The australopithecines, made famous by Louis and Mary Leakey, are quite distinct from humans. Several detailed computer studies of australopithecines have shown that their bodily proportions were not intermediate between those of man and living apes (m).

m. Dr. Charles Oxnard and Sir Solly Zuckerman, referred to below, were leaders in the development of a powerful multivariate analysis technique. A computer simultaneously performs millions of comparisons on hundreds of corresponding dimensions of the bones of living apes, humans, and the australopithecines. Their verdict, that the australopithecines are not intermediate between man and living apes, is quite different from the more subjective and less analytical visual techniques of most anthropologists. To my knowledge, this technique has not been applied to the most famous australopithecine, commonly known as “Lucy.”

“... the only positive fact we have about the Australopithecine brain is that it was no bigger than the brain of a gorilla. The claims that are made about the human character of the Australopithecine face and jaws are no more convincing than those made about the size of its brain. The Australopithecine skull is in fact so overwhelmingly simian as opposed to human that the contrary proposition could be equated to an assertion that black is white.” Zuckerman, p. 78.

“Let us now return to our original problem: the Australopithecine fossils. I shall not burden you with details of each and every study that we have made, but ... the conventional wisdom is that the Australopithecine fragments are generally rather similar to humans and when different deviate somewhat towards the condition in the African apes, the new studies point to different conclusions. The new investigations suggest that the fossil fragments are usually uniquely different from any living form ...” Charles E. Oxnard (Dean of the Graduate School, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and from 1973 to 1978 a Dean at the University of Chicago), “Human Fossils: New Views of Old Bones,” The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 41, May 1979, p. 273.

Charles E. Oxnard, “The Place of the Australopithecines in Human Evolution: Grounds for Doubt?” Nature, Vol. 258, 4 December 1975, pp. 389–395.

“For my own part, the anatomical basis for the claim that the Australopithecines walked and ran upright like man is so much more flimsy than the evidence which points to the conclusion that their gait was some variant of what one sees in subhuman Primates, that it remains unacceptable.” Zuckerman, p. 93.

“His Lordship’s [Sir Solly Zuckerman’s] scorn for the level of competence he sees displayed by paleoanthropologists is legendary, exceeded only by the force of his dismissal of the australopithecines as having anything at all to do with human evolution. ‘They are just bloody apes,’ he is reputed to have observed on examining the australopithecine remains in South Africa.” Lewin, Bones of Contention, pp. 164–165.

“This Australopithecine material suggests a form of locomotion that was not entirely upright nor bipedal. The Rudolf Australopithecines, in fact, may have been close to the ‘knuckle-walker’ condition, not unlike the extant African apes.” Richard E. F. Leakey, “Further Evidence of Lower Pleistocene Hominids from East Rudolf, North Kenya,” Nature, Vol. 231, 28 May 1971, p. 245.

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Many experts consider the skulls of Peking “man” to be the remains of apes that were systematically decapitated and exploited for food by true man (i). Its classification, Homo erectus, is considered by most experts to be a category that should never have been created (j).

The first confirmed limb bones of Homo habilis were discovered in 1986. They showed that this animal clearly had apelike proportions (k) and should never have been classified as manlike (Homo) (l).

i. Bowden, pp. 90–137.

Marcellin Boule and Henri V. Vallois, Fossil Men (New York: The Dryden Press, 1957), p. 145.

j. “[The reanalysis of Narmada Man] puts another nail in the coffin of Homo erectus as a viable taxon.” Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, as quoted in “Homo Erectus Never Existed?” Geotimes, October 1992, p. 11.

k. Donald C. Johanson et al., “New Partial Skeleton of Homo Habilis from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania,” Nature, Vol. 327, 21 May 1987, pp. 205–209.

l. “We present a revised definition, based on verifiable criteria, for Homo and conclude that two species, Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis, do not belong in the genus [Homo].” Bernard Wood and Mark Collard, “The Human Genus,” Science, Vol. 284, 2 April 1999, p. 65.

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Forty years after he discovered Java “man,” Eugene Dubois conceded that it was not a man, but was similar to a large gibbon (an ape). In citing evidence to support this new conclusion, Dubois admitted that he had withheld parts of four other thighbones of apes found in the same area (h).

h. Java man consisted of two bones found about 39 feet apart: a skullcap and femur (thighbone). Rudolf Virchow, the famous German pathologist, believed that the femur was from a gibbon. By concurring, Dubois supported his own non-Darwinian theory of evolution—a theory too complex and strange to discuss here.

Whether or not the bones were from a large-brained gibbon, a hominid, another animal, or two completely different animals is not the only issue. This episode shows how easily the person who knew the bones best could shift his interpretation from Java “man” to Java “gibbon.” Even after more finds were made at other sites in Java, the total evidence was so fragmentary that many interpretations were possible.

“Pithecanthropus [Java man] was not a man, but a gigantic genus allied to the Gibbons, superior to its near relatives on account of its exceedingly large brain volume, and distinguished at the same time by its erect attitude.” Eugene Dubois, “On the Fossil Human Skulls Recently Discovered in Java and Pithecanthropus Erectus,” Man, Vol. 37, January 1937, p. 4.

“Thus the evidence given by those five new thigh bones of the morphological and functional distinctness of Pithecanthropus erectus furnishes proof, at the same time, of its close affinity with the gibbon group of anthropoid apes.” Ibid., p. 5.

“The success of Darwinism was accompanied by a decline in scientific integrity ... A striking example, which has only recently come to light, is the alteration of the Piltdown skull so that it could be used as evidence for the descent of man from the apes; but even before this a similar instance of tinkering with evidence was finally revealed by the discoverer of Pithecanthropus [Java man], who admitted, many years after his sensational report, that he had found in the same deposits bones that are definitely human.” W. R. Thompson, p. 17.

W. R. Thompson, in his “Introduction to The Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin, refers to Dubois’ discovery in November 1890 of part of a lower jaw containing the stump of a tooth. This was found at Kedung-Brubus (also spelled Kedeong Broboes), 25 miles east of his find of Java “man” at Trinil, eleven months later. Dubois was confident it was a human jaw of Tertiary age. [See Herbert Wendt, In Search of Adam (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishers, 1955), pp. 293–294.] Dubois’ claims of finding “the missing link” would probably have been ignored if he had mentioned this jaw. Similar, but less convincing, charges have been made against Dubois concerning his finding of obvious human skulls at Wadjak, 60 miles from Trinil.

C. L. Brace and Ashley Montagu, Human Evolution, 2nd edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1977), p. 204.

Bowden, pp. 138–142, 144–148.

Hitching, pp. 208–209.

Patrick O’Connell, Science of Today and the Problems of Genesis, 2nd edition (Roseburg, Oregon: self-published, 1969), pp. 139–142.

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Since 1953, when Piltdown man was discovered to be a hoax, at least eleven people have been accused of perpetrating the hoax. These included Charles Dawson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.

The hoaxer now appears to have been Martin A. C. Hinton, who had a reputation as a practical joker and worked in the British Museum (Natural History) when Piltdown man was discovered. In the mid-1970s, an old trunk, marked with Hinton’s initials, was found in the museum’s attic. The trunk contained bones stained and carved in the same detailed way as the Piltdown bones. [For details, see Henry Gee, “Box of Bones ‘Clinches’ Identity of Piltdown Palaeontology Hoaxer,” Nature, Vol. 381, 23 May 1996, pp. 261–262.]

Before 1977, evidence for Ramapithecus was a mere handful of teeth and jaw fragments. We now know these fragments were pieced together incorrectly by Louis Leakey (e) and others into a form resembling part of the human jaw (f). Ramapithecus was just an ape (g). Some textbooks still claim that Ramapithecus is man’s ancestor, an intermediate between man and some apelike ancestor. This mistaken belief resulted from piecing together, in 1932, fragments of upper teeth and bones into the two large pieces. This was done so the shape of the jaw resembled the parabolic arch of man. In 1977, a complete lower jaw of Ramapithecus was found. The true shape of the jaw was not parabolic, but rather U-shaped, distinctive of apes.

