Evolution Impossible (10 page)

23
. Ibid.

24
. Spetner,
Not by Chance!
p. 85–160.

25
. Orr, “Testing Natural Selection,” p. 30–36.

26
.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Omim/mimstats.html
; see also,
http://www.hugo-international.org
.

27
. Loeb, Bielas, and Beckman, “Cancers Exhibit a Mutator Phenotype: Clinical Implications,” p. 3551–3557.

28
. Spetner,
Not by Chance!
p. 120.

29
. J. Sanford, J. Baumgardner, W. Brewer, et al., “Mendel’s Accountant: A Biologically Realistic Forward-time Population Genetics Program,”
Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience
, vol. 8, no. 2 (2007): p. 147–165.

30
. A.D. Chapman,
Numbers of Living Species in Australia and the World,
Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, Canberra, Australia, 2009, p. 7–11.

31
. H. Jeong, V. Barbe, C.H. Lee, et al., “Genome Sequences of
Escherichia coli
B Strains REL606 and BL21(DE3),”
Journal of Molecular Biology,
vol. 394, no. 4 (2009): p. 644–652.

32
. Evolution 101, “Patterns in Macroevolution,” 2009,
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/VIBPatterns.shtml p 2
.

33
. G. Lawton, “Uprooting Darwin’s Tree,”
New Scientist
(January 24, 2009): p. 34–39.

34
. A.D. Chapman,
Numbers of Living Species in Australia and the World,
Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, Canberra, Australia, 2009, p. 3.

35
. Cited by J.C. Avise, S.P. Hubbell, and F.J. Ayala, “In the Light of Evolution II: Biodiversity and Extinction,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
vol. 105, suppl. (2008); see
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/suppl.1/11453.full
.

36
. See
http://www.iucnredlist.org/
.

37
. Press release, December 10, 2009, University of Adelaide; see
http://www.adelaide.edu.au/news/news37301.html
.

Chapter 5

The Fossil Record — Evidence for Extinction, Not Evolution

Today, one of the main reasons for many scientists believing in evolution is the existence of fossils of animals and plants in rocks that have been dated as being millions of years old. This position is presented in most biology textbooks. In this chapter we will examine the fossil evidence to see if it provides any evidence for evolution.

Fossils are the remains or imprints or molds of long dead plants and animals found preserved in some way, usually in rocks, amber, tar, or in below-freezing conditions. Sometimes animals have been entombed in lava. In a lava flow above Blue Lake in the state of Washington there is a detailed mold of the body of a rhinoceros that is so detailed that even the folds in the skin and the eyes can be recognized. The majority of fossils, however, are found in sedimentary rocks such as mudstone, limestone, sandstone, shale, and coal. These rocks have been laid down or formed by processes involving the action of water. Since plants and animals decay or rot relatively rapidly or may be eaten by scavengers, the preservation in most cases has to be by some quick process such as rapid burial, while they are still alive or very soon after dying. This process leaves molds or imprints of the organism. After the rock hardens, the organic organism usually decomposes, dissolves, and leaches away. By making a plaster cast of the mold remaining in the rock, paleontologists can discern what the original animal or its shell or bone was like. In the case of footprints, trails, and burrows in soft surfaces such as sand or mud, which would quickly wash away or be disturbed by wind or other weathering processes, rapid hardening of the surface material by some process together with rapid burial is required.

Sometimes after bone or shell or wood is buried it turns to stone by the process of petrifaction. Minerals such as silica seeping underground fill microscopic voids in the bone or wood, sometimes also replacing the cell structures molecule by molecule. This eventually results in the original bone or wood turning to stone — the latter commonly being referred to as petrified wood. Under certain conditions, organic tissues such as cellulose (e.g., wood and leaf matter) or flesh, which are largely made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, break down, leaving just a carbon residue on the rock surface, which paints as it were the original outline of the animal or leaf.

Fossils can include unaltered remains and bones. For example, extinct mammals such as the woolly mammoth have been found in ice or in the frozen ground of the Arctic. The Beresovka mammoth, found in eastern Siberia in 1901, had uneaten food in its mouth and clotted blood in its chest, indicating very rapid preservation. Entire carcasses of the extinct woolly rhinoceros have also been found in oil seeps in Poland.
¹

The use of fossils to estimate the age of rocks was developed during the 17th to 19th centuries as part of the development of the science of stratigraphy. In 1669, a Danish physician by the name of Niels Stensen (or Nicolaus Steno) proposed that rock strata or rock layers are deposited sequentially, so that in an undisturbed sedimentary succession, each layer of rock is younger than the layer beneath it. This sequence may be overturned or inverted by subsequent earth movements. Thus, strata that are either perpendicular to the horizon or inclined to the horizon were at one time parallel to the horizon. Also, if some body of rock or discontinuity such as a fault cuts across a stratum or rock layer, it must have formed after that stratum was laid down. These stratigraphic laws have become basic principles that geologists use to determine the age relationships of rock layers.

Just over a century later, in 1799, a British geologist by the name of William Smith proposed that the sequences of strata could be correlated from one area to another. For example, the strata sequences in England could be correlated with those in France by comparing the fossils in the individual layers. Smith had been working with a long sequence of formations of fossil rich alternating limestones and shales in the southern part of England. After collecting a large number of rock samples, he perceived that each of the rock layers or strata carried a unique assemblage of fossils that could be used to recognize a particular strata in any rock outcrop. What Smith proposed became known as the
law of faunal succession
. This law together with Steno’s law of superposition of strata led to the conclusion that fossils in the lower strata are older than fossils in the higher layers.

