Evolution and Design
David Pratt
May 2004
Part 2 of 3
Contents
4. Fossils and missing links
5. Common descent and common design
4. Fossils and missing links
‘Trade secret’ revealed
Darwin envisaged one species slowly changing into a new one, which then
changed into another one, until finally not just new species belonging to the same
genus were produced, but new genera, families, orders, classes, phyla, and
ultimately kingdoms of organisms evolved. The fossil record demolishes this
model of ‘phyletic gradualism’.
Stephen J. Gould has said that ‘[t]he fossil record with its abrupt transitions offers
no support for gradual change’ and ‘[t]he extreme rarity of transitional forms in
the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology’.1 In his view,
Darwin’s rationalization that the gaps were due to the ‘extreme imperfection’ of
the fossil record is by now utterly untenable.
It is estimated that 20 to 30 million species are alive today, though fewer than 2
million have been documented in the professional literature. Over 99% of species
that have ever lived are extinct – some 200 million of them. But only about
150,000 species of extinct organisms have so far been catalogued on the basis
of fossil evidence.2 No one would deny that the fossil record is terribly
incomplete: 90 to 99% of the sedimentary rocks in which fossils might once have
been preserved have been destroyed by erosion. What’s more, we have barely
scratched the surface of existing sedimentary rocks. If 100,000 palaeontologists
were to work 8 hours a day, 365 days a year, it would take them 84 years to
investigate just 1 cubic mile of rock. But the estimated volume of sedimentary
rock deposits on the present continents is about 134 million cubic miles! 3
There are therefore innumerable missing fossils, but there is no reason to
suppose in advance that they would support the neodarwinian theory of
evolution; in fact, judging by the known fossil record there is every reason to think
they wouldn’t. The fossil species already found offer a good random sampling of
all the creatures that have existed, and continuous fossil-bearing sedimentary
sequences spanning over a million years have been discovered. But as Gould
says, ‘when fossils are most common, evolution is most rarely observed’. 4
If phyletic gradualism were true, species should be undergoing constant
modifications, and we would expect to find fossils of at least some of the
‘inconceivably great’ number of transitional forms that Darwin admitted his theory
required. But Niles Eldredge confesses:
No one has found any ‘in-between’ creatures: the fossil evidence has failed to
turn up any ‘missing links’, and many scientists now share a growing conviction
that these transitional forms never existed.’5
And Gould says:
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.6
If fish evolved into amphibians, for instance, we would expect to find intermediate
forms showing the gradual transition of fins into legs and feet. Since the transition
would have required many millions of years, during which many hundreds of
millions of transitional forms must have lived and died, at least some of them
should have been discovered in the fossil record. Similarly, if reptiles evolved into
birds, we would expect to find fossils showing the gradual transition of the
forelimbs of the ancestral reptile into the wings of a bird, and the gradual
transition of scales into feathers, hind feet into perching feet, the reptilian skull
into the birdlike skull, etc. But the fossil record provides no evidence that any
such transitional species ever existed.
Gould says that 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.’7
Fig. 4.1. In this diagram of dinosaur ancestry all the blue lines and dashed lines
refer to inferred fossils, i.e. fossils that have never been found.8 In other words,
all known dinosaur species represent only the twigs on the supposed
evolutionary tree or bush; darwinists cannot offer a single example of an ancestor
of the dinosaurs!
According to Stephen Stanley, ‘The fossil record does not convincingly document
a single transition from one species to another.’ Ernst Mayr says: ‘There is no
clear evidence for any change of a species into a different genus, or for the
“gradual emergence” of any evolutionary novelty.’9 And Eldredge writes:
Most families, orders, classes, and phyla appear rather suddenly in the fossil
record, often without anatomically intermediate forms smoothly interlinking
evolutionarily derived descendant taxa* with their presumed ancestors. 10
*A taxon (plural: taxa) is a named unit at any level of the hierarchy of classification (e.g. species,
genus, family, order, class, phylum).
It is highly significant that the gaps in the fossil record become larger, the higher
the taxonomic level, even though according to the darwinian theory there must
have been many times more transitional forms at higher levels. Horses, for
example, belong to the family Equidae (order Perissodactyla), while bears belong
to family Ursidae (order Carnivora). According to standard darwinism, the
divergence between orders, e.g. between bears and horses, should have taken
far longer and left behind more fossils than subsequent minor changes among
bears or horses. But as Hoyle and Wickramasinghe point out, the evidence is the
other way round, and this is the case for all classes of animals, not just
mammals.
