Evidence Against Evolution

Creation and Evolution — Steve Gregg

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Evidence Against Evolution

Creation and EvolutionSteve Gregg

Steve Gregg presents arguments against the theory of evolution by examining various evidences in support of creationism. He questions the notion that the outward structure of organs, such as tails, hold no significance and argues that similarities in appearance do not necessarily indicate common ancestry. Gregg challenges the fossil record, stating the absence of transitional forms and arguing that the fossil evidence does not align with the gradual view of evolution. He introduces alternative explanations, such as sudden transformation and genetic monstrosities, highlighting contradictions within the evolutionary theory.

Transcript

We looked in our last lecture about most of the evidences, in fact, pretty much all the evidences that have historically been presented in favor of evolution. Now, most of these have not really been evidences that show that evolution occurred, so much as evidences that were once thought, or in some cases are still thought, to show that creation did not occur. We talked about vestigial organs and structures, which are parts of the body which are thought to be useless.

And if they are useless, then it argues against creationism because it would suggest that there are no intelligent design about this. If there's parts of the body that have no function, it would suggest that there was not an intelligent designer, or else such a designer would not have included unnecessary parts. Whereas evolution might explain how there are unnecessary parts of the body, because that which was useful in one of our evolutionary ancestors might have ceased to be useful in a more highly evolved species like ourselves, but have left traces of its former existence in our ancestors in our body.

And of course, the tailbone is one of the classic things that people have brought up as an example of a vestigial organ. But we have what some have called a tailbone. And they say, well, that proves that we evolved from creatures that once did have tails.

And in the process of evolution, we lost any use for a tail. And therefore, all the outward structure of a tail is no longer with us. But the presence of a useless tailbone is evidence that there is a creature with a tail in our ancestry back there.

And so such vestigial structures have been thought to prove evolution or more properly to disprove creation. As we said last week, evolutionists used to have a great number of organs in the body that they thought were vestigial in this way. There were 180 at one time thought to be in the human body.

But with the increase of medical and scientific knowledge, those have for the most part been eliminated from the list because now scientists know what the functions of many things are, which they did not once know. The list of 180 structures in the human body once thought to be functionless has dwindled to five. And even the remaining five, there are some very excellent theories which may yet be verified about what their use may be.

So it'd be very hasty to say that there are really any functionless parts of the body. We can say there are still a few parts of body that we're not sure what their function is. But it'd be a very arrogant thing to suggest that we're not going to learn anything more than what we now know about the function of organs in the body.

Therefore, the presence of organs and structures that are sometimes called vestigial certainly is not any compelling evidence against creationism. Likewise, we talked about embryology and the thought of embryological recapitulation. The idea that the embryo goes through the evolutionary stages again in the womb.

This used to be well, Darwin thought the evidence for evolution from embryology was second to none. However, now the argument of embryological recapitulation, as it's called, is no longer even held to be so. Even among those who are very strongly evolutionists.

We talked also. Let me look over my notes and talk about natural and artificial selection, which is, of course. Especially artificial selection, the attempt in the laboratory to make evolution happen rapidly.

It is believed by evolutionists that evolution happened very gradually by the accumulation of small mutational steps, which may have been imperceptible in each generation, but accumulate over millions of generations. They produce new structures, new organs, whole new species. And yet in the laboratory, all they've been able to do, they have certainly been able to increase the number of mutations by exposing unfortunate laboratory animals to all kinds of forces.

They would not find in nature or that they might conceivably find in nature, but they are artificially imposed upon them, which causes mutations and causes changes at a faster rate than they normally would happen in nature. So that they might hopefully speed up the process of evolution to a short enough time that a human observer could see it and observe it and recognize it. Well, unfortunately for the evolutionists, they have, although they produce a great variety within species, they have not yet crossed the species border with any of their experiments.

And what they have really served to show is, first of all, there's a tremendous variability within each species. And they have also tended to show where the species boundaries are, because they've shown that after you reach a certain multiplicity of variations, there really isn't any further they can go. They reach a boundary and they don't go any further.

And what artificial selection has therefore really demonstrated is that species borders don't tend to be crossed in this manner, but that there's a fixity of species that nature is very resistant to cross and they have not yet been able to get it to do so. So that hasn't really helped evolution as much as they hoped it would. Then, of course, there is homology.

And that's what we were talking about when we closed last time. Homology is the comparison of various structures in creatures that are not very much alike, but the structures are similar. The leg of certain kinds of running animals, antelopes and zebras and gazelles and so forth, impala, the leg structure is very similar in these creatures and not surprisingly so.

They live in a similar environment and survive in a similar manner and the design works well. And so slight variations on the same design is what a creationist would expect to find among creatures that have similar needs. However, the evolutionist thinks that the presence of similarities of this sort.

Gives evidence that although these creatures are unlike each other now, they had an ancestor that they shared in common, an ancestor that had this basic trait. And as evolution proceeded in various directions and various branches on the family tree and went off into wildly different kinds of creatures. Yet they retained this ancestral form.

And the presence of homologous structures was once thought and is still thought by many to be one of the best evidences of descent from a common ancestor. However, we actually quoted some of the leading evolutionists on this point, including Sir Gavin De Beer. And his statement was, it is now clear that the pride with which it was assumed that inheritance of homologous structures from a common ancestor explained homology was misplaced.

The problem here is, of course, that they now know more about genetics than Darwin did. And what they have discovered to their surprise is that homologous structures do not frequently do not code from homologous genes. Now, Darwin explained homology as the inheritance of homologous structures in a creature from homologous genes.

But he was quite wrong about that. We now know and of course, it is what you would expect. If evolution took place by mutation, it means that the gene that codes for a front leg on a salamander, you'd expect it to have been mutated somewhat.

But the same gene would now produce a somewhat different looking front leg on another creature. But if it's an entirely different gene, then there's no reason to believe that there's anything similar or evolutionary that took place to produce these things. And therefore, many evolutionists are really struggling with the concept of homology.

One of the newest sciences that has been used by evolutionists to try to prove their theory has come up only since the 1950s. Only in the past 40 or so years have they known anything about this. This is the field of molecular biology.

In the 50s, they began to realize that certain proteins that are found in many different species like hemoglobin, that proteins, of course, are made up of sequences of amino acids, which can be combined in different ways in chains that make up proteins or not chains, but basically configurations. Each protein is made up of a different configuration of these 20 or some of the 20 amino acids. Now, this is analogous to the way a sentence is made up of letters.

If you could make a sentence of, say, a sentence that's 100 letters long. Obviously, some of those letters would occur more than once, but each sentence would have a different arrangement of letters. That's what makes a sentence different from another sentence is that the letters in the sentence are and the spaces are different from each other.

They're in a different order. They're all the same letters. It may be, but the different arrangement of them makes an entirely different sentence.

And so proteins that way you if you link the amino acids in a certain order, you get a particular protein, link them in a different order and you get a different protein. It was found in the 50s that the hemoglobin molecule of a chimpanzee would resemble the hemoglobin molecule of a human being more than it would resemble the hemoglobin molecule of a fish, for example, because it would be thought that a chimpanzee and a human being were more closely related evolutionary wise than a chimpanzee and a fish were. There'd be a further distance.

Now, this new science of molecular biology, it's called really armed evolutionists or science in general with a new way to quantitatively measure the distance between species until molecular biology came along. You could sort of instinctively feel, for example, that a zebra was more closely related to a gazelle than it was to a hamster. You know, you just kind of feel that.

They look more, they have more shared characteristics between a zebra and a gazelle than between a zebra and a hamster. But you would have no way to quantify the distance between any two species. I mean, it's just a matter of, you know, how many characteristics do you consider? There's no way to actually give a mathematical exactitude to how far these species are from each other.

But what you can do with these amino acid chains is you can take the amino acid chain of the hemoglobin of a zebra and that of an impala and that of a hamster, for example, and you can see how much difference there is in the actual chain. Now, imagine it this way. If you could take a sequence of 100 letters at random from the English language, let's say each letter represents an amino acid of some sort.

Take a sentence that's 100 letters long. Obviously, there's a specific configuration of those letters in a specific order. Take another sentence that has all the same letters, mostly in the same order it may be, but not exactly the same.

Suppose that 80 of the 100 letters are in the same position in both sentences, but 20 of them are not. 20 of them are different. You would say that the difference between those sentences is 20 percent difference.

Out of 100 letters, 80 of them are in the same position in both sentences. 20 of them are in different positions. Therefore, there is a 20 percent difference between those two sentences.

