Seven Signs of Evolution Refuted - Part 7

The last sign, #7, is “Lizards lose limbs”

Australian lizards called skinks are dropping their limbs to become more like snakes. And, according to a genetic family tree, some skinks have gone snaky in just 3.6 million years, relatively fast in evolutionary time. Scientists said the skinks’ lifestyle appears to be driving the change: They spend most of their time swimming through sand or soil. Limbs are not only unnecessary for this, they may be a hindrance. Once a skink goes snaky, they never go back, the researchers add. One of the snakelike skinks is shown here.¹²

If amoebas are going to evolve into avocados and archaeologists the organisms continually need to produce new structures. For natural selection to change a fish into an amphibian, for example, it needs to put legs on a fish. But here we see a process, a mutation that takes legs off. Mutations also remove eyes from fish. Mutations are going the wrong way. So, how did the legs get on the lizard in the first place? Not by natural selection. Note too that it does not take millions of years for a lizard to lose its legs. Just one mutation in one generation will do the trick. The loss of legs on lizards is consistent with, and thus points to the truth of, the biblical account of how the world came to be the way it is today—lizard leg loss is not a “sign of evolution”.

Source: Creation Ministries

< Part 6

Seven Signs of Evolution Refuted - Part 6

Sign #6: “Intermediate form supports flatfish evolution”

Flounder, sole, halibut and other flatfish have long struck biologists as evolutionary oddities: Both their eyes are on one side of the head, an adaptation that allows them to lie flat on the ocean bottom while keeping their eyes on the lookout for passing prey. The transition happens in the youth of flatfish, one eye migrating up and over the top of the head. Opponents of evolution argued that this curious anatomy could not have evolved gradually, as suggested by the theory of natural selection. That’s because there would be no advantage for an intermediate form –a fish with an only partially migrated eye. But now scientists have found those intermediate forms in museum collections. The 50 million-year-old fossils, including Heteronectes chantei shown here, have a partially displaced eye.

When flatfish die today they are not generally fossilized. Scavengers continue to eat their remains until there is nothing left. To fossilize a flatfish you need to bury it under sediment quickly. If a young flatfish was suddenly buried when its eye had only migrated part of the way around its head it would look just like the fossil pictured. It would not be a new species.

The sedimentary rocks of the world are filled with fossils that point to rapid burial. One example is a fish entombed in the act of swallowing another fish. Another is an ichthyosaur snap frozen in sediment while giving birth. The global Flood described in the Bible explains why we find so many fossils buried in sediment laid down by water all over the earth. Buried only 4,500 years ago, not 50 million years, sign # 6 is a powerful sign for creation.

Source: Creation Ministries

< Part 5 | Part 7 >

Seven Signs of Evolution Refuted - Part 5

Sign #5 is “Toxic toad evolves longer legs”

A toxic toad, introduced in 1936 to wipe out a beetle species wreaking havoc on Australia’s sugar cane crop, has become an uncontrollable pest itself, evolving longer legs to help it hop across the country at an ever-increasing clip. For their first 20 years or so in the country, they spread at a pace of 6 miles per year. They now cruise at about 30 miles per year. Why? Researchers found that the toads leading the cross-country march had legs that were 6 percent longer than those of the stragglers. The added length gives more speed, which permits the long-legged toads to secure the best habitat at the newly conquered terrain.

A toad with longer legs is just a toad. It is not evolution—I.e, a process of unlimited change, with the capacity for adding lots of new information (and thus potentially turning a toad into something radically different in time). It’s clear that all that is happening is a simple genetic shift in the proportion of a population having a particular characteristic that already exists in that population—in this case, long legs. The genetic information for long-leggedness has not appeared out of nowhere (i.e. evolved) but is part of the variation built into the toad kind at Creation.

Such simple shifting of relative gene frequencies can go either way. A year after the invasion front arrived at their research site near the city of Darwin, researchers found that the average fell back to 40% of body length, as the shorter-legged toads caught up.

A long-legged toad is still an amphibian and is not evolving into something else, such as a reptile, as the evolutionists claim happened in the past. Think of the fundamental design changes needed to transform an amphibian into a reptile. For example, toads grow from tadpoles whereas lizards hatch straight from eggs. A toad with longer legs is no closer to becoming a new species than a human with longer arms. The remarkable life cycle of the toad is an example of intelligent design and points to creation.

Source: Creation Ministries

< Part 4 | Part 6 >

Seven Signs of Evolution Refuted - Part 4

Sign #4: “Butterflies rapidly evolve resistance to killer bacteria”

A population of tropical butterflies on a South Pacific island evolved resistance to a killer bacteria in the span of a single year – a blink of the eye in evolutionary time. The bacteria infects females and selectively kills males before they hatch. The strategy reduced male Blue Moon butterflies to just 1 percent of the population. But just 10 generations later – a year’s time – males made up nearly 40 percent of the population. Scientists said the rebound is due to the evolution of a so-called suppressor gene that keeps the killer bacteria in check.

Genetic variation is always present within any population of organisms. That’s the starting point for natural selection. In other words, some of this population of butterflies was already resistant to the “killer bacteria” when it was introduced, so they survived. The butterflies did not wait until after the killer bacteria were introduced before evolving the resistant gene, otherwise they would have all died. From the 1% of individuals that survived the number of resistant butterflies quickly multiplied until they repopulated the island.

In other words, no new genetic information was produced by this event. In fact, the genetic information within the non-resistant butterflies was lost. If natural selection removes genetic information then how did the genetic information get into the butterflies in the first place? And it all happened quickly, within a few generations. Insect resistance is a sign that points to creation.

Source: Creation Ministries

< Part 3 | Part 5 >

Seven Signs of Evolution Refuted - Part 3

The third sign is “Human evolution speeding up?”

