Origins (Part 2)

Individual Topics — Steve Gregg

Next in this series

Overview of the Bible

00:00

Origins (Part 2)

Individual TopicsSteve Gregg

In this discussion, Steve Gregg explores some of the criticisms and challenges to the theory of evolution. He notes that some do not believe in evolution due to its association with atheism and materialism, but argues that the evidence used to support evolution has been weakened by scientific advances and discoveries. Moreover, he points out that the absence of transitional forms in the fossil record is a problem for the theory of evolution, but evolutionists maintain their belief in the theory despite its lack of scientific evidence.

Transcript

Last time we were talking about a lot of different things related to why people believe in evolution. When they do, there's an increasing number of people who don't believe in evolution, but you wouldn't know it from the media. It's a very politically incorrect thing to defect from the state religion, which is evolution.

It is the creation story of atheism and of materialism. In so far as our secular culture embraces atheism and materialism, they have to have their creation story. The only way they can really do that, as I pointed out yesterday, is by not allowing it to have any competition on the field.

Because their creation story, evolution, is nonsense. It's a fairy tale. That being so, it does not fare well in situations where its evidences have to be compared against the evidences for any competing view.

Basically, a theistic or God-centered creation story like we have. Nonetheless, evolutionists have tried, because when Darwin's book was written, still most people were creationists. Evolution had not captured the field and was not monopolizing the educational system like they do now.

They had to gain the field somehow, and they did so by claiming that science gave evidence of evolution more than of creation. Although many of the classic evidences they gave for evolution at the beginning are known to be no longer valid. Things that Darwin said and his supporters said, they said these 150 years ago almost.

You have to realize that science has progressed a long way since then. A lot of discoveries have been made that can be tested against the theories of Darwin. For example, Darwin thought a lot of things that modern scientists don't believe in.

Some of the things he thought, mistakenly, were, to his mind, support for his theory. But now, for example, he didn't know anything about genetics. He lived before Gregor Mendel discovered anything about genetics.

Well, how can you understand biology without understanding anything about genetics? So a lot of Darwin's thoughts about his theory did not take into consideration anything that we now know about genes. He thought, for example, that acquired traits, let's say like a suntan. A suntan is not a genetic trait unless you've got black parents and you're born black.

But if you're a white-skinned person and you go get a suntan, that's an acquired trait. It's not something in your genes. It's something that just happens.

If you get your nose cut off or you lose an ear or a finger, that's an acquired trait. You're not going to have babies missing a finger if you have your finger cut off. Because you'll pass along your genetics to your child, not what things have happened to you since you were born.

And Darwin believed that acquired traits can be passed on. And that's something that geneticists don't believe anymore. But he didn't know that.

In fact, Gregor Mendel's work was published in Darwin's Lifetime, but he never paid much attention to it. However, Mendel's work is scientific and Darwin's is not. And that's only one example of many things that Darwin and his supporters didn't know about that we know about now.

And a lot of that kind of stuff has come against this theory, though supporters of evolution sometimes act as if that isn't so. There are basically seven evidences that have classically been used to try to prove evolution has happened. I've got them in your notes, and I have quite a few quotes from experts.

As I said, the only creationist I ever quote, and I only do so very sparingly, is Philip Johnson, professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, in his book Darwin on Trial. I've read other books by him, too, but I don't quote creationists much in these notes. Because I am a creationist, and I don't want to seem too biased.

The people that are quoted here as authorities are evolutionists themselves. So I'm going to tell you what the evolutionist argument is. Then I'm going to tell you even what some evolutionists are willing to admit about the real nature of the evidence today.

So let's just go through these so-called evidences for evolution. The first of them would be what's called vestigial organs, or vestigial structures of the body. Now, I don't expect many of you to know immediately what that refers to, so I'll explain it.

A vestige is something left over. It's like a remnant. You know, if you're cutting a carpet to the size of your room, the parts you cut off because they don't fit and you throw away, those are the remnants, the vestiges of the carpet.

Only, not exactly the same thing as that. A vestige, in this definition, is left over from previous times. That it was something that may have had a use in former times, but it doesn't anymore, but it's still around.

We could talk about vestiges of ancient civilizations in terms of maybe monuments from ancient Greece, or something that are no longer usable or in use for anything, but they once were. Those are vestiges of that ancient culture. When we talk about vestigial organs or vestigial structures, what evolutionists mean is this.

That there are existing in animals and plants that are alive today, structures and parts of them that are not useful for anything, that are not used anymore. But they suggest that they were used by some evolutionary ancestor. The most obvious example we could give would be what's sometimes called the tailbone in a human being.

Now, human beings don't have tails, but we have a structure at the base of our spine that's called the cossacks. And that is sometimes referred to as a tailbone. Why? Well, because it's in the place where some animals have tails.

Now, our species doesn't have a tail, but evolutionists believe that somewhere way back there, we evolved from animals that did have tails. And in the process of evolution, the lifestyle of our ancestors ceased to have use for a tail. Maybe some of our ancestors needed that tail to hang on to a branch and reach out into a nest and steal eggs or fruit and to survive that way.

But as we became more terrestrial animals, we don't live up in the trees and so forth, we don't have as much use for the tail, and therefore our ancestors eventually just kind of disappeared. We don't have a tail anymore. But the tailbone, they say, is a vestige that is left over of that tail that our ancestors once had.

And here's how it's argued. It is argued that if we were designed by a creator, he certainly would not have included parts that are not used for anything. Right? I mean, if you build any kind of a mechanical thing, you don't just throw in a few extra parts, a few extra nuts and bolts, something that don't have any use.

A designer will include the parts that have a function for his design, and he doesn't have any reason to throw in other peripheral stuff. So it was argued that there are in these animals and in man too, certain organs and structures that are not used for anything. They're not useful.

But they are similar to structures that some other species have use for. And therefore, rather than saying that God created us the way we are and that he just threw in a few extra parts that weren't needed, it's more sensible, they say, to suggest that these parts exist because our ancestors used them. And in the process of evolution, the tail got smaller and smaller until it finally never broke the surface.

It now just exists in the skeleton as a little nub, for example. Now, I have a quote here from an atheist evolutionist. You may know his name, H.G. Wells, well known for his science fiction writing, but he was also well known for being an anti-Christian.

And in a book called The Science of Life, he wrote, back in 1934, he said, of a German writer, Wiedersheim, the celebrated German anatomist, enumerated in the body of man no less than 180 organs, which are vestigial, holy or almost useless to us, though useful in other species of animals, each one of them is a stumbling block to the believer in special creation, but an ally to the evolutionist. Unquote. Now, that's put very succinctly.

I think the whole argument about vestigial organs is put very succinctly there, isn't it? He said, okay, these organs are not useful to us, but they're useful to other species. And the presence of these organs is an ally, or it helps the theory of evolution, doesn't help the theory of creation at all, he says. And let me put that in perspective.

He made that comment in 1934. It may not surprise you that medical science and other science has advanced a great deal since 1934. And it's true, in the 19th century, there were 180 parts of your body that scientists at the time, they didn't know of any use for.

So they said, they're useless. Your pineal glands, your adrenal glands, all kinds of glands you've got, they never had any idea what they were for, they don't belong here. What are these for? You know, your tailbone and so forth.

And so they assumed that you had all these useless parts, and they were evidences of evolution. Just so you might know this, an update on the status of that situation. Science has now discovered the use of 175 of those 180 parts.

Okay, so there are still 5 parts of your body that scientists are not quite sure what they're for yet. But give them time. I mean, look at the trend.

You know, 180 back in 1934, down to 5 in the year 2001. That means 175 items, which scientists, more hastily than they should have, decided have no use, actually do have a use. They just didn't know about it.

And that gives good reason to believe that the 5 that remain on the list might also have a use that has not been fully discovered. Now, even those, even the 5 that are still on the list, there are some very good theories as to what their use is. And the tailbone is one of them.

Now, what is that tailbone for anyway? Well, there's a couple of important things that we know about it. One is that it is an anchor for very important pelvic muscles. These muscles in your pelvis and in your tail end, we might say, have to attach to something.

And there's nothing so nearby that's so suited to attach to as the caustics. This bone is well suited for an anchor, for these muscles. And very likely, that would be a good enough reason for it to exist.

There's more, though. Because of cancer and other reasons, they've had to have their tailbone surgically removed and they live their lives without it. You can live your life without a lot of things that have use, like an arm or a leg have plenty of use, but you can live without one.

Well, when you take out the tailbone, they can't sit comfortably anymore. Apparently, the presence of that tailbone makes a nice little tripod for you to sit on. Take it away and I guess you just rock endlessly back and forth.

I don't know. But the fact of the matter is, it is ridiculous to say it has no use just because it doesn't have a use that we could call essential to life, as near as we can tell. But it is still the kind of thing that a designer might well put in, because it works for what it's there for.