You can get an exact mathematical distance that you can measure between how different those sentences are from each other. Likewise, with the protein molecules, they can do the same kind of thing. If you take the protein molecule of, let's say, hemoglobin or some other protein of a particular species and figure out what the amino acid sequence is and take the sequence for the hemoglobin molecule for another species and put them up next to each other, you can see what percentage of the amino acids are in the same positions in both chains and what percentage is not.

This is something that was never done or dreamed of before the 50s. But ever since the 50s, it's been real fascinating. It's fascinating to all parties concerned.

And I remember back in, I guess it was in the early 80s, I was speaking on this subject in a school in Australia. And there was a an evolutionist present who was trying to nail me on this very thing. He was saying, well, they now know that the hemoglobin molecule of the chimpanzee is much closer to the of the human being than it is to, for instance, a dog.

And he said that proves that evolution is true. In fact, he said, I know. He says, this is no theory.

He says, this is proof. I said, what's your proof? And he gave me that example. And like similar examples to that, I said, well, you know, I don't really see that that proves anything other than we could have proven without the hemoglobin molecules.

What that shows us, of course, is that a chimpanzee is more like a human than it is like a dog. We would have guessed that. In fact, it didn't take an evolutionist to figure that out.

Before Darwin's time, there was Linnaeus, the guy who gave all the animals their present classifications. The father of taxonomy was Linnaeus, and he happened to be a creationist. And he knew that chimpanzees were closer to humans than to dogs.

And you can see that by the way he classified the animals. He classified humans and apes, both as primates. Dogs were somewhere altogether different in his chain.

So this molecular biology, insofar as it shows that some of these creatures are more like each other in their hemoglobin molecules than others. What it confirms is not Darwin, but Linnaeus. And Linnaeus was a creationist.

Therefore, there's obviously nothing about this information that proves evolution any more than if we measured some other set of likenesses between two. This is just homology again. This is just homology saying basically these molecules are like each other more than these two are.

And therefore, we know that these two creatures are more closely related. They say, but see, the whole point is, how do we know they're related to say they're like each other is not the same thing as to say they're related. I thought to point this out in our last lecture when we were talking about homology.

The fact that two persons look very much alike is no guarantee that they have a common ancestor very near to them. Similarity in appearance does not betoken common ancestry in every case. And therefore, it's only an assumption.

Actually, it is a philosophical assumption that the evolutionist brings to the evidence. You see, the creationist doesn't believe that there are any common ancestors of various species. Each species was created separately and specially.

They didn't evolve from one another. And so the evolutionist assumes common ancestry and therefore relationship between these creatures. But that's an assumption.

There's no proof of it. No matter how many characteristics you can compare, whether it's the wing of the bat or his hemoglobin molecules with that of another creature. No matter how many likenesses you find, it still doesn't tell you where those hemoglobin molecules came from in the first place.

It only shows that now that they exist, they resemble this creature more than they resemble those of this creature. Now, this molecular biology has actually provided some serious problems for evolution. In fact, the book by Michael Denton, Evolution, A Theory in Crisis, is a good summary of many of the evidences that are troublesome to evolution.

But it's written by a molecular biologist and a medical doctor. Michael Denton is a molecular biologist. This is his field.

There are several chapters on how this has been very seriously a problem to evolution. And by the way, he's an agnostic. He's not a creationist, though he's written one of the most devastating books against evolution ever written.

And he knows his stuff. I have some information from Michael Denton's book. I'm going to put some of it on the overhead here.

This particular piece is not, I mean, this came from his book. I got this transparency from his book. He has actually taken it from another book.

And many of you can't see from where you're sitting, I'm sure, these things. Let me see if I can explain to you. Along the top line, you've got different kinds of animals, starting from a very complex mammal and moving toward a more simple type of organism.

You've got horse, then dog, then kangaroo, then penguin, pecan duck, pigeon, turtle, tuna, bonito, carp, lamprey. A lamprey is sort of a fish-like thing or more like an eel-like thing. A screw worm, a silk worm, a horn worm, a castor, a sunflower, a wheat.

Then there's certain bacterial forms that are also on the list. And yeasts. We've got the same animals going down this side here.

And what you've got is a graph that shows how far, in molecular biological terms, how far these creatures are from each other in percentages. Now, the particular protein that these are measuring is not hemoglobin, but cytochrome C. In the far column on the right, you can see that a horse differs from a bacterium in 64% of the positions of the amino acids in the cytochrome C, which is a particular protein that was measured. 64%.

That is, the distance between a bacterium and a horse is 64%. The interesting thing, though, is that the difference between a tuna fish and the same bacterium is 65%. And the difference between a silk worm and that bacterium is 66% or 65% also.

Now, what you see is there's not really very much difference from that bacteria, no matter what kind of animal you compare it with. The horse, the tuna fish, the silk worm, the wheat. The wheat differs by 67% in the positions.

What you find is that when you start with a bacterium and measure the distance in molecular biological terms of its proteins, they're all about equally distant. This is not what evolutionists thought would show. They thought it would show, of course, that obviously you'd expect wheat to be much more like a bacterium in its molecular structure than you'd expect a fish to be, or which would be even less than a horse would be.

Now, I have here another transparency that illustrates these distances in several examples. By the way, that which I just showed you is a classic reference work on this subject. It doesn't come from creationists.

It's in the library, and it's basically the standard reference work on it. But based on that chart, I've got here some relative distances from you, starting from bacterial cytochrome, which is cytochrome C is the protein being considered. By the way, the same thing works out for every protein they check.

We're just working with one particular one here because it's in a lot of different species. From the bacteria to the horse is 64% difference. From the same bacteria to the pigeon is 64% difference.

From the same bacteria to tuna is 65%, and to the silkworm 65%, to the wheat 66%, and to yeast 69%. So the total range of differences from this whole range, from horse, pigeon, tuna, silkworm, wheat, and yeast, the range of difference is no more than 64% to 69%. And if you leave the yeast out, it's 64% to 66%, which means that they're all almost equidistant from each other.

This is not explainable in terms of evolution, because evolution would have suggested that the differences that existed existed because as evolution went on over millions of years, the distance increased considerably. Therefore, a very simple animal would have cytochrome C that was not very far mutated from that of the original bacteria. But a horse or some other higher animal would be tremendously further.

Now if you consider the silk moth as the starting point, the horse cytochrome is only 27% different than that of the silk moth. The pigeon is 25% different. The turtle 26% different.

The carp 25% different. And the lamprey 30% different. In other words, the full range there is 25% to 30%.

And if you really notice, the lamprey, which is like an eel, a very presumably primitive animal, is actually the furthest from the silk moth of all the ones considered. The horse is closer to a silk moth than a lamprey eel is, which is not at all what evolutionists would have predicted before this evidence came forth. Another example, starting with the lamprey itself.

Now this is particularly shocking. If you start with the cytochrome C of the lamprey, to the carp it's 75% different. Now a carp is a fish, a lamprey is an eel.

You'd expect those to be fairly close, I mean relatively close. 75% difference between a lamprey and a carp. 81% different from lamprey to frog.

To the chicken it's 78. To the kangaroo it's 76. And to man, 73.

Which means man is closer to the lamprey than the carp is. You see that? The difference in the cytochrome between a lamprey and man is only 73% difference. Whereas between the lamprey and the carp is 75% difference.

This is not at all the kind of information that evolutionists would have predicted that they'd find from this field of study. Starting with the carp. The horse is only 13% difference than the carp.

The rabbit is equidistant, 13% difference. The chicken 14%. Turtle and bullfrog are both 13% different.

Now notice we've got two mammals, a horse and a rabbit. A bird, a chicken. A reptile, a turtle, and a bullfrog is an amphibian.

These are from totally different classes of animals for the most part. Yet they are all equidistant from the fish. Except that the chicken is just 1% more different than the others.

But a bullfrog and a horse are as close to a fish as each other. Now see, the evolutionists would believe that the bullfrog evolved from the fish and many millions of years later, multiple mutations later, the rabbit and the horse would have come along. Of course, millions of years later.

But these protein molecules do not give that evidence. One other one I've given here. Let's see.

The gastropod mollusk. Now here we're, for the first time using, well not for the first time, we did that with bacterium too. We're dealing with an invertebrate, a mollusk.

This is something like a slug or something. It is 85% different in its cytochrome c from a lamprey. 88% different from a carp.