[T]he small divergences are there, the big are absent. We do not see part-bear,
part-horse. Even within a single order, families remain stubbornly distinct from
one another. For instance, the order Carnivora includes cats and dogs, and it is
obvious that we see no evidence whatsoever of part-cat, part-dog.11
As Jeffrey Schwartz says:
the truth of the matter is that we are still in the dark about the origin of most major
groups of organisms. They appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the
head of Zeus – full-blown and raring to go ...12
Fig. 4.2. The fossil record for the main vertebrate groups (above) and orders of mammals
(below). The widths of the solid areas indicate the changing numbers of species, and the
dotted lines represent hypothetical lineages, or missing evolutionary links.13
In 1977 Gould and Eldredge reviewed cases of supposed phyletic gradualism,
including several standard examples taught to students for decades, and found
them unsatisfactory or downright false.14 As Stanley says, ‘The known fossil
record fails to document a single example of phyletic (gradual) evolution
accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that
the gradualistic model can be valid.’15
Gould acknowledges that the small gradual changes observed in the fossil record
are so tiny that they cannot reasonably be extrapolated into large-scale evolution:
[W]ell-represented species are usually stable throughout their temporal range, or
alter so little and in such superficial ways (usually in size alone), that an
extrapolation of observed change into longer periods of geological time could not
possibly yield the extensive modifications that mark general pathways of
evolution in larger groups. Most of the time, when the evidence is best, nothing
much happens to most species.16
As Peter Williamson says, ‘conventional neoDarwinism ... has failed to predict the
widespread long-term morphological stasis now
recognized as one of the most striking aspects
of the fossil record’.17 On average, plant or
animal species tend to go extinct after about 4
million years, but some creatures have lasted
far longer without undergoing any marked
change – though one would expect random
genetic drift to alter appearances even without
adaptive pressures. 90 kinds of cyanobacteria
(blue-green algae), for instance, have survived with little change for a billion
years. The trilobites (fossil shown right) burst onto the scene in the early
Cambrian but then changed little for 300 million years. Marine shellfish have
existed unchanged for 10 to 14 million years. The new species of seabed
Foraminifera that appeared in the early Cenozoic were typically able to survive,
unaltered, for at least a further 20 million years.
Some extant vertebrates have never shown any evolutionary changes during a
species lifetime of at least 100 million years. The common freshwater ‘fairy
shrimp’ Triops differs from specimens preserved in rocks 180-200 million years
old only in having grown slightly bigger since that time. The coelacanth and
lungfishes appear to be wholly unchanged even after 300 million years – twice as
long as the age of dinosaurs. The lamp shell Lingula is a ‘living fossil’ that has
remained essentially unchanged for 450 million years. And the tuatara lizard has
shown little change for nearly 200 million years since the early Mesozoic. The
now-living mammals of Europe seem to have remained unchanged for the past
million years.
Began (years BP)
Phanerozoic eon
Cenozoic era
Quaternary period:
Holocene epoch
Pleistocene
Tertiary period:
Pliocene epoch
Miocene
Oligocene
Eocene
Palaeocene
10,000
1,600,000
5,300,000
23,700,000
36,600,000
57,800,000
66,400,000
Mesozoic era
Cretaceous
Jurassic
Triassic
144,000,000
208,000,000
245,000,000
Palaeozoic era
Permian
Carboniferous
Devonian
Silurian
Ordovician
Cambrian
286,000,000
360,000,000
408,000,000
438,000,000
505,000,000
540,000,000
Proterozoic eon
Late
Middle
Early
900,000,000
1,600,000,000
2,500,000,000
Archean eon
Late
Middle
Early
3,000,000,000
3,400,000,000
3,960,000,000
Hadean eon
4,600,000,000
Fig. 4.3. The scientific geological timescale (for corresponding theosophical
dates, see section 8).
Radiations and extinctions
The earliest forms of life are thought to have originated some 3.8 billion years
ago. They were unicellular microorganisms such as bacteria and blue-green
algae, composed of prokaryotic cells (i.e. cells without a nucleus). The more
complicated eukaryotic (nucleated) cell appeared about 2 billion years ago, and
is found in the protozoans, algae, and lower fungi. Its advent marks the greatest
known discontinuity in the sequence of living things.
Fig. 4.4. Prokaryotic cells carry their genetic information on a few
strands of DNA within the cell membrane, whereas eukaryotic cells
have membrane-bound organelles which include the nucleus,
mitochondria, and chloroplasts.1
The next great advance was the origin of multicellular organisms; their oldest
fossils are 1.7 billion years old. The great radiation and diversification of the
multicelled animals, or metazoans, began towards the end of the Precambrian,
with the appearance of the Ediacaran fauna. The radiation attained its climax in
the succeeding ‘Cambrian explosion’ from about 530 to 520 million years ago.
Just how one or more singled-celled organisms evolved into metazoans and
what intermediates were involved is one of the great unsolved puzzles of
evolution. There is a large gap between single-celled and multicelled animals, as
there is no known animal with 2, 3, 4 ... or even 20 cells. Moreover, not only has
multicellularity evolved separately in the three great higher kingdoms of life
(plants, fungi, and animals), but it is thought to have arisen several times in each
kingdom.
The Ediacaran, or Vendian, fauna appeared abruptly and fully formed about 610
million years ago, and comprised a wide variety of soft-bodied, shallow-water
marine invertebrates, some as large as 1 metre. Most of the fossils are relatively
simple, and many resemble worms, sea pens, and jellyfish. They are mostly
variations on a single anatomical plan: a flattened form divided into sections that
are matted or quilted together – a design no longer found today. Although
originally regarded as precursors of some of the later, Cambrian creatures, it is
now widely believed that most were unrelated to anything that came afterwards
and were a failed experiment. However, metazoan animals of modern design,
such as sponges, shared the earth with the Ediacaran fauna.