With more people crowding into ever more ecological niches over the past 10,000 years, humans appear to be evolving more rapidly than in the distant past, according to scientists. What’s more, as people adapt to different regions, cultures and diets, they are becoming increasingly different from people elsewhere. For example, Europeans have evolved a tolerance for dairy products into adulthood, whereas people in China and most of Africa have not.

These sorts of cultural differences provide absolutely no support to Darwin’s suggestion that humans evolved from apes.

All the people alive today are descended from the original human population of eight individuals that survived the global Flood, and later from those that migrated across the earth after the confusion of languages at the tower of Babel. That we are all “one blood” is supported by the latest genetic findings, and demonstrated by the fact that individuals from different cultures and different continents can marry and have children. The reason that many people in China and Africa cannot tolerate milk is that their genes controlling lactase production are functioning as originally designed, i.e. to switch off lactose production after weaning. In stark contrast, adult milk-drinkers are “mutants”—see Can’t drink milk? You’re normal! A mutation is a loss of information—just the opposite of what is needed in order to specify new design features in organisms. A random change in a complicated piece of machinery will degrade its performance, not enhance it. (So, in this case, the ability to digest lactose in adulthood is the result of a loss of information, not a gain.) And there are thousands of genetic mutations that have accumulated and cause diseases within humans since the time the original pair were created, perfect, about 6,000 years ago.

Human genetics is a sign of creation, not evolution.

Source: Creation Ministries

< Part 2 | Part 4 >

Seven Signs of Evolution Refuted - Part 2

The second sign is “Humans influence natural selection”

Is human activity “natural”? Scientists say human activity is indeed affecting the evolution of other species. In one example, the human preference for large snow lotus plants, which are used in traditional Tibetan and Chinese medicine, has meant that only the smaller plants go to seed. Hence, the snow lotus is getting smaller. In another example, scientists have found that human preference for trophy game such as big fish and caribou is driving these species to become smaller and reproduce at younger ages.

Yes, human selection pressures can cause lotus plants, fish and caribou to become smaller—see, e.g., Smaller fish to fry. But what evolutionists want you to think is that fish, lotus plants and caribou evolved from a single celled protozoan over millions of years. It’s a tactic called “bait and switch”. They tempt you with a Cadillac but give you a bicycle. If you accept the bait then you will think they can explain everything according to the laws of nature without any need for God creating. It’s a strategy in the cultural war designed to make people abandon their Christian heritage.

As explained above, the process of variation and natural selection is going in the wrong direction for bacteria-to-biologist evolution. It points to the fact that lotus plants, fish and caribou are derived from the separate kinds of organisms that were created at the beginning.

Source: Creation Ministries

< Part 1 | Part 3 >

Seven Signs of Evolution Refuted - Part 1

MSNBC recently published an article showing seven signs that proves evolution is true.

The first “sign of evolution” is Darwin’s finches

The seed-crushing bills of little songbirds called finches, which were adapted to various niches throughout the Galapagos Islands, proved integral to the formulation of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. And the birds haven’t stopped evolving. For example, the medium ground finch (Geospiza fortis), shown here, recently downsized its beak to exploit small seeds more efficiently after a larger finch arrived on its island and began competing for food. The smaller beaks on the smaller birds allowed them to thrive, while the big birds ate all the big seeds and nearly went extinct, scientists say.

Finch bills changing size is totally uncontroversial. Such variation is an amazing design feature that allows the original created kinds of creatures to adapt to different ecological niches.¹ But the genetic processes behind these changes do not support the evolutionist’s claim that reptiles evolved into birds over millions of years. These tiny variations are not like the fundamental design modifications needed for bird evolution, such as changing scales into feathers, heavy reptilian bones into hollow bird bones, and the reptilian lung into an avian lung. The process affecting the bills reduces the genetic information in the finches instead of increasing it as required. Even with millions of years of time it is not going to work because the process is going in the wrong direction.

On the other hand, the biblical creation model explains these changes without any problem. All the finches on the Galapagos Islands are descended from birds that survived Noah’s Flood on board the Ark, some 4,500 years ago. After the Flood, the birds multiplied and gradually migrated away from the Middle East. Some eventually reached the islands where they rapidly diversified into different environmental niches. Darwin’s finches are not a sign of molecules-to-man evolution but a sign of creation.

References

1 Williams, A., Facilitated variation: A new paradigm emerges in biology, Journal of Creation 22(1):85–92, 2008.

Source: Creation Ministries

Read part 2

Is Ida the Missing Link?

By Don Batten

I don’t think I have ever seen such blatantly over-stated claims on a fossil find, and I have seen a few, including one by a major co-author of this paper: Philip Gingerich’s claims for Pakicetus back in 1983. Gingerich had a couple of scraps of a skull of a mammal from Pakistan and claimed it as the evolutionary precursor of whales. He embellished the story with an artist’s drawing of what Pakicetus (“whale from Pakistan”) looked like, with legs becoming flippers, a tail fluke developing and the imaginary creature diving for fish. Cute. Gingerich claimed it was “perfectly intermediate, a missing link between earlier land mammals and later, full-fledged whales”. With such a strong, confident claim from the fossil expert, who could doubt that evolution was true? Seven years later, other paleontologists published a paper describing the rest of Pakicetus and the now almost complete fossil showed that Gingerich’s imagination had really run away with him and the animal was not the missing link he thought it was. See: Not at all like a whale.

Apparently many paleontologists appreciate this sort of over-the-top, publicity-seeking behaviour in support of evolutionary story-telling, because they recently elected Gingerich the president of the American Paleontological Association.

