to have been found in China: It is not clear that the structures found on the fossil reptiles, presented as feathered dinosaurs, are feathers at all. On the contrary, there is much evidence that this so-called "dino-fuzz" has no relation to feathers. Feduccia writes:
Having studied most of the specimens said to sport protofeathers, I, and many others, do not find any credible evidence that those structures represent protofeathers. Many Chinese fossils have that strange halo of what has become known as dino-fuzz, but although that material has been ''homologized'' with avian feathers, the arguments are far less than convincing.151After this statement, he says that Prum showed prejudice in his article in Scientific American:
Prum's view is shared by many paleontologists: birds are dinosaurs; therefore, any filamentous material preserved in dromaeosaurs must represent protofeathers.152
According to Feduccia, one reason why this prejudice was refuted was that traces of this dino-fuzz were also found on fossils that have no provable relationship with birds. In the same article, Feduccia says:
Most important, ''dino-fuzz'' is now being discovered in a number of taxa, some unpublished, but particularly in a Chinese pterosaur [flying reptile] and a therizinosaur [a carnivorous dinosaur]. . . Most surprisingly, skin fibers very closely resembling dino-fuzz have been discovered in a Jurassic ichthyosaur [extinct marine reptile] and described in detail. Some of those branched fibers are exceptionally close in morphology to the so called branched protofeathers (''Prum Protofeathers'') described by Xu [a Chinese paleontologist]. . . That these so-called protofeathers have a widespread distribution in archosaurs [a Mesozoic reptile] is evidence alone that they have nothing to do with feathers.153
In the past, Feduccia says, certain residue was found in the area of these fossils, but it was shown to be inorganic matter with no relation to the fossil:
One is reminded of the famous fernlike markings on the Solnhofen fossils known as dendrites. Despite their plantlike outlines, these features are now known to be inorganic structures caused by a solution of manganese from within the beds that reprecipitated as oxides along cracks or along bones of fossils.154
Another interesting point is that all the fossil "feathered dinosaurs" were found in China. How could these fossils have come to light in China, but nowhere else in the world? And why weren't any feathers or feather shafts found on these dinosaurs, claimed by evolutionists to be feathered, in these Chinese formations that could so well preserve even such a structure as the dino-fuzz? The answer is plain: It's because they didn't possess any avian feathers. Feduccia writes:
One must explain also why all theropods and other dinosaurs discovered in other deposits where integument is preserved exhibit no dino-fuzz, but true reptilian skin, devoid of any featherlike material (Feduccia 1999), and why typically Chinese dromaeosaurs preserving dino-fuzz do not normally preserve feathers, when a hardened rachis, if present, would be more easily preserved.155
So, what are these creatures, found in China, and presented as a supposed intermediate form between reptiles and birds?
Feduccia explains that some of the creatures presented as "feathered dinosaurs" were extinct reptiles with dino-fuzz, and that others were true birds:
There are clearly two different taphonomic phenomena in the early Cretaceous lacustrine deposits of the Yixian and Jiufotang formations of China, one preserving dino-fuzz filaments, as in the first discovered, so-called ''feathered dinosaur'' Sinosauropteryx (a commpsognathid), and one preserving actual avian feathers, as in the feathered dinosaurs that were featured on the cover of Nature, but which turned out to be secondarily flightless birds.156
That is, all the fossils presented as "feathered dinosaurs" or "dino-birds" belong either to flightless birds like chickens, or to reptiles that possess the feature called "dino-fuzz," an organic structure that has nothing to do with avian feathers. Clearly, no fossil establishes the existence of an intermediate form between birds and reptiles. (Besides the above-mentioned two basic groups, Feduccia also mentions "the abundant beaked bird Confusiusornis," some enantiornithines, and a newly identified seed-eating bird called Jeholornis prima, none of which is a dino-bird.)
Therefore, Prum and Brush's claim in Scientific American that fossils have proved that birds are dinosaurs is totally contrary to the facts.
The "Age Problem" that Evolutionists Want to Hide and the Misconception of "Cladistics"
In all evolutionist articles that fan the flames of the dino-bird myth, including the one by Richard O. Prum and Alan Brush in Scientific American, there is one forgotten and even hidden but very important fact.
The fossils of what they falsely call the "dino-bird" or "feathered dinosaur" do not date back any more than 130 million years. However, there is an extant fossil of a true bird at least 20 million years older than the fossils they want to present as a "half bird:" Archaeopteryx. Known as the oldest bird,Archaeopteryx is a true bird with perfectly-formed flying muscles, feathers for flight and a normal bird's skeleton. Since it could soar through the skies 150 million years ago, how can evolutionists maintain such nonsense as to present other creatures that lived later in history as the primitive ancestors of birds?
Darwinists have discovered a new method of doing so: cladistics, which has been frequently used in paleontology over the past few decades to interpret fossils. Those who promote this method are not interested in the fossils' age; they only compare the measurable characteristics of extant fossils and, on the basis of these comparisons, devise an evolutionist family tree.
Darwinists have discovered a new method of doing so: cladistics, which has been frequently used in paleontology over the past few decades to interpret fossils. Those who promote this method are not interested in the fossils' age; they only compare the measurable characteristics of extant fossils and, on the basis of these comparisons, devise an evolutionist family tree.
This method is defended on an evolutionist Internet site that explains the so-called rationale for positing Velociraptor, a much younger fossil thanArchaeopteryx, as the latter's ancestor:
Now we may ask "How can Velociraptor be ancestral to Archaeopteryx if it came after it?"