Artists’ drawings, even those based on speculation, powerfully influence the public. Nebraska man was mistakenly based on one tooth of an extinct pig. Yet in 1922, The Illustrated London News published a picture showing our supposed ancestors. Of course, it is highly unlikely that any fossil evidence could support the image conveyed of a naked man carrying a club.

e. Allen L. Hammond, “Tales of an Elusive Ancestor,” Science 83, November 1983, pp. 37, 43.

f. Adrienne L. Zihlman and J. Lowenstein, “False Start of the Human Parade,” Natural History, Vol. 88, August–September 1979, pp. 86–91.

g. Hammond, p. 43.

“The dethroning of Ramapithecus—from putative [supposed] first human in 1961 to extinct relative of the orangutan in 1982—is one of the most fascinating, and bitter, sagas in the search for human origins.” Lewin, Bones of Contention, p. 86.

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For over a century, studies of skulls and teeth have produced unreliable conclusions about man’s origin (a). Also, fossil evidence allegedly supporting human evolution is fragmentary and open to other interpretations. Fossil evidence showing the evolution of chimpanzees, supposedly the closest living relative to humans, is nonexistent (b).

Stories claiming that fossils of primitive, apelike men have been found are overstated (c).

It is now universally acknowledged that Piltdown “man” was a hoax, yet Piltdown “man” was in textbooks for more than 40 years (d).

a. “... existing phylogenetic hypotheses about human evolution [based on skulls and teeth] are unlikely to be reliable.” Mark Collard and Bernard Wood, “How Reliable Are Human Phylogenetic Hypotheses?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 97, No. 9, 25 April 2000, p. 5003.

b. “Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations. Fossil evidence of chimpanzee evolution is absent altogether.” Henry Gee, “Return to the Planet of the Apes,” Nature, Vol. 412, 12 July 2001, p. 131.

c. Lord Zuckerman candidly stated that if special creation did not occur, then no scientist could deny that man evolved from some apelike creature “without leaving any fossil traces of the steps of the transformation.” Solly Zuckerman (former Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Government and Honorary Secretary of the Zoological Society of London), Beyond the Ivory Tower (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1970), p. 64.

Bowden, pp. 56–246.

Duane T. Gish, Battle for Creation, Vol. 2, editor Henry M. Morris (San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers, 1976), pp. 193–200, 298–305.

d. Speaking of Piltdown man, Lewin admits a common human problem even scientists have:

“How is it that trained men, the greatest experts of their day, could look at a set of modern human bones—the cranial fragments—and “see” a clear simian signature in them; and “see” in an ape’s jaw the unmistakable signs of humanity? The answers, inevitably, have to do with the scientists’ expectations and their effects on the interpretation of data.” Lewin, Bones of Contention, p. 61.”

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Petrified trees in Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park contain fossilized nests of bees and cocoons of wasps. The petrified forests are reputedly 220 million years old, while bees (and flowering plants, which bees require) supposedly evolved almost 100 million years later (l). Pollinating insects and fossil flies, with long, well-developed tubes for sucking nectar from flowers, are dated 25 million years before flowers are assumed to have evolved (m). Most evolutionists and textbooks systematically ignore discoveries which conflict with the evolutionary time scale.

l. Stephen T. Hasiotis (paleobiologist, U.S. Geological Survey, Denver, personal communication, 27 May 1995.

Carl Zimmer, “A Secret History of Life on Land,” Discover, February 1998, pp. 76–83.

m. Dong Ren, “Flower-Associated Brachycera Flies as Fossil Evidence for Jurassic Angiosperm Origins,” Science, Vol. 280, 3 April 1998, pp. 85–88.

The best-preserved fossils are encased in amber, protected from air and water and buried in the ground. Amber, a golden resin (similar to sap or pitch) usually from conifer trees such as pines, may also contain other preservatives. No transitional forms of life have been found in amber, despite evolutionary-based ages of 1.5–300 million years. Animal behaviors, unchanged from today, are seen in three-dimensional detail. For example, ants in amber show the same social and work patterns as ants today.

Experts bold enough to explain how these fossils formed say that hurricane-force winds must have snapped off trees at their trunks, causing huge amounts of resin to spill out and act like flypaper. Debris and small organisms were blown into the sticky resin, which was later covered by more resin and finally buried.

In a clean-room laboratory, 30–40 dormant, but living, bacteria species were removed from intestines of bees encased in amber from the Dominican Republic. When cultured, the bacteria grew! This amber is claimed to be 25–40 million years old, but I suspect it formed at the time of the flood, only thousands of years ago. Is it more likely that bacteria can be kept alive thousands of years or many millions of years? Metabolism rates, even in dormant bacteria, are not zero.

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Sometimes, land animals, flying animals, and marine animals are fossilized side-by-side in the same rock (g). Dinosaur, whale, elephant, horse, and other fossils, plus crude human tools, have reportedly been found in phosphate beds in South Carolina (h). Coal beds contain round, black lumps called coal balls, some of which contain flowering plants that allegedly evolved 100 million years after the coal bed was formed (i). In the Grand Canyon, in Venezuela, in Kashmir, and in Guyana, spores of ferns and pollen from flowering plants are found in Cambrian (j) rocks—rocks supposedly deposited before flowering plants evolved. Pollen has also been found in Precambrian (k) rocks deposited before life allegedly evolved.

g. Andrew Snelling, “Fossil Bluff,” Ex Nihilo, Vol. 7, No. 3, March 1985, p. 8.

Carol Armstrong, “Florida Fossils Puzzle the Experts,” Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 21, March 1985, pp. 198–199.

Pat Shipman, “Dumping on Science,” Discover, December 1987, p. 64.

h. Francis S. Holmes, Phosphate Rocks of South Carolina and the “Great Carolina Marl Bed” (Charleston, South Carolina: Holmes’ Book House, 1870).

Edward J. Nolan, “Remarks on Fossils from the Ashley Phosphate Beds,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 1876, pp. 80–81.

John Watson did extensive library research on the relatively unknown fossil discoveries in these beds. Their vast content of bones provides the rich phosphate content. Personal communications, 1992.

i. A. C. Noé, “A Paleozoic Angiosperm,” Journal of Geology, Vol. 31, May–June 1923, pp. 344–347.

j. R. M. Stainforth, “Occurrence of Pollen and Spores in the Roraima Formation of Venezuela and British Guiana,” Nature, Vol. 210, 16 April 1966, pp. 292–294.

A. K. Ghosh and A. Bose, pp. 796–797.

A. K. Ghosh and A. Bose, “Spores and Tracheids from the Cambrian of Kashmir,” Nature, Vol. 169, 21 June 1952, pp. 1056–1057.

J. Coates et al., pp. 266–267.

k. George F. Howe et al., “A Pollen Analysis of Hakatai Shale and Other Grand Canyon Rocks,” Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 24, March 1988, pp. 173–182.

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In Uzbekistan, 86 consecutive hoofprints of horses were found in rocks dating back to the dinosaurs (b). Hoofprints of some other animal are alongside 1,000 dinosaur footprints in Virginia (c). A leading authority on the Grand Canyon published photographs of horselike hoofprints visible in rocks that, according to the theory of evolution, predate hoofed animals by more than 100 million years (d). Dinosaur and humanlike footprints were found together in Turkmenistan (e) and Arizona (f).

b. Y. Kruzhilin and V. Ovcharov, “A Horse from the Dinosaur Epoch?” Moskovskaya Pravda [Moscow Truth], 5 February 1984.

c. Richard Monastersky, “A Walk along the Lakeshore, Dinosaur-Style,” Science News, Vol. 136, 8 July 1989, p. 21.

d. Edwin D. McKee, The Supai Group of Grand Canyon, Geological Survey Professional Paper 1173 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), pp. 93–96, 100.

e. Alexander Romashko, “Tracking Dinosaurs,” Moscow News, No. 24, 1983, p. 10. [For an alternate but equivalent translation published by an anti-creationist organization, see Frank Zindler, “Man—A Contemporary of the Dinosaurs?” Creation/Evolution, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1986, pp. 28–29.]

f. Paul O. Rosnau et al., “Are Human and Mammal Tracks Found Together with the Tracks of Dinosaurs in the Kayenta of Arizona?” Parts I and II, Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 26, September 1989, pp. 41–48 and December 1989, pp. 77–98.

Jeremy Auldaney et al., “More Human-Like Track Impressions Found with the Tracks of Dinosaurs in the Kayenta Formation at Tuba City Arizona,” Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 34, December 1997, pp. 133–146 and back cover.