Fig. 4.5. Classification of Ediacaran organisms according to their variations
on a single flattened, quiltlike anatomical plan.2
The first worldwide fauna of hard parts (such as calcium carbonate shells)
appeared in the early Cambrian (the Tommotian). They include creatures of
modern design, but most of its members are tiny blades, caps, and cups of
uncertain affinity, known as the ‘small shelly fauna’, usually 1 to 5 mm in length. It
may represent another failed experiment. It was immediately followed by the
most dramatic phase of the Cambrian explosion (the Atdabanian).
Fig. 4.6. Above: Representative organisms of the Tommotian ‘small shelly fauna’.
Below: The most characteristic and abundant of all Tommotian creatures are the
archaeocyathids, the first reef-forming creatures, simple in form, usually coneshaped, with double walls – cup within cup.3
The Cambrian explosion is one of evolution’s greatest mysteries.4 Within just 5 to
10 million years, about 70 phyla, or basic body plans, burst onto the scene with
little hint of any transition from previous ancestors. They include clams, snails,
trilobites, brachiopods, worms, jellyfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, swimming
crustaceans, sea lilies, and other complex invertebrates. Although they differ
drastically from one another, darwinists like to believe that they all evolved from
the same common ancestor – a flatworm-like creature.
It is possible that not a single new animal phylum has appeared since the
Cambrian explosion;* the history of life since then has largely been a tale of
endless variations on the basic body plans that emerged during the Cambrian or
late Precambrian. Many phyla have, however, gone extinct, leaving only about 30
today. The Cambrian explosion is a glaring refutation of neodarwinism. New
phyla are supposedly produced by the gradual divergence of species, which
eventually become so dissimilar as to constitute a whole new body plan. This
means that the number of phyla should tend to increase with time. Instead, we
see the exact opposite!
*The five recognized kingdoms – bacteria (microorganisms without cell nuclei), protists
(microorganisms with cell nuclei), plants, fungi, and animals – are divided into phyla, which are in
turn divided into classes, orders, families, genera, and species. Well-known phyla include:
sponges, corals (e.g. hydras, jellyfish), annelids (e.g. earthworms, leeches), arthropods (e.g.
insects, spiders, lobsters), molluscs (e.g. clams, snails, squid), echinoderms (e.g. starfishes, sea
urchins), chordates (all vertebrates, including reptiles, fish, mammals). The only extant animal
phylum with a good fossil record that is not known from Cambrian rocks is the Bryozoa, which
first appears in the early Ordovician. Gould says there is good reason to think that all major
anatomical designs made their appearance in the Cambrian and predicts that fossils of bryozoans
will eventually turn up.5 All the (non-algal) phyla of plants are thought to be post-Cambrian.
A
B
Fig. 4.7. Creatures from the Cambrian explosion. A. Marrella, ranging from 2.5 to
19 mm in length. B. Opabinia, 43 to 70 mm long, showing the frontal nozzle with
terminal claw, five eyes on the head, and body sections with gills on top. C.
Sidneyia, an arthropod, seen from below and above. D. Two species of
Anomalocaris; the biggest specimens are estimated to have been nearly 2 ft long –
by far the largest of all known Cambrian animals.6
C
D
There have been several other notable radiations of new lifeforms since the
Cambrian explosion. For instance, the advent of life on land about 420 million
years ago was so sudden and spectacular that it has been called the Silurian
explosion. It is impossible to point to any ancestors for this brand-new life, or to
any subsequent evolution in it.
Some 140 million years ago, in the Cretaceous, about 43 families of flowering
plants, or angiosperms (a phylum that includes all the grasses, palms, and all
nonconiferous trees) appeared abruptly with no trace of ancestors or
intermediate forms. At their first appearance the angiosperms were divided into
different classes, many of which have persisted with little change up to the
present day. Darwin called their sudden emergence ‘an abominable mystery’,
and it remains so to this day. Most major groups of organisms – phyla, subphyla,
and even classes – have appeared in this way.
Just as there have been major radiations of new organisms, so have there been
several major extinctions and many minor ones. The largest known extinction
occurred at the end of the Permian period, some 245 million years ago, and
wiped out about 95% of all marine species. Three other mass extinctions
occurred at the end of the Ordovician, in the late Devonian, and at the end of the
Triassic, 440, 365, and 210 million years ago respectively.
Another mass extinction took place at the end of the Cretaceous period and the
beginning of the Tertiary (the K-T boundary), about 65 million years ago; it wiped
out two-thirds of all species then living, including the dinosaurs. The most popular
explanation is that the earth was struck by an asteroid or comet, generating a
huge dust cloud which blocked out sunlight and led to the collapse of the food
chain. However, the extinctions began hundreds of thousands of years before the
K-T boundary, and some scientists believe that the main causes were a long
period of intense global volcanism, related climatic changes, and changes in sealevel or land elevation.7 This extinction was followed by the rapid diversification
and rise to dominance of the mammals.