Foundations for a new paradigm for the earth sciences were laid by Scottish geologist James Hutton, who in 1785 published a work called
Theory of the Earth
in which he presented his
principle of uniformitarianism
. Hutton proposed that the earth had been gradually changing over a very long period of time and was continuing to change in the same way. Thus the geological processes observed in the present could be used to explain the past.

Three decades later another British geologist, Charles Lyell, studied the fossils in the European Alps, and conceived the idea of dividing the geological rock layer system into groups characterized by the proportion of recent to extinct species of marine shells. Lyell had noticed that the fossils in the highest and hence more recent layers seemed to be more complex than the fossils in the lower older strata. This suggested to Lyell that the type of fossil could therefore be used to position the order of deposition of a particular group of rock layers relevant to rock layers in another location.

He proposed names for these groups that later became universally adopted by geologists: Eocene, meaning “dawn of recent”; Miocene, “less of recent”; and Pliocene, “more of recent.” He published a table of shells corresponding to the classifications. His idea of a correlation between the fossil content of the rock layers and geological time was first published in Lyell’s 1830–1833 work
The Principles of Geology
. It pioneered the concept of the geologic column, which was developed further over the following decades by Lyell and other geologists. Lyell had adopted Hutton’s uniformitarianism view and proposed that the rock layers had formed as a result of geological heat and pressure processes acting on sediments from the weathering of rocks that had accumulated slowly in river deltas, lakes, and seas. Lyell carried out his own observations to estimate the slow rates of geological processes and calculated the subsequent long ages for geological formations.

One of Lyell’s most influential long age calculations, which was subsequently used to demolish scientific belief in the biblical Flood, was his calculation of the age of the Niagara Falls gorge. In Lyell’s time, geology at Oxford University was still taught in the context of the biblical Flood occurring about 4,500 years ago.
²
Archbishop James Ussher had calculated from the biblical record and then best-known dates for the rule of King Solomon that the worldwide Flood occurred around the year 2349 b.c.
³

When Lyell visited the falls in 1841, he had been told by a local inhabitant that the falls retreat about three feet per year. However, Lyell assumed that this was an exaggerated claim and estimated that a recession rate of around one foot per year was more likely.
⁴
Since the gorge was around 35,000 feet long, he calculated that it must be around 35,000 years old. This figure was widely accepted as an actual measurement and served as a “proof” in the minds of many scientists that the world must be much older than the dates calculated from the biblical account.
⁵
It is revealing to note that the rate of one foot per year was based on a personal estimate or “conjecture” by Lyell and not on the basis of scientific measurement, yet it had a profound effect on the scientific worldview in terms of the acceptability of long ages for rocks and the fossil record. Subsequent measurements after 1841 showed that the rate of erosion was actually much faster at around four to five feet per year.
⁶
For example, if
Lyell had based his calculation on an actual measurement of five feet per year, he would have determined the age of the canyon as only 7,000 years, which would not have posed such a threat to biblical dating. In fact, if the rate was faster in the past such as when floodwaters were previously receding, an even shorter age becomes very acceptable.

Given that we do not actually “know” what the recession rates were prior to the 18th century (indeed they may have been much faster at times and slower at other times), we cannot actually “know” the age of the canyon by this method. In fact, the current official government of Ontario position on the age of the falls is that they are 12,500 years old. However, this figure is not calculated from erosion rates but comes from general age estimates based on theories of glacial activity in the area during a past ice age, which also suggest that the water flow over the falls has varied substantially over time.
⁷

Even though Lyell had no actual proven scientific evidence for his long ages, his theories about the age of rocks continued to gain wide acceptance. On the basis of measured current rates of erosion of rocks and the accumulation of alluvial sediments, Lyell estimated the rate at which the different rock strata possibly formed. By measuring the thickness of the strata, the period of time corresponding to the individual rock layers or strata could be calculated. Because Lyell had observed that there were sedimentary strata thousands of meters thick that contained millions of fine layers, Lyell came to the conclusion that the lower strata must have been formed millions of years earlier. It followed that the fossils in these layers must also be millions of years old.

Using this methodology, it was possible to estimate the individual time periods for various particular fossil strata corresponding to the different sections of the “geological column.” By adding up these time periods, the total age of the rocks in the different sections of the “column” could be calculated. Thus, particular fossils could be assigned to particular time periods and subsequently used to date rocks that contained those particular fauna.

No single region contains a complete record of geological time, although the layers of the Grand Canyon, for example, display rock layers that in terms of conventional geological time would correspond to hundreds of millions of years of the geologic column. However, since parts of the geological record occur all over the world, the part of the record that is preserved in one region is compared with the record in another region. Any partially overlapping pattern of sequences — for example, multiple alternate layers of limestone and shale with similar fossils — could be used to establish a correspondence between the two sections of the record. In this way the geologic column has been built up by the collaboration of geologists throughout the world.

The corresponding geologic time scale was calculated on the basis of the measured total thickness of sedimentary rock and assumed rates of erosion and sedimentation based on the assumption of uniformitarianism — that is, it was assumed that these rates have remained essentially constant over hundreds of millions of years. Until the development of radiometric dating, which is discussed in more detail in a later chapter, the estimates of geological time varied by as much as a factor of ten.
⁸