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Frequently, fossils are not vertically sequenced in the assumed evolutionary order (a).

a. Walter E. Lammerts has published eight lists totaling almost 200 wrong-order formations in the United States alone. [See “Recorded Instances of Wrong-Order Formations or Presumed Overthrusts in the United States: Parts I–VIII,” Creation Research Society Quarterly, September 1984, p. 88; December 1984, p. 150; March 1985, p. 200; December 1985, p. 127; March 1986, p. 188; June 1986, p. 38; December 1986, p. 133; and June 1987, p. 46.]

“In the fossil record, we are faced with many sequences of change: modifications over time from A to B to C to D can be documented and a plausible Darwinian interpretation can often be made after seeing the sequence. But the predictive (or postdictive) power of theory is almost nil.” David M. Raup, “Evolution and the Fossil Record,” Science, Vol. 213, 17 July 1981, p. 289.

“Fossil discoveries can muddle our attempts to construct simple evolutionary trees—fossils from key periods are often not intermediates, but rather hodgepodges of defining features of many different groups.” Neil Shubin, “Evolutionary Cut and Paste,” Nature, Vol. 394, 2 July 1998, p. 12.

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In fact, many more phyla are found in the Cambrian than exist today (f). Complex species, such as fish (g) worms, corals, trilobites, jellyfish (h) sponges, mollusks, and brachiopods appear suddenly, with no sign anywhere on earth of gradual development from simpler forms. Insects, a class comprising four-fifths of all known animal species (living and extinct), have no known evolutionary ancestors (i) The fossil record does not support evolution (j).

f. “Compared with the 30 or so extant phyla, some people estimate that the Cambrian explosion may have generated as many as 100.” Roger Lewin, “A Lopsided Look at Evolution,” Science, Vol. 241, 15 July 1988, p. 291.

“A simple way of putting it is that currently we have about 38 phyla of different groups of animals, but the total number of phyla discovered during that period of time [Cambrian] (including those in China, Canada, and elsewhere) adds up to over 50 phyla. That means [there are] more phyla in the very, very beginning, where we found the first fossils [of animal life], than exist now.

“Stephen Jay Gould has referred to this as the reverse cone of diversity. The theory of evolution implies that things get more complex and get more and more diverse from one single origin. But the whole thing turns out to be reversed—we have more diverse groups in the very beginning, and in fact more and more of them die off over time, and we have less and less now.” Chien, p. 2.

“It was puzzling for a while because they [evolutionary paleontologists] refused to see that in the beginning there could be more complexity than we have now. What they are seeing are phyla that do not exist now—that’s more than 50 phyla compared to the 38 we have now.” Ibid., p. 3.

g. “But whatever ideas authorities may have on the subject, the lung-fishes, like every other major group of fishes that I know, have their origins firmly based in nothing, a matter of hot dispute among the experts, each of whom is firmly convinced that everyone else is wrong...I have often thought of how little I should like to have to prove organic evolution in a court of law.” Errol White, “A Little on Lung-Fishes,” Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, Vol. 177, Presidential Address, January 1966, p. 8.

“The geological record has so far provided no evidence as to the origin of the fishes ...” J. R. Norman, A History of Fishes, 3rd edition (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), p. 343.

“All three subdivisions of the bony fishes first appear in the fossil record at approximately the same time. They are already widely divergent morphologically, and they are heavily armored. How did they originate? What allowed them to diverge so widely? How did they all come to have heavy armor? And why is there no trace of earlier, intermediate forms?” Gerald T. Todd, “Evolution of the Lung and the Origin of Bony Fishes—A Causal Relationship?” American Zoologist, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1980, p. 757.

h. Cloud and Glaessner, pp. 783–792.

i. “There are no fossils known that show what the primitive ancestral insects looked like...Until fossils of these ancestors are discovered, however, the early history of the insects can only be inferred.” Peter Farb, The Insects, Life Nature Library (New York: Time, Inc., 1962), pp. 14–15.

“There is, however, no fossil evidence bearing on the question of insect origin; the oldest insects known show no transition to other arthropods.” Frank M. Carpenter, “Fossil Insects,” Insects (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), p. 18.

j. “If there has been evolution of life, the absence of the requisite fossils in the rocks older than the Cambrian is puzzling.” Marshall Kay and Edwin H. Colbert, Stratigraphy and Life History (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965), p. 103.

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Evolution predicts that minor variations should slowly accumulate, eventually becoming major categories of organisms. Instead, the opposite is found. Almost all of today’s plant and animal phyla—including flowering plants (c), vascular plants (d), and vertebrates (e)—appear at the base of the fossil record.

c. “... it is well known that the fossil record tells us nothing about the evolution of flowering plants.” Corner, p. 100.

A. K. Ghosh and A. Bose, “Occurrence of Microflora in the Salt Pseudomorph Beds, Salt Range, Punjab,” Nature, Vol. 160, 6 December 1947, pp. 796–797.

A. K. Ghosh, J. Sen, and A. Bose, “Evidence Bearing on the Age of the Saline Series in the Salt Range of the Punjab,” Geological Magazine, Vol. 88, March–April 1951, pp. 129–133.

J. Coates et al., “Age of the Saline Series in the Punjab Salt Range,” Nature, Vol. 155, 3 March 1945, pp. 266–267.

Clifford Burdick, in his doctoral research at the University of Arizona in 1964, made discoveries similar to those cited in the four preceding references. [See Clifford Burdick, “Microflora of the Grand Canyon,” Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 3, May 1966, pp. 38–50.]

d. S. Leclercq, “Evidence of Vascular Plants in the Cambrian,” Evolution, Vol. 10, No. 2, June 1956, pp. 109–114.

e. John E. Repetski, “A Fish from the Upper Cambrian of North America,” Science, Vol. 200, 5 May 1978, pp. 529–531.

“Vertebrates and their progenitors, according to the new studies, evolved in the Cambrian, earlier than paleontologists have traditionally assumed.” Richard Monastersky, “Vertebrate Origins: The Fossils Speak Up,” Science News, Vol. 149, 3 February 1996, p. 75.

“Also, the animal explosion caught people’s attention when the Chinese confirmed they found a genus now called Yunnanzoon that was present in the very beginning. This genus is considered a chordate, and the phylum Chordata includes fish, mammals and man. An evolutionist would say the ancestor of humans was present then. Looked at more objectively, you could say the most complex animal group, the chordates, were represented at the beginning, and they did not go through a slow gradual evolution to become a chordate.” Paul Chien (Chairman, Biology Department, University of San Francisco), “Explosion of Life,” www.origins.org/articles/chien_explosionoflife.html, p. 3. Interviewed 30 June 1997.

“At 530 million years, the 3-centimeter-long Haikouichthys appears to be the world’s oldest fish, while another new specimen, Myllokunmingia, has simpler gills and is more primitive. To Conway Morris and others, the presence of these jawless fish in the Early Cambrian suggests that the origin of chordates lies even farther back in time.” Erik Stokstad, “Exquisite Chinese Fossils Add New Pages to Book of Life,” Science, Vol. 291, 12 January 2001, p. 233.

“The [500] specimens [of fish] may have been buried alive, possibly as a result of a storm-induced burial. ... The possession of eyes (and probably nasal sacs) is consistent with Haikouichthys being a craniate, indicating that vertebrate evolution was well advanced by the Early Cambrian.” D. G. Shu et al., “Head and Backbone of the Early Cambrian Vertebrate Haikouichthys,” Nature, Vol. 421, 30 January 2003, pp. 527, 529.

D. G. Shu et al., “Lower Cambrian Vertebrates from South China,” Nature, Vol. 402, 4 November 1999, pp. 42–46.

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“Evolutionary biology’s deepest paradox concerns this strange discontinuity. Why haven’t new animal body plans continued to crawl out of the evolutionary cauldron during the past hundreds of millions of years? Why are the ancient body plans so stable?” Jeffrey S. Levinton, “The Big Bang of Animal Evolution,” Scientific American, Vol. 267, November 1992, p. 84.

“Granted an evolutionary origin of the main groups of animals, and not an act of special creation, the absence of any record whatsoever of a single member of any of the phyla in the Pre-Cambrian rocks remains as inexplicable on orthodox grounds as it was to Darwin.” T. Neville George (Professor of Geology at the University of Glasgow), “Fossils in Evolutionary Perspective,” Science Progress, Vol. 48, No. 189, January 1960, p. 5.

b. Strange Cambrian fossils, thought to exist only in the Burgess Shale of western Canada, have been discovered in southern China. See:

L. Ramsköld and Hou Xianguang, “New Early Cambrian Animal and Onychophoran Affinities of Enigmatic Metazoans,” Nature, Vol. 351, 16 May 1991, pp. 225–228.