And there are a few glands yet that are still questionable what they're for, but I dare say, the argument from vestigial organs is greatly weakened by scientific advances since the time of H.G. Wells and Wiedersheim. There is an evolutionist named S.R. Skadding. In his article, in an article or magazine called Evolutionary Theory, published back in 1981, he said, quote, an analysis of the difficulties in unambiguously identifying functionalist structures leads to the conclusion that vestigial organs provide no evidence for evolutionary theory, unquote.

Now, I realize that guy used a lot of big words. Evolutionists do that whenever they have to admit something that's damaging to them, because they're hoping the average reader won't know what they meant. But, I mean, look, I mean, you guys are smart.

You can diagram sentences. What is the bottom line? The bottom line of his statement is that vestigial organs provide no evidence for evolutionary theory, right? That's not very helpful to evolutionists to say that, because that's one of their great evidences. Well, he says it doesn't provide any evidence.

Well, why doesn't it? Well, he says because there's a difficulty in identifying functionless structures. In other words, it's hard to really be sure if any given structure really is without function. It may be that we just don't yet know what the function is.

Now, there are other vestiges we need to be aware of in the animal world. Pigs have toes that never reach the ground on the back of their legs. There are newts that live underground all their lives, never see light, and they have eyes that are blind.

They have sightless eyes. Now, these are often referred to as vestiges also. But I have no problem seeing those as vestiges.

And at this point, I should probably clarify what creationists believe and what they don't believe. Some people try to draw this huge black line between the creationists and evolutionists and say, creationists don't believe any kind of evolution occurs. Well, that's not true.

Everybody who's knowledgeable knows that what some people might call microevolution occurs. But it's not really properly called microevolution, because that suggests it's evolution. We're just talking about variation.

The fact of the matter is, there is one species of dogs on this planet, it's called Canis familiaris, but there are over 200 varieties of dogs. And some of them look so different from each other that you wouldn't have known they were the same species if they couldn't interbreed with each other. Usually, a species is identified as a population group that is capable of interbreeding with each other and producing fertile offspring.

It was mentioned by someone here yesterday that you can, or maybe it was not here, but that you can breed a lion to a tiger in some cases. There have been some specialized cases where zoologists have bred lions and tigers together. And they do produce an offspring.

We call it a ligon, for obvious reasons. Or a liger. Or a tigon.

I forget which. Or both. It might depend on if it's male or female.

But the fact is that the offspring from these unions between a tiger and a lion are not fertile. That's the end of the development. They can produce a baby, but it can't do anything.

It can't produce more babies of the same kind. And therefore, by definition, tigers and lions are not the same species. Because although they can reproduce to each other, in some limited way, they can't produce fertile offspring so as to produce yet a new species.

They are isolated in their own families and they can't produce new species. Well, creationists, generally speaking, don't have any problem agreeing that there is such a thing as variation within a species. That's not really evolution.

It's not even micro-evolution. Because evolution... Let me arm you against a common ploy, a propaganda ploy of evolutionists. They try to win the debate by defining the words the way they want to define them.

And when they say, well, how can you say evolution doesn't occur? They'll say, evolution just means change. That's all evolution means. It just means change.

And we all know that things change. We can see change in the dog breed. You know, different changes in the dog breed.

Fine. But evolution doesn't just mean change. They're misleading you if they say that.

When we talk about the theory of evolution, we're not just talking about things change. Everybody knows that things change. But that's a different claim than what evolution makes.

Evolution claims that every species that exists originated from previously existing species because of a series of changes. So that you... What evolution is claiming is not just that things change, but that things change in a certain direction that makes it capable, makes some simple species capable of producing more complex species and all the variety we see in the natural world. That's what evolution means.

It doesn't just mean change. It means a specific kind of change. And no one has ever seen that happen.

Even the dogs. You can take... No one knows what the original dog looked like. In all likelihood, it was probably more like a wolf or a coyote than your common domestic breeds.

But from the genetic pool in a dog, if you breed and crossbreed and do whatever you have to do, you can get a whole bunch of different shapes and sizes and colors and things of dogs. You can get dogs with no hair, dogs with long, shaggy hair, everything. You are not creating a new species because the original dog, before there were any of these varieties, had all the genetics in it for all the different breeds.

The varieties came out because the genes mixed in different ways as generations went by. But all the genes were there. What breeders of dogs have found out is basically that although some species have a tremendous gene pool that allows a lot of variation, there are limits to the variation.

There are boundaries to the gene pool. Dogs are a good example because so many different breeds of one species can exist. Most creatures are not that versatile.

Horses, for example, there are a variety of horses you can produce from an original one pair because of the gene pool, but not as many varieties as there are of dogs. But take something like a human, and how many varieties of those are there? Well, we've got black ones and we've got several different colors of humans. Those are varieties of the same species.

Certainly there are different body shapes and heights and so forth that different races of people exhibit. These are variations within a species, but you never find, at least so far, a human being that's 20 feet tall. Now, if the original dog was the size of a Chihuahua and it produced eventually St. Bernard's, you'd have to say, well, maybe if the genetic pool of humans was as great as that in dogs, we might have people that are 20 feet tall someday.

There's no reason to believe that's true because the genes for a 20 foot tall person would have to be present from the beginning. And they haven't been discovered yet. They haven't apparently showed up.

Now, about the dangling toes of pigs and the sightless eyes of underground newts, those certainly do give evidence that the pig, as we have it today, may well have had ancestors that had all its toes on the ground and that the underground newts that have sightless eyes may have ancestors that maybe had eyes that can see. We don't know. We don't know if they did or not.

But we see nothing of evolution because a pig whose toes don't reach the ground is not an improvement over a pig whose toes do. And a newt that doesn't have eyes that can see is not an improvement over a newt that has eyes that can see. What we can say is that newts that live underground didn't need eyes so much so that those mutant ones that had eyes that didn't see were able to survive in that environment where the ones that lived above ground couldn't.

And so the mutant newts above ground that didn't have eyes that could see, they died off. But the ones that lived underground didn't need eyes, survived. What we can see is degeneration in a species.

To say a newt has eyes that can't see may indeed speak of the fact that it may have had ancestors that had eyes that could, but that's not an improvement. Evolution requires an improvement of the species. That never happens through mutation.

A newt whose toes didn't reach the ground may well have been a mutant of a superior pig that walked with its toes all underground or whose toes were positioned in a way that they could benefit it. Now they're useless vestiges. But see, insofar as there are indeed vestigial structures, they don't argue for evolution.

They argue as readily for degeneration. And that's something the Bible tells us to expect. There's a law of physics called the second law of thermodynamics, and it is a law that states everything tends to deteriorate.

Everything tends to break down. Things don't tend to improve on their own. They tend to break down and degenerate.

Well, that's true of the genetic integrity of certain species too. So, I mean, the genetics, if there's mutations in a species, and let's say a pig that had all its toes on the ground, there was a mutation and one of its offspring had toes that didn't reach the ground. That's not evolution.

That's just a monstrosity. That's actually just a mutant. Now, if that mutant had such a bad mutation that it couldn't survive, it'd be gone.

But toes that don't reach the ground apparently don't prevent survival. So that mutant passed along its genetics to other pigs, and eventually we have a bunch of them that do that. But that's not evolution.

Evolution requires improvement but they're not, they don't speak of an improvement or of evolution. They speak of degeneration and mutation in the species. And as far as human vestigial organs, it's doubtful that there's even a single one that they won't find a use for.

Let's talk about another alleged evidence for evolution, embryological recapitulation. Now, it's questionable whether this should be brought up. On one hand, Darwin thought that evolutionists of all time are saying that this evidence isn't useful anymore.

I'll tell you what it is. You may have heard of it. Darwin believed, and many evolutionists still seem to, that the embryo of a species, as it is developing in the womb of its mother, goes through a progress of development that resembles its own species evolution.

For example, they believe that the human being, like through its evolution stage and other stages like that. And they say, well, look at the human embryo. It starts out with a single cell.

At a certain point, it looks more like a fish embryo than anything else. There's these bars and grooves that appear for a short time in the human embryo that look a lot like the gills of certain fishes. And so evolutionists sometimes refer to these as the gill slits because the whole billions of years of evolution that they think happened before in the ancestry of humans is recapitulator.

It goes through it again. In the womb, in nine months. And this proves evolution.

It's sort of like the development of the embryo in the womb is a documented case of evolution of our species. Well, first of all, this isn't true. And it can be now shown that it isn't true in many evolutions.

Some of the major ones, like Stephen Jay Gould, who's America's leading evolutionist, he says it's not even an argument worth bringing up because it's not valid anymore. But part of the reason is in Darwin's day, scientists had not examined the stages of the embryo in every state carefully enough. So they had seen the embryo in a few stages and made their theories.

But when they discovered more about the development of the embryo, they realized it didn't work. The theory didn't work. But let's pause for a moment and say, suppose it looked like it did work.

