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Creation: Facts of Life

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 * 3.5 Vertebrates: Animals with Backbones


3.5 VERTEBRATES: ANIMALS WITH BACKBONES


THE FOSSIL EVIDENCE

by Dr. Gary Parker
Featured in Creation: Facts of Life


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When we come to the vertebrates, the animals with backbones, the situation
changes dramatically. We run smack into the most powerful evidence of evolution.
At least that’s what I used to tell my students when I taught university biology
as an evolutionist.

Sometimes I would run into a student who would ask me, “If evolution is true,
where are the missing links?” “Missing links?” I’d say. “Glad you asked. It just
so happens we have a perfect example: Archaeopteryx, the link that shows how
reptiles evolved into birds!”

Archaeopteryx has been the showcase for evolution. Found in 1860, the Berlin
specimen is pictured in nearly all biology textbooks. That specimen, along with
a reconstruction in the same position, is shown in Figure 25.

 * 
 * 
 * 

Figure 25. At last—evidence of evolution! . . . or is it? The famous
Archaeopteryx combines features most often found in reptiles (teeth, claws,
unfused vertebrae, and a long bony tail) with features distinctive of
birds(wings, feathers, and a furcular or wishbone).Does Archaeopteryx provide
clues as to how scales evolved into feathers, or legs into wings? Is
Archaeopteryx more likely an evolutionary link, or a mosaic of complete traits
(a distinctive created kind)? Read both sides and think about it.

At first, you may wonder what the fuss is all about. It has feathers, wings, and
a beak, so it’s a bird. But look closer. It has teeth in the bill, claws on the
wings, no keel on the breast bone, an unfused backbone, and a long, bony tail.
These are all characteristics we normally associate with reptiles. What’s more,
the existence of a creature like Archaeopteryx was predicted by evolutionists
before any such specimen was found! What’s a creationist going to say to a
“perfect example of evolution” like Archaeopteryx? There’s no way I can get you
to consider creation without facing up to Archaeopteryx.


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Well, first of all, the reptile-like features are not really as reptile-like as
you might suppose. The familiar ostrich, for example, has claws on its wings
that are even more “reptile-like” than those of Archaeopteryx. Several birds,
such as the hoatzin, don’t have much of a keel. The penguin has unfused
backbones and a bony tail. No living birds have socketed teeth, but some fossil
birds do. Besides, some reptiles have teeth and some don’t, so presence or
absence of teeth is not particularly important in distinguishing the two groups.

More importantly, take a look at the individual features of Archaeopteryx. Is
there any clue as to how legs evolved into wings? No, none at all. When we find
wings as fossils, we find completely developed, fully functional wings. That’s
true of Archaeopteryx, and it’s also true of the flying insects, flying reptiles
(pterodactyls), and the flying mammals (bats).

Is there any clue in Archaeopteryx as to how reptilian scales evolved into
feathers? No, none at all. When we find feathers as fossils, we find fully
developed and functional feathers. Feathers are quite complex structures, with
little hooks and eyelets for zippering and unzippering them. Archaeopteryx not
only had complete and complex feathers, but feathers of several different types,
including the asymmetric feather characteristic of strong fliers.

What about lack of a keel? Actually, muscles for the power stroke in flight
attach to the wishbone or furcula, and Archaeopteryx had “an extremely robust
furcula.” A growing number of evolutionists, perhaps a consensus, now believe
that Archaeopteryx was a strong flier and the first bird, and not a missing link
between reptiles and birds (see Carey1).

Despite the demise of Archaeopteryx, evolutionists retain a deep-seated belief
that someday a missing link between dinosaurs and birds will be found. As I
write this, the evolutionist’s faith is focused on fossils from China, where
large numbers of dinosaurs, dinosaur eggs, and some birds are found.

Several mistaken claims have already been made and falsified, including the
major blunder published in National Geographic under the title “Feathers for T.
rex.”2

With all the artistic (NOT scientific) skill for which National Geographic is
famous, the public was treated to the picture of a baby “T. rex-bird” covered
with down feathers like a newly hatched chick. Detailed art-work showed a
close-up of the presumed “dinosaur feather.” In three months, over 100,000 young
people saw the “proof” for dinosaur-bird evolution on display at National
Geographic’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

It was all FAKE. The supposed fossil was fake. The art work and article in
National Geographic described a fake. What influenced so many students touring
the National Geographic exhibit in Washington was the display of a fake.