Gingerich likened finding Ida to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in archaeology (which finally enabled the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics)! His collaborators on this paper are willingly joining in the hyping. In a televised meet-the-press, co-author Dr Jørn Hurum said, “It’s really, really hard to pinpoint exactly who gave rise to humans at that point, but this is as good as it gets, really.” According to ScienceNews, Hurum said, “This is the first link to all humans … truly a fossil that links world heritage.”² And, “It is the scientific equivalent of the Holy Grail. This fossil will probably be the one that will be pictured in all textbooks for the next 100 years.”³

Hurum has a reputation in his own right in Scandinavia for frequent appearances on television and radio to promote his views of evolution and paleontology.⁴ At the press conference with the researchers, a journalist asked about the appropriateness of all the hype over a supposedly scientific discovery and Hurum told The New York Times, “Any pop band is doing the same. We have to start thinking the same way in science.”

Hurum also likened the find to discovering the “lost ark of archaeology”⁵ while co-author Jens Franzen hailed it as “the eighth wonder of the world.”³ Wow!

The claims

An article in the New York Daily News summarized the claims as follows [numbering added]:³

1. “… the long-sought missing link between humans and apes.
2. “… the fossil of the lemur-like creature dubbed Ida shows it had opposable thumbs like humans and fingernails instead of claws.
3. “… hind legs offer evidence of evolutionary changes that led to primates standing upright—a breakthrough that could finally confirm Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.”

Comments:

1. To be fair, the paleontologists did not actually say it was a link between humans and apes, but it is understandable that journalists might interpret what they said in this way.⁶ They were claiming that Ida might shed some light on what might have been the connection between mankind’s supposed evolutionary ancestry, as a primate, and non-primates. Dr Jens Franzen said at the press conference at the celebratory “launch” in New York, “We are not dealing with our grand-grand-grandmother, but perhaps with our grand-grand-grandaunt.” Note that Franzen here admits that the creature is not an ancestor of humans, so Ida is not a link between humans and anything, not even with the hypothetical precursors of primates in general.
2. Lemurs have opposable thumbs (hallux) and fingernails instead of claws too, but almost no-one has considered them to have anything to do with man’s ancestry. Furthermore, like other primates, but not humans, they have them on their feet, which is good for grabbing onto branches, but makes walking upright rather difficult.
3. Note the careful wording. The authors imagined some hint of characteristics that might be relevant to walking upright tens of millions of evolutionary years later. I could find nothing in the published paper that substantiated this conjecture.⁷ And note that this “could finally confirm Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.” This tacitly admits that it has not yet been confirmed, contrary to many other hyped-up fossil finds that have been paraded as “proof” of evolution (the story of human evolution has been a very adaptable, ever-changing story—see Anthropology and apemen Q&A).

What did they find?

The scientific paper⁸ does not contain any hint of the over-the-top statements (above) that we have been hearing in the media blitz. The paper describes an exceptionally well preserved fossil of a lemur-like creature (95% complete), which is unusual for primate fossils.

The authors of the paper did not find the fossil; Dr Jørn Hurum convinced the University of Oslo to purchase the main part from private collectors (it cost a million dollars!). That means that the taphonomy (the exact location/situation) of the fossil is not known with certainty, although it apparently came from the Messel Pit in Germany, which has been well-studied. When collected in 1983, the collectors split it into two pieces and sold them separately. The lesser half ended up at a private museum in Wyoming, USA, and had been studied by Jens Janzen (a co-author of this current paper) in the early 1990s. He recognized that there had been some doctoring of it to make it look as complete as possible. The researchers brought the two parts together for study. They used X-radiography to distinguish the real fossil from doctored parts.

With such a complete fossil, the detailed description took a large part of the paper. The fossil has a basic body pattern and toe and finger nails like lemurs, but lacks two features that are peculiar to lemurs: a toilet claw on a toe and grooming teeth (a row of fused teeth), both used for grooming, so it is not “just a lemur”.

There is nothing in the paper that substantiates the outlandish statements made to the lay public. The only relevant section includes a table and discussion that claims that the creature has more similarities to the Primate suborder Haplorrhini (which includes tarsiers, monkeys, apes and humans) than the other suborder, Strepsirrhini (which includes lemurs, lorises, etc.). However, the authors classified Darwinius as belonging to the Strepsirrhini and said they are not advocating otherwise. Strange. Maybe they said this to get it through the referees, because a proposal to shift the group that includes Darwinius (Infraorder Adapiformes) from one suborder of the primates to the other would certainly have been controversial, as well as very difficult to justify. With the public media fest orchestrated, a delay in the publication of the paper would have been embarrassing. Nevertheless, the claim that Ida is at all relevant to the evolutionary story of human origins depends on the authors establishing what they expressly disavowed in their paper.

Furthermore, there are absolutely no other fossils connecting Darwinius, or its kin, to humans or even to any of the claimed evolutionary ancestors of man. There is a gap of some 40 million evolutionary years!

Drawing: Bogdan Bocianowski. See Ref. 8.

Reconstruction of what Darwinius masillae could have looked like. Commissioned by the paleontologists, it does not support the media hype about its relevance to human evolution; it is so similar to creatures living today.

Looking at the fossil and the artist’s reconstruction, it strikes me as absolutely unremarkable in appearance. If you saw this creature in the jungle, you would think “lemur” or similar. It should be of concern to evolutionists that something they say is 47 million years old is so similar to modern primates like lemurs.

Evolutionist skeptics of the hype

Interestingly, a number of evolutionists are criticizing the over-hyping of this fossil. Ann Gibbons, in a commentary on ScienceNow⁹ gave air to some criticism:

“‘It’s an extraordinarily complete, wonderful specimen, but it’s not telling us too much that we didn’t know before,’ says paleoanthropologist Elwyn Simons of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

“‘This is the first link to all humans,’ said Hurum at the press conference.

“Many paleontologists are unconvinced. They point out that Hurum and Gingerich’s analysis compared 30 traits in the new fossil with primitive and higher primates when standard practice is to analyze 200 to 400 traits and to include anthropoids from Egypt and the newer fossils of Eosimias from Asia, both of which were missing from the analysis in the paper. ‘There is no phylogenetic analysis to support the claims, and the data is cherry-picked,’ says paleontologist Richard Kay, also of Duke University. Callum Ross, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois agrees: ‘Their claim that this specimen should be classified as haplorhine is unsupportable in light of modern methods of classification.’”