Suppose the embryo really did go through all the stages that evolution claims our species went through. Would that prove evolution? I'm not sure why it would. I mean, can anyone think of why, if evolution was true, why it would be recapitulated in every generation in the womb? There's no obvious reason for those two things to be connected, at least to me.

Someone could say that they do, but there's no obvious reason why scientifically it should. And the theory itself is kind of goofy from the outset. But it was still one of the best they had.

Basically, all their theories, all their support is kind of goofy. But Darwin believed that the support for his theory from embryology was second to none. He thought that was the best evidence there was going to be.

However, more recent evolutionists have said things that are not as supportive. Sir Gavin De Beer was formerly the director of the British Museum of Natural History. I mean, he's one of Britain's greatest experts about the natural world.

And in Nature magazine, which I told you last time was the premier British journal of science, in Nature magazine, April 24, 1965, page 331, Sir Gavin De Beer made this comment. Quote, The visceral pouches of embryo reptiles, he's talking about the so-called gill slits that are found in the embryo that are thought to be like gills of fish. He says, The visceral pouches of embryo reptiles, birds and mammals bear little resemblance to the gill slits of the adult fish.

Anyone who can see can convince himself of the truth of this. All that can be said is that the fish preserves its visceral pouches and elaborates them into gill slits, while reptiles, birds and mammals do not preserve them as such, but convert them into other structures such as eustachian tubes, the tonsils and the thymus gland. In other words, what Darwin didn't know in his day is now known that if you take a human embryo and look at it at the stage where it has these grooves in its neck, what they're called visceral pouches now, those are not related to the gills of a fish.

A fish has similar looking grooves in its embryo stage, but the grooves in its neck develop into gills. In other creatures that are not fish, the same visceral pouches develop into other things that aren't related to respiration, aren't related to breathing. They're not related at all.

They're just something that has a superficial resemblance to the fish's gills. Professor E.S. Goodrich at Oxford University said this in 1947, a long time ago. He said, the respiratory surface of the lung, which is the last to appear in the embryo, must have been present from the first and throughout phylogeny.

Now, I realize some of that word is going to go over your head. I'll tell you what he said. He said, you know, when the lungs first evolved in animals, they must have had this surface called the respiratory surface of the lung.

It had to be there or you wouldn't have the lungs working. So, what he's saying is the very earliest animals that had lungs, which in his mind would have the amphibians like reptiles and frogs, because they have them in their later parts of their life, or at least the reptiles, they must have had this respiratory surface of the lung. But, in the human embryo, that respiratory surface of the lung doesn't come early.

It comes last. It comes near the end. In other words, it doesn't correspond to an early stage in the evolution of the lung at all.

You see, he's saying that what happens in the womb does not correspond with what they think must have happened in evolution in history. Here's another example. This comes from Sir Gavin De Beers.

We quoted earlier, but this time in the Oxford University Press third edition, he wrote an article called Embryos and Ancestors, obviously about the subject. And he said, teeth were evolved before tongues. Now, let's stop a minute.

There are very primitive sea creatures that have teeth, but don't have tongues. So, he believes that in evolution, teeth appeared in some animals before any had tongues. But, he said, in mammals now, tongues develop before teeth.

You can prove that to yourself just by looking at a newborn baby. They have tongues, they don't have teeth. And so, in the development of the human embryo, the tongue kind of evolved before the teeth.

But, they believe in evolution, teeth came before tongues. So, it doesn't work. This embryological recapitulation there just isn't true.

It doesn't happen. Another writer, R. Danson, in New Scientist Magazine. Oh, by the way, I shouldn't quote him.

I should give you another example that I don't have a quote here for. But, you know, the human heart has four chambers. You would think that if the development of the heart and the embryo followed some simple to complex evolutionary scheme of ancient history, that the embryo would start with a one-chambered heart, and then develop a two-chambered heart, and then in the mature form be four-chambered.

That would be the natural progression you would think. However, as it turns out, the human heart and the embryo starts out as two-chambers. Then it goes to one chamber, and then to four before the child is born.

So, it doesn't go the way, again, evolution would predict. They didn't know this in Darwin's day, but they do now. So, it really, the whole argument from embryological recapitulation is nonsense.

It just isn't true. Not all evolutionists have heard this yet. I've still had them bring it up to me as one of the proofs of evolution, but they haven't kept up on it as much as they should.

R. Danson, in New Scientist Magazine, Volume 49, page 35, in 1971, said this, quote, The theory of evolution is no longer with us. Now, I might just explain his comment here before I finish the quote. Obviously, the theory of evolution is still with us, and it seems to be, you know, as loud and vocal in its assertions as ever.

But he's saying that among those who are researchers, there are many who no longer have confidence in the theory of evolution. Now, you won't find this out in high school, and you probably won't find it out in most college classrooms. But colleges and high schools are not taught by researchers.

They're taught by educators, who were taught by earlier educators, who were taught by earlier educators, and a lot of times they don't know what the current information is. They learn from their professor what he learned from his professor what he learned from his professor, and a lot of them have never seen whether it's still true. But those who do the research have, in many cases, had grave doubts about evolution, although many of them are not becoming creationists.

And so he says, the theory of evolution is no longer with us, because neo-Darwinism is now acknowledged as being unable to explain anything more than trivial change. And in default of some other theory, we have none. In other words, they're not willing to become creationists.

They'd have to give up the faith for that. But he says, despite the hostility of the witness provided by the fossil record, despite the innumerable difficulties, and despite the lack of even a credible theory, evolution survives, in some circle. Can there be, he says, any other area of science, for instance, in which a concept as intellectually barren as embryonic recapitulation could be used as evidence for a theory, unquote.

Now, he clearly is not a creationist, because he says, you know, evolution insofar as it survives, that's because there's no other theory we were willing to accept. But he says, it is, our confidence in it is gone. Why? He says, well, because there's the hostility of the witness of the fossil record.

We'll talk about that later. He says, because of innumerable difficulties. We'll talk about those later.

He says, because of even the lack of a credible theory, evolution, he says, has all these problems, and he says, for example, think about the argument from embryonic recapitulation. He says, can you think of any other area of science that would allow such an intellectually barren concept as that to be introduced as evidence for a theory? Now, this isn't evolution. He says, that is a totally intellectually barren concept.

And, of course, anyone with common sense would have known that anyway. But evolution is so desperate for evidence, often are willing to hope against hope that something might make sense that doesn't. I mentioned Stephen J. Gould.

He's a professor of biology and geology at Harvard. He's also a hobbyist at paleontology. He studies dinosaur bones and stuff.

He writes more than most, and he is certainly the most popular expert on evolutionary literature in America today. If you have not heard of Stephen J. Gould, it's only because you haven't been reading evolutionary literature. If you had, everybody quotes him, everybody loves him.

He's got a cult following in most universities. He's huge in the evolutionary community. But Stephen J. Gould, back in 1980, in Natural History magazine, made this statement, quote, the theory of recapitulation should be defunct today, unquote.

In other words, he's assessing the evidence. Some of it I've told you, there's more. He says, it's a defunct theory today.

There's no sense in bringing it up. He also said, in another situation, Discover magazine, back in 1982, September, Stephen J. Gould said, the theory of recapitulation died more than 50 years ago, unquote. I actually was giving a lecture on creation and evolution in a secular biology class in a college, Worcester State College in Massachusetts.

The reason was, I was in Worcester teaching in a church as a visiting guest and a student, and I was of this college, who came to my talks, asked if I'd be willing to come and speak to the biology class. Her professor didn't want me to, but she said, well, aren't we fair minded here? Don't want to hear both sides of the professor renege. But the professor was very hostile to me.

He gave me a whole class I was able to address. And I basically gave a short talk and then took questions and answers. And one of the students brought up, a very kind of hostile student, brought up this embryological recapitulation.

And I started telling him some of the problems of the theory, and I said, I told him why it's not a valid argument for evolution and so forth. But he kept on me like a pit bull, you know. He wasn't going to let it die.

And finally, the professor himself, he didn't like me at all. But the professor himself spoke up to the student and said, listen, the theory of embryonic recapitulation has been obsolete for over 50 years. Same thing Stephen Jay Gould said.

Now, this professor didn't like to have to admit that. But he had to rebuke his own student, who was supporting evolution, with this theory of evolution. He had to admit it.

But not all evolutionists have heard it, and certainly not all are willing to admit it. Why? Because they've got a real small stock of arguments in their favor. And that's one of the things that they would like to use.

They'd like to think you won't know they're lying. Number three, natural and artificial selection. What is that? Well, Darwin's theory of evolution was based on something he called natural selection.

Natural selection simply means this. I'll put it real easy. Survival of the fittest.

You've heard that term. It's a more popular popular way of saying natural selection. The reason it's called natural selection is Darwin thought that in every generation of animals, like let's take any given litter of kittens.

Anyone had cats that had kittens? Well then you know there's different colors of kittens in the same litter. Some kittens may be actually bigger than others. There may be a runt that's weaker.

