Dino-wacky

Evolutionist Jack Horner, author of How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever, believes a genetic storehouse of information in ancient dinosaurs produced modern birds by simply switching off some genetic information. Thus evolution of new kinds, in his view, was accomplished not by adding new information but by subtracting it. If only he could find “an adventurous postdoc” to identify those genes and reverse evolution for him, he says he could prove “evolution works.”

What about the massive physiologic changes involved in reversing the evolution that supposedly took place while evolving from a reptilian respiratory system to an avian one? Not a problem, Horner asserts. During a recent interview, Horner said there would be no need for “messing with physiology or something like that. A bird is really a dinosaur, so we're pretty sure that the breathing apparatus of a bird evolved from the breathing apparatus of a dinosaur, and is therefore completely different than a mammal.” In other words, he believes a dinosaur had a bird-like respiratory system from the outset.

Horner sees a pet chickenosaurus as a powerful tool to take into a classroom, even though he acknowledges it would be a modified chicken rather than an actual dinosaur.

Horner sees a pet chickenosaurus as a powerful tool to take into a classroom, even though he acknowledges it would be a modified chicken rather than an actual dinosaur. He says, “The most important thing is that you cannot activate an ancestral characteristic unless the animal has ancestors. So if we can do this, it definitely shows that evolution works. . . . There are people who are misinformed, and there are people who are uninformed [about the validity of evolution]. If people are uninformed, this will probably get through to them. If they've been misinformed and don't mind being misinformed, then they probably will continue to be misinformed.”

The fallacy of Horner’s argument, “that you cannot activate an ancestral characteristic unless the animal has ancestors,” hinges on the definition of ancestral characteristic. Having a common characteristic—such as the presence of a tail-like structure during embryonic development—does not mean that structure is ancestral. Believing in the fraudulently based theory of embryonic recapitulation, Horner thinks this “tail” is a “dinosaurian trait” he can reactivate.1

This temporary embryonic tail-like structure results from the rapid growth of the nervous system and the embryonic presence of what Horner has identified as 15 extra vertebrae.2 Horner thinks the chicken embryo is a picture of its evolutionary ancestor. These so-called extra vertebrae Horner claims the evolutionary ancestor had are really somites, not vertebrae. Somites are blocks of embryonic tissue genetically programmed as templates to guide development and precursors of specific structures (like muscles, bones, and skin). The genetically programmed regression of some somites once they have served their developmental purpose in no way proves the chicken had an evolutionary ancestral dinosaur tail.

Yet Horner claims, “Knowing that birds descended from dinosaurs and knowing the changes that occur from dinosaurs to birds, we know that the changes that did occur occurred because of genetics.” Horner thinks “rewinding the evolutionary process” will prove evolution occurred in the first place, since he “knows” it did, even though no scientist ever saw it. But all flipping such genetic switches will do is elucidate the genetic blueprint God designed for chickens.

Yet evolutionists draw imaginary connections between real organisms—living ones like birds and extinct ones like dinosaurs—and hypothetical common ancestors.

Evolutionists simply assume animals had to have evolved from other ancestral kinds. But the fossil record lacks transitional forms. No kind of organism can be shown to have been the ancestor of a different kind of organism, and organisms are only observed to vary within the limits of their kinds. Yet evolutionists draw imaginary connections between real organisms—living ones like birds and extinct ones like dinosaurs—and hypothetical common ancestors. Embryonic recapitulation is the idea that embryonic development is a replay of a process they just assume occurred.

Horner also offers no source for this batch of genetic information the ancestral dinosaur had. Yet the “source” he is able to imagine but unable to supply the Bible provides in an eyewitness account that does not disagree with scientific observations. Colossians 1:16 says, “By Him [Jesus Christ, the Son of God] all things were created. . . All things have been created by Him and for Him.” And Genesis chapters 1 and 2 tell us God spoke all things into existence over a period of six days. By summing up the genealogical information in the Bible, we even know when He did it: about 6,000 years ago. With such an eyewitness account in agreement with observable science, we are neither “misinformed” nor “uninformed” but are rather well informed and reliably informed by the only One who was there.