A Mountain of Evidence? (Part 3)

In my last article, I wanted to focus on the issue of Haeckel’s forged embryo drawings to demonstrate that creationists’ objections to specific evolutionary evidence aren’t simply a knee-jerk, emotionally based science denial but legitimate concerns of misuse of science at a fundamental level for the promotion of one ideology over another: namely, materialistic naturalism (basically atheism—a worldview totally lacking any intrinsic moral or ethical outlook) versus the biblical view of origins.

A Quick Walkthrough

The following exploration will be a much quicker overview of several common evolutionary arguments to demonstrate why they do not stand up under scrutiny.

Because I will only be touching on them briefly, there are links provided below to more comprehensive articles for further research.

This certainly isn’t an exhaustive list, but it will demonstrate just how weak the evolutionary edifice's structural integrity is.

The Millar/Urey Experiment

Science students around the world likely remember seeing a diagram in their textbooks (based on a 1953 experiment) showing some glass containers containing gases, electrodes, and a small “organic trap” at the bottom—which promoted the idea that scientists had basically found a way to make life in a test tube, simply because they had synthesized a mixture of amino acids (the supposed building blocks of life) in a controlled laboratory experiment.

The promoted takeaway message? God was not required to explain how life was created. Science has “shown” that life can happen through purely natural processes.

Highly lauded for years as powerful proof of an evolutionary worldview, today we hear more modern comments like the following from a Time magazine article:

. . . this textbook picture of how life originated, so familiar to college students just a generation ago, is under serious attack . . . “It was,” says planetary scientist and White House fellow Christopher Chyba, “a beautiful picture.” “Unfortunately,” he adds, “it is probably wrong.”1

The article (written from a pro-evolution standpoint) goes on to describe the many reasons this experiment fails to live up to its initial claims and admits that the origin of life is still “a mystery.”

One of the main reasons is that it was proposed back when our understanding of DNA was in its infancy. You see (regardless of other problems with the experiment), producing a roughly equal amount of left- and right-handed amino acids really isn’t that big of a deal. It’s exactly what happens to amino acids inside living things when they die—amino acids become randomized.

What is a big deal is that living things have genetic instructions written in the most sophisticated coded language ever seen (DNA), which provides the ability to produce only left-handed amino acids (the requirement for life as we know it).

So, the greatest hurdle for naturalists to overcome is not the question of where the material aspects of life come from; the crucial puzzle to solve is the issue of where the non-materialistic genetic code required for life originated.

Indeed, Oxford-educated scientists have come together under the Voices of Oxford (VOX) banner (along with several outside investors) to set up a contest called “The Evolution 2.0 prize,” where the winner can claim a ten-million-dollar prize by solving the claimed central question: How do you get from chemicals to the information coded in DNA? How do you get a code without designing one?

As they will not accept any ideas involving God, you’ll likely not be shocked to hear that no one has claimed the prize.

The Fossil Horse Series

Another piece of common evidence for evolution in older textbooks was the famous “horse evolution series,” which showed a diagram tracing a tiny, supposed 50-million-year-old, four-toed horse called Eohippus through a series of supposed ever-evolving creatures to Equus, the single-toed horse of today.

Rather than beat a dead horse (pun intended) and explain why the so-called evidence is hogwash rather than horse-sense (I just can’t help myself), let me quote the esteemed evolutionist and curator at the American Museum of Natural History, Dr. Niles Eldredge,

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 (in the American Museum) 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 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.2

Archaeopteryx

The fossils of Archaeopteryx—said to be the earliest example of birds evolving and a transitional form between dinosaur and bird—have been popularized for years in textbooks, TV shows, and on T-shirts as proof of evolution. Because of the unique combination of features they had, they are touted as the quintessential “missing link.”

However, unknown to most laypersons, all (including Archaeopteryx) of the transitional fossils proposed by evolutionists have been critiqued by other researchers because of their dubious nature within the evolutionary community.

So, it isn’t just creationists that have countered that Archaeopteryx was just a bird such as those flapping around today. For example, world-renowned evolutionary bird expert Allan Feduccia has spoken against the use of Archaeopteryx as a missing link very disapprovingly:

Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of ‘paleobabble’ is going to change that.3

Despite the overwhelming evidence establishing Archaeopteryx as a true bird and not a transitional form, many evolutionists continue to present it as such. However, a verified discovery demolishes the idea of it as a missing link between dinosaurs and birds.4

An admitted true bird was found in 1977, “which dates (by the evolutionists’ own methods) at some 60 million years older than Archaeopteryx”;5 this led researcher Prof. John Ostrom of Yale to say,

[W]e must now look for the ancestors of flying birds in a period of time much older than that in which Archaeopteryx lived.6

Obviously, children can’t be older than their parents! And this is what likely fuels Feduccia and other more honest evolutionists’ vocal contempt for the continued use of Archaeopteryx to prop up this fallacious missing-link angle. And what assuredly prompted Feduccia to quip,

You can’t be your own grandmother.7

Pakicetus

Evolutionists will often claim that fossil evidence has indisputably proven that whales evolved from land animals. However, examining the facts shows this to be completely unsubstantiated.