87% different from a frog. And only 85% different from a chicken and a kangaroo. Which means that the gastropod mollusk is closer to a kangaroo than it is to a carp or a lamprey.

Once again, not at all what one would have expected if we had tried to classify these animals on the basis of outward characteristics or in terms of their emergence in the evolutionary scheme of things. We would expect the distances to be of an entirely different picture. Now, in view of this fact, I have some quotes from the molecular biologist himself, Dr. Michael Denton.

Let's put up this quote. He said, There is not a trace at a molecular level of the traditional evolutionary series, cyclostome, fish, amphibian, reptile, mammal. Incredibly, man is as close to lamprey as are fish.

An extraordinary mathematical exactness in the degree of isolation is apparent. So although cytochrome c sequences varied among the different terrestrial vertebrates, all of them are equidistant from those of fish. So amphibia, always traditionally considered intermediate between fish and other terrestrial vertebrates, are in molecular terms as far from fish as any other group of reptiles or mammals.

To those well acquainted with the traditional picture of vertebrate evolution, the result is truly astonishing. This man is an agnostic, not a creationist. But because he is a molecular biologist, he is pretty much impressed by this particular field, and you can see why.

This is why his book is called Evolution, A Theory in Crisis. Further from his book, on page 289, he said, The really significant finding that comes to light from comparing the proteins amino acid sequences is that it is impossible to arrange them in any sort of evolutionary sequence. Again, another quote from his book, this from page 289 and following.

Dr. Michael Denton said, Thousands of different sequences, proteins and nucleic acids 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 Dayhoff's standard reference book, Atlas of Protein Structure and Function. That's what we saw a page of a moment ago on the screen, available in any major library.

One other quote from Michael Denton on this, from page 290 of his book. 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 evolutionary theory, like Agassiz and Owen, and the idea of organic evolution might never have been accepted. In other words, back when there was still tremendous struggle between these ideologies of creation and evolution, if they had known at that time what we now know about the molecular evidence that we've just presented, he says, the idea of evolution may have never taken hold.

There might not have been any evolutionists today or any time in the last hundred years if this information had been out back then. Unfortunately, of course, evolution has taken hold in the past hundred years in such a way that almost no evidence is considered to be damaging to it because all they do is just say, well, I guess our theory of evolution as we had it formulated must not have been true. We'll just have to find out how it is that evolution really did happen so we can accommodate this evidence.

It never occurs to them to say maybe evolution didn't happen. A good scientific theory should have predictive value. That is to say, if you have really discovered something that is true in nature, you should be able to predict what kinds of evidences are going to be found out there.

It is known for a fact that the evolutionists expected different evidence than this to emerge in the area of molecular biology. It's very damaging to them. Now we'll go to something completely different.

What you see there on the screen is the traditional evolutionary geological column. I'm sure all of you have seen it before in textbooks, in high school, in college if you've been in college. And you can see what this represents are the various layers or strata of the Earth's crust.

It is believed by evolutionists that these various strata were laid down over billions of years, and they were formed through a slow process called sedimentation. It is believed that the Earth was once covered entirely by water and suspended in the water were minerals, which eventually and very gradually settled to the bottom of the oceans and eventually solidified into solid sheets of rock. And that this is how the various layers of the Earth's crust accumulated, one on top of the other.

If this is true, then of course as you dig deeper into the Earth's crust, you'll come to the earlier layers that were laid down a long time ago. And if this sedimentation process is the correct hypothesis for how the Earth's crust was formed, it would no doubt be a slow and gradual process, probably taking thousands or millions of years. Evolutionists would say billions of years.

And if so, then the fossils that we'd find in different layers would seemingly represent the creatures that were alive at different times in Earth's history. Now as you can see from the chart, at the top, which represents the the shallowest layers of the Earth's crust, we have man. And then as you move down, you move down toward the presumably earlier creatures that had evolved prior to this.

So you go down to the earlier layers of rock and you've got mammals and you've got flying reptiles and dinosaurs and you've got earlier reptiles coming along down there. And then you've got amphibian and insects below that in the Carboniferous strata. And then down further in the Devonian and the Cerulean and the Ordovician, you've got the fishes and fish-like things.

Before that, you've got the Cambrian. The Cambrian is occupied. You can't see that very well from where you're sitting because of this.

The Cambrian has basically nothing but, in this particular picture, has nothing but invertebrates in it that were thought to be prior to the emergence of fish. Below the Cambrian, there's nothing there on the picture because in pre-Cambrian rocks, they have not really found any indisputable fossils of multicellular creatures at all. They have found some fossils in pre-Cambrian rocks that are thought to be those of single-celled organisms.

Though this chart might have been drawn by somebody who is an expert, it's artificial. It only appears that way in the pages of textbooks. This is not the way the fossils have been actually found in the strata of rock.

Now, if it were so, that in the deeper you dug into the Earth's crust, the more restrictedly and exclusively simple creatures you found. And as you moved upward in the Earth's crust, you found an increasing gradation of more complex creatures. This would help to confirm evolution, it would seem, because it would suggest that in the earliest days of life on Earth, there were only these simple invertebrates.

And as you see, as you move up, basically, if this is a true timeline of development, then you would see that at later periods, increasingly more complex creatures populated the Earth. So as long as this picture from this textbook can be riveted in the mind of students, it will seem to them as a very good evidence of evolution. Now, the problem is, as I said, this is not the way it really is in the real world.

There's no place in the real world that archaeologists or paleontologists or geologists have ever found even so much as half of this picture in one place. Furthermore, there are a number of places where they find fossils of these creatures in the reverse order. What would seem to be dinosaur fossils found in a layer that's above mammal fossils.

Now, that doesn't work well for evolution. So in cases like that, it is suggested that you found the results of an overthrust. An overthrust is when a sheet of the Earth's crust comes up, bumps up against another one, rises up and then falls over backward or so, so that the fossils that were in it are now on top of fossils that were later and you've had an overthrust.

Now, this kind of thing can occur. It is known from geology that overthrusts do occur. Though that is not always, there's not evidence of that in every case where the fossils are in the wrong order.

And there's other problems that are not reflected by this traditional picture. I have a quote here from Professor John W. Klotz from Concordia College. He wrote a book called Genes, Genesis and Evolution.

And in that book, he tells us, quote, in what is known as the Cambrian Period, now that's the lowest strata, supposedly, where any multicellular fossils have ever been found, the Cambrian. He says, in what is known as the Cambrian Period, there is a literal, literally a sudden outburst of living things of great variety. Very few of the groups which we know today were not in existence at the time of the Cambrian Period.

One of the problems of the Cambrian Outburst is the sudden appearance of all these forms. All of the animal phyla are represented already in the Cambrian Period, except two major soft-bodied phyla, which may have been present without leaving fossil evidence, and the chordates, which are fish. Even the chordates may have been present since an object which looks like a fish scale has been discovered in Cambrian rocks, unquote.

Now, according to Professor John Klotz, and I haven't seen this evidence myself, but he's, in his book, he says this is the case that virtually every phyla of creatures, except fish, and a couple of soft-bodied types of creatures, have been found in Cambrian rock, which is supposed to be the very earliest rock. This would suggest that the traditional picture that we just showed you on the screen is somewhat selective in what it likes to show. It shows only a few very basic invertebrates in the Cambrian rock, but in real life, they have found virtually every kind of animal in Cambrian rocks.

In Science Magazine, Ernst Mayr, whose name is well known to anyone who has done graduate studies in evolution, he was one of the leading evolutionists, he said, mammals appeared in the fossil record before birds, and primates, which is, of course, apes and monkeys, primates appeared in the Eocene considerably earlier than some of the orders of lower animals. The four great types of animals appeared simultaneously in the earliest fossil bearing record, that is the Cambrian rocks. Stephen Jay Gould, coming right up to contemporary times, in 1984, Stephen Jay Gould, of course, has a big fan club at every major university.

He's a leading evolutionary speaker and proponent and enemy of creation, by the way, very strong enemy of creationism. Of course, he's professor of biology and geology at Harvard. And Stephen Jay Gould said, quote, I regard the failure to find a clear vector of progress in life's history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record.

We have sought to impose a pattern that we hoped to find on a world that does not really display it. Here's another quote from Stephen Jay Gould, and he kind of summarizes, he makes a very interesting summary statement. This was cited by Jeremy Churfess in New Scientist Magazine, volume 102, May 17th, 1984.

