"Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists - by design or stupidity, I do not know - as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. The punctuations occur at the level of species; directional trends (on the staircase model) are rife at the higher level of transitions within major groups." [emphasis mine]

- Stephen J. Gould


Note: Dr. Gould's rant re-emphasizes his own admission of the absence of macro-evolutional evidence. He also commits the straw man fallacy of attempting to debunk a belief that anti-Darwinists do not hold.

The findings of micro-evolutional evidence he touts are actually part of the creationists' and ID theorists' models, and the "punctuations"are exactly where only creationism and IDT predicts they should be.

"If the average length of finch beaks in a population increases five per cent following drought years, and droughts occur every ten years, how long will it take the beaks to grow from an average of one inch in length to ten feet, or for finches to become eagles?"

- Philip Johnson

"Ernst Haeckel's comparative embryo drawings. The human body being laden with 'vestigial structures' from our animal past. Human blood and sea water having the same percentage of salt. Babies being born with 'monkey tails'..."

- James Perloff answering WorldNetDaily's question "What evidences [for evolution] have been discredited?"

 

 

Where did man come from?
4) finally, the missing links!

 

"Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny."

- Carl Sagan

"I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time."

- Isaac Asimov
Author of Isaac Asimov's Guide to the Bible

 

10.12 The search for transitional forms

Archaeopteryx was once thought to be the first find of an actual transitional form. It was a fossil impression of a feather dated prior to the believed appearance of birds. The name was coined by Hermann von Meyer, but it was a collector by the name of Haberlein who acquired the entire fossil. Haberlein's asking price for it was supposedly so high that the curator of the Munich fossil collection resorted to publishing a personal sketch of it. Haberlein's potential fortune was thwarted until, amazingly, he just happened to turn up another Archaeopteryx. This one he succeeded in selling for 20,000 German marks.

Although Archaeopteryx had been marketed as being the missing link between dinosaurs and birds, close study revealed that it failed to show any true intermediary signs. The creature had both fully developed reptilian legs as well as fully developed bird feathers - no half-scale, half-feather type developments. Blackmore and Page record,

In 1985, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe claimed the fossil was a blatant forgery. Haberlein, they said, had assembled some dinosaur bones and added feather marks by pressing real feathers on to a paste of powdered limestone. 26 [emphasis mine]

Fragments of chicken feathers in the pasting were said to have been detected using a microscope. Some evolutionists continue to believe Archaeopteryx to be genuine; declaring it proof that birds descended from dinosaurs. At the same time, other evolutionists are as convinced the complete opposite is true; that dinosaurs descended from birds:

The dinosaurs that came before Archaeopteryx were all much less birdlike than the ones that came after. If the BADD (birds are dinosaur descendants) theory were correct, we would see plenty of very birdlike dinosaurs - Velociraptors and such - in the fossil record earlier than Archaeopteryx. Where are they? 27

In the end, there is no consensus among evolutionists of what, if anything, Archaeopteryx is clear proof. With the significant doubt over this supposed transitional form, the search for the first genuine proof of Darwinian evolution still goes on. The most zealous search was, and still is, for the missing link between modern man and the previous form or forms from which he supposedly came. During the hundred plus years of searching, six instances of discovery are of particular importance to mention.


10.13 Finally, the missing links!

The most zealous search in evolutionary archaeology was, and still is, for the missing link between modern man and the form, or forms, from which he supposedly came. During the one hundred plus years of active searching, these six high-profile discoveries are among evolutionists' greatest finds.


1. Neanderthal Man was the earliest pronouncement of having linked ape and man. In 1856, an unusual skeleton was found in a cave in the Neanderthal Valley near Dusseldorf, Germany. The posture indicated the creature may have walked with an ape-like gate.
Eight years later, scientists began to wonder if this was an ancestral species of mankind. The discovery of other skeletons in the same cave produced ancestors that were clearly human.

Further investigation revealed that the occupant of the initial skeleton had suffered from a vitamin D deficiency, like rickets. Even Thomas Huxley was confident that the skeleton was definitely not the missing link. The classification of Neanderthal Man was consequently changed to Homo sapien. The find had created such a stir in its day however, that the term "Neanderthal" remains descriptive of a backwards or crude person, not someone suffering from a crippling disease.


2. Java Man, or Pithecanthropus erectus, was the next missing link claim to stir investigation. In 1887, Eugene Dubois set out for Sumatra in order to find humanity's missing link. Easily enough he found it, or so he thought. In 1891, Eugene Dubois had found three teeth and, one hundred yards away, a small piece of a skullcap. One year later he found a fragment of a left thigh bone. They were all found in a river bed among the bones of various extinct animals.