Well, because of the many gaps in the fossil record, fossils don't always show up "on time." For example, a recently discovered partial fossil from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar, Rahonavis, seems to be a cross between birds and something like Velociraptor, but appears 60 million years too late. No-one however says its late appearance is evidence against its being a missing link, it may just have lasted a long time. Such examples are called "ghost lineages"; we assume these animals existed earlier when we have probable ancient ancestors for them a long way back, and perhaps possible descendants back then too.157
This summation shows what a huge distortion cladistics is. The following point needs to be made clear: the Velociraptor in the above extract is one of the fossils portrayed as a supposed intermediate form in the myth of birds evolving from dinosaurs. Like the others, however, this is nothing more than biased evolutionist interpretation. The feathers seen in the imaginary reconstructions of Velociraptor merely reflect evolutionists' imaginations; the fact is that there is no evidence the animal had feathers at all. In addition, again as we have seen in the above quotation, evolutionists manifestly distort the results from the fossil record according to their own theories. The only reason for supposing that a species, with a 70-million-year-old fossil, actually existed 170 million years earlier—and establishing an evolutionary family relationship on the basis of that supposition—is to distort the facts.
Cladistics is a covert confession that the theory of evolution cannot cope with the fossil record and opens a new dimension. To sum up:
1) Darwin predicted that, once the fossil record was studied in detail, intermediate forms would be discovered to fill in the gaps between all the known species. This is what the theory expected.
2) But 150 years of work in paleontology has produced no intermediate forms, and no traces of these creatures have been discovered. This is a great defeat for the theory.
3) In addition to the fact that no intermediate forms have been found, the age of those creatures posited as ancestors of others only on the basis of comparison is also in dispute. A creature that appears more "primitive" may have appeared in the fossil record later than a creature that seems more "developed."
3) In addition to the fact that no intermediate forms have been found, the age of those creatures posited as ancestors of others only on the basis of comparison is also in dispute. A creature that appears more "primitive" may have appeared in the fossil record later than a creature that seems more "developed."
So, at this point, evolutionists were constrained to develop the inconsistent method known as cladistics.
With cladistics, Darwinism, purporting to be a theory that starts from and relies on scientific evidence, has been revealed to be no such thing, but a dogma that distorts scientific evidence, changing it according to suppositions—much like Lysenkoism, the official scientific doctrine of the USSR in the time of Stalin. It was nonsense concocted by Trofim Lysenko, who rejected the laws of genetics and was an adherent of Lamarck's theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics. Like Lysenkoism, Darwinism, too, thus became recognized as having no basis in science.
The Unbridgeable Differences Between Birds and Dinosaurs
Not only Prum and Brush's thesis, but every version of the "birds are dinosaurs" theory has been discredited. The differences in anatomical structure between birds and dinosaurs cannot be bridged by any process of evolution. Here I outline some of these differences, examined in detail in my other books:
1) The structure of birds' lungs is totally different from that of reptiles and all other land vertebrates. Air is unidirectional in birds, it always flows in one direction through the lung. So a bird is able to constantly take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide at the same time. It is not possible that this structure, peculiar to birds, could have evolved from the lungs of an ordinary land vertebrate. Any creature possessing an intermediate structure could not breathe and therefore, would not survive.158
1) The structure of birds' lungs is totally different from that of reptiles and all other land vertebrates. Air is unidirectional in birds, it always flows in one direction through the lung. So a bird is able to constantly take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide at the same time. It is not possible that this structure, peculiar to birds, could have evolved from the lungs of an ordinary land vertebrate. Any creature possessing an intermediate structure could not breathe and therefore, would not survive.158
2) Embryological comparisons of birds and reptiles made in 2002 by Alan Feduccia and Julie Nowicki showed a major difference in the hand structure of the two, proving that it was impossible to establish an evolutionary connection between them.159
3) The final comparison between the skulls of the two groups showed the same conclusions. As a result of a study he carried out in 1999, Andre Elzanowski concluded that there were "no specific avian similarities found in the jaws and palates of dromaeosaurids [a group of theropod dinosaurs]." 160
4) Another difference separating birds from reptiles is their teeth. It is known that in the past, some birds had teeth in their beaks—which for a long time was presented as a so-called proof of evolution. But eventually, it became known that birds' teeth were peculiar to them. On this subject, Feduccia writes:
Perhaps the most impressive difference between theropods and birds concerns the structure of teeth and the nature of their implantation. It is astounding that more attention has not been given to the dramatic differences between bird and theropod teeth, especially when one considers that the basis of mammal paleontology involves largely tooth morphology. To be brief, bird teeth (as seen in Archaeopteryx, Hesperornis, Parahesperornis, Ichthyornis, Cathayornis, and all toothed Mesozoic birds) are remarkably similar and are unlike those of theropods. . . There is essentially no shared, derived relationship of any aspect of tooth morphology between birds and theropods, including tooth form, implantation, or replacement. 161
5) Birds are warm-blooded, while reptiles are cold-blooded. This means that they have two very different metabolisms and it's not possible that a change from one to the other was effected by random mutations. To remove this difficulty, it was proposed that dinosaurs were warm-blooded. But this thesis rests on no evidence and there is much proof to discredit it.162
All this removes scientific support for the evolutionist thesis about the origin of birds. The Darwinist media may be able to prolong the furor over the dino-bird, but it is now clear that this was a non-scientific propaganda campaign.
Everyone who examines the origin of birds and all the other creatures in nature apart from evolutionist dogma will plainly see that creatures are far too complex ever to be explained in terms of natural influences of random occurrences. The only explanation for this lies in the fact of Creation.
God, Who knows every kind of creation with His supreme knowledge, created every living thing perfectly in one moment. In the Qur'an, God reveals:
Does not man see that We created him from a drop yet there he is, an open antagonist! He makes likenesses of Us and forgets his own creation, saying, "Who will give life to bones when they are decayed?" Say: "He Who made them in the first place will bring them back to life. He is Knower of every kind of creation." (Surah Ya Sin: 77-79)