On page 29, he quotes Stephen Jay Gould as saying, quote, If there were no imperfections, he means in nature, there would be no evidence to favor evolution by natural selection over creation. Stephen Jay Gould tries to point out a great number of things in nature that he says are imperfections. And he says, see, a creator wouldn't have done it that way.

And he said, if there were no imperfections, we would be left without any evidence to favor evolution over creation. What a statement. Now, of course, the question arises, does the presence of imperfections favor evolution over creation? Actually, it seems to me like the postulates of evolution is not that things become imperfect, but that they improve.

That's the whole concept behind evolution. One would wonder if evolution is true, why such creatures have not been weeded out in the process of natural selection? Why such characteristics still are there at all if they are in fact imperfections? The creationist has no problem with this. Because the creationist believes that everything was created perfect in the beginning.

And therefore, if there is going to be any vertical movement through the process of mutation, it would only, it could only go down in quality. Things could never get better if they start out perfect, but they could certainly get worse. And it is the belief of creationists, and not only the belief of creationists, it's known from science that mutations occur and, you know, monsters occur, I mean, in the sense of creatures that are not very much like anything else or like their ancestors, mutations do change things.

And all of those mutations change things in the direction of imperfection. There is no problem with the fact that there are imperfections. We would expect that.

Ever since what the creationist believes happens, at least the Christian creationist believes in the fall, things have tended to degenerate. The second law of thermodynamics has tended to make things wear out and run down and so forth. And basically, all the change that has ever been perceived has been in the direction of degeneration, not upward mobility in terms of evolution.

So the presence of imperfections today is no problem to the creationist because we would just say, well, those imperfections are not original. That creature was perfect when it came about, but over the thousands or millions of years, if you want to grant that much time, sure there's been the introduction of mutations and so forth that have produced imperfections. But that doesn't challenge the question of evolution.

It doesn't challenge the question of creation as the original thing. But what's amazing is Stephen Jay Gould, who thinks imperfections are the death knell of creationism. He says, except for that, we've got no evidence left to favor evolution over creation, which I'm sure many of his colleagues wish he hadn't said that.

Now, in fact, he might even wish now that he hadn't said that it's hard to say because creationists like myself have seized upon that and said, well, I guess that says a lot, Stephen. All right. I mean, let's look now at the fossil record more specifically.

It has been said that the evidence from the fossil record is the best evidence against evolution. That is, creationists are fond like myself are fond of showing you what the fossil record really contains. Why would this be so? Why would it be better than anything else we've discussed? Certainly, the molecular biology is very favorable toward creation in that it is unfavorable to evolution favorable to evolution.

But the fossil record is excellent as a field of study to show that evolution never occurred because the fossil record is the record of what really happened. You see, whatever may be done in a laboratory, whatever guesses we might make about the meaning of different stages of the embryo, whatever interpretations or theories we press upon the presence of apparently functionless things in your body, those are all guesses and they're all interpretations and they could be right or they could be wrong. The evolutionists might turn out to be right or the creationists might turn out to be right, but you really never know which explanation it is.

When you look at the fossil record, you see the record of what really happened. You really have history in the rocks. And therefore, we should be able to go and look at the fossils in the rocks and say, do the fossils that have been found support evolution or do they support creation? Now, in order to determine that, we have to ask ourselves what would we expect to find in the rocks if evolution occurred? And on the other hand, what would we expect to find in the rocks, what fossils would we expect if creation occurred? Now, think about it.

If creation occurred, well, let's start. If evolution occurred, then every type of higher animal evolved through various, very small gradations from some lower animal. This didn't happen in a generation or two.

This happened over millions of generations where a very slow and gradual process produced over millions of years, hosts of creatures no longer present in the living world, apparently. Can't find them alive. They gotta find them dead if we're gonna believe they existed because you can't find them alive.

You do not see in the living world, this creatures that are partially reptile, partially bird, for example. And yet the reptile is thought to have evolved into a bird, not suddenly, but by slow and gradual processes, millions of various gradations. There should be such a step ladder of changes that are so intermediate that it'd be hard to know when you've crossed over, which of these creatures has crossed over from being a reptile into a bird? Because as you look at them, there'd be an increasing number of bird-like characteristics being acquired to a reptilian original.

And you really wouldn't know quite sure when did you get a bird out of a reptile? When did it change? I mean, they're kind of all, it's so slight. This is how evolution is said to have happened. So we should expect if this, and this is not just from reptiles to bird.

We're talking about every species of creatures in the world, millions of them that are known to exist. And it is thought that some millions are not yet known to exist at the bottom of the ocean in the rainforest and so forth. It is partially, there's probably millions of species we haven't seen yet, but for every one of these millions of species, there should be a whole chain of ancestors showing the descent by gradual improvements, by gradual changes from some previous ancestor.

Which means of course, for every skeleton of a lizard you would find, and every skeleton of a bird you would find, there should have been literally millions of creatures that were somewhere between a reptile and a bird who should have lived, died, and left fossils just like anybody else does. Okay, now of course, not everything that dies leaves a fossil, we admit it. In fact, a very small percentage of creatures that die actually end up fossilized.

But if the fossil record is a true sampling, a random sampling of the creatures, of a percentage of the creatures that lived and died and left fossils, then we should find at least as many transitional intermediate fossils between different major groups as we find fossils of creatures in those major groups. Do you understand that concept? That's basic logic. And it's not just creationism, it's Darwin himself said this is what he expected to find.

Because if evolution occurred, that's what would be there. That's what lived and died and we should find them. Now in Darwin's day, paleontology, which is the study of the fossil record, was a brand new science.

They had found very few fossils in his day. He admitted they didn't find these transitional forms yet, but he was quite sure given enough time, they'll find them because he was sure they had existed. And therefore, of course, they would be in the fossil record.

Now, if creation occurred, however, you would not expect to find transitional forms such as this because according to creation, there were none. There were no intermediates between reptiles and birds because reptiles were specially created, birds were specially created, and there was no transition between them. Therefore, the fossil record should look entirely different in its contents if creation occurred, than it would look if evolution occurred.

This should be the simplest of all evidence to consider and to reach conclusions about. Because the predictions based upon the evolutionary model are entirely different about what you'd find in the fossil record than the predictions based upon the creation model. You see? So it seems like what they should be able to do, anyone should be able to do this.

Let's go talk to a leading paleontologist, say, what have you found? What has everybody found? What is there? Let's clean these fossils up. Let's categorize them. Let's, you know, identify them and let's see what it shows.

Does it give the evidence that evolution would predict or does it give the evidence that creation would predict? And then let's just let the evidence lead us where it will. We can easily predict what you would find if evolution happened and what you would find if creation had found. The question is now, what have they found? What, which of these two paradigms is supported by the fossil record? And of course, the reason I make such a big deal about it is if you didn't already know, is that the evidence is on the side of the creationists, which is why creationists love to talk about it because it is, it's such damaging evidence to the evolutionists.

Let's go ahead and look at our first quote. This quote comes from W.R. Thompson. Is this not working? This is from W.R. Thompson.

He wrote the introduction to the 1956 edition of Darwin's book, The Origin of Species. So this statement appeared in Darwin's book in the 1956 edition. And in that place, W.R. Thompson wrote, quote, "'Therefore, if we found in the geological strata a series of fossils showing a gradual transition from simple to complex forms, and could be sure that they correspond to a true time sequence, then we should be inclined to feel that Darwinian evolution had occurred even though its mechanism remains unknown." In other words, if we saw these, if we found in the fossil record all these missing links and so forth, all this transitional intermediates, we would be almost forced to conclude that evolution had occurred, even if we couldn't explain how it occurred.

That's what he means. Then he says, "'That is certainly what Darwin would have liked to report, but of course he was unable to do so. What the available data indicated was a remarkable absence of the many intermediate forms required by the theory.'" Now, next we have a quote from Darwin himself from The Origin of Species to show that Darwin understood fully the necessity of finding these intermediates.

Go ahead and put that up there. This is from Darwin himself in his book, The Origin of Species on page 462. Darwin said, quote, "'Geological research has done scarcely anything in breaking the distinction between species by connecting them together by numerous fine intermediate varieties.

And this not having been affected is probably the gravest and most obvious of all the many objections which may be urged against my views,' unquote." So how damaging this evidence was. You know, here he's laying out a scenario in his book of this is how I think it happened. I think it happened just this way with all these intermediates.

He says, now there's a bit of a problem. Geology has not yet found any of these intermediates. And he's quite honest.