The excitement of the discovery drew twenty-four European scientists to confer on the matter. However, the majority opinion was that the elements had all come from an ape. Seven dissenting scientists believed they had all come from a man. Professor Virchow of Berlin made the comment,

There is no evidence at all that these bones were parts of the same creature. 28

Later, Dubois produced two human skulls he had found at the same level as the skullcap and stated his new belief that the fragments had all come from a gibbon.

Nevertheless, there remained the feeling that science had just missed discovering the missing link. Java Man came to be the placecard for the missing link that evolutionists hoped to someday find. So confident were many in its expected discovery that Java Man still remains in many textbooks. Donald Johanson, discoverer of Lucy, even appears to attribute man's first use of hand axes to imaginary "Java Man". 29


3. Piltdown Man followed as the next discovery to vie for the title of missing link. In 1912, Charles Dawson presented to the British Museum a partial skull, bone fragments and teeth he found along with some primitive tools. They had been found in a gravel pit in Piltdown, Sussex, England and were estimated to be 500,000 years old. The missing link was finally found. Then came a discovery in October of 1956. Scott Huse writes,

Reader's Digest came out with an article, summarized from Popular Science Monthly, entitled The Great Piltdown Hoax. Using a new method to date bones based upon fluoride absorption, the Piltdown bones were found to be fraudulent. Further critical investigation revealed that the jaw-bone actually belonged to an ape that had died only 50 years previously. The teeth were filed down, and both teeth and bones were discolored with bichromate of potash to conceal their true identity. 30 [emphasis mine]

It was later testified to that philosophy writer Teilhard de Chardin had placed them there in order to expedite the proof of evolutionary theory. Photos of the teeth show they had been filed down in such an unrealistic manner (each at different heights and angles) that there is no way natural wear would have produced such a result. The skull had belonged to a human, the jaw to an orangutan.

Of further note about Piltdown Man is that during the fifty or so years it was believed authentic, evolutionists wrote and taught of the apelike features of the skull (which proved to be human) and the humanlike features of the jaw (which proved to be orangutan). These falsehoods have had little or no negative impact on the believability of Darwinism and, incredulously, still serve to support it to some degree.


4. Nebraska Man was the 1922 entry for proof of man's evolution from ape. Nebraska Man was also the clinching evidence presented in the famous Scopes monkey trial of 1925. John Scopes was accused of teaching evolution in violation of the state law of Tennessee. Scopes was defended by Clarence Darrow and W.R. Malone who cleverly argued the legitimacy of teaching evolution in spite of the technical illegality of their client's actions with respect to then current law. The prosecuting attorney, William Jennings Bryan, tried to counter this strategy in saying

It is not scientific truth to which Christians object, for true science is classified knowledge and nothing can be scientific unless it is true. Evolution, on the other hand, is not truth; it is merely hypothesis - it is millions of guesses strung together. 31

Darrow responded by presenting a discovery that Harold Cook had found in the Pliocene deposits of Nebraska: a single tooth. With the use of so-called expert testimony, the tooth was introduced as confirming proof that an ape-man race once inhabited the prosecutor's own home state one million years ago.

The prosecution asked for more time to investigate the tooth, but Bryan lost the case. Tragically, he died five days later. It is especially tragic in light of the fact that subsequent investigation unearthed the skeleton from which the tooth came. The tooth was decided to have come from an extinct species of pig. The decision to allow the teaching of evolution as science, though based on errant data, was never reversed.


5. Ramapithecus was another supposed ape-man based on several teeth and part of an upper jaw. Over forty skeletons from which these came have been found. These have come to be classified as orangutan-like and not at all on the way to becoming human.


6. Australopithecines, or Lucy, was found in 1974 by Donald Johanson in Ethiopia. Lucy is a three and a half foot skeleton about forty percent complete. However, the knee joint was found over a mile away and two hundred feet deeper than the rest of the skeleton. It is that same knee joint, along with a thigh bone, on which Johanson stakes his claim that the chimpanzee-like creature walked upright three million years ago. In spite of the fact that the knee joint end of the femur was crushed, he states

The angle of the thigh bone and the flattened surface at its knee joint end... proved she walked on two legs." 32

The assertion here is that walking upright, if that can actually be granted, is proof that humanity evolved from this creature. Yet, it has been observed that the rain forest pigmy chimp spends most of its life walking upright. Therefore, the ability of chimpanzees to sometimes walk upright is insufficient proof of our supposed evolution from them. One of Johanson's fellow evolutionists, anthropologist Richard Leaky, dismisses Lucy's authenticity and actually believes it to be a mosaic of two or more species. 33


10.14 Tools of chimps or men?

As recently as May of 2002, CBSnews.com reported a story about living West African chimpanzees who have been discovered using crude stone tools to break open panda tree nuts. The chimps retain the same specially selected stones at common "workstations" where the young, apparently for untold ages, have learned to reproduce the procedure by watching their parents.