The advent of the modern mammals after the death of the dinosaurs should have
left the best-preserved fossils of intermediate species. 65 million years ago,
mammals were small nocturnal tree-shrew-like animals, and roughly 10 million
years later we find essentially modern whales, dolphins, rodents, marsupials, anteaters, horses, camels, elephants, bears, lions, bats, etc. All modern orders of
mammals seem to have arisen independently and at about the same time. Not
only are all traces of intermediate species missing, but anyone who tries to
imagine a sequence of viable intermediate animals between, for example, a treeshrew and a bat – each of which is ‘better adapted’ than its predecessor – will
very soon be convinced that such a sequence is inconceivable. Moreover,
modern bats appeared twice over in the early Cenozoic.
Transitionals and mosaics
The myriads of transitional forms that Darwin expected to turn up have failed to
do so; the fossil record is about as discontinuous today as it was in his own time.
While the more honest darwinists admit this, some claim that there are countless
transitional species. This is because any species which combines features from
two more or less successive groups of organisms is immediately hailed as a
candidate for one of the intermediate forms that are assumed to have linked the
two groups.
The ‘transitional’ fossils presented are nearly always vertebrates – which
constitute less than 0.01% of the entire fossil record. The bulk of this tiny sliver of
the fossil record is made up of fish, where we find no signs of darwinian
evolution. The remainder are land-dwelling vertebrates; of those species
unearthed, 95% are represented by a bone or less. This means that
interpretations are very subjective, and there is serious disagreement among
leading palaeontologists about which specimens qualify as transitional, and
which supposed transitional forms fit into which lineages and where.
About 95% of the fossil record consists of complex invertebrates. Millions of
different species of these creatures have been catalogued, and we have entire
fossils of them, not just bits and pieces. In this rich portion of the fossil record,
there is no sign whatsoever of gradual evolution. Moreover, the existence of
entire specimens makes it difficult for evolutionists to speculate about
‘transitionals’. The remaining 5% of the fossil record consists mostly of plants and
algae, where again we find no fossil evidence of gradual evolution. 1
In 1938 fishermen in the Indian Ocean hauled to the surface a coelacanth
(pronounced: SEE-la-kanth), a living relative of the ancient Rhipidistia. The
coelacanths appeared about 400 million years ago and were thought to have
gone extinct 100 million years ago. On the basis of fossil evidence, it had been
touted as a missing link between fishes and four-legged terrestrial vertebrates,
but these hopes were dashed once the soft anatomy of a living specimen could
be examined. Scientists had envisioned coelacanths dragging themselves along
the ocean floor with their lobed limblike fins, but it turned out that they swim
rather than crawl. This shows how difficult it is to draw conclusions about the
overall biology of organisms from their skeletal remains alone. The coelacanth is
just another peripheral twig on the presumed tree of life. The coveted title for
missing link between marine and terrestrial life is currently held by
Eusthenopteron – for darwinists’ sake, let’s hope that it stays dead!
Fig. 4.8. The earliest known amphibian (Ichthyostega) beneath the nearest presumed
fish ancestor (Eusthenopteron).2 Ichthyostega already had well-developed fore- and
hindlimbs and was fully capable of terrestrial motion – there are no traces of gradual
limb development in the fossil record.
The lungfish is a classic example of an intermediate type. It has fins, gills, and an
intestine containing a spiral valve like any fish, but lungs, heart, and a larval
stage like an amphibian. But although it has a mixture of fish and amphibian
traits, the individual characteristics are not in any realistic sense transitional
between the two types. Another example is the egg-laying mammals, or
monotremes, such as the duckbill platypus. The monotremes are reptilian in so
far as they lay eggs, but entirely mammalian in their possession of hair,
mammary glands, and three ear bones. Here, too, instead of finding character
traits obviously transitional we find them to be either basically reptilian or
basically mammalian.
Another supposedly intermediate group is a group of reptile-like amphibians, one
of which, Seymouria, has been described as almost exactly on the dividing line
between amphibians and reptiles. In terms of purely skeletal characteristics
Seymouria would appear to be a convincing intermediate, but there is a serious
problem. The major difference between amphibians and reptiles lies in their
reproductive systems. Amphibians lay their eggs in water and their larvae
undergo a complex metamorphosis (like a tadpole) before reaching the adult
stage. Reptiles develop inside a hard shell-encased egg and are perfect replicas
of the adult on first emerging, and the problems of envisaging the gradual
evolution of the reptilian egg are immense. But fossil evidence suggests that
Seymouria was wholly amphibian in its reproductive system. A further difficulty is
that Seymouria appears in the fossil record 20 million years too late to be an
ancestor of the reptiles.3
The small caterpillar-like organism Peripatus is considered to be intermediate
between the annelid worms and the arthropods. But once again, its organ
systems are not strictly transitional between the two groups. For example, its
circulatory and respiratory systems are typically arthropod in their basic design,
while its nervous and excretory systems are typical of those seen in many
annelid worms. Peripatus, like the lungfish and the platypus, is really a mosaic of
characteristics drawn from two distinct groups. As Denton says:
they provide little evidence for believing that one type of organism was ever
gradually converted into another. ... Between lungfish and amphibia, between
monotremes and reptiles and between Peripatus and arthropods, there are
tremendous gaps unbridged by any transitional forms.4
The ancient bird-dinosaur Archaeopteryx from the late Jurassic is a celebrated
intermediate fossil. The specimens of this primitive bird range from the size of a
blue jay to that of a large chicken. Archaeopteryx possessed reptilian features
such as teeth, a long tail, and claws on its wings. However, it was also covered
with feathers – not ‘primitive’ feathers (no such things are known in the fossil
record), but fully modern flight feathers. Its wings indicate that it could fly, but
skeletal structures related to flight are incompletely developed, suggesting that it
may not have been able to fly far. Archaeopteryx hints at a reptilian ancestry, but
it is not led up to by a series of transitional forms from an ordinary terrestrial
reptile through a number of gliding types with increasingly developed feathers
until the full avian condition is reached.