There's some competition for the milk supply. The runt may be crowded out and the bigger one's crowded out and it doesn't get as much milk or whatever. It may be that the coloration of one of these kittens is much more suited for camouflage than the coloration of another one, making it have an advantage when it comes to hunting.

And so Darwin said that as you find all this variety in any generation of creatures, some specimens, some individuals are more suited for survival than others. That nature has given them, because he doesn't believe God did it, says nature has given them advantages that their peers don't have. And in the struggle for survival, those specimens that have these advantages will survive and the others won't.

That's why it's called survival of the fittest. The reason it's called natural selection is because it's saying nature has therefore selected which ones will have advantages and which ones won't. And has therefore, in doing so, nature has selected which traits will survive and be passed on to the new generations.

And this is basically what Darwin thought happened. Now, the idea then is, Darwin thought, that for example, before there were giraffes, the ancestors of the giraffe, whatever they may have looked like, didn't have long necks like giraffes do. And they ate leaves from low-lying trees.

But it may have been that in some of their offspring, some of their offspring had a little bit longer necks. I mean, not like a modern giraffe, but maybe some of them had just a little more neck length than others. And as the branches on the lower branches of the trees began to be defoliated, and those animals with the shorter necks couldn't reach the higher branches, those ones that had a slightly longer neck could reach the food supply and the others couldn't.

And therefore, the ones with the longer necks survived and passed on that characteristic to their offspring. But the ones with the shorter necks died off because they couldn't reach the brush. They were not selected by nature to survive in that situation.

Well, as the story goes, these creatures that had slightly longer necks than their ancestors, even their offspring, because they varied, had some of them had slightly longer necks, even maybe than their parents. And so, as the process went on, generation after generation, the ones with the longer necks survived for the same reason. Eventually, only the ones with really long necks were around and all their ancestors had died off.

Of course, this doesn't explain why it would be that antelopes and palas and other creatures that never did develop such long necks were able to survive, even though they couldn't reach the tall leaves. But, I mean, the point is, the ones with the long necks were more advantaged, their ancestors died off, nature selected them over a period of thousands, millions really, of generations. These little tiny changes accumulated until you have all these changes.

Now, scientists have decided that if natural selection is true, it should be possible for us to artificially get the same results in a laboratory. Now, one of the problems, you know, if you say, well, no one's ever seen an ape evolve into a man, evolutionists will say, of course not, because it takes too long, it takes millions of years, it takes, you know, hundreds of thousands of generations, you'll never see it happen. But they say it still happens.

But they've experimented with creatures that have a much shorter life cycle, like the fruit fly. The fruit fly has a very short life cycle and you can produce thousands of generations of them, you know, in a few years' time. In fact, multiplied thousands of generations of fruit flies have been produced in laboratory conditions and what they do, they bombard these fruit flies with radiation of different kinds, x-rays, gamma rays, ultraviolet rays, things that are known to produce mutations.

And so they produce more mutations in these fruit flies than they would normally have under natural conditions. They're speeding it up. They figure that all creatures came from mutations, but mutations happen so rarely in nature, you can't observe the evolution.

So they thought, we'll speed this process up. We'll bombard these creatures with more of these mutating forces and produce many thousands of generations in a short time and we'll see what it does. And so they produced many thousands of generations of fruit flies under these highly increased mutagenic circumstances.

And you know what they got? I'm sure many of you do, because it's been widely publicized. They got fruit flies that have smaller wings. They have fruit flies that have larger wings.

They have fruit flies that have no wings. They have fruit flies that have larger eyes. They have fruit flies that have smaller eyes.

They have fruit flies that have no eyes. They have fruit flies that have more bristles on their thorax than their parents did of hair. They have some that have no hair.

They have some that have sparse hair. They've got fruit flies with misshapen wings. Their wings are different shapes.

The main problem with most of these mutant fruit flies is they can't survive. And most of them are, not I should say most, but many of them are sterile. It is hard to argue that any of these fruit flies are actually improved like evolution would require.

They're not really any better off than their ancestors, therefore they give natural selection nothing to work with. And the fact is, and evolutions have often bemoaned this fact, is that the fruit flies that were produced artificially, it's called artificial selection as opposed to natural selection, they're still fruit flies. They haven't become house flies or mosquitoes or butterflies or anything like that.

They're still a fruit fly. They're just weird fruit flies. They're just mutant fruit flies.

That's all they are. And so this has been very discouraging for evolutions. Many of them have argued that you're not going to be able to prove evolution this way.

But some people feel very helpful that they will. I'm not going to read all these quotes I have because some of it is, well there's a lot of them here, but let me just quote some of them. C.P. Martin in American Scientist magazine back in 1953 pointed out, quote, it is doubtful that of the mutations that have been seen to occur, a single one can definitely be said to have increased the viability of the affected plant or animal.

Viability means the ability to survive. So he said it is doubtful of the millions and millions of mutations that scientists have observed, he says it's doubtful to say for sure that even one of them ever increased the ability of the affected creature to survive, which is what evolution requires. You see if evolution is going to get the changes necessary to create arms and legs from creatures that had only fins, then that's going to be the result of real major mutations.

But mutations simply don't produce such things. Mutations only deform what's already there. They don't make new structures.

No mutation has caused a fruit fly to grow an arm or it had a wing. It deforms the wing, but it doesn't create a new structure. So artificial selection has not proven evolution, has not even helped at all.

D.S. Faulkner in his book Introduction to Quantitative Genetics wrote this, quote, our domestic animals and plants are perhaps the best demonstration of the effects of this principle. The improvements that have been made by selection in these have clearly been accompanied by a reduction of fitness for life under natural conditions. Only the fact that domestic animals and plants do not live under natural conditions has allowed these improvements to be made.

Now I'll put that in real simple English. You take a creature like a wolf. You breed it for a hundred generations.

You come up with a domestic dog of some kind. You breed those for hundreds of generations of dogs and you get all kinds of varieties of dogs. What you will find is although you produce a lot of variation, you have not produced a dog that can really survive in nature better than the original.

As a matter of fact, you might have produced a dog that's more suited to your purposes. If you want a dog to live inside your RV, then it's good they came up with a chihuahua or a French poodle, a miniature poodle or a pug. But you let one of those creatures go in the wild and you'll find out whether it's an improved version over the original or not.

You see, an improved specimen is not improved in terms of our preferences. It's in terms of its survivability. We're talking about evolution taking place when there are no people around to decide that toy poodles are cute and to protect them from predators.

We're talking about creatures changing in a natural world where they have to compete for survival. What Faulkner is saying is our domestic animals and plants, that is the animals and plants that we have bred for human use and we protect them and they're raised and produced in a protected environment for human purposes. He says they demonstrate that the changes that have been made have not been improvements.

They've been accompanied by reduction in fitness. That's not what evolution is looking for. They're going the wrong way.

This is not evolution in progress. Philip Johnson, who as I said is a creationist but makes some very salient points, made this point, quote, Artificial selection is not basically the same sort of thing as natural selection, but rather is something fundamentally different. Human breeders produce variations among sheep and pigeons for purposes absent in nature, including the sheer delight of seeing how much variation can be achieved.

When domesticated animals return to the wild state, the most highly specialized breeds quickly perish and the survivors revert to the original wild type. Natural selection is a conservative force that prevents the appearance of extremes of variation that human breeders like to encourage. What artificial selection actually shows is that there are definite limits to the amount of variation that even the most skilled breeders can achieve.

Now, I won't paraphrase all that because it's so long. I hope that that's clear what he's saying. He's saying that artificial selection doesn't prove evolution.

It actually, if anything, disproves evolution. Pierre P. Grasset, remember we read a review of his book yesterday by Theodosius Dobzhansky. He's the most noted French zoologist.

His knowledge of the living world is encyclopedic. Well, in his book, The Evolution of Living Organisms, he wrote this, quote, in spite of the intense pressure generated by artificial selection, eliminating any parent not answering to the criteria of choice, over a whole millennia, that means groups of thousands of years, no new species are born. A comparative study of serra, hemoglobins, blood proteins, infertility, et cetera, proves that the strains remain within the same specific definition, as they don't produce new species, just variations in a species.

This is not a matter of opinion or subjective classification, but a measurable reality. The fact is that selection gives tangible form to and gathers together all the varieties of a genome that it's capable of producing, but it does not constitute an innovative evolutionary process, end quote. Now, again, what he's saying is that when you do artificial selection, you can show how much variation can exist in a limb or something like that, but you can't produce a new kind of limb.

It's not innovative. It's conservative. It preserves the species.

It doesn't allow radical changes to occur that will make new species, which evolution needs. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Natural History Museum, interviewed on BBC back in 1982, said, quote, no one has ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural selection. No one has gotten near it, end quote.