Jun-yuan Chen et al., “Evidence for Monophyly and Arthropod Affinity of Cambrian Giant Predators,” Science, Vol. 264, 27 May 1994, pp. 1304–1308.

Evolving so many unusual animals during a geologic period is mind-boggling. But doing it twice in widely separated locations stretches credulity to the breaking point. According to the theory of plate tectonics, China and Canada were even farther apart during the Cambrian.

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The “evolutionary tree” has no trunk. In what evolutionists call the earliest part of the fossil record (generally the lowest sedimentary layers of Cambrian rock), life appears suddenly, full-blown, complex, diversified (a), and dispersed—worldwide (b).

a.“There is another and allied difficulty, which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks.” Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 348.

“The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several palaeontologists—for instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and Sedgwick—as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection.” Ibid., p. 344.

“To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer.” Ibid., p. 350.

“The case at present must remain inexplicable, and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.” Ibid., p. 351.

“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 ... The Precambrian record is now sufficiently good that the old rationale about undiscovered sequences of smoothly transitional forms will no longer wash.” Stephen Jay Gould, “An Asteroid to Die For,” Discover, October 1989, p. 65.

“And we find many of them [Cambrian fossils] already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists.” Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), p. 229.

“One of the major unsolved problems of geology and evolution is the occurrence of diversified, multicellular marine invertebrates in Lower Cambrian rocks on all the continents and their absence in rocks of greater age.” Daniel I. Axelrod, “Early Cambrian Marine Fauna,” Science, Vol. 128, 4 July 1958, p. 7.

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In fact, chains are missing, not links. The fossil record has been studied so thoroughly that it is safe to conclude that these gaps are real; they will never be filled (l).

l. “It may, therefore, be firmly maintained that it is not even possible to make a caricature of an evolution out of palaeobiological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as due to the scarcity of the material. The deficiencies are real; they will never be filled.” Nilsson, p. 1212.

“...experience shows that the gaps which separate the highest categories may never be bridged in the fossil record. Many of the discontinuities tend to be more and more emphasized with increased collecting.” Norman D. Newell (former Curator of Historical Geology at the American Museum of Natural History), “The Nature of the Fossil Record,” Adventures in Earth History, editor Preston Cloud (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1970), pp. 644–645.

“A person may choose any group of animals or plants, large or small, or pick one at random. He may then go to a library and with some patience he will be able to find a qualified author who says that the evolutionary origin of that form is not known.” Bolton Davidheiser, Evolution and Christian Faith (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1969), p. 302.

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Theropod “arms” (relative to body size) are tiny, compared with the wings of supposedly early birds.

“... most theropod dinosaurs and in particular the birdlike dromaeosaurs are all very much later in the fossil record than Archaeopteryx [the supposed first bird].” Hinchliffe, p. 597.

Birds have many unique features difficult to explain from any evolutionary perspective, such as feathers, tongues, and egg shell designs.

j. “When and where the first Primates made their appearance is also conjectural....It is clear, therefore, that the earliest Primates are not yet known...” William Charles Osman Hill, Primates (New York: Interscience Publishers, Inc., 1953), Vol. 1, pp. 25–26.

“The transition from insectivore to primate is not clearly documented in the fossil record.” A. J. Kelso, Physical Anthropology, 2nd edition (New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1974), p. 141.

“Modern apes, for instance, seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans—of upright, naked, toolmaking, big-brained beings—is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter.” Lyall Watson, “The Water People,” Science Digest, May 1982, p. 44.

k. “At any rate, modern gorillas, orangs and chimpanzees spring out of nowhere, as it were. They are here today; they have no yesterday, unless one is able to find faint foreshadowings of it in the dryopithecids.” Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981; reprint, New York: Warner Books, 1982), p. 363.

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i. “The [evolutionary] origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved.” W. E. Swinton, “The Origin of Birds,” Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds, editor A. J. Marshall (New York: Academic Press, 1960), Vol. 1, Chapter 1, p. 1.

Some have claimed birds evolved from a two-legged dinosaur known as a theropod. However, several problems exist.

A theropod dinosaur fossil found in China showed a lung mechanism completely incompatible with that of birds. [See John A. Ruben et al., “Lung Structure and Ventilation in Theropod Dinosaurs and Early Birds,” Science, Vol. 278, 14 November 1997, pp. 1267–1270.] In that report, “Ruben argues that a transition from a crocodilian to a bird lung would be impossible, because the transitional animal would have a life-threatening hernia or hole in its diaphragm.” [Ann Gibbons, “Lung Fossils Suggest Dinos Breathed in Cold Blood,” Science, Vol. 278, 14 November 1997, p. 1230.]

Bird and theropod “hands” differ. Theropods have “fingers” I, II, and III (having lost the “ring finger” and little finger), while birds have fingers II, III, and IV. “The developmental evidence of homology is problematic for the hypothesized theropod origin of birds.” [Ann C. Burke and Alan Feduccia, “Developmental Patterns and the Identification of Homologies in the Avian Hand,” Science, Vol. 278, 24 October 1997, pp. 666–668.] “...this important developmental evidence that birds have a II-III-IV digital formula, unlike the dinosaur I-II-III, is the most important barrier to belief in the dinosaur origin [for birds] orthodoxy.” [Richard Hinchliffe, “The Forward March of the Bird-Dinosaurs Halted?” Science, Vol. 278, 24 October 1997, p. 597.]

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g. Evolutionists believe that amphibians evolved into reptiles, with either Diadectes or Seymouria as the transition. By the evolutionists’ own time scale, this “transition” occurs 35 million years (m.y.) after the earliest reptile, Hylonomus (a cotylosaur). A parent cannot appear 35 million years after its child! The scattered locations of these fossils also present problems for the evolutionist.

[See Steven M. Stanley, Earth and Life Through Time (New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1986), pp. 411–415. See also Robert H. Dott Jr. and Roger L. Batten, Evolution of the Earth, 3rd edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), p. 356.]

It is true that skeletal features of some amphibians and some reptiles are similar. However, huge differences exist in their soft internal organs, such as their circulatory and reproductive systems. For example, no evolutionary scheme has ever been given for the development of the many unique innovations of the reptile’s egg. [See Denton, pp. 218–219 and Pitman, pp. 199–200.]

h. “Gaps at a lower taxonomic level, species and genera, are practically universal in the fossil record of the mammal-like reptiles. In no single adequately documented case is it possible to trace a transition, species by species, from one genus to another.” Thomas S. Kemp, Mammal-Like Reptiles and the Origin of Mammals (New York: Academic Press, 1982), p. 319.

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d. “The insect fossil record has many gaps.” “Insects: Insect Fossil Record,” Britannica CD, Version 97 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1997).

e. Speaking of the lack of transitional fossils between the invertebrates and vertebrates, Smith admits:

“As our present information stands, however, the gap remains unbridged, and the best place to start the evolution of the vertebrates is in the imagination.” Homer W. Smith, From Fish to Philosopher (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1953), p. 26.

“How this earliest chordate stock evolved, what stages of development it went through to eventually give rise to truly fishlike creatures we do not know. Between the Cambrian when it probably originated, and the Ordovician when the first fossils of animals with really fishlike characteristics appeared, there is a gap of perhaps 100 million years which we will probably never be able to fill.” Francis Downes Ommanney, The Fishes, Life Nature Library (New York: Time, Inc., 1963), p. 60.

“Origin of the vertebrates is obscure—there is no fossil record preceding the occurrence of fishes in the late Ordovician time.” Arthur N. Strahler, Science and Earth History: The Evolution/Creation Controversy (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1987), p. 316.

f. “...there are no intermediate forms between finned and limbed creatures in the fossil collections of the world.” Taylor, p. 60.

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“The absence of any known series of such intermediates imposes severe restrictions on morphologists interested in the ancestral source of angiosperms [flowering plants] and leads to speculation and interpretation of homologies and relationships on the basis of the most meager circumstantial evidence.” Charles B. Beck, Origin and Early Evolution of Angiosperms (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 5.