Scientists with expert knowledge of birds, such as Storrs Olson at the
prestigious Smithsonian Institute, also in Washington, D.C., recognized the
scientific problems with National Geographic’s story almost immediately. In an
open letter published in the Smithsonian magazine (dated November 1, 1999),
Storrs Olson3 sternly rebuked National Geographic for (emphasis added) “. . .
UNSUBSTANTIATED, SENSATIONALISTIC, TABLOID JOURNALISM . . . .”—putting the
Geographic article in the same class as those about alien abductions and pigs
that fly. His letter included details of many other examples of “scientific
malpractice” in the National Geographic article.

The fake was not particularly clever or subtle. Bolstering the myth that
evolution is making scientific progress, a fawning and uncritical media often
publicize flashy stories of exaggerated claims, only to publish an obscure
retraction or “different interpretation” a few weeks later.

The “feathers for T. rex” turned out to be fossils of bird parts cemented
together with fossils of dinosaur parts. At least this time the evolutionist’s
error was so huge and obvious that it did get national media attention. The
article detailing the fake in USA Today,4 for example, was headlined:

> The Missing Link That Wasn’t

The National Geographic debacle should encourage scientific skepticism for
several reasons. First, evolutionists are human beings, and all human beings
make mistakes. Second, even if it’s given a scientific sounding name (like
“Archaeoraptor”), a discovery announced in the news is not really scientific
until other scientists have checked it out thoroughly. It only took a few weeks
for scientists to disprove both Geographic’s claims about its “dinosaur-bird”
and the news report that a NASA team had found fossils in Martian rock, but it
took over 40 years to prove that “Piltdown Man” (“Eoanthropus dawsoni”) was a
hoax, and Archaeopteryx has remained in textbooks long after it was
scientifically discredited as a reptile-bird link.

When you hear another fossil from China is claimed as a dino-bird link (and I’m
sure you will), check out the “rest of the story” on a major creationist website
such as answersingenesis.org or icr. org. Furthermore, the fossils from China
currently promoted in the press are in the wrong place to include the ancestors
of birds, because fossil birds have already been found in lower layers. By the
evolutionist’s own definition, a fossil qualifies as a missing link or
transitional form in an evolutionary series IF AND ONLY IF it is found in both a
morphologic series and a stratigraphic series, i.e., it must show gradation in
structural features such as a “sceather” stage between scales and feathers
(morphologic series), and these gradations must occur from lower to higher in a
series of rock strata (stratigraphic series).5

Although the Chinese fossils currently hyped are too high in the stratigraphic
series, some evolutionists say the same form could one day be found in a lower
layer. That’s true, but it’s an act of faith, not a fact of science!

The whole search for missing links demonstrates that evolution is really a very
strong faith-based belief system or world view, not a strictly scientific
theory. An empirical scientist would survey fossil discoveries looking for
patterns of order; an evolutionist begins with belief in Darwin’s belief, and
then goes looking for the evidence to support that belief, evidence that Darwin
said was missing. When I was an evolutionist, I hoped that I might one day
become an “evolution hero” by finding a missing link. Fossil support for the
evolutionist’s “tree of life” would require finding thousands upon thousands of
missing links, and only a handful have even been proposed. (Problems are exposed
in the evolutionist’s beliefs about the railroad worm, ammonites, fish-amphibian
transitions, horses, and whales in books by Gish6, Parker,7 and Bliss, Parker,
and Gish,8 and at icr.org and answersingenesis.org, and the platypus has already
been discussed). No scientist building up a theory from the fossil evidence
would ever come up with the concept of evolution guided by mutation-selection.

Despite phenomenal fossil failure, faith in evolution remains unbounded.
Evolutionists who admit that science has falsified the neo-Darwinian
interpretation9 of evolution don’t usually turn to creation; they just propose
different kinds of evolution.

A few evolutionists make it unnecessary to hunt for dino-bird links, for
example, by simply saying that “birds are dinosaurs.” A sign at the Cincinnati
Zoo (1997) put it this way: “Dinosaurs went extinct millions of years go—or did
they? No—birds are essentially modern short-tailed feathered dinosaurs.” A
nature encyclopedia10 included this interesting tidbit: “The smallest dinosaur
is the bee hummingbird . . . .” According to the view of this small minority,
you could order “Kentucky-fried dinosaur,” or point to a hummingbird and say
“What a cute little dinosaur.”