Professor Philip Johnson, again, who I quoted a moment ago, said, when I want to know how a fish can become a man, I'm not enlightened by being told that organisms that leave the most offspring are the ones that leave the most offspring. Such illogic survived and reproduced itself for the same reason that an apparently incompetent species sometimes avoids extinction. There was no effective competition in its ecological niche.

If you didn't follow his reasoning, it's quite sarcastic, but what he's saying is, actually, sometimes species that don't seem superior do survive, but only because they have no competition in their environment. He said also, the idea that evolutionists can say, well, a fish can become a man because species that produce more offspring produce more offspring, and that's the proof for evolution. He says that line of reasoning survived for the same reason that an incompetent species survives.

There was no competition. No one was challenging evolution, and so any dumb argument for evolution sounded legitimate and survived because it didn't have any competition in the field. Let's talk about the fourth argument for evolution.

That's homology. Now, I've got an evolutionist telling us what homology means. In case you wonder, it's in Darwin's Origin of Species.

Darwin said homology is defined as that relation between the parts that results from their development from corresponding embryonic parts. Now, he didn't know about genetics, but modern homology teaches something like this. There are similarities between certain species that are not, as a whole, similar to each other.

For example, a classic example is the fin of a whale, the wing of a bat, and the hand of a man. Now, obviously, a whale and a bat and a man are very different kinds of animals. I mean, no one would mistake them for each other.

And yet, if you look at the skeleton of a whale's fin and a wing of a bat and a man's hand, you'll see there is similarity in the skeletal structure of those three things. And the argument goes like this. Well, these structures, the whale's fin, the bat's wing, and the human hand, have developed from mutations in the same chromosomes, in the same genes.

And some ancestor had this basic structure in their limb, and it, through evolution, developed along different branches of the family tree. Some evolved into whales, some into bats, and some into man. And they retained this basic structure from the original type, but through mutation of this gene.

It produced a fin in one case, a wing in another case, and a hand in another case, but you still have the basic skeletal type retained. Now, basically what is being said here is, creatures that are not very much like each other are in many ways quite like each other, which suggests common ancestry that came about from mutation of certain genes. The fact that all creatures have cells, for example, I mean, that's a very basic consideration, suggests that, well, they all came from a creature that had cells with protoplasm, but they evolved from that.

Now, there are serious problems with the arguments from homology, and I'm going to quote a lot right now from a microbiologist, a molecular biologist, named Michael Denton. He's not a creationist, but he wrote a book called Evolution, A Theory in Crisis, which is the most devastating critique of evolution I've ever read. He's an agnostic.

He doesn't know if there's a God, and he doesn't believe in creation. But I quote him quite a bit, because he's not an advocate of creationism, but he's very intelligent, very knowledgeable, and very honest about the problems that evolution faces. And on this matter of homology, he had several things to say.

One, in his book Evolution, A Theory in Crisis, on page 145, he said, quote, the validity of the evolutionary interpretation of homology would have been greatly strengthened if embryological and genetic research could have shown that homologous structures were specified by homologous genes and followed homologous patterns of embryological development. Now, let me stop a moment. A homologous structure, what he means by that is like, like I said, a whale's fin, a bat's wing, a man's hand, that have similar skeletal structures.

Those three things are homologous between those species. Those are homologous structures. They're similar to each other.

But he says, evolution would have been strengthened if it could have been shown that these homologous structures developed from the same genes in the chromosome. But that's not what happened. Actually, for example, the leg of a salamander might code from the fourth gene on the chromosome, but the leg of a lizard from the eighth gene on the chromosome, totally different gene, which would suggest that it's not a mutation of that gene that caused that leg to change.

Homology doesn't work when they find this stuff out. Michael Denton goes on, he says, such homology would indeed be strongly suggestive of true relationship of inheritance from a common ancestor. But it has become clear that the principle cannot be extended in this way.

Homologous structures are often specified by non-homologous genetic systems. And the concept of homology can seldom be extended back into embryology. Now, some of those words go way over your head.

I'll just clarify. It's what I said more simply a moment ago. Structures that are similar to each other often come from genes that are not corresponding to each other in the different species, as you would expect.

I mean, you would expect that a creature that had a fin, like a fish, if it was going to develop into the leg of an amphibian, that the genes that produced the fin in the fish would be the same genes in a mutated form that produced a leg later on, where the fin used to be. But it doesn't happen that way. Different genes.

Totally different. Homology doesn't work, he says. Sir Gavin De Beer, whom I quoted earlier, a leading British authority, says, therefore, correspondence between homologous structures cannot be pressed back to similarity of position of the cells in the embryo or its parts of the egg out of which these structures are ultimately differentiated, unquote.

In other words, saying the same thing. Homology is a false theory. It doesn't work.

Michael Denton, again, said, quote, with the demise of any sort of straightforward explanation for homology, one of the major pillars of evolutionary theory has become so weakened that its value as evidence for evolution is greatly diminished. The breakdown of the evolutionary interpretation for homology cannot be dismissed as a triviality, unquote. Sir Alistair Hardy, another evolutionist, writing in a book called The Living Stream in 1965, said, quote, the concept of homology is absolutely fundamental to what we are talking about when we speak of evolution.

Yet, in truth, we cannot explain it at all in terms of present-day biological theory, unquote. So it's absolutely fundamental to evolution, but it can't be explained scientifically in terms of modern-day scientific knowledge. Sir Gavin De Beer, again, in a book he wrote called Homology, an Unsolved Problem.

Well, what does a creationist say about all this? What does a creationist say when he says, well, look at the similar skeletal structure of the fin of the whale and the wing of the bat and the hand of man. Why is that similar? Well, the creationist can say, well, we believe that everything was created by an intelligent designer that used sound engineering principles. And just as you can look at any number of bridges that are designed by engineers, they don't all look just alike, but they all have some things in common that are part of the soundness of their design.

There are things that have worked well in one bridge that other bridges employ, and if a certain type of teeth worked well in one kind of grass-eating animal, why would not a creator put a similar or identical kind of teeth in another kind of animal that's supposed to eat the same grass? Why not? Even if they were, in other respects, very different creatures, if they're supposed to eat the same grass, why shouldn't they all have similar teeth? There's no problem with that. It's sound engineering principles. It's sound design.

Furthermore, I would say this. Anyone who has a favorite painter or a favorite musician or a favorite songwriter or a favorite artist of any kind and exposes themselves a great deal to the work of that artist soon recognizes the distinctive earmarks of that person's work. So that if you see a painting by your favorite artist, and it's a painting you've never seen before, and no one tells you that's by them, you might recognize it as their style.

Because you've seen enough of their style that it's in everything they do. And you might say, oh, I get it. He did that one, too.

Or I've had favorite singers or songwriters who a new song would come out of theirs, and I'd never heard the song, but as soon as I heard it, I knew it was their stuff. Not even so much from their voice, sometimes just from the style of the music. It's their distinctive style.

And why wouldn't it be that God, who is the artist who designed everything, wouldn't also have his distinctive hallmarks of his work there, sort of like his signature there, in that he made them all, he put in similar things. DNA is one of the things he put in all of them. He didn't have to, but why not? It worked well.

Why not use it widely in other creatures? That is at least what a Christian would say, or a creationist would say about homology, but to an evolutionist, it's an unsolved problem. And Sir Gavin De Beer, in his booklet Homology, an Unsolved Problem, wrote this. He says, it is now clear that the pride with which it was assumed, that the inheritance of homologous structures from a common ancestor explained homology, was misplaced.

Now again, he doesn't like to put his words in an order that makes it easier to understand. He said, there was a certain pride that turns out to have been misplaced pride. What was the pride? It was the pride that the evolutionists used to have when they were able to say, homologous structures explain homology in evolutionary terms.

He says, we now see that the pride with which that was claimed was a misplaced pride, because it isn't true. Let's go to another line of evidence here. Number five, molecular biology.

This actually is one of the newest. It is the newest of all the evidences about this matter of origins that has come up. It has only come up in the last 50 years, as they've gotten more powerful microscopes, and they can look at the cell and see it in far more detail.

They can analyze the DNA more than they used to be able to. That just wasn't possible more than 50 years ago, and so this field of science didn't exist. Now, many evolutionists will tell you that they can prove evolution is true by comparing the DNA or by comparing the chromosomes of different kinds of animals.

And they say they've proven evolution this way. Now, I was speaking actually in a public high school in Australia, and a student brought this up to me. He says, I can prove.

I said, evolution can't be proved. He said, it can be. He says, for example, he says, if you look at the chromosome of the proteins of one of an ape, let's say of a chimpanzee, and let's take the hemoglobin molecule or the insulin molecule in a chimpanzee, and you take the same corresponding molecule in a dog, and the same corresponding one in a frog, and the same corresponding molecule, the hemoglobin, let's say, in a man, you'll find that there is greater similarity in the hemoglobin molecule of the ape than there is... the ape and the man.

It's more similar than the ape and the dog. And the ape and the dog are more similar in this respect than the dog and the frog. And he said, this proves evolution.