Fig. 4.9. The feather is both extremely light and structurally strong – an engineering
marvel.5 A single pigeon feather may have several hundred thousand barbules and millions
of hooklets (hamuli).
The only sort of evolution documented in the fossil record are several instances
where a relatively minor morphological transformation can be traced through a
series of fossil forms. The best-known case is that of the horse. The series starts
with the original dog-sized horse, Eohippus (or Hyracotherium), which lived about
60 million years ago and had four toes on the front feet. It then passed through
three-toed varieties, and ended with the modern one-toed Equus. However, the
evolution of the horse is now admitted to have been much more complicated than
originally assumed, and some palaeontologists see it as an example of
saltational rather than gradual evolution. The various species appeared abruptly
and remained unchanged throughout their lifetimes (in some cases as much as 4
million years), many other species appeared that are entirely inconsistent with
the supposed ‘trend’, and three-toed horses and one-toed horses commonly
coexisted in North America.6
The differences between Eohippus and the modern horse are relatively trivial, yet
the two forms are separated by 60 million years and at least 10 genera and a
great number of species. The horse series therefore emphasizes just how vast
the number of genera and species must have been if all the diverse forms of life
on earth had really evolved in the gradual way that neodarwinism implies. There
must have been countless transitional species linking such diverse forms as land
mammals and whales or molluscs and arthropods. Yet they have all vanished
without leaving a trace of their existence in the fossil record. This seems to leave
a saltational model as the only evolutionary explanation of the gaps.
References
‘Trade secret’ revealed
1. Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, London: Penguin Books, 1990 (1980),
pp. 150, 156.
2. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A theory of the origins of
species, New York: Basic Books, 2002, p. 52.
3. Sri Ramesvara Swami (ed.), Origins: Higher dimensions in science, Los Angeles,
CA: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1984, p. 50.
4. Quoted in Walter J. ReMine, The Biotic Message: Evolution versus message
theory, Saint Paul, MN: St. Paul Science, 1993, p. 428.
5. Quoted in Alexander Mebane, Darwin’s Creation-Myth, Venice, FL: P&D Printing,
1994, p. 18.
6. Quoted The Biotic Message, p. 303.
7. The Panda’s Thumb, p. 151.
8. ‘Dinosaur’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, CD-ROM 2004.
9. Quoted in Darwin’s Creation-Myth, p. 18.
10. Quoted in The Biotic Message, p. 304.
11. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Our Place in the Cosmos: The
unfinished revolution, London: J.M. Dent, 1993, p. 135.
12. Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins: Fossils, genes, and the emergence of
species, New York: John Wiley, 1999, p. 3.
13. Michael Denton, Evolution: A theory in crisis, Bethesda, MA: Adler & Adler, 1986,
p. 173; Our Place in the Cosmos, p. 134.
14. Alec Panchen, Evolution, London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993, pp. 162-3.
15. Quoted in Evolution: A theory in crisis, p. 182.
16. Quoted in The Biotic Message, p. 305.
17. Peter G. Williamson, ‘Morphological stasis and developmental constraint: real
problems for neo-darwinism’, Nature, v. 294, 1981, pp. 214-5.
Radiations and extinctions
1. James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A biography of our living earth, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 115.
2. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the nature of history,
New York: Norton, 1989, p. 313.
3. Ibid., pp. 315-6.
4. James P. Gills and Tom Woodward, Darwinism under the Microscope: How
recent scientific evidence points to divine design, Lake Mary, FL: Charisma
House, 2002, pp. 25-7, 95-106; Duane T. Gish, Evolution: The fossils still say
no!, El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1995, pp. 53-69; J.S. Levinton,
‘The big bang of animal evolution’, Scientific American, Nov 1992, pp. 52-9; Chris
Clowe, ‘The Cambrian “explosion” ’,
www.peripatus.gen.nz/paleontology/CamExp.html.
5. S.J. Gould, ‘Of it, not above it’, Nature, v. 377, 1995, pp. 681-2.
6. Wonderful Life, pp. 114, 126, 177, 203.
7. See ‘The great dinosaur extinction controversy’, davidpratt.info.
Transitionals and mosaics
1. Fred Williams, ‘Exposing the evolutionist’s sleight-of-hand with the fossil record’,
Jan 2002, www.evolutionfairytale.com/articles_debates/fossil_illusion.htm.