“The origin of angiosperms, an ‘abominable mystery’ to Charles Darwin, remained so 100 years later and is little better today.” Colin Patterson et al., “Congruence between Molecular and Morphological Phylogenies,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Vol. 24, 1993, p. 170.

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“It has long been hoped that extinct plants will ultimately reveal some of the stages through which existing groups have passed during the course of their development, but it must be freely admitted that this aspiration has been fulfilled to a very slight extent, even though paleobotanical research has been in progress for more than one hundred years. As yet we have not been able to trace the phylogenetic history of a single group of modern plants from its beginning to the present.” Chester A. Arnold, An Introduction to Paleobotany (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947), p. 7.

“... to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favour of special creation. If, however, another explanation could be found for this hierarchy of classification, it would be the knell [the death signal] of the theory of evolution. Can you imagine how an orchid, a duckweed, and a palm have come from the same ancestry, and have we any evidence for this assumption? The evolutionist must be prepared with an answer, but I think that most would break down before an inquisition. Textbooks hoodwink.” E. J. H. Corner, “Evolution,” Contemporary Botanical Thought, editors Anna M. MacLeod and L. S. Cobley (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), p. 97.

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Fossil links are also missing between large groupings of plants (c), between single-celled forms of life and invertebrates (animals without backbones), among insects (d), between invertebrates and vertebrates (animals with backbones) (e), between fish and amphibians (f), between amphibians and reptiles (g), between reptiles and mammals (h), between reptiles and birds (i), between primates and other mammals (j), and between apes and other primates (k).

c. If evolution happened, nonvascular plants should have preceded vascular plants. However, fossils of nonvascular plants are not found in strata evolutionists believe were deposited before the earliest vascular plants appeared.

“The bryophytes [nonvascular plants] are presumed to have evolved before the appearance and stabilization of vascular tissue—that is, before the appearance of these tracheophytes [vascular plants] —although there is no early bryophyte [nonvascular plant] fossil record.” Lynn Margulis and Karlene V. Schwartz, p. 250.

“The actual steps that led to the origin of seeds and fruits are not known ...” Ibid.

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At the most fundamental level, a big gap exists between forms of life whose cells have nuclei (eukaryotes, such as plants, animals, and fungi) and those that don’t (prokaryotes such as bacteria and blue-green algae) (b).

b. “The prokaryotes came first; eukaryotes (all plants, animals, fungi and protists) evolved from them, and to this day biologists hotly debate how this transition took place, with about 20 different theories on the go.... [What was thought to be an intermediate between prokaryotes and eukaryotes] is no longer tenable.” Katrin Henze and William Martin, “Essence of Mitochondria,” Nature, Vol. 426, 13 November 2003, p. 127.

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Gould and Eldredge claimed transitional fossils are missing because relatively rapid evolutionary jumps (which they called punctuated equilibria) occurred over these gaps. They did not explain how this could happen.

Many geneticists are shocked by the proposal of Gould and Eldredge. Why would they propose something so contradictory to genetics? Gould and Eldredge were forced to say that evolution must proceed in jumps. Never explained, in genetic and mathematical terms, is how such large jumps could occur. To some, this desperation is justified.

“...the gradual morphological transitions between presumed ancestors and descendants, anticipated by most biologists, are missing.” David E. Schindel (Curator of Invertebrate Fossils, Peabody Museum of Natural History), “The Gaps in the Fossil Record,” Nature, Vol. 297, 27 May 1982, p. 282.

“Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of ‘seeing’ evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists the most notorious of which is the presence of ‘gaps’ in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them.” David B. Kitts (School of Geology and Geophysics, University of Oklahoma), “Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory,” Evolution, Vol. 28, September 1974, p. 467.

“In spite of the immense amount of the paleontological material and the existence of long series of intact stratigraphic sequences with perfect records for the lower categories, transitions between the higher categories are missing.” Goldschmidt, p. 98.

“When a new phylum, class, or order appears, there follows a quick, explosive (in terms of geological time) diversification so that practically all orders or families known appear suddenly and without any apparent transitions.” Ibid., p. 97.

“There is no fossil record establishing historical continuity of structure for most characters that might be used to assess relationships among phyla.” Katherine G. Field et al., “Molecular Phylogeny of the Animal Kingdom,” Science, Vol. 239, 12 February 1988, p. 748.

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In a published interview, Dr. Niles Eldredge, an invertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, stated:

“But the smooth transition from one form of life to another which is implied in the theory is...not borne out by the facts. The search for “missing links” between various living creatures, like humans and apes, is probably fruitless...because they probably never existed as distinct transitional types...But no one has yet found any evidence of such transitional creatures. This oddity has been attributed to gaps in the fossil record which gradualists expected to fill when rock strata of the proper age had been found. In the last decade, however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them. If it is not the fossil record which is incomplete then it must be the theory.” “Missing, Believed Nonexistent,” Manchester Guardian (The Washington Post Weekly), Vol. 119, No. 22, 26 November 1978, p. 1.

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“...there are about 25 major living subdivisions (phyla) of the animal kingdom alone, all with gaps between them that are not bridged by known intermediates.” Francisco J. Ayala and James W. Valentine, Evolving, The Theory and Processes of Organic Evolution (Menlo Park, California: The Benjamin Cummings Publishing Co., 1979), p. 258.

“Most orders, classes, and phyla appear abruptly, and commonly have already acquired all the characters that distinguish them.” Ibid., p. 266.

“All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.” Gould, “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,” p. 23.

“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils....We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.” Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution’s Erratic Pace,” Natural History, Vol. 86, May 1977, p. 14.

“New species almost always appeared suddenly in the fossil record with no intermediate links to ancestors in older rocks of the same region.” Ibid., p. 12.

“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.” Stephen Jay Gould, “Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?” Paleobiology, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1980, p. 127.

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“This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists. It is true of almost all orders of all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate. A fortiori, it is also true of the classes, themselves, and of the major animal phyla, and it is apparently also true of analogous categories of plants.” George Gaylord Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 107.

“...the geologic record did not then and still does not yield a finely graduated chain of slow and progressive evolution. In other words, there are not enough intermediates. There are very few cases where one can find a gradual transition from one species to another and very few cases where one can look at a part of the fossil record and actually see that organisms were improving in the sense of becoming better adapted.” Ibid., p. 23.

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“But the curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps: the fossils go missing in all the important places. When you look for links between major groups of animals, they simply aren’t there; at least, not in enough numbers to put their status beyond doubt. Either they don’t exist at all, or they are so rare that endless argument goes on about whether a particular fossil is, or isn’t, or might be, transitional between this group or that.” Hitching, p. 19.

“There is no more conclusive refutation of Darwinism than that furnished by palaeontology. Simple probability indicates that fossil hoards can only be test samples. Each sample, then, should represent a different stage of evolution, and there ought to be merely ‘transitional’ types, no definition and no species. Instead of this we find perfectly stable and unaltered forms persevering through long ages, forms that have not developed themselves on the fitness principle, but appear suddenly and at once in their definitive shape; that do not thereafter evolve towards better adaptation, but become rarer and finally disappear, while quite different forms crop up again. What unfolds itself, in ever-increasing richness of form, is the great classes and kinds of living beings which exist aboriginally and exist still, without transition types, in the grouping of today.” Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 2 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 32.

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Dr. Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum (Natural History), was asked by Luther D. Sunderland why no evolutionary transitions were included in Dr. Patterson’s recent book, Evolution. In a personal letter, Patterson said:

“I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be asked to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic licence, would that not mislead the reader?...Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say that there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least “show a photo of the fossil from which each type organism was derived.” I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.” Copy of letter, dated 10 April 1979, from Patterson to Sunderland.

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The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has one of the largest collections of fossils in the world. Consequently, its former dean, Dr. David Raup, was highly qualified to discuss the absence of transitions in the fossil record:

“Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. 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 some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified 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 much less gradualistic. So Darwin’s problem has not been alleviated in the last 120 years and we still have a record which does show change but one that can hardly be looked upon as the most reasonable consequence of natural selection.” David M. Raup, “Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology,” Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Vol. 50, No. 1, January 1979, p. 25.

“Surely the lack of gradualism—the lack of intermediates—is a major problem.” Dr. David Raup, as taken from page 16 of an approved and verified transcript of a taped interview conducted by Luther D. Sunderland on 27 July 1979.