Now, to me, I was familiar with this argument. I mean, I just said, this is just the argument of homology taken to the molecular level. All you're saying is there are, you know, a frog is less like a dog than a dog is like an ape.

That's what you're saying. I mean, we would have known that even before we looked at their genes. If I would just look at a picture of a frog and a picture of a dog and a picture of an ape and a picture of a man, I would be able to tell you already, without looking at their genetics, I could say, the ape is more like a man than the frog is.

And the dog is more like an ape than the frog is. I could have told you that. We didn't have to look under a microscope.

That's obvious. And you know what? The discovery that this is true doesn't support evolution at all. It supports what was already known from another field called taxonomy.

I mentioned taxonomy the other day. It was founded by a man named Linnaeus. He was a creationist, by the way.

He was before Darwin's time. He was a creationist. Linnaeus.

He started the field of taxonomy. You know what taxonomy is? You ever seen these pictures of like a family tree of different species? You've got the stalk and then you've got this branch over here are your primates. Here's the canines over here and the felines over here and then there's the hawk-like birds over here and here's the sparrow-like birds and there's these different branches on it, different species.

These family trees in Linnaeus were not really thought to be ancestry. He was just trying to demonstrate how some creatures are more closely similar to each other than others are. And he didn't do this based on molecular biology because he was too ancient.

He didn't know. He did it based on their outward traits. But you know what has turned out is that now that they looked at the cells and the proteins of these creatures and they can say, look, the protein of the ape is more like a man's protein than it is like the protein of a dog.

That has confirmed what Linnaeus said. Linnaeus already said that apes were more like people than they were like dogs. That was obvious without the microscope.

And so it really hasn't proved evolution. It proved Linnaeus' theory, who was a creationist. It just means that Linnaeus was right.

These two creatures are closer to each other than these two creatures are. Not in relationship, not in evolutionary relationship, but just in measurable similarities. Now here's what you need to understand if you're going to talk knowledgably about this at all.

And that is that a protein, well, I don't know, you may not all know this, so I'll give you a real basic, here's the facts of life, of biological life. All living things are made of cells. Everyone knows that? Plants and animals are all made of cells.

Cells are made of proteins. There's hundreds of different kinds of proteins. And the average cell has, I think, about 400 different kinds of proteins in it.

But cells are made up of protein molecules. So okay, living things are made of cells and cells are made of protein molecules. What are protein molecules made of? Amino acids.

There are 21 different amino acids. Like letters in a sentence, there's 26 letters in an alphabet, there's 21 amino acids. You arrange these in a certain order in a chain and you get a certain protein.

You arrange the same 21 in a different chain and you get a different protein. It's just like letters in a sentence. You take the 26 letters of the alphabet, you arrange them one way, you've got a certain sentence that has a certain message.

Take the same letters and rearrange them in different words, you've got a different sentence, different message. Same letters, different arrangement, okay? A protein molecule is a chain of amino acids, and these can be any one of the 21 in any position. And most proteins have, you know, a few hundred amino acids in them.

And then amino acids are made of simpler compounds like hydrogen and basic elements and so forth. Now that's what life breaks down to chemically. Now, what this molecular biology studies is the chain of amino acids that makes up, let us just say the insulin molecule in different species.

This may sound really boring to you, but it's really, I was gonna say it's really interesting, but I can't make an interesting view if it is an interesting view, but it's really significant. Because if you look at a protein molecule, what you're looking at is a chain of different amino acids in different sequence. And let's say, for the sake of explaining it easily, let's say a particular protein has a hundred amino acids in it in a certain sequence.

Let's say that all insulin molecules, insulin is a protein, all insulin molecules have a, I don't think this is quite correct, but just for the sake of illustration, have a hundred amino acids in them. Now, you can, the scientists are now able to identify each amino acid and they can tell you what the sequence is. Now, if you take the amino acid sequence of a chimpanzee's insulin molecule, and you take the insulin molecule of a human and look at the amino acid sequence, they'll be similar in certain positions, but some amino acids will be different in different positions.

Let's say they're similar in 97 out of a hundred positions, but three of them are out of sequence in the human from the ape comparison. You know what I mean? You get the following what I'm saying? Then you could say, then the ape differs from the man in that respect by a 3% margin. See, now you can actually quantify the difference between an ape and a man.

Everyone could have looked at apes and men and said they're different in some ways, but now we can quantify in terms of their insulin, they're 97% the same and 3% different, right? Now, if you do the same thing, look at the amino acid sequence in the insulin of a frog, you might find that it's different from that of an ape. Let's say it's different, 60% different, and it's the same 40%. Now, this is this new science of molecular biology that scientists get really fascinated with because they can now say, okay, we don't have to kind of guesstimate how close these creatures are to each other in some way.

We can now give it a mathematical certainty. This is 60% same as this creature and 40% different. Okay, that's what it is.

And of course, what they found out is what I said Linnaeus found out. Creatures that look a lot like each other also typically have greater similarity in the way their amino acid protein molecules are made. Now, here's some quotes from Michael Denton.

This is his field, actually. And he points out that this field has not helped evolution at all for certain reasons. He says, there is not a trace at the molecular level of the traditional evolutionary series.

Cyclostome, fish, cyclostome is a creature more simple than a fish. Cyclostome, fish, amphibian, reptile, mammal. He says, there's no evidence of that in the molecular level.

He says, incredibly, man is as close to the lamprey, which is of course a fish-like thing, as are fish. A lamprey is like an eel. Now, what he's saying is, if you take the insulin molecule, the lamprey, and compare it with that of a man and that of a fish, although the fish is more like the man than the lamprey is, the lamprey is equally distant from the fish and the man.

I mean, there's so many different sequences possible. They've got charts of this. I have them in an overhead projector, transducer I use when I give lectures about this, a chart from one of the basic books that shows these different creatures and what the percentage difference is from each other.

It's true that the fish's sequences of amino acids are more like a man's than the lamprey's is like a man. But the lamprey's is as different from the fish's as it is from the man in a different way. And so, he's saying this is not what evolutionists would have expected to find.

He says, so although cytochrome C sequence, that's a particular protein, varied among the different terrestrial vertebrates, all of them are equidistant from those of the fish. So when you take this protein, cytochrome C, and you check it out in a lamprey, in a fish, in a frog, in a moth, a moth was in there, I think a rat, a dog, an ape, a bird, a man, you compare the cytochrome C in all of these. And what you'll find out is that they differ from each other, but all the ones on the land are equally distant in terms of percentages from the fish.

Rather than finding the amphibian is closer to the fish and then the reptile is further from the fish and so forth. They're all, what he's pointed out is that all species are about equally distant from each other in these ways. The percentages are different by a few ciphers, but not by very much in most cases.

So it hasn't helped the evolution of theory at all. He says the really significant finding that comes to light from comparing the proteins, amino acid sequences is that it's impossible to arrange them in any sort of an evolutionary sequence. That's not helpful to the evolutionists.

Michael Denton also says this in his book. He says, thousands of different sequences, protein and nucleic acid have now been compared in hundreds of different species, but never has any sequence been found to be in any sense the lineal descendant or ancestor of any other sequence. Anyone who doubts this need only consult the sequence difference matrices given in Day-Hoff's standard reference book, the Atlas of Protein Structure and Function, available in any major library.

That's what I took my chart from, from my overhead project thing. He says, look at it. You can see they're all equally distant from each other in terms of the differences in their protein.

One last quote from him on this. He said, there is little doubt that if this molecular evidence had been available one century ago, it would have been seized upon with devastating effect by the opponents of evolution theory, like Agassiz and Owen, and the idea of organic evolution might never have been accepted. He's saying this is a late developing discovery in science, but if it had been around in Darwin's day, Darwin's theory might never have been accepted because it's so devastating to it.

Those who opposed evolution didn't have this evidence then, but we do now, he's saying. Okay, real quickly, a couple other things. The geological column is next.

What is that? Well, the geological column refers to that thing you'll see in a textbook once in a while. It might look like a hillside. It's got all these horizontal lines dividing it into different layers.

Ever seen those before? It's called the geological column. Those layers are allegedly the sediments of rock that have gradually laid down over billions of years because evolutionists believe the Earth is billions of years old and that the Earth's crust built up gradually as minerals in the water settled to the ground and became liquefied into rock. And over millions and millions of years, layer after layer after layer of these rocks developed.

And so they say, look, here's the different rocks. Each layer represents a different period of ancient history. And so they have names from the Paleozoic and the Jurassic and the Cretaceous period and so forth.

I mean, these are different names they give them. The evolutionist assumes that these layers were laid down over millions of years and they find, or they at least say they find, in the textbooks, they say they find the fossils of simple creatures in the lower layers and progressively more complex creatures near the top. And they say, you see, these rocks are leaving a record of what existed back millions of years ago.

Millions of years ago, we only find fishes and no other creatures. In the later layers, we find some amphibians. In the later layers, we find reptiles and so forth.