2. Denton, Evolution: A theory in crisis, p. 167.
3. Ibid., pp. 176-7.
4. Ibid., p. 110.
5. Ibid., p. 203.
6. Gish, Evolution: The fossils still say no!, pp. 189-97.
5. Common descent and common design
Classification
Taxonomy, or systematics, is the science of biological classification, and seeks to
arrange plants and animals into hierarchies of superior and subordinate groups
on the basis of the features they have in common. Branching diagrams
(dendograms or cladograms) are drawn up showing the affinities between
different species, and most taxonomists then interpret each node where a new
branch begins as representing a hypothetical common ancestor. Alec Panchen
says that common descent ‘seems so obviously the correct answer to the
apparent relationships of classification, that any rejection of that explanation must
surely be due to ignorance, stupidity or prejudice’.1
Fig. 5.1. A dendogram.
However, a group of dissident scientists, called ‘transformed cladists’ by their
opponents, reject the hypothesis of common ancestry as unnecessary and see
cladograms solely as a representation of a natural hierarchy of characteristics.
Although they reject the a priori assumption of ancestor-descendant sequences
(phylogeny), and express notable dissatisfaction with evolutionary theory and
methods, most transformed cladists are in fact evolutionists, even though their
peers regard them as traitors. They merely recognize that virtually all groups,
living or extinct, are already too specialized to be reasonably called directly
‘ancestral’ to any other, and that none of the logically required truly ancestral
forms are to be found in the fossil record. Only the outer twigs on the supposed
evolutionary tree can be verified; the ancestral forms constituting its trunk and
boughs are all missing. As Gareth Nelson and Norman Platnick wrote in 1984:
‘We believe that Darwinism is a theory that has been put to the test in biological
systematics, and has been found false.’2
Since the fossil record has not provided any substantial evidence of the
evolutionary tree of descent that darwinists expected to find, they now often
speak of a labyrinthine ‘bush’. They acknowledge, however, that it is often
difficult to judge where any given fossil falls among the many branches of the
tree or bush. Robert Wesson writes:
Charts depicting ancestries through the ages are sometimes fudged by drawing
connections where they are assumed; the more honest ones have dotted lines.
The gaps in the record are real ... The absence of a record of any important
branching is quite phenomenal. Species are usually static, or nearly so, for long
periods, species seldom and genera never show evolution into new species or
genera but replacement of one by another, and change is more or less abrupt. 3
And Ernst Mayr says:
It comes as rather a surprise to most nontaxonomists how uncertain our
understanding of degrees of relationship among organisms still is today. For
instance, it is still unknown for most orders of birds which other order is a given
order’s nearest relative. The same is true for many mammalian families and
genera ...Yet these uncertainties in the classification of higher vertebrates are
very minor compared to those of the invertebrates, the lower plants, and most of
all, the prokaryotes and viruses.4
David Raup points out that many scientists think the fossil record is far more
darwinian than it really is due to oversimplified textbooks, semipopular articles,
etc. plus wishful thinking; ‘some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks,’ he says.
Various ‘tricks’ are used to strengthen the impression of darwinian descent. For
instance, some authors display a series of fossils which show a progression in
morphology, but which are not chronologically successive, and therefore cannot
be evolutionary sequences. Alternatively, a chronologically successive series of
teeth, jaw bones, etc. may be displayed as an evolutionary sequence, even
though the author may know that the body parts are from organisms that could
not reasonably have formed a lineage.5
Homology, parallelism, and convergence
Similarities in the structure, physiology, or development of different species are
said to be homologous if they are attributed to descent from a common ancestor.
For instance, the forelimbs of humans, whales, dogs, and bats are regarded as
homologous, i.e. derived from an ancestor with similarly arranged forelimbs.
Corresponding features with similar functions that are not thought to have
originated by common descent are said to be analogous. Examples are the
wings of birds and flies, which are believed to have developed independently.
There are many cases where similar features once classed as homologous have
later been reclassified as analogous.
The common-descent explanation of homologous features in different species is
weakened by the fact that the features concerned are often specified by different
genetic systems. Darwinists believe that genes have repeatedly become entirely
altered with no change in the structure or function governed by these genes. For
instance, genes such as those governing the eyes may evolve into entirely
different genes but the structure (the eye) governed by these genes remains
unchanged. A further problem is that homologous structures are often arrived at
by different embryological routes. For instance, structures such as the vertebrate
alimentary canal are formed from quite different embryological sites in different
vertebrate classes. The amniotic and allantoic membranes which surround the
growing embryo in reptiles, birds, and mammals are considered strictly
homologous but in mammals the processes which lead to their formation and the
cells from which they are derived differ completely from those in reptiles and
birds.
‘Homologous’ structures are supposed to have initially originated by the random
accumulation of tiny advantageous mutations, and then to have been inherited by
descendant species and further adapted, thanks to natural selection of further
random mutations. ‘Analogous’ structures, on the other hand, are supposed to
have arisen by random mutations several times and entirely independently – this
is called parallel or convergent evolution. Parallel evolution refers to the
appearance of similar patterns in more or less closely related plant and animal
species, while convergent evolution refers to the appearance of striking
similarities among organisms only very distantly related.