Expectedly, the evolutionists interviewed were thrilled at the idea they were watching exactly how early man worked. Their attitude was basically 'We know that early man, too, worked that way because those are the same kinds of tools we have found and are displaying in our museums.'

Of course, the most obvious possibility was not even mentioned in the article - the possibility that the rocks or "stone tools" in our museums might never have belonged to early man at all. Two things to come to mind:

1. The stones may have actually belonged to chimps, not ancient man; and not millions of years ago, maybe just thousands of years ago. Or even just last week (why not?). And...

2. If a chimp can make use of an ancient rock to feed himself today, isn't modern man capable of doing the same? Yes. Thus the crudeness of an alleged "stone tool" is not necessarily indicative of how long ago it must have been used. Neither does its age or condition prove who must have used it, or what their cranial capacity was.

In this article, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology did show just a little humility in admitting that all the implications of this discovery were not yet clear. What is clear is that there are always two sides to the story behind every evolutionary find, and that dedicated evolutionists have proven not to be the most objective source from which to hear them both. The next three examples reinforce this point.


10.15 The evolution of the horse

A popular example of evolution in many text books is that of the horse. The Field Museum of Chicago was the source of this exhibit, showing a range of skeletons progressing from a rodent-sized creature to that of today's full grown horse. However, Gene Edward Veith shares the little-publicized truth that the skeletons

...have nothing to do with each other. They represent different species, different branches, and overlapping times, as even evolutionists - called on the matter by critics of Darwinism - have been forced to admit. The Field Museum, to its credit, has pulled the showcase, substituting a photo of the old exhibit, along with an account of the controversy. "Once we told the story wrong," it confesses, making "the complex seem simple." 78


10.16 The evolution of the finch

The National Academy of Science's publication Guidebook cites what casual readers might mistake to be a valid example of natural selection. The example concerns beaks of finches found on the Galapagos islands. The work Guidebook cites is by Peter and Rosemary Grant of Princeton University (though they omit the title of the Grant's research paper). Part of the text follows:

...a single year of drought on the islands can drive evolutionary changes in the finches. Drought diminishes supplies of easily cracked nuts but permits the survival of plants that produce larger, tougher nuts. Drought thus favors birds with strong, wide beaks that can break these tougher seeds, producing populations of birds with these traits. The Grants have estimated that if droughts occur about once every 10 years on the islands, a new species of finch might arise in only about 200 years. 79

Phillip Johnson fills in some critical details that Guidebook omits:

It is no wonder that the Guidebook's authors did not quote the title of the Grant's 1987 paper in Nature, "Oscillating Selection in Darwin's Finches," because that would have signaled to teachers, and perhaps also to bright students, that the finch-beak example involves no continuing directional change at all. The drought year in question was followed by a few years of floods, and the average beak size promptly went back to normal. 80

Contrary to how natural selection is claimed to progress a species, the adaptation by progressive generations of finches during drought years did not replace the original species pattern. The original pattern was restored upon normal environmental conditions. Evolution cannot explain this backwards adaptation, but normal variation and known adaptive abilities within a species can. It is regrettable that the National Academy of Sciences apparently knows this and, for that reason, had to present the craftily edited tale of natural selection that they did.


10.17 The evolution of the moth

One more classic example of natural selection at work is, or was, that of the peppered moths of England. The 1999 July/August edition of Touchstone magazine sets up the story:

According to the textbook story, the moths rest during the day on tree trunks and are eaten there by birds. While the tree trunks were light-colored, the light moths were better camouflaged, but the dark moths had the advantage after the trunks became dark due to the effects of industrial pollution. 81

The story concludes with the light moth population coming back after air quality was improved in the 1950's. Furthermore, a 1980's discovery found that those moths do not even rest on trees, and previous photos of moths on trees were of moths (dead or alive) hand-placed or glued into position.


If you find any of the above evolutionary falsehoods shocking, you probably want to ask, "What do more honest evolutionists have to say about all this? Haven't they spoken out?"

Yes, they have, and that is the next section.

 

 

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NEXT: PART 5) Evolutionists on neo-Darwinism

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WHY THIS CHAPTER?

Nothing proves the falsehood of the previous missing link discovery like the next missing link discovery.

Every time evolutionists claim, "Now we've really found it", the only thing you can be sure of is that last time they really didn't, for example:

"Missing link between man and apes found" -- Telegraph, April 3, 2010

Here is the tired history of "finally finding" the missing link...


1. Archaeopteryx
2. Neanderthal man
3. Java man
4. Piltdown man
5. Nebraska man
6. Ramapithecus
7. Lucy
8. Chimps & tools
9. Evolution of the horse
10. Evolution of the finch
11. Evolution of the moth