Darwin is actually a fairly humble guy. I mean, from all the biographies and biographical information I've read about him, he was a very kind of a humble, retiring man. He was not, he was a rebel.

He was a rebel against Christianity. He'd been a Christian and he apostatized from Christianity. And he definitely, in many of his letters that have been published, shows his animosity toward Christianity.

So he wasn't humble enough, but in his general outlook and things, he was willing to admit the problems with his theory in his book. And this is one of them. He says, this absence of these intermediate forms in the fossil record, he says, "'is probably the gravest and most obvious of all the many objections which may be urged against my views.' He admitted there were many objections could be urged against his views, but this was probably the worst.

And I think creationists would have to say, he's right. It is, it is the worst. This is the worst thing that could happen to Darwin.

But fortunately for him, he could, and he did point to this fact, say, but very few fossils have been found, of course. And therefore we don't know what might turn up in future digs. Well, of course, if Darwin could come back today, 135 years later, he could see what they've dug up.

Unfortunately, he wouldn't be able to modify his chapter because things remain the same. Let's look at some quotes. We'll get some of them a little more modern.

We'll come right up to the present time. This is a quote, dates back to 1952, Richard B. Goldschmidt writing in the prestigious journal, American Scientist, volume 40, January, 1952. He said, quote, "'The facts of greatest general importance are the following.

When a phylum, class, or order appears, there follows a quick explosive in terms of geological time, diversification, so that practically all orders or families known appear suddenly and without transition.'" Now he's talking about the nature of the fossil record. He says, "'Every major group appears suddenly, without transition.'" What he means by that when he says suddenly is you don't find any gradualism. You don't find any gradual development in terms of the animals that are found.

They're just sudden emergence of different kinds of animals with no transitions between the various groups. This led this particular writer, Richard B. Goldschmidt, to the view that the first bird hatched from a reptile's egg earned him the scorn of the entire scientific community at the time. Because they criticized Richard B. Goldschmidt about this.

They said, you know, that's absolutely unscientific, that's absurd. No one has ever seen a bird hatch from a reptile's egg. And Dr. Goldschmidt said, well, that's cheap criticism because neither has anybody ever seen a reptile slowly and gradually evolve into a bird either.

And we, of course, agree both with Dr. Goldschmidt and with his critics because nobody has seen any kind of evolution occur, whether slow and gradual or otherwise. But you see, the reason he was forced to come up with this crazy idea, and I would have to admit it was crazy, that a lizard laid an egg and a full-fledged bird hatched out. The reason this man was compelled to, you know, invite the ridicule of his entire field against him, of his companions, was because he was compelled by the false evidence.

He says there's no transitional forms. And so a reptile lays an egg, a bird hatches out, that tells why there are no transitional forms. They never existed.

Well, we agree, they never did exist, but we don't believe that that's quite the right explanation of the absence of the transitional forms. But that a man would feel compelled to come up with such an absurd view shows how compellingly damaging the fossil evidence was to the traditional gradual view of evolution that Darwin taught. Here's a quote from Robert Barnes in an article or a chapter he wrote called Invertebrate Beginnings in the book, Paleobiology.

Appeared in 1980, it was published in 1980. And on pages, I think it's volume six, pages 365 through 370, Robert Barnes wrote this. He said, quote, the fossil record tells us almost nothing about the evolutionary origin of phyla and classes.

These are different categories of creatures, of course, and plants. He says intermediate forms are non-existent, undiscovered or not recognized, unquote. In other words, in 1980, this gentleman writing in the book, Paleobiology, had to say, if there ever were any transitional forms, we either, they haven't been recognized or we haven't discovered them yet or whatever.

Now, when this is pointed out to evolutionists today, what is usually said is, well, you know, very few creatures, when they die, leave fossils. Furthermore, we haven't found all the fossils that are yet to be found, so just be patient. Now, two problems with this argument.

One is, of course, as I said, even if a very small minority of creatures that live and die actually leave fossils for us to find, yet the fossil record should be a true random sampling of the creatures that lived at any given time. It would perhaps be that only very few specimens from any period survive, but we should have a sampling of most of the species or at least a number of the species that exist at any time. And since these so-called intermediates would really have to outnumber the more clearly defined species, because it would take millions of intermediates to produce one clearly defined species from another.

So you'd have all these millions of different species. You would expect that you'd be tripping over these fossils all the time in these intermediate forms, even if you're not looking for them. They should be the most common phenomenon in the fossil record.

And as far as saying that we haven't found enough fossils yet, there are literally tens of millions of fossils that have now been dug up. There are plenty of paleontologists out there digging up the bones. And I have a friend who's an amateur in Michigan.

He's an amateur fossil hunter. He goes out occasionally on a weekend looking for fossils. He'll come home with 50 fossils after a day's hunting.

They're not hard to find. Fossil beds are all over the place. And paleontology is not an infant science anymore.

They have found millions of fossils. One museum alone in Chicago holds over a million fossils in it. And that's only one museum.

So you can know they found a few fossils by now. They found a lot of fossil creatures. And the intermediate creatures between all the major groups are conspicuous by their absence from this particular field of paleontology.

Look at this quotation from E.J.H. Korner from Cambridge University. He wrote a chapter in the book Contemporary Botanical Thought in 1961. He said, quote, "'Much evidence can be adduced in favor of the theory of evolution from biology, biogeography, and paleontology.

But I still think that to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation,' unquote." Now this is not a creationist writing this book. He's an evolutionist. He says, I'm sure there's good evidence for evolution somewhere out there.

But in my field, botany, plants, I would have to say if I were unprejudiced in the matter, judging from the fossil record alone, I'd have to favor special creation. Now it's quite clear he's not unbiased and he's not just using the fossil evidence. But why does he say that? Why does he say to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation simply because in the fossil record, you find fossils of ancient flowering plants, fruit bearing plants, grasses, and various other things, but you don't find any fossils of transitional species.

You remember the plants were supposedly evolved just like the animals did. So there should be intermediates between all the major plant groups, but there are none found. And so he says to the unprejudiced, I still think he's, it sounds like he's coming up against his own colleagues here but he doesn't want to be a creationist.

He says to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation. Here's a, from the time-life book, The Fishes. Some of you probably familiar with the time-life series of nature books, time-life nature library.

From the book, The Fishes written by F.D. O'Maney, we have this comment, quote, how this earliest chordate stock evolved, that is fishes, what stages of development it went through to eventually give rise to truly fish-like creatures, we do not know. Between the Cambrian, where it probably originated, and the Ordovician, where the first fossils with really fish-like characteristics appeared, there is a gap of perhaps a hundred million years, which we will probably never be able to fill, unquote. What he means is that from the such creatures as are thought to have lived in the Cambrian period to the evolution of the fish, evolution is going to take about a hundred million years of evolution to get from there to there.

Trouble is, we can't fill that gap with any actual fossils. There's no fossils of creatures intermediate between the invertebrates found in the Cambrian and the fish in the Ordovician. Imagine that.

Now, I'm willing to admit that fossilization doesn't happen most of the time, but a hundred million years of Earth's history without a single fossil, or at least not enough fossils for us to find one of them in a hundred million years, that's a significant change, by the way, from something like a jellyfish in the Cambrian or a coral or a sponge found in the Cambrian to a creature that's a fish, has a full skeleton. It has gills, it has eyes, it has fins, it swims. It does all those things that none of those invertebrates can do.

It's got scales all over its body. It's an entirely different animal, entirely different. They say, well, that'd take at least a hundred million years of evolution.

Trouble is, fossil record kind of leaves that part of history undocumented for us. There's no transitional forms found there. This quotation is from Barbara Stahl in 1974 from the McGraw-Hill book published in that year called, Vertebrate History, Problems in Evolution.

She is an evolutionist. It's not a creationist critique of evolution. This is an evolutionary writer.

Vertebrate history, problems in evolution. Well, here's what she says in that book on page 146. She says, quote, the modern coelacanth, maybe I should tell you what a coelacanth is.

Before I read the quote, the coelacanth is a fish which was found in the fossil record in strata that were thought to be 200 million years old. They found skeletons of this fish, 200 million years old, they thought. And it was believed that this was probably the fish that from its body shape and so forth was most likely to be the ancestor of the amphibians that went ashore.

And it was of all the different fish species, it was thought that this is the most likely candidate from outwards visible signs in the fossil record. This is probably the ancestor that was the likely candidate to be the ancestor of amphibians, okay? And unfortunately they couldn't be sure. They couldn't look at any of its internal parts to see if it was developing skeletal changes to equip it to go on land.