A more serious post-neo-Darwinian theory did spark considerable scientific
discussion. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, a group of evolutionists led
by Harvard’s Stephen Gould tried to resurrect the idea that evolution happened
in big jumps—“The Return of Hopeful Monsters” Gould called it.11 The
hopeful-monster idea (variously expressed as punctuated equilibrium, saltatory
evolution, or quantum speciation) was proposed to explain why the links required
by gradual evolution have never been found.12 “Big jumpers” argued that
mutations in embryonic regulator genes could effect major changes in multiple
systems simultaneously, but known examples produced only hopeless monstrosities
(like four-winged flies that couldn’t fly), never hopeful monsters! Nor could
“big jumpers” answer this crucial question about the first appearance of any
hopeful-monster: with what would it mate?

 * 
 * 
 * 

 * 
 * 
 * 

Figure 26. When they were known only from fossil remains, bones in the fins of
the coelacanth were imagined to have joints at the wrist and elbow and to have a
shoulder attachment strong enough for walking on land. Then the coelacanth was
found alive and well, a fisherman’s favorite deep in the Indian Ocean, having
fins without wrists or elbows, designed for swimming not walking. Once again
evolutionists were forced to abandon a presumed “missing link” used for decades
to “prove evolution.” The new evidence supported instead the creationist
prediction that differences between fossil fish and amphibians would be like
those between living members of these groups.

At least the creationist and the post-neo-Darwinian punctuationalist agree that
the missing links are missing. What is the scientific difference between saying
that the missing links can never be found (the “new” evolution) and saying that
they never existed at all (creation)?

Sometimes it’s kind of fun to be a creationist. The “rear-guard” neo-Darwinian
evolutionists like to point out the apparent absurdity of hopeful-monster
evolution and claim that evolution could not happen fast. The punctuational
evolutionists point to genetic limits and the fossil evidence to show that
evolution did not happen slowly. The creationist simply agrees with both sides:
Evolution couldn’t happen fast, and it didn’t happen slowly—because evolution
can’t and didn’t happen at all! In terms of the kind of variation that can and
did occur, the creation concept seems to be the far more logical inference from
our observations.

At least the hopeful monster concept avoids the problem of missing links. But
notice: this alternate concept of evolution is based on the fossils we don’t
find and on genetic mechanisms that have never been observed. The case for
creation is based on thousands of tons of fossils that we have found and on
genetic mechanisms (variation within kind) that we do observe and see occurring
every day. As a scientist, I prefer a model that’s based on what we do see and
can explain (creation), rather than one that’s based on what we don’t see and
cannot explain (evolution).

Previous Chapter 3.4 Fossil Plants Next Chapter 3.6 Human Beings


CREATION: FACTS OF LIFE

Dr. Parker, a leading creation scientist and former AiG speaker, presents the
classic arguments for evolution used in public schools, universities, and the
media, and refutes them in an entertaining and easy-to-read style. A must for
students and teachers alike! This is a great book to give to a non-Christian as
a witnessing tool.

Read Online


FOOTNOTES

 1.  Bjorn Carey, “Early Bird,” Discover (April 2006): p. 15. See all footnotes
 2.  C.P. Sloan, “Feathers for T. rex,” National Geographic (November 1999). See
     all footnotes
 3.  Storrs Olson, open letter, Smithsonian (November 1999). See all footnotes
 4.  Tim Friend, “The ‘Missing Link’ That Wasn’t,” USA Today (Feb. 1, 2000). See
     all footnotes
 5.  Parker and Parker, The Fossil Book. See all footnotes
 6.  Duane T. Gish, Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No! (Green Forest, AR:
     Master Books, 1995). See all footnotes
 7.  Parker and Parker, The Fossil Book. See all footnotes
 8.  Bliss, Parker, and Gish, Fossils: Key to the Present. See all footnotes
 9.  David Raup, “The Revolution in Evolution” World Book Science Year 1980. See
     all footnotes
 10. M.A. Norell, E.S. Gaffney, and L. Dingus, Discovering Dinosaurs in the
     American Museum of Natural History (New York: Knopf, 1995). See all
     footnotes
 11. Stephen Jay Gould, “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,” Natural History
     (June/July 1977). See all footnotes
 12. Stephen Jay Gould, “Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?”
     Paleobiology (Winter 1980). See all footnotes


RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

 * The Fossil Book with Study Guide: Single copy$18.99Sale
 * Evolution Exposed: Biology$15.99
 * The New Answers Book 1: eBook$7.92Sale

 * Evolution
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 * Charles Darwin
 * Evidence Against Evolution
 * Human Evolution
 * Missing Links
 * Natural Selection
 * Origin of Life
 * Scopes Trial
 * Theistic Evolution
 * Theory of Evolution
 * Young-Earth Evolution


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