And they say, this is Earth's history documented in the geological column. Well, it's important for you to know that this is one of the biggest scams out there. The geological column does not exist, period.

It does not exist anywhere except in the textbooks. You're not going to go into any mountainside and dig and find these discrete different layers here, you know, like the rock is a different color. Oh, we've gotten through the Cretaceous, now we're down to the Jurassic here.

I mean, no, it's all, generally speaking, for hundreds of feet down, it's all the same kind of rock. Well, how do you define in which layer it is? They define it by which kind of fossils they find in them. And if they find a dinosaur fossil, they assume, well, that must be a Cretaceous or Jurassic period because dinosaurs lived during that period and they haven't lived since.

So they define the rocks by what kinds of fossils they found in them. But they assume that these different creatures died off at different periods of time, and that's how they assume the rocks are that old. Now, the assumptions they've made about these kind of things are very faulty.

For example, there's a kind of fish called the coelacanth. Evolutionists once thought that the coelacanth was probably the fish from which amphibians eventually evolved. They had some fossils of it.

And their judgment was that the coelacanth died out 200 million years ago. And whenever they found a coelacanth skeleton, they said, oh, these rocks must be 200 million years old. Coelacanth was alive in these days.

Well, they've caught two dozen living coelacanth fishes in recent decades off the coast of Madagascar. I mean, the fish is not extinct. They thought for years it was gone for 200 million years.

And based on that assumption, they assumed the rocks it was found were 200 million years old. But since they're still alive today, we have every reason to believe that even if the Earth was 200 million years old, they've been here all along. And therefore, if you find there's a skeleton of a rock, it doesn't prove that that rock is that old.

And the same is true of what they call index fossils. There's certain species that they use index fossils. If they assume this kind of species died out x number of years ago, you find that in the rocks, then that rock is that old.

Can't be any newer because they died out since then. However, you may have heard there are many, many creatures that were once thought to have died out billions of years ago that they now know differently. These trilobites, which were like little shellfish-type creatures, they were thought to be some of the very earliest invertebrates.

However, they have now found fossils of trilobites that are squished under the foot of a human sandal. And they believe that trilobites died out billions of years before man got here, or millions, hundreds of millions. And yet, they find fossils that don't agree with them.

There actually is no case in nature where you will find a geological column the way it is in the books. And there's a lot of things different, too, because you don't find in the geological column what they show in the books. You don't find in nature.

When you dig down in the ground, you're not going to find human skulls first, then get down and find ape skulls, and then go down further and find only reptile skulls, and then eventually go further down and find amphibians. That's not how they're in the rocks. I have some quotes here.

This is from David Raupp. He's one of the world's leading, most respected paleontologists. That's experts on fossils.

He's based at the University of Chicago in the Field Museum of Natural History there. He sent a letter to Science Magazine, which is America's greatest science journal. And it was published in 1981.

He said this, quote, a large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleobiology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources, low-level textbooks, semi-popular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved, he says.

Now, he's an evolutionist, and he's an expert in this particular field. He says, in the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been found.

Yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks. One of the ironies of the evolution-creation debate, he says, is that the creationists have accepted the mistaken notion that the fossil record shows a detailed and orderly progression, and they have gone to great lengths to accommodate this fact to their flood geology, unquote. Now, that's true.

Creationists do talk about that progression of the fossil record as perhaps being due to the flood. But what he says is ironic, because they have mistakenly thought that that progression actually exists. And therefore, they're explaining it in terms of their flood geology.

He says that that progression doesn't exist. He says low-level textbooks and non-professional articles sometimes promote the idea that it does. But he says there's some pure fantasy in there.

Another quote from Professor John W. Klotz from Concordia College, in his book Genes, Genesis, and Evolution, said, in what is known as the Cambrian period, there is literally a sudden outburst of living things. Now, by the way, the Cambrian is the first period, supposedly, that had multicellular creatures appearing in it. So we're talking about the very earliest fossil-bearing rocks, supposedly, that had creatures with more than one cell in them.

And that's the Cambrian. He says, in what is known as the Cambrian period, there's literally a sudden outburst of living things of great variety. Very few of the groups, which we now know today, were not in existence at that time of the Cambrian period.

One of the problems of the Cambrian outburst is the sudden appearances of all these forms. All of the animal phyla are represented already in the Cambrian period, except for two minor soft-bodied phyla, which may have been present without leaving fossil evidence, and the chordates, which are fishes. He says, even the chordates may have been present, since an object which looks like a fish scale has been discovered in Cambrian rocks, end quote.

Now, this is very damaging to evolution, because they want there to be only really simple creatures in the earliest rocks, and a gradual development as you go up. He said, no, in the Cambrian rocks, they find every kind of creature that's known today, practically. That's not evolutionary support.

Professor Daniel Axelrod from the University of California in Science Magazine, 1958, wrote, when we turn to examine the pre-Cambrian rocks, which was before the Cambrian, for forerunners of these early Cambrian fossils, they are nowhere to be found. Many thick, over 5,000 feet, sections of sedimentary rock are now known to lie in unbroken succession below strata concerning the earliest Cambrian fossils. These sediments apparently were suitable for the preservation of fossils, because they're often identical with the overlying rocks, which are fossil for us.

Yet no fossils are found in them. Clearly, a significant but unrecorded chapter of the history of life is missing from the rocks of pre-Cambrian time. What he's saying is this.

In the Cambrian rocks, for example, you find a fish, skeleton, or something, some creature like that. It is thought that this creature took 100 million years to evolve. Therefore, there must have been some ancestors during those 100 million years.

Why didn't any of them leave fossils? You look in the pre-Cambrian rocks where these ancestors should have been, and there's no fossils at all. It just can't be explained in terms of evolution. It doesn't make sense to them.

Ernst Mayr from Harvard University in Science Magazine wrote in 1972, he wrote, mammals appeared in the fossil record before birds. And primates, that's things like monkeys and apes, appeared in the Eocene considerably earlier than some of the orders of the lower animals. The four great types of animals appeared simultaneously in the earliest fossil brain record, it means the Cambrian.

In other words, none of, all these things are facts that disprove the evolutionary argument from the geological column. Stephen Jay Gould, who I've mentioned before in Natural History Magazine, wrote, and this is a, if you get only one quote on this subject, take this one with you. Stephen Jay Gould said, I regard the failure to find a clear vector of progress in life's history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record.

He says this, we have sought to impose a pattern that we hoped to find on a world that does not really display it, unquote. He's talking about the textbook pictures of the geological column. He says, we have tried to impose this pattern.

He says, the real world doesn't display it. And he's an evolutionist. He'd love to say, ah, we've proven it from the, no, he has to admit it.

He also said, in New Scientist, actually, it was quoted by another guy, Jeremy Churfess, but Stephen Jay Gould is quoted saying, if there were no imperfections in nature, there would be no evidence to favor evolution by natural selection over creation. What does he mean by that? What Stephen Jay Gould means is this. If you find something in nature that seems to be not perfectly designed, then that would seemingly mean that God didn't make it, because God would have made it perfect, and he says that's the last argument for evolution we have.

In other words, all the classic arguments for evolution are, as far as he's concerned, out the window. He says, if we didn't have these imperfections in nature, we wouldn't have any evidence to support evolution over creation. Now, when America's leading evolutionist spokesman, Harvard biologist and geologist Stephen Jay Gould, says there are no evidence to support evolution over creation except imperfections, he's really making it thin for them.

He's putting them on a thin wire. Now, let me ask you this. Do imperfections in nature prove evolution over creation? No, they prove degeneration.

Do evolutionists believe in that? Like I said, the dangling toes of pigs, that's an imperfection. But that doesn't prove evolution. It just proves that the species is degenerated.

That is not a proof over evolution, and if that isn't, then nothing is, he says. Now, there is the fossil record, and I've run out of time, and this is one of the most interesting. I've given you a lot of quotes you can read, and you can get them on your own, but to make a long story short, the most conclusive evidence that evolution did not occur, and remember I said that there's only two possibilities, evolution or creation.

If you could prove that evolution didn't occur, then you have thereby proven that creation did, because it's the only other option. The best proof in the world that evolution did not occur is the fossil record. Now, by that, we're kind of talking about a related field to the geological column, but now we're talking more about what's actually, what kind of fossils are found and what kind are not, because the fossil record contains millions and millions and millions of fossils, and that's not an exaggeration.

The Field Museum of Natural Science in Chicago has a million fossils in it, just that one museum. Millions and millions and millions of fossils have been found of creatures, many of which are extinct. These fossils, we assume, give us an idea of what kind of creatures have lived before, before we were here, the ones that are extinct.

Mammoths, there's no mammoths living today, as far as we know, I mean, but we found their fossils. We know they're dinosaurs. We don't know, there could be dinosaurs someplace today, but we haven't found them, and if they are extinct, we know that they lived before.