“In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.” Stanley, p. 95.

“But fossil species remain unchanged throughout most of their history and the record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition.” David S. Woodruff, “Evolution: The Paleobiological View,” Science, Vol. 208, 16 May 1980, p. 716.

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If evolution happened, the fossil record should show continuous and gradual changes from the bottom to the top layers. Actually, many gaps or discontinuities appear throughout the fossil record (a).

a. “But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them imbedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?” Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 163.

“...the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed [must] truly be enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? 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 [of evolution].” Ibid., p. 323.

Darwin then explained that he thought that these gaps existed because of the “imperfection of the geologic record.” Early Darwinians expected the gaps would be filled as fossil exploration continued. Most paleontologists now agree that this expectation has not been fulfilled.

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The earth’s sedimentary layers are typically parallel to adjacent layers. Such uniform layers are seen, for example, in the Grand Canyon and in road cuts in mountainous terrain. Had these parallel layers been deposited slowly over thousands of years, erosion would have cut many channels in the topmost layers. Their later burial by other sediments would produce nonparallel patterns. Because parallel layers are the general rule, and the earth’s surface erodes rapidly, one can conclude that almost all sedimentary layers were deposited rapidly relative to the local erosion rate—not over long periods of time.

Fossils crossing two or more sedimentary layers (strata) are called poly- (many) strate (strata) fossils. [Fossil trees are found worldwide crossing two or more strata]…Had burial been slow, the treetop[s] would have decayed. Obviously, the tree[s] could not have grown up through the strata without sunlight and air. The only alternative is rapid burial. Some polystrate trees are upside down, which could occur in a large flood. Soon after Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, scientists saw trees being buried in a similar way in the lake-bottom sediments of Spirit Lake. Polystrate tree trunks are found worldwide.

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Fossils all over the world show evidence of rapid burial. Many fossils, such as fossilized jellyfish (a), show by the details of their soft, fleshy portions (b) that they were buried rapidly, before they could decay. (Normally, dead animals and plants quickly decompose.) The presence of fossilized remains of many other animals, buried in mass graves and lying in twisted and contorted positions, suggests violent and rapid burials over large areas (c). These observations, together with the occurrence of compressed fossils and fossils that cut across two or more layers of sedimentary rock, are strong evidence that the sediments encasing these fossils were deposited rapidly—not over hundreds of millions of years. Furthermore, almost all sediments that formed today’s rocks were sorted by water. The worldwide fossil record is, therefore, evidence of rapid death and burial of animal and plant life by a worldwide, catastrophic flood. The fossil record is not evidence of slow change (d).

a. Thousands of jellyfish, many bigger than a dinner plate, are found in at least seven different horizons of coarse-grained, abrasive sandstone in Wisconsin. [See James W. Hagadorn et al., “Stranded on a Late Cambrian Shoreline: Medusae from Central Wisconsin,” Geology, Vol. 30, No. 2, February 2002, pp. 147–150.]

Coarse grains slowly covering a jellyfish would allow atmospheric oxygen to migrate in and produce rapid decay. Burial in clay or mud would better shield an organism from decay. If coarse-grain sand buried these jellyfish in a storm, turbulence and abrasion by the sand grains would tear and destroy the jellyfish.

Charles Darwin recognized the problem of finding fossilized soft-bodied organisms such as jellyfish. He wrote:

“No organism wholly soft can be preserved.” Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 330.

Once again, a prediction of evolution is seen to be wrong.

Preston Cloud and Martin F. Glaessner, “The Ediacarian Period and System: Metazoa Inherit the Earth,” Science, Vol. 217, 27 August 1982, pp. 783–792. [See also the cover of that issue.]

Martin F. Glaessner, “Pre-Cambrian Animals,” Scientific American, Vol. 204, March 1961, pp. 72–78.

b. Donald G. Mikulic et al., “A Silurian Soft-Bodied Biota,” Science, Vol. 228, 10 May 1985, pp. 715–717.

“... preconditions for the preservation of soft-bodied faunas: rapid burial of fossils in undisturbed sediment; deposition in an environment free from the usual agents of immediate destruction—primarily oxygen and other promoters of decay, and the full range of organisms, from bacteria to large scavengers, that quickly reduce most carcasses to oblivion in nearly all earthly environments; and minimal disruption by the later ravages of heat, pressure, fracturing, and erosion....But the very conditions that promote preservation also decree that few organisms, if any, make their natural homes in such places.” Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1989), pp. 61–62.

c. Presse Grayloise, “Very Like a Whale,” The Illustrated London News, 1856, p. 116.

Sunderland, pp. 111–114.

David Starr Jordan, “A Miocene Catastrophe,” Natural History, Vol. 20, January–February 1920, pp. 18–22.

Hugh Miller, The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1858), pp. 221–225.

d. Harold G. Coffin, Origin By Design (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Assn., 1983), pp. 30–40.

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Ernst Haeckel, by deliberately falsifying his drawings (b), originated and popularized this incorrect but widespread belief. Many modern textbooks continue to spread this false idea as evidence for evolution (c).

b. Haeckel, who in 1868 advanced this “biogenetic law” that was quickly adopted in textbooks and encyclopedias worldwide, distorted his data. Thompson explains:

“A natural law can only be established as an induction from facts. Haeckel was of course unable to do this. What he did was to arrange existing forms of animal life in a series proceeding from the simple to the complex, intercalating [inserting] imaginary entities where discontinuity existed and then giving the embryonic phases names corresponding to the stages in his so-called evolutionary series. Cases in which this parallelism did not exist were dealt with by the simple expedient of saying that the embryological development had been falsified. When the ‘convergence’ of embryos was not entirely satisfactory, Haeckel altered the illustrations of them to fit his theory. The alterations were slight but significant. The “biogenetic law” as a proof of evolution is valueless. W. R. Thompson, p. 12.

“To support his case he [Haeckel] began to fake evidence. Charged with fraud by five professors and convicted by a university court at Jena, he agreed that a small percentage of his embryonic drawings were forgeries; he was merely filling in and reconstructing the missing links when the evidence was thin, and he claimed unblushingly that ‘hundreds of the best observers and biologists lie under the same charge.’” Pitman, p. 120.

M. Bowden, Ape-Men: Fact or Fallacy? 2nd edition (Bromley, England: Sovereign Publications, 1981), pp. 142–143.

Wilbert H. Rusch, Sr., “Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny,” Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 6, June 1969, pp. 27–34.

“...ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, meaning that in the course of its development [ontogeny] an embryo recapitulates [repeats] the evolutionary history of its species [phylogeny]. This idea was fathered by Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist who was so convinced that he had solved the riddle of life’s unfolding that he doctored and faked his drawings of embryonic stages to prove his point.” Fix, p. 285.

“[The German scientist Wilhelm His] accused Haeckel of shocking dishonesty in repeating the same picture several times to show the similarity among vertebrates at early embryonic stages in several plates of [Haeckel’s book].” Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 430.

“It looks like it’s turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology.” Michael K. Richardson, as quoted by Elizabeth Pennisi, “Haeckel’s Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered,” Science, Vol. 277, 5 September 1997, p. 1435.

“When we compare his [Haeckel’s] drawings of a young echidna embryo with the original, we find that he removed the limbs (see Fig. 1). This cut was selective, applying only to the young stage. It was also systematic because he did it to other species in the picture. Its intent is to make the young embryos look more alike than they do in real life.” Michael K. Richardson and Gerhard Keuck, “A Question of Intent: When Is a ‘Schematic’ Illustration a Fraud?” Nature, Vol. 410, 8 March 2001, p. 144.

c. “Another point to emerge from this study is the considerable inaccuracy of Haeckel’s famous figures. These drawings are still widely reproduced in textbooks and review articles, and continue to exert a significant influence on the development of ideas in this field.” Michael K. Richardson et al., “There Is No Highly Conserved Embryonic Stage in the Vertebrates,” Anatomy and Embryology, Vol. 196, No. 2, August 1997, p. 104.

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Many single-celled forms of life exist, but no known forms of animal life have 2, 3, 4, or 5 cells (a). Known forms of life with 6–20 cells are parasites, so they must have a complex animal as a host to provide such functions as respiration and digestion. If macroevolution happened, one should find many transitional forms of life with 2–20 cells—filling the gap between one-celled and many-celled organisms.

a. E. Lendell Cockrum and William J. McCauley, Zoology (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Co., 1965), p. 163.