[Note added: Brian Switek, science writer, in The Times online 26 May criticized the hyping of Ida. Following mention of other hyped discoveries (a mammoth and a marine reptile), he wrote, “Frozen mammoths and giant marine reptiles are fascinating, but they do not strike at the heart of the evolution/creationism culture war in the way that a potential human ancestor does. This is why I wish more care had been taken in promoting Ida. ... Likening Ida to the Holy Grail and the Lost Ark only compounds the problem; creationists will undoubtedly argue that these metaphors reveal that evolution is a religion with its own holy relics.” This shows that the concern from evolutionists over the hyping of Ida does not necessarily stem from concern for truthfulness, but from the realization that this will backfire in the “culture war”, which is really the war against the God of the Bible.]

Preservation in shale?

The fossil is embedded in shale. The Messel shale has yielded many other interesting and very well-preserved fossils. The shale is supposed to have formed in a lake bed created by volcanic activity. This lake bed, “filled with water, which seemingly, one way or another, accumulated gases that poisoned the animals individually, episodically, or periodically [refs]. The result is a diverse fauna of exceptionally preserved insects, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals [refs].”⁸ [my emphasis]. It stretches the imagination to think what gas could have killed such a wide range of creatures in repeated episodes. ScienceNews reported,

“The scientists believe she was overcome by carbon dioxide gas whilst drinking from the Messel lake: the still waters of the lake were often covered by a low lying blanket of the gas as a result of the volcanic forces that formed the lake and which were still active. Hampered by her broken wrist, Ida slipped into unconsciousness, was washed into the lake, and sunk to the bottom, where the unique conditions preserved her for 47 million years.”²

There is a mixture of fossils of terrestrial and aquatic creatures. Did carbon dioxide gas kill fish as well? It would have to be a prolonged period of carbon dioxide blanketing to de-oxygenate the water for the fish to be killed. And such fish would bloat and float, which is not conducive to being buried and preserved/fossilized.

Also, how could the creatures then get preserved with such detail, with the slow accumulation of sediment in the lake, as per the deep-time evolutionary approach to the geology? Even the soft body outline of Ida is preserved, and remnants of her last meal (fruit and leaves).

Wikipedia commons

A fossil from the Messel oil shale of a bat that is very similar to today’s microbats.

This could be yet another example of catastrophic burial associated with Noah’s Flood. Recent studies have shown how fine-grained rocks like shale can form very quickly, contrary to long-standing evolutionary notions. See: Mud experiments overturn long held geological beliefs.

Stasis

Many other interesting and well-preserved fossils have been found in the Messel bed. Some of the best preserved are clearly recognizable, such as a bat, which is clearly a bat—a microbat that probably had echolocation. Fish found include bowfin, perch, gar and eel. Reptiles include crocodiles, alligators, turtles and a snake. And there are quite a few birds and mammals. Considering the supposed 47 million years of time, the similarity of so many of these creatures to today’s survivors speaks of stasis—creatures reproducing “after their kind”, not evolution.

Summary

Sadly, the gullible will be further convinced with all the bravado that evolution explains our origins and they therefore have no need for a Creator. But this is much ado about almost nothing other than a nicely preserved fossil for which they had paid a lot of money. And in the Year of Darwin, evolutionists, and especially atheists, are keen to milk it for what it is worth to push evolution to the public. If this is the best they have, Bible-believing creationists have nothing to fear.

Source: Creation Ministries

Radiometric Dating Breakthroughs

By Dr. Carl Wieland

A few years ago, some leading creationist geologists and physicists began a detailed research project into Radioactivity and the Age of The Earth (RATE). This RATE project began as a cooperative venture between the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), the Creation Research Society of USA (CRS) and Creation Ministries International (CMI).¹

With the release of key peer-reviewed papers at the 2003 ICC (International Conference on Creationism), it is clear that RATE has made some fantastic progress, with real breakthroughs in this area.

A young age for ‘ancient’ granites

When physicist Dr Russell Humphreys was still at Sandia National Laboratories (he now works full-time for ICR), he and Dr John Baumgardner (still with Los Alamos National Laboratory) were both convinced that they knew the direction in which to look for a definitive answer to the puzzle of why radiometric dating consistently gives ages of millions and billions of years.

Others had tried to find an answer in geological processes—e.g. the pattern was caused by the way the magma was emplaced or how it crystallized. This is indeed the answer in some cases.^2,3 But Drs Humphreys and Baumgardner realized that in other cases there were many independent lines of evidence that suggested that huge amounts of radioactive decay had indeed taken place. (These include the variety of elements used in ‘standard’ radioisotope dating, mature uranium radiohalos and fission track dating.) It would be hard to imagine that geologic processes alone could explain all these. Rather, there was likely to be an answer that concerned the nuclear decay processes themselves.

From the eyewitness testimony of God’s Word, the billions of years that such vast amounts of radioactive processes would normally suggest had not taken place. So it was clear that the assumption of a constant, slow decay process was wrong. There must have been speeded-up decay, perhaps in a huge burst associated with Creation Week and/or a separate burst at the time of the Flood.