There were dinosaurs, and they could well be still in someplace that we haven't looked, but the fact is, the fossil record does not support evolution, and here's why it doesn't. If evolution occurred, then amphibians evolved from fishes, and amphibians evolved into reptiles and those into birds and mammals. Well, they didn't do so real suddenly.

They did so over millions of years and very gradually, which means that you shouldn't only find a reptile in the fossil record and a bird. You should find these transitions that a reptile had to go through to become a bird. You should, at some point, find a creature that had a forelimb that was not quite a leg and not quite a wing, because its ancestors didn't have wings, and its descendants didn't have legs.

Right, a bird doesn't have a forelimb, a leg, and a reptile doesn't have a wing there, but if the leg became a wing very gradually over time, then it had to go through some stages where it was neither quite a wing nor quite a leg, for that matter, but it was something in between, and that's true of every major structure. It's true of finding legs developing from fish scales. It's true of finding creatures that have skeletons, evolving from creatures that didn't have skeletons.

I mean, you've gotta have transitions here that can't just happen overnight, and if there were millions of years where these transitional forms lived, reproduced, died, and so forth, why aren't they in the fossil record? You see, evolution anticipated, Darwin anticipated that these transitional forms, what we call intermediate forms, would be found in the fossil record. When Darwin was alive, the fossil record had not been discovered very thoroughly. Paleontology existed, which is the study of the fossil record but it was an infant science.

Now it isn't. They'd only found relatively few fossils in Darwin's day, and he knew they had not found any transitional forms, but he believed they would. He just figured as they find more fossils, they'll find the fossils of these transitional forms, but they haven't, and I just wanna read a few quotes.

I have a bunch of them here. I won't read them all at all, but it'd be good, it'd be useful to read them all, because these are all evolutionists speaking, and yet they're all admitting that the fossil record does not provide any transitional forms. For example, on page nine, Robert Barnes in the Invertebrate Beginnings in the book Paleobiology wrote in 1980, quote, the fossil record tells us almost nothing about the evolutionary origin of phyla or classes.

Intermediate forms are non-existent, undiscovered or not recognized. The next quote there is from Dr. E.J. Corner of Cambridge University in his essay in Contemporary Botanical Thought. He's talking about the evolutionary plants.

He says, much evidence can be induced in favor of the theory of evolution from biology, biogeography and paleontology, but I still think, he says, that to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation. Now, why do you say that? Because he's studied the fossil record of plants. And what you find in the fossil record is you find grasses, you find trees, you find shrubs, but you don't find any transitional forms between these basic types of plants.

And he says, therefore, he said, even though he believed in evolution, he said, if I was unprejudiced, which he is now admitting he's not, he says, to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation, but he doesn't follow it because he's not unprejudiced. Let's go down a little further. Down the quote from A.J. Marshall in the book, The Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds, he wrote in 1960.

His opening sentence in the book was this, the origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved. Now, you gotta realize, if that happened, if a reptile evolved into a bird, it had to be through thousands and thousands of intermediate stages that were very slight.

All those creatures had to be real creatures, not fiction creatures. They had to really live. They had to die.

They had to leave fossils. But they have found millions of fossils, but they've not found one fossil of a transitional form. And think of all the changes that would have to take place.

He says, not one fossil exists of that. There's more quotes here. All of them are very encouraging to the creationists, I have to tell you.

There is another quote or two I was hoping to find. Okay, over on page 11, let me give you just a couple, two more short quotes, and I'll leave the rest to you to read on your own. In the middle of page 11, a quote by Dr. David B. Kitt.

University of Oklahoma, he received his degree under George Gaylord Simpson, one of the leading evolutionists of his generation. This appeared in Evolution Journal back in 1974. Now, two years before this, in 1972, this is a quote from Dr. David B. Kitt.

The same man, David Kitt, debated publicly against Dwayne Gish. Now, Dwayne Gish is one of the finer creationist debaters out there, I have him on video debating some evolutionists. He always wins, because he's right.

And he knows the facts. But this man, David B. Kitt, had the unfortunate duty of debating Dwayne Gish at a university two years before this quote appeared in Evolution Journal. And Dr. Gish made the comment about the absence of transitional forms in the fossil record.

It's called the gaps in the fossil record. You know, you have these gaps where you've got a reptile and you've got a bird, but in the gap, there's nothing in between. And David B. Kitt, during the debate, turned to Dr. Gish and said, he says, indeed, there are gaps and they are a problem.

He admitted it. Two years later, he wrote this article for the Journal of Evolution in which he said, his article is called Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory. David B. Kitt wrote, quote, despite the bright promise that paleontology, that means fossil record, 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, unquote. Now, this, listen, if there's any record outside the Bible of what really happened, it's in the rocks. The fossil record is the record.

Did these creatures evolve from each other or did they appear suddenly in their present form? The answer would seem to be they appeared suddenly in the present form, the very thing creation would predict, but the opposite of what evolution would predict. This guy, I love this guy's quote because he's an evolutionist. He debated against creationists, but he also is somewhat honest and he says, listen, notice that last line, evolution requires.

He didn't say, he didn't say evolution would be greatly strengthened by the presence of transitional forms or evolution would be more credible if there were evolution. He says it requires it. You can't have evolution without transitional forms.

He says evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology, another fancy way of saying the fossil record does not provide these forms. In other words, they didn't exist. Or if they did, they didn't leave fossils, which is a strange phenomenon since thousands of different species, even millions of species have left fossils over periods of, they think millions of years, of course, it's only been thousands in my judgment.

But the fact is, millions of creatures have left fossils, different species, but none of them, not a single one of them from a transitional form. That is a problem. The last quote is from Stephen Stanley in the book Macroevolution, published in 1979.

He said, and he is a paleontologist also, he says, the known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic, that means relating to the phyla, gradual evolution accomplished in major morphological transitions and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid, unquote. What he's saying is the known fossil record, and it's pretty well known now, it provides no evidence that the gradualistic model of evolution can be valid. Now, these are not just a few quotes.

If you read through these notes, I've got quote after quote, after quote, after quote, all of them from evolutionists who are admitting this. Stephen Jay Gould actually has made himself famous by writing on this very subject. He's a paleontologist.

And he, in his early books, used to mention that this absence of intermediate forms of fossil record, he called it the trade secret of paleontology. In other words, it was something paleontologists knew, but they didn't want other people to know. Why not, I wonder? Because it destroys evolution.

The fossil record destroys evolution. Well, then why does Stephen Jay Gould admit this and still remain an evolutionist? Well, he came up with his own theory. It's called punctuated equilibrium.

He and a guy named Niles Eldridge came up with this theory and became famous for it. And their theory is that evolution didn't happen quite the way that Darwin thought, gradually. It happened suddenly.

And they actually rehabilitated a guy who had kind of been thought of as a coupe. This Richard B. Goldschmidt, he used to be at University of California, Davis. Goldschmidt had said, the first bird hatched from a reptile's egg.

Now, he was an evolutionist. And his fellow evolutionist, Goldschmidt, was told, they said, you're nuts. A bird can't hatch from a reptile's egg.

And they said, Goldschmidt, that's not scientific because no one has ever seen a bird hatch from a reptile's egg. And Goldschmidt said, well, that's a cheap criticism because neither has anyone seen a bird slowly and gradually evolve from a reptile either. And both of them are right, of course.

No one's ever seen a reptile rise to a bird either gradually or suddenly. But this ridiculous suggestion that every major animal group came about suddenly without transitional forms was Goldschmidt's idea. And he was forced to this view by the fact that the fossil record has no transitional forms.

Which means this, that when they look at the fossil record, evolutionists don't say, oh, guess what? Surprise, it doesn't support our theory. I guess those creationists were right. The creationists would have expected this fossil record to be just as it is.

They say, hmm, must be a different form of evolution. A princess kissed the frog and he turned into a prince. That's how it happened, not slowly and gradually.

And that's the kind of nonsense they have to come up with. Now, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge haven't said it quite so crassly as that. They say, well, it wasn't quite like a reptile in a bird hatched out, but rather a very few generations of macro mutations occurred and produced species so quickly that the intermediates were never registered in the fossil record.

The problem with that is that macro mutations are always harmful and damaging to species. They're not helpful. In fact, there's not known a macro mutation that's ever occurred that didn't destroy the specimen that was affected by it.

So their theory is not strong either. And what evolutionists have to do basically, they have no arguments in their favor. They have no science in their favor.

They have only intimidation and monopoly on the educational institutions in their favor. And that may not last forever. There may actually be some smart people who become the new educators of the next generation who've actually looked at these things.

They don't have as much at stake in defending the old theory. And so we may see evolution disappear eventually here because with this many evolutionists saying this many damaging things against evolution, you know, can it last? I have my doubts. I hope not.

That's why my longer tape series on this is called Evolution, An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone. It came and it's really, it's time has gone too because it doesn't fit the evidence any longer.