Lynn Margulis and Karlene V. Schwartz, Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1982), pp. 178–179.

Perhaps the simplest forms of multicellular life are the Myxozoans, which have 6–12 cells. While they are quite distinct from other multicellular life, they are even more distinct from single-celled life (kingdom Protista). [See James F. Smothers et al., “Molecular Evidence That the Myxozoan Protists are Metazoans,” Science, Vol. 265, 16 September 1994, pp. 1719–1721.] So, if they evolved from anywhere, it would most likely have been from higher, not lower, forms of life. Such a feat should be called devolution, not evolution.

Colonial forms of life are an unlikely bridge between single-celled life and multicelled life. The degree of cellular differentiation between colonial forms of life and the simplest multicellular forms of life is vast. For a further discussion, see Libbie Henrietta Hyman, The Invertebrates: Protozoa through Ctenophora, Vol. 1 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1940), pp. 248–255.

Nor do Diplomonads (which have two nuclei and four flagella) bridge the gap. Diplomonads are usually parasites.

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Creationists reason that there are real limitations to genetic changes and that this indicates a special creation of each major category of life forms. Each new life form came into being by an act of intelligent intervention specifying its genetic information for its peculiar function. Just as letter sequences make up different words, DNA codes vary and produce different species. If it requires intelligence to create King Lear from selecting and sorting the words in a dictionary, then it also requires intelligence to select and sort genetic information to produce a variety of species which work together as a system in nature. The sudden appearance of these life forms only strengthens our case that a supernatural intelligence was at work to accomplish this organization. By the principle of uniformity, this is the most plausible solution to the problem.

CONCLUSION

Now that we have new evidence about the nature of the universe, the information stored in DNA molecules, and further fossil confirmation, the words of Louis Agassiz resound even more loudly than they did when first written in 1860: "[Darwin] has lost sight of the most striking of the features, and the one which pervades the whole, namely, that there runs throughout Nature unmistakable evidence of thought, corresponding to the mental operations of our own mind, and therefore intelligible to us as thinking beings, and unaccountable on any other basis than that they owe their existence to the working of intelligence; and no theory that overlooks this element can be true to nature." [Louis Agassiz, "Contribution to the Natural History of the United States" in American Journal of Science, 1860]

There are two views of origins. One says that everything came about by natural causes; the other looks to a supernatural cause. The overwhelming evidence supports the Creationist view.

[From When Skeptics Ask by Geisler & Brooks]

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The fossil evidence clearly gives a picture of mature, fully functional creatures suddenly appearing and staying very much the same. There is no real indication that one form of life transforms into a completely different form. While these two features seem to invalidate classical evolution, they are somewhat problematic to creationists also.

Some creationists say that the fossil record reflects the debris of the great Flood either because some animals were better able to escape the waters or by hydrodynamic sorting as the remains settled. These scientists are concerned with preserving a young earth on the grounds that they believe in a literal six-day, twenty-four hour period Creation with no large gaps in the early genealogies of Genesis. Others, known as old earth creationists, hold that the earth need not be only thousands of years old. This group understands the fossil record to show that Creation was accomplished in a series of stages, each new appearance in the geological strata pointing to a new moment of direct creation. Invertebrates appeared first, followed by a long period of nature balancing itself before the next burst of creation. Fish appeared next and then amphibia and so on until man was created. The latter view does agree with the fossil record, but there is no consensus between creationists about the age of the earth. This is a hotly debated issue, bur no matter which way it is resolved, they both agree that the existing fossil evidence supports Creation better than evolution.

Some evolutionists have attempted to deal with the fossil evidence by introducing the idea of punctuated equilibrium. These scientists say that the jumps in the fossil record reflect evolutionary jumps which brought on major changes in shorter times. Hence, evolution is not gradual, but punctuated by sudden leaps from one stage to the next. The theory has been criticized because they cannot produce any evidence for a mechanism of secondary causes which makes these sudden advances possible. Their theory then appears to be based solely on the absence of transitional fossils. Darwin, after all, understood suddenness to be evidence of Creation. If this is true, then it supports what Creationists said all along—the sudden appearance of fully formed animals is evidence of Creation.

[From When Skeptics Ask by Geisler & Brooks]

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A major problem for evolution is the analogy of selective breeding being used to prove that natural processes did it all because it contains a great deal of intelligent intervention that is overlooked in the theory. Breeders manipulate according to an intelligent plan to produce specific developments. Informationally speaking, this is going from a state of complexity in the DNA code to a higher, or at least more specific, state, of complexity. It is like changing the sentence, "She had brown hair," to the more complex statement, "Her tresses were auburn and shown in the sun." This increase in information coded into the DNA requires intelligence just as surely as the original coding to produce life did. Indeed, if Darwin's analogy proves anything, it shows the need for intelligent intervention to produce new life forms. Again, the principle of uniformity leads us to this conclusion once it is realized that we are working within origin science, not operation science.

But what of the fossil evidence that has been so widely proclaimed? Darwin recognized this as a problem as well and wrote in The Origin of Species, "Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain, and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory." [Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 280] In the 130 years since Darwin wrote, the situation has only become worse for his theory. Noted Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould has written, "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils." [Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution's Erratic Pace" in Natural History May 1977, p. 14]

Eldredge and Tattersall agree, saying:

“Expectation colored perception to such an extent that the most obvious single fact about biological evolution—non-change—has seldom, if ever, been incorporated into anyone's scientific notions of how life actually evolves. If ever there was a myth, it is that evolution is a process of constant change.” [Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall, The Myths of Human Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 8]

What does the fossil record suggest? Evolutionists like Gould now support what creationists like Agassiz, Gish, and others have said all along:

“The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:

“1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.

“2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors: it appears all at once and ‘fully formed.’" [Gould, op. cit. pp. 13-14]

[From When Skeptics Ask by Geisler & Brooks]

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There are two views of origins. One says that everything came about by natural causes; the other looks to a supernatural cause. In the case of the origin of new life forms, they appeared either by an evolutionary process of natural selection without any intelligent intervention or by special Creation through the work of an intelligent designer.

Darwin made one of his greatest contributions to the theory of evolution with his analogy of selection by breeders to selection in nature. This principle of natural selection became the hallmark of evolution because it provided a system by which new developments of life forms could be explained without recourse to a supernatural cause. The main evidence that he put forward to support this analogy was the fossil record. Introductory biology books ever since have pictured this gradual transition of life forms from simple to complex in acceptance of this view.

Darwin himself was aware that there were serious problems with the analogy between breeders and nature, but he hoped that what humans could do in a few generations could be done by nature in several hundred generations. However, time is not the only factor, which weakens the analogy. E.S. Russell wrote:

“It is unfortunate that Darwin ever introduced the term ‘natural selection,’ for it has given rise to much confusion of thought.

“Conclusion: Rather than being analogous, in the most crucial aspects, natural selection and artificial selection are exact opposites.

“He did so, of course, because he arrived at his theory through studying the effects of selection as practiced by man in the breeding of domesticated animals and cultivated plants. Here the use of the word is entirely legitimate. But the action of man in selective breeding is not analogous to the action of ‘natural selection’ but almost its direct opposite .... Man has an aim or an end in view; ‘natural selection’ can have none. Man picks out the individuals he wishes to cross, choosing them by the characteristics he seeks to perpetuate or enhance. He protects them and their issue by all means in his power, guarding them thus from the operation of natural selection, which would speedily eliminate many freaks; he continues his active and purposeful selection from generation to generation until he reaches, if possible, his goal. Nothing of this kind happens, or can happen, through the blind process of differential elimination and differential survival which we miscall “natural Selection.” [E.S. Russell, The Diversity of Animals ([1915] 1962), p. 124. Cited in James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)]

[From When Skeptics Ask by Geisler & Brooks]

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What could explain the sudden appearance of life and also provide for the informational organization of living matter? If we apply the principle of uniformity (analogy) to the question, the only cause that we know routinely does this kind of work in the present is intelligence. The reasonable assumption is that it also required intelligence to do it in the past. Uniform experience proves this to us and, as Hume said, "As a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof from the nature of the fact" that the information inherent in living things required an intelligent cause. Since it is not possible that we are speaking of human intelligence, or even living beings in the natural sense, it had to be a supernatural intelligence. This does create a disjunction in the course of nature, which irritates most scientists; however, once it is admitted that there is a radical disjunction from nothing to something at the beginning of the universe, there can be little objection to the idea of another intervention when the evidence clearly points to it.