After all, a fish, it has bony structures in its fins but they don't connect to a pelvis and therefore they couldn't support body weight. You know, there is the, in the fish, they've got the vertebrae, they've got their backbone, but the bones in the fins do not in any way connect to the vertebrae so as to support the weight of the animal. However, every amphibian, including say a salamander, it has a pelvic girdle to which its leg bones are connected.

And of course that's connected to the spine so that its legs are in such a way that they can lift the weight of the body. Fish do not have anything of the skeletal structure. It is thought that the fish that evolved into amphibians must have had some changes in the skeleton from ordinary fish and that it must have had some organs inside that were pre-adapting so that they could eventually go on land and so forth.

Well, unfortunately the coelacanth was extinct 200 million years ago so they couldn't be quite sure of it until they began catching them alive off the coast of Africa. And they caught, oh, they've caught at least a couple of dozen of them by now. The fish that they were quite sure had become extinct 200 million years ago.

Now, by the way, as a side note, I wanna read you this quote about the coelacanth but as a side note, this calls into serious question the whole method of dating rocks because when they tell you such and such a rock is X hundred million years old, you might think, oh, they're basing that on carbon 14 or uranium lead or thorium lead dating or something like that. No, they're not using any such thing. The principal method for dating rocks is through what they call index fossils.

Index fossils means there's certain fossils of creatures that are believed to become extinct at a certain period of time. Upon evolutionary theory, it's figured out about that long ago, they probably evolved and went extinct. And if you find those fossils in the rocks, they give you the reading of how old the rocks are because those creatures lived at that time.

Therefore, rocks that had a coelacanth skeleton in them were at one time believed to be 200 million years old because it was believed that coelacanths became extinct 200 million years ago. Now we know they didn't become extinct 200 million years ago, they're still around. So the rocks that were judged to be 200 million years old by the finding of those skeletons, now it throws into a question whether those rocks are even a thousand years old for that matter, because who knows, it might've been a modern coelacanth that left that fossil.

And therefore there are problems even in dating these rocks. The evolutionists speak with great confidence that they know how old these rocks are, but really the principal means of dating rocks is through index fossils. The index fossil dating method assumes they know when certain things became extinct and then just imposes those dates on the rocks that have the fossils of those things.

That's why they believe certain rocks are 70 million years old that have dinosaur fossils because they assume dinosaurs died out in the Cretaceous period 70 million years ago. However, if you would find a living dinosaur somewhere in the world today, it would throw of course into question the whole age of any of the rocks that had dinosaur bones in it. I don't know that they ever will find a living dinosaur.

They have found a dead one not too long ago, skin and all. And the photograph that was taken of it before they threw its rotting body back into the sea because the fishermen didn't want it to spoil their catch, they took a sample of the tissue. They took a photograph of it.

It's been published. I saw it first in 1977 in Newsweek Magazine, the week that they found it. It's been republished.

We have a book or two at home that has a picture of it. It looks like a dinosaur to me. It looks like a plesiosaur, a seagoing dinosaur.

As I recall, I think it was about between 20 and 30 feet long. It was a reptile judging by the tissue sample they took. And a huge, a huge aquatic reptile that looks very much like a plesiosaur, which is a kind of dinosaur, which they had previously only found skeletons of.

And if this was in fact a plesiosaur, it's hard to say because it was partially decayed. Been dead a few days apparently. It would suggest that some dinosaurs might still be alive today.

It is said that we know less about the creatures of the deep sea bottom than we know about the face of the moon and the dark side of the moon. And therefore there's a lot to discover yet. Who knows? We may find in some of the uncharted rainforest or in the deep ocean, some living dinosaurs.

I'm not counting on it. I'm not even predicting it, but who can say that it could never happen? If they found a living dinosaur, it would again be a problem to the evolutionists in learning how to redate their rocks. But this lady, Barbara Stahl, in Vertebrate History, Problems in Evolution made this statement, quote, "'The modern coelacanth,' that's that fish, "'shows no evidence of having internal organs "'pre-adapted for the use of in a terrestrial environment,' "'on the land, in other words.

"'The heart is characteristically fish-like "'in showing no sign of division "'into the left and right sides. "'And the gut, with its spiral-valved intestine, "'is the type common to all fishes, "'except the most advanced rays.'" In other words, once they got to take a look at one of these things alive, they said, eh, doesn't look like there's much evolution took place in this critter. From the skeletons alone, they thought it might be on its way to becoming an amphibian.

When you cut one of them open alive, of course they're not alive anymore when you do that, but when you take a living one and cut it open, you find that there's not much evidence that it was anything other than just another funny-looking fish. And there are a lot of different funny-looking fish, I guarantee you, especially on the deep sea bottom. Here's a quote from A.J. Marshall in the book Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds.

You got that quote there? This was published some time ago, back in 1960. However, nothing has changed in this regard since that time. A.J. Marshall in the book Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds made this statement, quote, 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, unquote. Now, this is starting to sound redundant, but it's extremely significant. This is the opening line of his book.

It's his first statement on chapter one, page one. The origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There's no fossil of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved.

Let me ask you if you are very much aware of what a remarkable change it is from a reptile to a bird. Birds are warm-blooded animals. They have an entirely different kind of metabolism than reptiles, which are cold-blooded.

A cold-blooded animal like a reptile, its body temperature is regulated not by internal factors, but by the environment. Warm-blooded creatures, birds, mammals, ourselves, for example, our body temperature remains constant unless we have a fever. The environmental factors do not change it.

There's an entirely different kind of metabolism there. It's a different kind of creature altogether. Every reptile is covered with scales.

Every bird is covered with feathers. It is believed, of course, by evolutionists that a feather evolved from a scale, but there is nothing in common with a scale, which is just a rough piece of skin, and a feather, which is an elaborate vein of intricate design. I think we might even have a picture of this feather to show you here eventually.

If not, that's all right. I'll tell you about it later. But scales have to turn into feathers.

Cold-blooded creature has to turn into a warm-blooded creature. And then, of course, the forelegs, the front legs of the reptile have to adapt into wings. Now, this is perhaps the most difficult part of all, because we know not only do we not have fossils of creatures that are transitional, one cannot even hypothesize a creature that could survive that is transitional between a reptile and a bird.

Because you see what would happen if a creature had a leg and it gave birth to a creature whose leg was a little more like a wing than its father's or mother's leg was. And then the next generation, we had a little more like a wing. And then eventually, very gradually, a wing replaced a leg.

Do you realize that most of the stages that we would have to go through from reptile to bird you would have neither a wing nor a leg? You wouldn't have a full wing. The creature would lose the use of its foreleg long before it would have the use of a wing. So it's very difficult to imagine how, in Darwin's view, the creature that has lost the use of its foreleg and has something that's a useless future wing developing, how that creature is more fit for survival than his ancestors who had four good legs to run on.

Obviously, you cannot even hypothesize a creature developing a wing from a leg without going through stages that are totally inconceivable that they would even survive. So we have this serious problem. Not only can you not imagine such creatures, but if they existed, they would have left fossils, it is believed.

And yet there exists no fossil of the remarkable change, how that remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved. Much easier for me to believe if there's no fossils of intermediate forms that that change never did occur. That the bird was created separately from the reptile, and that makes sense.

It fits the fossil record. It fits the facts. It relieves us of the need to explain fairy tales.

There's no shortage of fossil creatures that have been found. But what is absent is fossil creatures that show any evidence of being transitional between one major animal group and another major animal group. And yet we should have thousands of them.

They should be all over the place. And this is something that Stephen Jay Gould calls the trade secret of paleontology, namely the absence of transitional fossils. He called it the trade secret of paleontology because for a long time, paleontologists were trying very hard to keep it a secret.

They knew it, but they didn't want non-evolutionists to know it because the evidence was so damaging to what they were trying to present as fact, as true. Stephen Jay Gould is very strongly committed to evolution, but he's also a paleontologist, and he's come out and said, listen, we've known this all along. There just aren't any transitional forms.

And therefore he has suggested another form of evolution, which we'll talk about in a few moments. This comes from Dr. David B. Kitts from the University of Oklahoma. He wrote in the journal Evolution in 1974, an article called Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory.

In that article, David B. Kitts said this, despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of seeing evolution, it has presented some nasty problems 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 is very important.

He says evolution requires this. He doesn't say that it would be convenient if evolution supplied a few of these or that our knowledge of evolution would be greatly enhanced by finding a few of these. He states it exactly as it is, evolution requires them.