In his 1983 article about Pakicetus (meaning “whale of Pakistan” because of bones found in Pakistan and cetus, which is Latin for “whale”), Dr. Phil Gingerich (whale paleontologist from the University of Michigan) claimed his find, Pakicetus,

. . . is the oldest and most primitive whale yet discovered . . . it is an important transitional form linking Paleocene carnivorous land mammals and later, more advanced marine whales.8

The article contained a rather goofy-looking drawing (supposedly dependent on all the fossil evidence he’d found) depicting a half-land, half-sea creature diving into the water to hunt fish.

However, the only bits of bone he’d collected were a few pieces of the skull. He had absolutely no fossil evidence below the head, yet if the drawing was supposedly based on the facts he had at the time, how could he possibly know how to draw its front and rear ends (complete with front legs) and know the diet of the creature?

Gingerich was so taken with his own imagination that in 1994 he declared,

In time and in its morphology, Pakicetus is perfectly intermediate, a missing link between earlier land mammals and later, full-fledged whales.9

However, by 2001, almost the whole skeleton had been found. And what did it show? Well, a technical paper in Nature unequivocally declared that the bones demonstrated Pakicetus was a land animal and “no more amphibious than a tapir” (a pig-like creature)!

There is no indisputable fossil evidence presented in the Nature article or any other evolutionist publication that such creatures ever existed in the past, showing that the story of whale evolution is a myth—the product of evolutionary imagination.

However, if you type Pakicetus into Google, the very first article that appears (from Wikipedia) states,

Pakicetus is an extinct genus of amphibious cetacean of the family Pakicetidae, which was endemic to Pakistan during the Eocene, about 50 million years ago. It was a wolf-like animal, about 1 metre to 2 metres long, and lived in and around water where it ate fish and small animals.10

I invite you to simply look up the cover of Science magazine from April 22, 1983,11 and compare it with the more typical modern images of Pakicetus as seen in the Wikipedia article.

How Gingerich could have made his claim that Pakicetus was a perfect intermediate, a missing link between land mammals and whales, when its current description is that of a wolf-like animal about one to two meters long is astonishing—and a testimony to the amount of storytelling commonly involved in the “science” of evolution.

Tiktaalik

Another overblown missing link claim came from the discovery of Tiktaalik, a supposed transitional fish-to-tetrapod that was declared proof positive that fish had evolved into amphibians millions of years ago.

And when I say this discovery was overblown, I am not overstating the evolutionary community’s affection and blatant promotion of this fossil as the in-your-face proof of evolution that should make creationists tremble with fear!

Indeed, a front-page article in the New York Times claimed Tiktaalik was,

[A] powerful rebuttal to religious creationists, who hold a literal biblical view on the origins and development of life.12

A Tiktaalik song (still available on YouTube, complete with several comments mocking creationists) was written and played with glee by evolutionists celebrating their “fishapod” animal ancestry and embracing their “inner fish.”

Even rabid atheist Richard Dawkins joined in the celebration by saying,

Tiktaalik is the perfect missing link—perfect, because it almost exactly splits the difference between fish and amphibian, and perfect because it is missing no longer.13

This supposed evidence for evolution was likely over-hyped because the whole idea of walking fish has become somewhat symbolic of the evolutionary worldview in opposition to biblical Christianity, as many evolutionists display the Darwin fish symbol on the back of their cars, clothing, and ballcaps as a public declaration of their allegiance to the atheistic story of evolution.

Now you’d think that by now, examples like Pakicetus might cause evolutionists to tread more lightly—and not double-down so quickly before celebrating their materialistic victory.

But alas, they once again paid the price for their premature promotion of this supposed positive proof of evolution with the discovery of some fossil footprints found of a creature that preceded the existence of good old Tiktaalik by millions of years—according to the evolutionary timescale.

Obviously (like the Archaeopteryx example), if there were fully formed tetrapods walking around 10 million years before Tiktaalik came on the scene, then the famous “fishapod” was late to the evolutionary party and was not the missing link it had been declared as.14

And this (whether they were ever noticed by the masses of people who’d seen the positive promotion of Tiktaalik) led to numerous backtracking statements from a variety of scientific sources:

They force a radical reassessment of the timing, ecology, and environmental setting of the fish-tetrapod transition, as well as the completeness of the body fossil record.15

[It] will cause a significant reappraisal of our understanding of tetrapod origins.16

We thought we’d pinned down the origin of limbed tetrapods. We have to rethink the whole thing.17

These results force us to reconsider our whole picture of the transition from fish to land animals.18

So, as we’ve seen already, as soon as one gets past the bluff and bluster of the oft-touted “mountain of facts for evolution” and begins examining the individual pieces, the mountain looks much more like a molehill indeed.

And we’ll continue to sift through more of the pile of evolutionary evidence next week in “A Mountain of Evidence? (Part 4)—Keep digging through the pile.”