There is now powerful confirmatory evidence that at least one episode of drastically accelerated decay has indeed been the case, building on the work of Dr Robert Gentry on helium retention in zircons. The landmark RATE paper,⁴ though technical, can be summarized as follows:

• When uranium decays to lead, a by-product of this process is the formation of helium, a very light, inert gas, which readily escapes from rock.
• Certain crystals called zircons, obtained from drilling into very deep granites, contain uranium which has partly decayed into lead.
• By measuring the amount of uranium and ‘radiogenic lead’ in these crystals, one can calculate that, if the decay rate has been constant, about 1.5 billion years must have passed. (This is consistent with the geologic ‘age’ assigned to the granites in which these zircons are found.)
• However, there is a significant proportion of helium from that ‘1.5 billion years of decay’ still inside the zircons. This is, at first glance, surprising for long-agers, because of the ease with which one would expect helium (with its tiny, light, unreactive atoms) to escape from the spaces within the crystal structure. There should surely be hardly any left, because with such a slow buildup, it should be seeping out continually and not accumulating.
• Drawing any conclusions from the above depends, of course, on actually measuring the rate at which helium leaks out of zircons. This is what one of the RATE papers reports on. The samples were sent (without any hint that it was a creationist project) to a world-class expert on helium diffusion from minerals to measure these rates. The consistent answer: the helium does indeed seep out quickly over a wide range of temperatures. In fact, the results show that because of all the helium still in the zircons, these crystals (and since this is Precambrian basement granite, by implication the whole earth) could not be older than 14,000 years. In other words, in only a few thousand years, 1.5 billion years’ worth (at today’s rates) of radioactive decay has taken place. Interestingly, the data have since been refined and updated to give a date of 5,680 (± 2,000) years.

The paper looks at the various avenues a long-ager might take by which to wriggle out of these powerful implications, but there seems to be little hope for them unless they can show that the techniques used to obtain the results were seriously flawed.

More surprises on radiocarbon

Another dramatic breakthrough concerns radiocarbon. It’s long been known that radiocarbon (i.e. carbon-14, or ¹⁴C) keeps popping up reliably in samples (of coal, oil, gas, etc.) which are supposed to be ‘millions of years’ old. However, with the short half-life of ¹⁴C it should decay to zero in only some tens of thousands of years at the most.⁵ For instance, CMI has, over the years, commissioned and funded the radiocarbon testing of a number of wood samples from ‘old’ sites (e.g. samples with Jurassic fossils, samples inside Triassic sandstone, and samples burnt by Tertiary basalt) and these were published (by then staff geologist Dr Andrew Snelling) in Creation magazine and Journal of Creation. In each case, with contamination eliminated, the result has been in the thousands of years, i.e. ¹⁴C was present when it ‘shouldn’t have been’. These results encouraged the rest of the RATE team to investigate ¹⁴C further, building on the literature reviews of creationist physician Dr Paul Giem.

In another very important paper, scientists from the RATE group summarized the pertinent facts and presented further experimental data.⁶ The bottom line is that virtually all biological specimens, no matter how ‘old’ they are supposed to be, show measurable ¹⁴C levels. This effectively limits the age of all buried biota to less than (at most) 250,000 years. (When one takes into account the probability that before the Flood the ratio of radioactive to ‘normal’ carbon was much lower,⁷ the calculated age comes right down into the biblical ‘ballpark’.)

Interestingly, specimens which appear to definitely be pre-Flood seem to have ¹⁴C present, too, and importantly, these cluster around a lower relative amount of ¹⁴C. This suggests that some ¹⁴C was primordial (existing from the very beginning), and not produced by cosmic rays—thus limiting the age of the entire earth to only a few thousand years.

This appears to have been somewhat spectacularly supported when Dr Baumgardner sent five diamonds to be analyzed for ¹⁴C. It was the first time this had been attempted, and the answer came back positive—¹⁴C was present. The diamonds, formed deep inside the earth, are assumed by evolutionists to be over a billion years old. Nevertheless they contained radioactive carbon, even though, if the billion-year age were correct, they ‘shouldn’t have’.

This is exceptionally striking evidence, because a diamond has remarkably strong lattice bonds (that’s why it’s the hardest substance known), so subsequent atmospheric or biological contamination should not find its way into the interior.

The diamonds’ carbon-dated ‘age’ of about 58,000 years is thus an upper limit for the age of the whole earth. Again, this is entirely consistent with helium diffusion results reported above, which indicate the upper limit is in fact substantially less.^8,9

¹⁴C workers have no real answer to this problem, namely that all the ‘vast-age’ specimens they measure still have ¹⁴C. Labelling this detectable ¹⁴C with such words as ‘contamination’ and ‘background’ is completely unhelpful in explaining its source, as the RATE group’s careful analyses and discussions have shown. But it is no problem or mystery at all if the uniformitarian/long-age assumptions are laid to one side and the real history of the world, given in Scripture, is taken seriously. The ¹⁴C is there, quite simply, because it hasn’t had time to decay yet. The world just isn’t that old!

The ¹⁴C results are an independent but powerful confirmation of the stunning helium-diffusion results. It looks like 2003 was a bad year for megachronophiles (lovers of long ages), but a good year for lovers of the Word of God.