In the plant kingdom, the most familiar examples of parallel evolution are the
forms of leaves, where very similar patterns have appeared again and again in
separate genera and families. In butterflies, many close similarities are found in
the patterns of wing colouration, both within and between families.
Fig. 5.2. Three species of South American butterflies which closely mimic
each other, even though they belong to quite distinct families. Their colours
are the same: black, white, and brilliant orange (stippled areas).1
One of the most spectacular examples of parallel evolution is provided by the two
main branches of the mammals, the placentals and marsupials, which have
supposedly followed independent evolutionary pathways, after splitting off from
some primitive mammalian common ancestor in the late Cretaceous. (Placentals
bear their young fully developed, while marsupials give birth prematurely and
nurture their young in a pouch.) The marsupials of Australia have evolved in
isolation from placental mammals elsewhere yet have given rise to a whole range
of similar forms: pouched versions of anteaters, moles, flying squirrels, cats,
wolves, etc. Much the same phenomenon occurred in South America, where
marsupials independently gave rise to a range of parallel forms.
Fig. 5.3. Examples of parallel evolution. Above: A and B, a marsupial flying
phalanger and a placental flying squirrel; C and D, marsupial and placental jerboas; E
and F, marsupial and placental moles. Below: The marsupial Tasmanian wolf (left)
and the familiar placental wolf (right), with the corresponding skulls.2
Even more mysterious is the convergent evolution of similar structures in
organisms otherwise extremely different. The eyes of vertebrates, for example,
have many features in common with the eyes of cephalopods, such as the
octopus, including the lens, retina, and musculature. Darwinists believe that the
eye evolved independently at least 40 times in the animal kingdom. Wings
allegedly evolved independently no less than 4 times: in insects, flying reptiles,
birds, and bats. The whale, dolphin, extinct ichthyosaurus of the Mesozoic, and
shark all look similar. Yet the shark is a fish, the ichthyosaurus was an aquatic
reptile, and the whale and dolphin are mammals. Even so bizarre a feature as
saber-length fangs appeared 4 times over in 4 different lineages.
Simon Morris argues that the ubiquity of parallelism and convergence ‘means
that life is not only predictable at a basic level, it also has direction’.3 But he has
no explanation other than the standard neodarwinian tale that similar forms and
structures evolve because random mutations are sifted by similar selection
pressures, and because there may be only a very limited number of ways of
solving particular challenges (e.g. designing an eye). However, it is difficult
enough to imagine how a complex organ or organism could have evolved even
once by a combination of thousands of randomly generated ‘beneficial’
mutations; the idea that it could have happened more than once beggars belief.
Moreover, when related species independently evolve similar physical traits they
sometimes use the same genes to do so – which deals a further blow to the idea
that evolution is essentially a random process.4
Many examples from the fossil record therefore suggest that particular
evolutionary pathways are repeated: organisms with features almost identical to
previous species appear again and again. Instead of thinking in terms of random
mutations, it seems more reasonable to suppose that records of past features
and structures are stored in some way, and that these records can be tapped into
and modified during the design of later creatures.
Embryology
Vertebrate embryos pass through a series of similar stages in early development.
In 1866 Ernst Haeckel formulated the ‘biogenetic law’, which states that
‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, meaning that embryological development
recapitulates ancestry. He argued that an organism evolves by tacking on new
stages to its process of embryonic development, so that as an organism passes
through embryonic development it retraces every adult stage of its evolutionary
ancestors. Biologists soon discarded the idea that evolution is limited to changes
added at the end of the development process, and took the view that evolution
can affect all phases of development, removing developmental steps as well as
adding them, so that embryology is not a strict replay of ancestry.
Fig. 5.4. Above: Haeckel’s infamous drawings of vertebrate embryos. Left to
right: fish, salamander, turtle, chicken, pig, cow, rabbit, human. Haeckel had
falsified his drawings to make their early stages appear more alike than they
really are. His contemporaries spotted the fraud and got him to admit it.
Below: Photos of (from top to bottom) a human, pig, chick, and fish embryo
at similar stages of development.1
The embryo starts as a single cell, then divides into a tiny multicellular ball. A
mammal embryo continues through stages resembling fish and reptiles before
finishing as a fully formed mammalian youngster. Comparative embryology
shows how different adult structures of many animals have the same embryonic
precursors. Darwinists interpret these shared developmental features as
evidence that many animals have ancestors in common; closely related animals
show more similarities than more distantly related animals. For instance, at a
certain stage of development, vertebrate embryos develop pharyngeal pouches
resembling the gill pouches found in fish, though these features are never
functioning gills, not even in embryonic fish. These features then go on to
develop into very different adult structures – gills in the fish, and ear, jaw, and
pharynx in the mammal. This is interpreted to mean that all mammals share a
common ancestor whose embryo had pharyngeal pouches.