They're absolutely essential for the documentation of the fact of evolution. If evolution occurred, they would have been there. They are not there.

He said evolution requires them, paleontology, which is simply the fossil record, the study of the fossil record does not provide any of them. Let's put that next one on there by Stephen Stanley. In his book, Macroevolution, he's an evolutionist.

He wrote this book back in 1979, but things have not significantly changed since then in terms of the fossil evidence and the intermediate forms. He said the known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic gradual evolution, accomplishing a major morphological transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid, unquote. In other words, the known fossil record doesn't offer any evidence for evolution because it is so difficult or impossible to explain the possible stages that these creatures must have gone through to become what they now are.

And because intermediate forms are absent from the fossil record, evolutionists, many of them, have had to change their opinion. Have they given up the faith and become creationists? No, they couldn't be expected to make a radical change like that. They've simply come up with a new kind of evolution.

Now, do not think that all evolutionists are changing. Some of them just continue to ignore the evidence and pretend like Darwin was right all the while. But many of the brighter, younger evolutionists are saying, no, obviously Darwin was wrong.

This slow and gradual process that Darwin thought was the means of evolution just didn't happen. It would be documented in the fossil record. It's not there.

Actually, we can't even explain how it could have happened. How could you develop a thing like a feather by small and gradual developments that you need a fully functioning feather all at once? You need an eyeball all at once. You can't have part of an eyeball.

It's not going to help anything. You know, 50% of an eyeball is not going to be able to see. You've got to have a fully functioning eyeball or no vision at all.

And therefore, you couldn't imagine an eyeball developing by small stages over millions of years. A creature either needs one or doesn't need one. His lifestyle either uses eyes or doesn't use eyes.

And if he uses eyes, he needs a fully developed eye. If he doesn't use eyes, there's no reason why a developing eye would be developing and be preserved in the course of evolution. It would be a useless structure.

And therefore, evolution can't explain these things in the slow and gradual sense that Darwin explained it. Now we have people saying evolution happened a little more rapidly than that, in leaps. Now, a long time ago, a guy named Otto Schindelwolf, a German scientist, and another German scientist, Richard B. Goldschmidt, came up with an idea, which is, I don't know if I have a quote for it.

Is that it there? Yeah, okay. Otto Schindelwolf said this, the first bird hatched from a reptilian egg. Now this solves the problem of the missing links.

This solves the problem of the illogical sequence of transitional forms that would have to exist that couldn't survive. It's much easier just to say a lizard laid an egg and a bird hatched out. Feathers, warm blood, wings, everything different about it, but it just happened all at once.

Now, Richard B. Goldschmidt was not appreciated in his lifetime because Darwin's theory was still, had a stranglehold on the evolutionary community and this slow and gradual stuff seemed to still make sense to most evolutionists back then. This was back in the 40s, that Richard B. Goldschmidt came up with this. And so he was kind of hooted out of the podium, as it were, and his book was ridiculed and so forth.

But actually he's been resuscitated a little bit by some modern thinkers. Dr. Stephen Jay Gould, who I've mentioned many times and he certainly needs to be mentioned frequently because he's one of the leading evolutionary spokesmen today, actually wrote an article several years ago saying, you know, we need to look at Richard B. Goldschmidt's work again because the trade secret of evolution is that there are no transitional forms. And unless we're going to find some transitional forms, we're going to have to question whether they ever existed.

And if they never existed, then Darwin was wrong. But Gould is an atheist. He can't believe in creationism.

Therefore, he has to believe in rapid evolution. Not quite as rapid as Richard B. Goldschmidt said. Stephen Jay Gould would not say that the first bird hatched from a reptile's egg, but he does believe in something called punctuated equilibrium.

Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge back in the, I guess it was in the early 70s, I think maybe around 71, I don't know if I have the date right, published work suggesting that there's a new theory of evolution that really needs to replace the old. That evolution didn't happen by a continuous, gradual development of things, but there was equilibrium most of the time, which means things didn't change. Things stayed the same for millions of years.

But then these periods of equilibrium were punctuated by periods of rapid spurts of development, where something, you know, some atrocity came out of an egg. It didn't look very much like its parents. It was a mutation of a radical sort, but it did at least have some advantages over its parents.

And some of those advantages would be things like eyeballs that its parents didn't have and some of the major structures that had to change. Now, I may be overstating Stephen Jay Gould's position, but he did say he thought that Richard B. Goldsmith should be looked at again and should be given a little bit of respect. Now, this view of punctuated equilibrium is actually taking over the evolutionary community.

It's my judgment. Most of the younger, brighter evolutionists are holding to it. Let me read you a few things though about this.

The staunch Darwinists who still hold to a gradualistic approach to the evolution of the human species. I think that this punctuated equilibrium is heresy. And the funny thing about this, this is an intramural debate among evolutionists.

You've got the punctuated equiliberalists saying Darwinism can't have happened because of all of these problems. So they're destroying any possibility of believing in Darwinism. But the Darwinists are coming out and saying, but punctuated equilibrium couldn't happen because mutations on a grand scale would destroy the creature.

And so they destroy punctuated equilibrium. So they both shoot each other dead and there's no evolution left. Now, of course, they usually do this debating behind closed doors because they don't really want the creationists to hear.

But the fact of the matter is no form of evolution really is commanding the support, the unanimous support of the scientific community, which makes one wonder exactly what is the nature of the claims that it is science that they're talking about? When two competing ideas both say the other is entirely unscientific, how can anyone say evolution has been proved in any sense if no one can agree as to how it happened and both groups say the other is impossible? Well, let's look at this quote. This comes from Howard Gruber, a book he wrote called Darwin on Man, a Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity published in 1981 by the University of Chicago Press. Natura non facet sultum, that's Latin.

It means nature makes no jumps. Was a guiding motto for generations of evolutionists and proto evolutionists, but Darwin encountered it in a sharp and interesting form posed as an alternative of terrible import. Nature makes no jumps, but God does.

Therefore, if we want to know whether something that interests us is of natural origin or supernatural, we must ask, did it arise gradually out of that which came before or suddenly without any evident natural cause? Several typos here. Sometime in his Cambridge years, 1927 to 1930, Darwin took cognizance of the proposition that in order to show something was of natural origin, it must be shown that it evolved gradually from its precursors. Otherwise, its origins are supernatural.

This formulation of the choices open to rational men remained a leitmotif throughout his life. In other words, Darwin was very adamant that nature makes no jumps. You can't have punctuated equilibrium.

You can't have hopeful monsters, as Richard B. Goldschmidt called them, creatures that were monstrosities because they had such monstrous mutations vis-a-vis their parents. But although they were monstrosities, they happened to have some advantages too, so they were hopeful monsters. And that's what Richard B. Goldschmidt believed.

Well, Darwin was totally against this idea of rapid evolution, and throughout his life, the idea that nature makes no jumps was a very strong opinion that Darwin held, even against many of his other supporters. People who supported him, like Thomas Huxley, argued with him about this. He said, Darwin, you're putting a burden on yourself that is unnecessary.

Thomas Huxley, who was Darwin's chief supporter, argued with Darwin about this very thing because the lack of transitional forms in nature and in the fossil record demonstrated that slow and gradual evolution didn't happen. But Darwin was strong on this. His view required slow and gradual evolution with intermediate forms.

Here's what Darwin himself said on the subject in The Origin of Species on page 242. This is Charles Darwin's own words. Quote, he who believes that some ancient form was transformed suddenly through an internal force or tendency will further be compelled to believe that many structures beautifully adapted to all the other parts of the same creature and to the surrounding conditions have been suddenly produced.

And of such complex and wonderful co-adaptions he will not be able to assign a shadow of an explanation. To admit all of this is, as it seems to me, to enter into the realms of miracle and to leave those of science. That is, to believe in the immediate and sudden appearance of the thing like an eyeball or a wing on a bird or a feather instead of slow and gradual.

He says that's to leave the realm of science and get into the realm of miracle. Well, now we're getting close to the truth. The creationists have said all along that these things are the result of a miracle.

Darwin, I think, had it right there. He said if you're going to believe in the sudden appearance of these perfectly designed complex structures you're leaving the realms of science into the realm of miracle. Let me show you what, again, Michael Denton says in his book Evolution, Theory and Crisis.