References and notes

1. The Australian ministry’s contribution was mostly providing the expertise of geologist Dr Andrew Snelling; however, when he commenced work with ICR, the project rightly reverted to a joint project of ICR/CRS.
2. Snelling, A.A., The failure of U-Th-Pb ‘dating’ at Koongarra, Australia, Journal of Creation 9(1):71–92, 1995.
3. Walker, T., The Somerset Dam igneous complex, south-east Queensland, Honours thesis [1^st class Honours or Summa cum laude awarded], Department of Earth Sciences, University of Queensland, 1998.
4. Humphreys, D. et al., Helium diffusion rates support accelerated nuclear decay, <www.icr.org/research/icc03/pdf/Helium_ICC_7-22-03.pdf>, 16 October 2003.
5. Even with the most sensitive AMS techniques used today, nary an atom of ¹⁴C should be present after 250,000 years.
6. Baumgardner, J. et al., Measurable ¹⁴C in fossilized organic materials: confirming the young earth creation-flood model, <www.icr.org/research/icc03/pdf/RATE_ICC_Baumgardner.pdf>, 16 October 2003.
7. Factors which would lower the ratio: (1) more ¹²C in the biosphere due to the much greater amount of plant and animal life on the planet, (2) possibly less ¹⁴C production due to stronger magnetic field deflecting cosmic rays better, (3) ¹⁴C formed by cosmic rays started building up at creation, and in only 1,600 years before the Flood would not have reached equilibrium.
8. Chaffin, E., Accelerated decay: Theoretical models, in: Ivey, R.L., Jr., Ed., Fifth International Conference on Creationism, Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, pp. 3–15, August 2003; <www.icr.org/research/icc03/pdf/RATE_ICC_Chaffin.pdf>, 16 October 2003.
9. This burst of accelerated decay would be expected to have a greater effect, proportionately, the longer the half-life. Compared to the effect on a uranium isotope with a half-life of billions of years, the effect of speeded-up decay on ¹⁴C, with its half-life of the order of 5,000 years, would be much less, which would explain why there is still some of this primordial ¹⁴C left. Other papers by RATE scientists at the 2003 ICC dealt with theoretical grounds for accelerated decay and also gave further supportive evidence from isochron dates for this varying effect. I.e. ‘good’ isochrons obtained for different decay chains within the same rock sample, which should have all registered the same ‘date’, varied from one another indicating a greater effect on longer half-life isotopes. See Snelling, A.A. et al., Radioisotopes in the diabase sill (Upper Precambrian) at Bass Rapids, Grand Canyon, Arizona: An application and test of the isochron dating method, in: Ivey, R.L., Jr., Ed., Fifth International Conference on Creationism, Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, pp. 269–284, August 2003; <www.icr.org/research/icc03/pdf/ICCBassRapidsSill_2-%20AAS_SA_and_WH.pdf>.

Source of the article: Creation Ministries.

Neo-Darwinism is Dying with a Chicken Bone in its Throat

By David Gee^[i]

The modern bird is believed by the evolutionary scientists of our modern age to have evolved from reptilian ancestors, arising from the dinosaurs in a similar fashion to the mammals and modern reptiles. The believed driving force of this is natural selection pushing mutations in the direction of an arboreal and then flight based life-style.

Among many other problematic steps in the proposed evolutionary tree (e.g. life from non-life and evolution of insects to name two) is the step from reptiles to birds. This evolutionary step would better be described as a cliff than a step so great are the differences between the groups.

There has been much debate over the process involved in the evolution of birds even among evolutionists:

Alan Feduccia, a world authority on birds at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote an encyclopaedic book on living and fossil birds^[ii]. He pointed out much evidence against the dinosaur-to-bird theory, including the huge differences in lung and embryonic thumb structure. With regard to evolution of flight in dinosaurs he commented: 'It's biophysically impossible to evolve flight from such large bipeds with foreshortened forelimbs and heavy, balancing tails.'

His colleague, University of Kansas palaeontologist Larry Martin, commented on the wishful thinking and bias of another 'feathered dinosaur' claim: 'You have to put this into perspective. To the people who wrote the paper, the chicken would be a feathered dinosaur.'^[iii].

While there is honest science being done by some, the popular media on the other hand have acted in an entirely biased fashion. This is shown in a National Geographic article run on dinosaur-bird evolution^[iv].

Dr Storrs Olson (Curator of Birds at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC), wrote in response to the NG article: 'The idea of feathered dinosaurs and the theropod origin of birds is being actively promulgated by a cadre of zealous scientists acting in concert with certain editors at Nature and National Geographic who themselves have become outspoken and highly biased proselytizers of the faith. Truth and careful scientific weighing of evidence have been among the first casualties in their program, which is now fast becoming one of the grander scientific hoaxes of our age-the palaeontological equivalent of cold fusion.'^[v].

Many people view the evolution of birds as a given and assume there is solid science in support of the fanciful drawings and theories. This is a blatant fabrication and in this article I will seek to point to some of the major problem points in the theory of evolution with regard to birds.

Firstly a brief look at several supposed dinosaur/bird intermediaries that have been brought forward by the popular media and evolutionary scientists:

Archaeopteryx: For a long time thought to be a transitional form but in the words of Dr A Feduccia an evolutionist and ornithologist 'Palaeontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it's not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of 'paleobabble' is going to change that.'^[vi].

Sinosauropteryx prima: Many creationist were sceptical of this "feathered dinosaur" find and they were vindicated when four leading palaeontologists, including Yale University's John Ostrom, later found that the 'feathers' were just a parallel array of fibres, probably collagen^[vii]. This conclusion was supported by later research by Dr A Feduccia^[viii].

Mononykus: The cover of Time magazine even illustrated it with feathers, although not the slightest trace of feathers had been found^[ix]. Later evidence indicated that 'Mononykus was clearly not a bird ... it clearly was a fleet-footed fossorial ^[digging] theropod.'^[x].

Protarchaeopteryx robusta and Caudipteryx zoui: are claimed to be 'the immediate ancestors of the first birds.'^[xi] but these two fossils are 'dated'  120-36 myo, while Archaeopteryx, a true bird, is 'dated' 140-150 myo, making these 'bird ancestors' far younger than their descendants! Dr Feduccia was not convinced, and neither was his colleague, University of Kansas palaeontologist Larry Martin saying: 'You have to put this into perspective. To the people who wrote the paper, the chicken would be a feathered dinosaur.'^[xii]

Many of the design features in birds that mean they are impressively suited to a life in the skies. But there are two features in particular that are amazing in their complexity, efficiency and ingenuity: the avian lung and the flight feather.

Feathers

Feathers are amazing things, and if mankind could produce a material similarly suited to flight it would revolutionise the flight industry. Even the evolutionists point to their unique nature, Feduccia says 'Feathers are a near-perfect adaptation for flight'. They are lightweight, strong, aerodynamically shaped, and have an intricate structure of barbs and hooks. This structure makes them waterproof, and a quick preen with the bill will cause flattened feathers to snap into fully aerodynamic shape again. ^[xiii]

See the contrast here between the detailed structures of a feather (left) and scales (right), both magnified 80 times.