Other theories have been advanced to explain the origins of first life on earth. One is that new natural laws need to be discovered, but scientists can only point out the need and cannot explain how the organizing work can be done. Others suggest that life may have come to earth from somewhere else in the universe, either on a meteorite or on an ancient spaceship, but both of these solutions just push the question back one step: Where did that life come from? Still others borrow from pantheism and hold that some mind within the universe can account for the origin of life. Thermal vents in the sea floor and clay deposits are being studied as possible breeding grounds for life's beginnings, but none of these views really accounts for a way to harness the energy to make specified complexity possible. The most probable cause is a supernatural intelligence.

[From When Skeptics Ask by Geisler & Brooks]

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Evolutionists have never shown any mechanism that can harness the energy to do the work of selecting amino acids and sorting which will build each gene to develop a living organism. It doesn't do any good to have a drawer full of batteries if we don't have a flashlight (a mechanism for harnessing energy) to put them in. The DNA molecule is very complex. In fact, it has the specified complexity that we spoke of earlier. The English alphabet has twenty-six letters; the Greek alphabet has twenty-four and the genetic alphabet has only four, but the method of communicating by the sequence of letters is the same. Information scientist Hubert P. Yockey insists, "It is important to understand that we are not reasoning by analogy. The sequence hypothesis applies directly to the protein and the genetic text as well as to written language and therefore the treatment is mathematically identical." [Hubert P. Yockey, "Self-Organization, Origin of Life Scenarios, and Information Theory" in Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1981, p. 16] It turns out that a single strand of DNA carries the same amount of information as a volume of an encyclopedia. Granting that there may have been enough energy available to do the work, the only systems we know which can harness the energy to do this kind of work are either living (but these were not around before life began) or intelligent. It is easy to pump a lot of energy into a system at random if all you want to do is make it hot, but if you want to organize it—that is, put it in order and create information—that requires intelligence.

[From When Skeptics Ask by Geisler & Brooks]

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The geological record does not support the view that life arose spontaneously from non-living matter. Evolutionists date this origin at about 3.5 billion years ago; however, cells capable of photosynthesis have been found in rock from South Africa dated more than 3.1 billion years old, and in Australian rock dated 3.5 billion years old, five different kinds of cells have been identified. There also appears to be evidences of living cells in rocks from Greenland dated 3.8 billion years ago. There are no signs in the geologic record of pre-cellular life. But if the age of the earth is about 4.6 billion years and life seems to be abundant, complex, and diverse by 3.5 billion years, that allows only 170 million years for the earth to cool and evolution to take place. This is considerably less than the 2 bil1ion years originally estimated. Just to complicate matters further, there is growing evidence that the early earth was rich in oxygen but low in nitrogen—just the opposite of what evolution needs.

The experiments which support the generation of living matter from nonliving chemicals are flawed by the very interference of the intelligent scientist performing the experiment. These experiments do not really reproduce the conditions of early earth. There were no traps to collect only the amino acids produced. The chemicals used were not nearly as concentrated and not handpicked to form a better reaction. There were many sources of energy acting simultaneously on the chemicals, and not always in harmony. And the levels of energy and wavelengths of light were not controlled. In other words, the experimenters are only fooling themselves to think that they are observing a natural process. They have manipulated the process by their own [intelligent] intervention.

[From When Skeptics Ask by Geisler & Brooks]

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There are two views of origins. One says that everything came about by natural causes; the other looks to a supernatural cause. In the case of the origin of first life, either it came about by spontaneous chemical generation without intelligent intervention, or by the intervention of an intelligent being through special Creation.

Evolutionists believe that life began in a spontaneous way from nonliving chemicals by purely natural processes. Shortly after the earth was cooled enough to allow it, they tell us, the combination of simple gases like hydrogen, nitrogen, ammonia, and carbon dioxide reacted to form elementary amino acids, which in time developed into DNA chains and finally cells. Of course, this is said to have taken several billion years and the extra energy of the sun, volcanic activity, lightning, and cosmic rays were needed to keep the process going. Experimentation begun by Stanley Miller arid Harold Urey has attempted to reconstruct these conditions and has had success in producing various amino acids needed for life. From this, much of the scientific community has concluded that the spontaneous chemical generation of life from a pre biotic soup is the way life began.

There are, however, some very good reasons to reject this view. First, the early earth conditions necessary to produce life are just as likely to destroy it. The experimental work has shown that no oxygen can be present for the reaction to work. Also, the energy needed from the sun and cosmic radiation are damaging to the very substances produced. Under the conditions required for life to have arisen spontaneously, it is more likely that the elements would be destroyed faster than they could be produced. Even if the right chemicals could be produced, no satisfactory answer has been given for how they could have been arranged properly and been enclosed in a cell wall. This would require another set of conditions altogether.

[From When Skeptics Ask by Geisler & Brooks]

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Evidence that the universe began is the radiation "echo" which seems to come from everything. It was first thought to be a malfunction or static on the instruments. But research has discovered that the static was coming from everywhere—the universe itself has low-level radiation from some past catastrophe that looks like a giant fireball.

No explanation other than the big bang has been found for the fireball radiation. The clincher, which has convinced almost the last doubting Thomas, is that the radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson has exactly the pattern of wavelengths expected for the light and heat produced in a great explosion. Supporters of the Steady State theory have tried desperately to find an alternative explanation, but they have failed. [Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: Warner Books, 1978), p. 5]

Again, this evidence must lead one to conclude that there was a beginning of the universe.

The law of causality tells us that whatever happens is caused, so what caused the universe to begin? It is [speculatively] possible that this big bang is simply the latest in a series of explosions that destroy all evidence of what came before. But that only backs the question up a few steps to "What caused the first explosion?" It is also [speculatively] possible that the steady state theory is right, that the universe had no beginning and is creating hydrogen from nothing to maintain energy without running down. But this explanation is contrary to the evidence and the law of causality. Both of these answers are [speculatively] possible; neither is plausible.

Logically, if we are looking for a cause, which existed before the entirety of nature (the universe) existed, we are looking for n supernatural cause. Even ]astrow, a confirmed agnostic, has said as much: "That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact." [Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: Warner Books, 1978), p. 15, 18] Since he is speaking from the viewpoint of operation science, he probably means that there is no secondary cause, which can explain the origin of the universe. But with the recognition of origin science we can posit a supernatural primary cause that seems to be the most plausible answer to the question. Jastrow closes his book God and the Astronomers with these words:

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” [Ibid., pp. 105-106]

[From When Skeptics Ask by Geisler & Brooks]

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Scientists argue that the universe is not simply in a holding pattern, maintaining its movement from everlasting to everlasting. It is expanding. It now appears that all of the galaxies are moving outward as if from a central point of origin, and that all things were expanding faster in the past than they are now. Remember that as we look out into space, we are also looking back in time, for we are seeing things not as they are now, but as they were when the light was given off many years ago. So the light from a star 7 million light years away tells us what it was like and where it was 7 million years ago.

“The most complete study made thus far has been carried out on the 200-inch telescope by Allan Sandage [as of 1990]. He compiled information on 42 galaxies, ranging out in space as far as 6 billion light years from us. His measurements indicate that the Universe was expanding more rapidly in the past than it is today. This result lends further support to the belief that the Universe exploded into being.” [Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: Warner Books, 1978), p. 95]

This explosion, sometimes called the Big Bang, was a beginning point from which the entire universe has come. Putting an expanding universe in reverse leads us back to the point where the universe gets smaller and smaller until it vanishes into nothing. So the universe, at some point in the distant past, came into being out of nothing.

[From When Skeptics Ask by Geisler & Brooks]

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The first law of thermodynamics says that the actual amount or energy in the universe remains constant—it doesn't change. The second law of thermodynamics says that the amount of usable energy in any closed system (which the whole universe is) is decreasing. Everything is tending toward disorder and the universe is running down. Now if the overall amount of energy stays the same, but we are running out of usable energy, then what we started with was not an infinite amount: You can't run out of an infinite amount. This means that the universe is and always has been finite. It could not have existed forever in the past and will not exist forever into the future. So it must have had a beginning.

[From When Skeptics Ask by Geisler & Brooks]

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