He said, by its very nature, evolution cannot be substantiated in the way that is usual in science by experiment and direct observation. Neither Darwin nor any subsequent biologist has ever witnessed the evolution of one new species as it actually occurs. Outside of direct observation, the only means of providing decisive evidence for evolution is in the demonstration of unambiguous sequential arrangements in nature.

The absence of intermediate forms essentially emptied all of Darwin's macroevolutionary claims of any empirical basis. Now, I'd like to read some things by people who are favorable to punctuated equilibrium. This is almost hilarious, but it would be hilarious if not for the fact that these are sober statements by men who are the leading men of science in our educational institutions.

Stephen Jay Gould himself is professor of biology and geology at Harvard and a major spokesman. Although I'm not quoting him, I'm quoting those that follow his ideas here. I do quote him sometimes in his notes, but not in this particular section.

This comes from actually an article that appeared in Newsweek in their science section, November 3rd, 1980. And it's by Jerry Adler and John Kerry. Jerry Adler writes a great deal for Newsweek, especially in the science section.

And he's very fascinated with the evolutionary. I've noticed that a lot of times in Newsweek, Jerry Adler writes stories relevant to evolution. He seems to be fascinated with it.

Well, in this story that appeared in November, 1980, these Newsweek writers said, the missing link between man and apes whose absence has comforted religious fundamentalists since the days of Darwin, is merely the most glamorous of a whole hierarchy of phantom creatures. In the fossil record, missing links are the rule. The story of life is as disjointed as a silent newsreel in which species succeed one another as abruptly as Balkan prime ministers.

The more scientists have searched for transitional forms, the more they've been frustrated. Evidence from fossils now points overwhelmingly away from the classical Darwinism which most Americans learned in high school. Scientists now believe that species changed little for millions of years and then evolved quickly in a kind of quantum leap.

Not necessarily in a direction that represents an obvious improvement in fitness. The theory is still being worked out. But at a conference in mid-October, 1980, at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, the majority of 160 of the world's top paleontologists, anatomists, evolutionary geneticists, and developmental biologists supported some form of this theory of punctuated equilibria.

This is the theory of hopeful monsters, a point of bitter contention among geneticists and biologists. To some geneticists, all monsters are hopeless. Such a major change in structure can only be the result of gross chromosome rearrangements, so many other delicate systems would be set awry as a result that the organism could not survive, they say.

Let's go on to another quotation. This from Ernst Mayr, very famous leader in evolutionary thought. Population, Species, and Evolution is the name of the book published by Harvard University Press in 1970.

Ernst Mayr said, the occurrence of genetic monstrosities by mutation is well substantiated, but they are such evident freaks that these monsters can be designated only as hopeless. They are so utterly unbalanced that they would not have the slightest chance of escaping elimination through selection. Giving a thrush the wings of a falcon does not make it a better flyer.

Indeed, having all the other equipment of a thrush, it would probably hardly be able to fly at all. To believe that such a drastic mutation would produce a viable new type capable of occupying a new adaptive zone is equivalent to believing in miracles, unquote. So, Ernst Mayr says the same thing that Darwin said.

If you're gonna believe in this sudden appearance of these highly complex, well-adapted structures, you're leaving the realm of science into the realm of miracles. It helps if you're gonna believe in miracles to believe in a deity. This comes from a book by Francis Hitching called The Neck of the Giraffe.

The subtitle used to be Where Darwin Went Wrong. I first encountered this book in 1982 when it came out. It was excerpted in Life Magazine.

A lengthy excerpt of the book was in Life Magazine. I was amazed by it because here was an evolutionist who is, in his book, just demolishing evolution, just marshaling the kinds of evidences that creationists love to bring forward to show that evolution could have happened. But then in the end, he stands in favor of punctuated equilibrium as a solution to these problems, which it is not.

But the book in those days was called The Neck of the Giraffe, Where Darwin Went Wrong. Now they just call it The Neck of the Giraffe. And the reason is because this guy's gotten blasted by his colleagues in the evolutionary community because he pulled the covers, basically, on all the damaging evidence that they have against them.

And he, at least to soften the title, he doesn't suggest necessarily that Darwin went wrong. But in his book, I'd like to read just a couple of paragraphs, put them before you. No, there's one before that.

Having rejected modern Darwinism. It should be right there. Thanks.

He says, having rejected modern Darwinism because it is inadequate to answer these and many other questions. And rejecting on the other hand, the creationist explanation because it cannot be scientifically argued. What then do we put in their place? How else have we arrived at today's forms? So far in the list of alternatives to neo-Darwinism, we have had hopeful embryonic monsters, new species by way of chromosomal change, and catastrophes that cause mass extinction, leaving a small number of lucky survivors.

If you combine these ideas and others, such as the revival of the notion that acquired characteristics can be occasionally passed on from parents to offspring, a new scenario from the origin of species begins to emerge. In as few words as possible. Here we go.

Here's his new explanation that replaces Darwinism. And of course it can't, this has to be instead of creationism. Why? Because creationism cannot be scientifically argued.

Well, let's look at this new scenario, how scientific it is. In as few words as possible. A severe environmental crisis accelerates embryonic restructuring and isolated mutants survive.

Accordingly, the emergence of the first land animals might be examined thus. In the wake of a disaster, probably global, a large number of amphibious creatures were thrown far up on shore and became stranded. Many died of starvation or injury, but many others survived.

And among the mothers, the multiple effects of changed diet, stress, prolonged exposure to a new climate and acquired immunity to virus diseases led to intense genetic pressure on their unborn young. Chromosomal changes led to hopeful monsters by the thousands emerging from new laid eggs. The vast majority were stillborn or impotent or failed to make an impact because the chromosomal change was bred out.

But just occasionally through harem type breeding in isolated populations, the chromosome change was perspectuated. After a few generations, several varieties of monsters became viable, new species that then proliferated over a largely unpopulated globe. Now this is suggested to us with a serious face.

He's not smiling when he says it. He really believes this is more scientific than creationism is. What is he saying? Now he's trying to describe in this lengthy paragraph the emergence of the first land animals.

Now we're talking now about amphibious creatures like salamanders evolving into a fully land animal like a lizard. Now that's only one of zillions of such changes that have to happen because every species has to evolve in a similar manner in some way or another. But here's how the first lizard came about perhaps from a first amphibian.

He says a global calamity, a disaster threw a whole bunch of these critters out ashore where they couldn't get back to the water. Now he admits this would be a little hard on him. You take a frog or a salamander, take it away from water for a few hours and see what happens to it.

It doesn't live very well. And in a day or two or less, he's gonna be dead. Now hitching is realistic here.

He admits most of them are gonna have a real hard time of it. They're gonna, a lot of them are gonna die. Some are gonna be injured, starve to death or whatever because the food they eat isn't there.

But he says a few lucky survivors survive and they reproduce. Now, not only do they reproduce, but their young, their unborn young are under intense genetic pressure. Now, I would challenge any scientist to describe to me what intense genetic pressure is.

Is this where you put a gene in a vice grip and tighten it down? How do you put pressure on a chromosome? Well, I'll tell you. The pressure is this, change radically or die. That's the pressure.

If you don't produce a hopeful monster, if you don't produce a totally new kind of animal in one generation, you're out of there. You only get one chance. That's the genetic pressure they're under.

Now, what is it that produces this genetic pressure? Well, here it is. It's in the middle of the quote. He says, the multiple effects of a changed diet, stress, prolonged exposure to a new climate and acquired immunity to virus diseases led to an intense genetic pressure on the unborn young.

Now, changed diet, stress. No question about it, these sound like they'd be under a lot of stress in that new situation. Changed diet, they got one day to change their diet radically from what they ate when they're in the water to what they eat when they're on land because they're not gonna get back to water for the next meal.

They got to change their diet immediately. They're gonna have to acquire immunities to new viruses. That usually takes a few generations or at least a generation to develop.

Well, not always, I mean, it depends. But then it's also, what else they got going for them there? Oh yes, prolonged exposure to a new climate. That is not going to be helpful to them.

That's not gonna produce hopeful situations for them. There is absolutely nothing scientific. This is the most absurd scenario that's ever been suggested.

No one has ever seen this ever happen. Science can't claim that there's any evidence for this. The only evidence they have is the absence of evidence for a slow and gradual evolution.

In other words, this theory has no positive evidence in its camp. It is simply a deduction coming from the absence of evidence for a slower kind of evolution. They have to postulate fast evolution Why? Because creationism is the only other alternative to that and that's not scientifically arguable.

But this doesn't sound extremely scientifically arguable to me either.