While there is no clear scientific rational for the gradual production feathers it is theorised: 'Feathers are modified reptilian scales,'^[xiv] this is a widely held view among evolutionists. Scales are derived from embriologic folds in skin; feathers are complex structures with a barb, barbules, and hooks. They also originate in a totally different way, from follicles inside the skin in a manner akin to hair.

To change from scale to feather the required increase in DNA information (complexity not quantity of DNA) would be huge to say the least. The structure would need be internalised in the skin and also produce the complex arrangement of the feather, all while providing an increase in fitness with each subsequent mutation. Again this is a point glossed over by evolutionists.

It has also been suggested that flight feathers began as insulation and progressed to flight feathers as time passed. The flight feather is an extremely poor insulator, whereas the fluffy down feather is an excellent insulator. Even if it was given that as some have suggested dinosaurs began with downy feathers. The selection towards insulation would select away from the development of hooks and barbs, as the loss of insulation would outweigh benefit in the movement towards flight feathers.

Also feather proteins (Φ-keratins) are biochemically different from skin and scale proteins (α-keratins). One researcher concluded:

At the morphological level feathers are traditionally considered homologous with reptilian scales. However, in development, morphogenesis ^{[shape/form generation]}, gene structure, protein shape and sequence, and filament formation and structure, feathers are different^[xv].

Lungs

The bird lung and associated systems are dumbfounding in both their efficiency and intricacy. A one way system of air sacs and a small light weight lung that maximises oxygen uptake. As described in creation magazine:

As a bird breathes, air moves into its rear air sacs (1). These then expel the air into the lung (2) and the air flows through the lung into the front air sacs (3). The air is expelled by the front air sacs as the bird breathes out. The lung does not expand and contract as does a reptile's or mammal's. The blood which picks up oxygen from the lung flows in the opposite direction to the air so that blood with the lowest oxygen (blue in the diagram always means lower oxygen, red means high oxygen) is exposed to air with the lowest oxygen. The blood with the highest oxygen is exposed to air with an even higher oxygen concentration. This ensures that, in every region of the circulation, the concentration of oxygen in the air is more than that of the blood with which it is in contact. This maximises the efficiency of oxygen transfer from the air to the blood. This is known as counter-current exchange.^[xvi]

The lungs of most other vertebrates are far less complicated and are variations on the theme of billows style lungs. The non-avian vertebrate lung is in essence a complex sack and the breathing is driven with either a diaphragm or similar muscular structure to propel air in and out. This system of  respiration is efficient enough for low altitude living and flying (in the case of bats) but it is not suited to high altitude activity (just talk to any mountain climber).

The next obvious question is given these two systems are so disparate is it theoretically possible for the reptilian lung to evolve into an avian lung? Evolutionary theory demands that each subsequent change provide a greater advantage at every stage. In this scenario the lungs of hypothetical intermediate stages could not conceivably function properly, meaning the poor animal would be unable to breathe. So natural selection would work to preserve the existing arrangement, by eliminating any misfit intermediates.^[xvii]

To illustrate this point I will refer to my work in the veterinary field. To progress towards an avian lung there would need to be air sacs formed which participate in breathing, a close parallel to this would be a diaphragmatic hernia/tear. Injured animals with tears to the diaphragm present with depression, breathing difficulties, inappetance and in the long term weakness and weight loss. It defies rationality that someone could suggest that animals in this condition are more able to compete than others.^[xviii]

Evolutionists propose that birds evolved to better take advantage of the niche in the air, 'chasing the beetle' as such. Regardless of the other obstacles to this theory it is ridiculous to claim that birds would evolve such complex respiration to aid in flight. Bats with a standard mammalian lung are able to forage up to a height of 3km, thus only at very high altitude does the avian lung become an advantage. Natural selection does not drive evolution even in theory when there is no advantage in the changes.^[xix]

Recent fossil evidence has been found which some believe point to certain dinosaurs possibly having avian style lungs. Majungatholus atopusi^[xx], a theropod dinosaur has been found to have evidence of pneumatic invasion of the cervical, thoracic and abdominal vertebrae strikingly similar to modern birds. There are several points that must be noted in reference to this, as discussed in the Journal of Creation^[xxi]:

1. The bony pneumatizations in this theropod dinosaur are remarkably similar to those in birds, but according to several lines of evidence it can be assumed theropod dinosaurs are more similar to birds than to reptiles.
2. It cannot be known for certain that theropod dinosaurs had any air sacs at all as modern birds do, although it is not an unreasonable inference that they had at least some, including an abdominal air sac. If on the other hand they did not have air sacs, then the pneumatizations discovered in the vertebrae presumably only served the function of lightening the bones for running.
3. If they did have air sacs as birds do, there is no way of knowing whether they also had a flow-through lung like birds.An abdominal (caudal) air sac is necessary for a flow-through lung, but it does not therefore follow that having such a sac means one has a flow-through lung. The Nature authors believe theropods likely did have a flow-through lung, and cite certain features of the skeleton in support.But there have been other detailed studies suggesting theropods had a crocodile-like liver-pumping mechanism for ventilation.^[xxii]
4. Those evolutionists in the faction that believes dinosaurs (specifically theropods) gave rise to birds would be understandably encouraged by this paper, but it has not even begun to address the huge difficulties (including embryonic development paradoxes) pointed out by the opposing evolutionary faction.
5. If it turned out that theropods did indeed have the same type of flow-through lung as birds, that would be an even bigger encouragement for the dino-bird faction, but it also fits perfectly comfortably within a creation framework; it would be a very reasonable design feature applied by a common Designer for fast-running small dinosaurs. However: Evolutionists would still be stuck with exactly the same massive problem of explaining the seemingly impossible transition from bellows to flow-through ventilation.