Theosophy agrees that embryology provides information about evolutionary
history, but rejects the darwinian notion that every new type of organism arose
through the continuous transformation of physical ancestors (see section 8). It
should be noted that materialistic science cannot truly explain any aspect of
embryological development. For example, how does an embryo know when to
stop making liver cells and to start making kidney cells? Chemical signals are
believed to trigger the changes, switching certain combinations of genes on and
off at just the right moments – but this raises more questions than it answers.
Moreover, no known genetic mechanism explains morphogenesis or how
organisms are able to retain a memory of ‘ancestral’ forms.
Another way of looking at embryological development is expressed in Von Baer’s
laws, which were formulated before Haeckel’s biogenetic law. They indicate that
the most generalized characters tend to appear earliest in ontogeny, followed by
less generalized characters and finally the most specialized. This means that
those structures that develop early in the embryo are common to many different
species, whereas structures that develop late in the embryo are the ones that
can be used to distinguish between species. In other words, lifeforms tend to
begin near a common point and diverge outward, each on its own unique path,
like the diverging spokes of a wheel. Von Baer was a creationist and formulated
this law in opposition to evolution, but darwinists believe that the stage of
development at which two species diverge depends on how closely they are
related – the assumption being that the only way they can be related is by
physical descent. Theosophy postulates the existence of astral root-types, which
were then developed in many different directions – not in a random fashion, but
guided by nature’s instinctive intelligence.
Darwinists find further evidence of common descent in ‘vestigial organs’, which
they view as the remains of what were once fully functional organs in the
evolutionary ancestors of the species concerned. The human coccyx (tailbone),
for example, is seen as a vestigial tail and evidence that some of our ancestors
had a tail.2 The remains of a hip girdle and hind limbs in whales, and the reduced
hind limbs of primitive snakes are interpreted as incomplete modifications of the
structures of their ancestors. But this sort of evidence is also compatible with
some kind of conscious design, since modification of certain basic structures
would be more efficient than designing everything from scratch. Moreover, the
lack of any substantial fossil evidence for gradual evolutionary change is
consistent with the theosophical view that the preparations for new physical
features and forms take place on the ethereal level.
Genetic affinities
Darwinists explain not only similar bodily structures but also genetic similarities in
terms of common descent. But again, such similarities show nothing definite
about how the organisms originated, and could just as easily be attributed to
some form of conscious design.
Darwinists use differences in proteins and DNA as a ‘molecular clock’ to estimate
how long ago different species diverged from a common ancestor. Each gene or
protein is a separate clock, which ‘ticks’ at a different rate. For instance, it is
estimated that 600 million years are required to produce a 1% difference in the
histones of 2 different organisms, compared with 20 million years for cytochrome
C, 5.8 million years for haemoglobin, and only 1.1 million years in the case of the
fibrinopeptides. However, the evolutionary trees based on different classes of
proteins sometimes show considerable differences, and there are also large
differences in the family trees based on comparisons of morphologies (visible
traits) and those based on biochemistry. Evolution rates based on the fossil
record, for example, are much higher than those predicted from genetics. 1
The meaning of overall DNA similarity between two organisms is a matter of
debate. For instance, the genetic similarity of humans and chimpanzees has
been put at 95%, 98.5%, and even 99.4%; yet humans possess selfconscious
intelligence while apes do not. On the other hand, there are two species of fruit
fly (Drosophila) that look alike but have only 25% of their DNA sequences in
common. One study found that the snake and the crocodile (both reptiles) had
only around 5% of their DNA sequences in common, whereas the crocodile and
chicken had 17.5% of sequences in common – the opposite of what
neodarwinism predicts. There are more than 3000 species of frogs, all of which
look superficially the same, but there is greater variation of DNA among them
than between the bat and the blue whale.2 This is a further indication that far
more than DNA is required to build an organism.
References
Taxonomy
1. Alec Panchen, Evolution, London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993, p. 59.
2. Quoted in Alexander Mebane, Darwin’s Creation-Myth, Venice, FL: P&D Printing,
1994, p. 30.
3. Robert Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994,
pp. 39, 45.
4. Quoted in Walter J. ReMine, The Biotic Message: Evolution versus message
theory, Saint Paul, MN: St. Paul Science, 1993, p. 311.
5. Ibid., pp. 280, 409.
Homology, parallelism, and convergence
1. Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past, New York: Vintage, 1989, p. 291.
2. Ibid., pp. 293-4.
3. Simon Conway Morris, ‘We were meant to be ...’, New Scientist, 16 Nov 2002,
pp. 26-9.
4. Ananthaswamy Anil, ‘Evolution returns to same old genes again and again’, New
Scientist, 23 Aug 2003, p. 15.
Embryology
1. www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/odyssey/clips/;
www.geocities.com/a_and_e_uk/PerloffC10.htm.
2. See ‘Human evolution: the ape-ancestry myth’, section 6, davidpratt.info.
Genetic affinities
1. William R. Corliss (comp.), Biological Anomalies: Mammals II, Glen Arm, MD:
Sourcebook Project, 1996, pp. 182-8, 191-2.
2. ReMine, The Biotic Message, p. 449; Richard Milton, ‘Darwinism – the forbidden
subject’, www.alternativescience.com/darwinism.htm.
Evolution and Design: Part 3
Evolution and Design: Contents
Homepage
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