Conclusion

Someone I am sure will say at this point "So what? Evolution is still true". But these issues are unavoidable and their implications huge, for in the words of evolutionist Dr Michael Denton (in reference to evolution of the bird lung):

'I think it doesn't require a great deal of profound knowledge of biology to see that for an organ which is so central to the physiology of any higher organism, its drastic modification in that way by a series of small events is almost inconceivable. This is something we can't throw under the carpet again because, basically, as Darwin said, if any organ can be shown to be incapable of being achieved gradually in little steps, his theory would be totally overthrown. ^[xxiii]

Scientific theories claim to have power to explain some observed system, if an exception to a theory is found then the theory is modified. This is standard approach in the scientific community when practising honest science. Likewise the following should also happen: multiple contradictions are found and the theory fails to not only explain the systems/specimens found but the there is no way the systems/specimens could occur if the theory is truth. Logical conclusion - the theory is false and does not need to be revised but scrapped.

In the respects I have covered above and in several others avian species remain a group that roundly refutes evolutionary theory. The shear irrationality of claiming that birds arose by a series of small changes is astounding. Even the evolutionist camp when honest are uncertain this group could evolve. This is clear from Dr s Feduccia, Olson, and Denton. There is much disagreement over, no rational for, and a paucity of evidence to support the evolution of birds. If evolutionist's were honest, they like Dr Denton would admit that the problems with the evolution of birds are a death blow to the theory they hold as a quasi-religious world view.

Interestingly, some defenders of dinosaur-to-bird evolution discount the evidence against their theory by saying, 'The proponents of this argument offer no animal whose lungs could have given rise to those in birds, which are extremely complex and are unlike the lungs of any living animal.'^[xxiv]  Of course, only evolutionary faith requires that bird lungs arose from lungs of another animal. As opposed to the biblical creation model which dictates the bird kind were made this way by a creator, thus needing no precursor from another animal.

The bird is an amazing combination of design features that would be sufficient to make any engineer green with envy. The creation model is the only theory that will account for the features of extant and extinct birds but evolutionists will not accept it, why is made clear by Sir Arthur Keith:

"Evolution is unproven and unprovable, but we believe it because the alternative is unthinkable."

So evolutionists commit themselves to a theory which is unworkable in the face of all they know and all that logical scientific thought tells them. I among others hope that they will change their minds before they choke to death on the chicken bone in their scientific throat.

---

^[i]               I am deeply indebted to Creation Ministries for large portions of this article and give my grateful thanks to Dr Jonathan Sarfati and Dr Carl Wieland for their articles on this subject. Most of the scholarship is theirs, I would like that made clear from the beginning.

^[ii]               Feduccia, A., The Origin and Evolution of Birds, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2^nd Ed.,1999

^[iii]              Cited on the CNN website <http://www.cnn.com/>, June 24, 1998

^[iv]          Sloan, C.P., Feathers for T. Rex?, National Geographic 196(5):98-107

^[v]               Olsen, S.L., Open letter to: Dr Peter Raven, Secretary, Committee for Research and Exploration, National Geographic Society, emphases added

^[vi]              Cited in V. Morell, Archaeopteryx: Early Bird Catches a Can of Worms, Science 259(5096):764-65, 5 February 1993.

^[vii]             New Scientist 154(2077):13, 12 April 1997; Creation 19(3):6, June-August 1997

^[viii]             'Do Feathered Dinosaurs Exist?: Testing the Hypothesis on Neontological and Paleontological Evidence', by Alan Feduccia, Theagarten Lingham-Soliar, and J. Richard Hinchliffe, Journal of Morphology 266:125-166, 2005

^[ix]              Time (Australia), 26 April 1993

^[x]               D.P. Prothero and R.M. Schoch, editors, Major Features of Vertebrate Evolution, On the Origin of Birds and of Avian Flight, by J.H. Ostrom (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), p. 160-177

^[xi]              Ji Qiang, P.J. Currie, M.A. Norell, and Ji Shu-An, Two Feathered Dinosaurs from Northeastern China, Nature 393(6687):753-761, 25 June 1998. Perspective by K. Padian, same issue, p. 729-730

^[xii]            Cited 24 June 1998, CNN website <www.cnn.com>

^[xiii]             A. Feduccia, The Origin and Evolution of Birds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 130.

^[xiv]             R. Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1996), p. 113.

^[xv]             A.H. Brush, On the Origin of Feathers, Journal of Evolutionary Biology 9:131142, 1996.

^[xvi]             Blown Away By Design, Creation 21(4):14-15 September 1999

^[xvii]            Refuting Evolution: A handbook for students, parents, and teachers countering the latest arguments for evolution by Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D., F.M.; Creation 21(4):14-15; September 1999

^[xviii]           Michael Denton, Blown Away By Design, Creation 21(4):14-15

^[xix]             Ibid

^[xx]             O'Connor, P. and Claessens, L., Basic avian pulmonary design and flow-through ventilation in non-avian theropod dinosaurs, Nature 436:253-256, 14 July 2005

^[xxi]             Carl Wieland, Dinos breathed like birds?, Journal of Creation 19(3):11-12, December 2005

^[xxii]            Forster, C.A., Sampson, S.D., Chiappe, L.M. & Krause, D.W., The theropod ancestry of birds: new evidence from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar, Science 279, pp. 1915-1919, 1998. Also Sereno, P.C., The evolution of dinosaurs, Science 284, pp. 2137-2147, 1999.

^[xxiii]           The quotations in this article were extracted (with permission) from a video interview available on cassette (NTSC) from Access Research Network, PO Box 38069, Colorado Springs CO 80937-8069, USA. It was then re-checked with Dr Denton to ensure it fairly represented his current views. Emphasis added. Quoted in xvii

^[xxiv]           K. Padian and L.M. Chiappe, The Origin of Birds and Their Flight, Scientific American 278(2):38-47, February 1998, p. 43.