The science of evolution is anything but science.

Blackshoes:
Evolution is nothing more than naturalistic, humanistic worldviews and religion based entirely on faith that masquerades as science.

Blackshoes:

44 Reasons Why Evolution Is Just A Fairy Tale For Adults



The theory of evolution is false. It is simply not true. Actually, it is just a fairy tale for adults based on ancient pagan religious philosophy that hundreds of millions of people around the world choose to believe with blind faith. When asked to produce evidence for the theory of evolution, most adults in the western world come up totally blank. When pressed, most people will mumble something about how “most scientists believe it” and how that is good enough for them. This kind of anti-intellectualism even runs rampant on our college campuses. If you doubt this, just go to a college campus some time and start asking students why they believe in evolution. Very few of them will actually be able to give you any real reasons why they believe it. Most of them just have blind faith in the priest class in our society (“the scientists”). But is what our priest class telling us actually true? When Charles Darwin popularized the theory of evolution, he didn’t actually have any evidence that it was true. And since then the missing evidence has still not materialized. Most Americans would be absolutely shocked to learn that most of what is taught as “truth” about evolution is actually the product of the overactive imaginations of members of the scientific community. They so badly want to believe that it is true that they will go to extraordinary lengths to defend their fairy tale. They keep insisting that the theory of evolution has been “proven” and that it is beyond debate. Meanwhile, most average people are intimidated into accepting the “truth” about evolution because they don’t want to appear to be “stupid” to everyone else.

In this day and age, it is imperative that we all learn to think for ourselves. Don’t let me tell you what to think, and don’t let anyone else tell you what to think either. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions. The following are 44 reasons why evolution is just a fairy tale for adults…

#1 If the theory of evolution was true, we should have discovered millions upon millions of transitional fossils that show the development of one species into another species. Instead, we have zero.

#2 When Charles Darwin came up with his theory, he admitted that no transitional forms had been found at that time, but he believed that huge numbers certainly existed and would eventually be discovered…

“Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed. But, as by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?”

#3 Even some of the most famous evolutionists in the world acknowledge the complete absence of transitional fossils in the fossil record. For example, Dr. Colin Patterson, former senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History and author of “Evolution” once wrote the following…

“I fully agree with your comments about the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them …. I will lay it on the line – there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.”

#4 Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University, once wrote the following about the lack of transitional forms…

“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.”

#5 Evolutionist Stephen M. Stanley of Johns Hopkins University has also commented on the stunning lack of transitional forms in the fossil record…

“In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.”

#6 If “evolution” was happening right now, there would be millions of creatures out there with partially developed features and organs. But instead there are none.

#7 If the theory of evolution was true, we should not see a sudden explosion of fully formed complex life in the fossil record. Instead, that is precisely what we find.

#8 Paleontologist Mark Czarnecki, an evolutionist, once commented on the fact that complex life appears very suddenly in the fossil record…

“A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth’s geological formations. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin’s hypothetical intermediate variants –instead species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God.”

#9 The sudden appearance of complex life in the fossil record is so undeniable that even Richard Dawkins has been forced to admit it…

“It is as though they [fossils] were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. Both schools of thought (Punctuationists and Gradualists) despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. The only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation and both reject this alternative.”

#10 Nobody has ever observed macroevolution take place in the laboratory or in nature. In other words, nobody has ever observed one kind of creature turn into another kind of creature. The entire theory of evolution is based on blind faith.

#11 Evolutionist Jeffrey Schwartz, a professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, openly admits that “the formation of a new species, by any mechanism, has never been observed.”

#12 Even evolutionist Stephen J. Gould of Harvard University has admitted that the record shows that species do not change. The following is how he put itduring a lecture at Hobart & William Smith College…

“Every paleontologist knows that most species don’t change. That’s bothersome….brings terrible distress. ….They may get a little bigger or bumpier but they remain the same species and that’s not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don’t change, its not evolution so you don’t talk about it.”

#13 Anyone that believes that the theory of evolution has “scientific origins” is fooling themselves. It is actually a deeply pagan religious philosophy that can be traced back for thousands of years.

#14 Anything that we dig up that is supposedly more than 250,000 years old should have absolutely no radiocarbon in it whatsoever. But instead, we find it ineverything that we dig up – even dinosaur bones. This is clear evidence that the “millions of years” theory is simply a bunch of nonsense…

It’s long been known that radiocarbon (which should disappear in only a few tens of thousands of years at the most) keeps popping up reliably in samples (like coal, oil, gas, etc.) which are supposed to be ‘millions of years’ old. For instance, CMI has over the years commissioned and funded the radiocarbon testing of a number of wood samples from ‘old’ sites (e.g. with Jurassic fossils, inside Triassic sandstone, 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. C-14 was present when it ‘shouldn’t have been’. These results encouraged the rest of the RATE team to investigate C-14 further, building on the literature reviews of creationist M.D. Dr Paul Giem.

In another very important paper presented at this year’s ICC, scientists from the RATE group summarized the pertinent facts and presented further experimental data. The bottom line is that virtually all biological specimens, no matter how ‘old’ they are supposed to be, show measurable C-14 levels. This effectively limits the age of all buried biota to less than (at most) 250,000 years.

#15 The odds of even a single sell “assembling itself” by chance are so low that they aren’t even worth talking about. The following is an excerpt from Jonathan Gray’s book entitled “The Forbidden Secret“…

Even the simplest cell you can conceive of would require no less than 100,000 DNA base pairs and a minimum of about 10,000 amino acids, to form the essential protein chain. Not to mention the other things that would also be necessary for the first cell.

Bear in mind that every single base pair in the DNA chain has to have the same molecular orientation (“left-hand” or “right hand”)? As well as that, virtually all the amino acids must have the opposite orientation. And every one must be without error.

“Now,” explained Larry, “to randomly obtain those correct orientations, do you know your chances? It would be 1 chance in 2110,000, or 1 chance in 1033,113!

“To put it another way, if you attempted a trillion, trillion, trillion combinations every second for 15 billion years, the odds you would achieve all the correct orientations would still only be one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion … and the trillions would continue 2755 times!

“It would be like winning more than 4700 state lotteries in a row with a single ticket purchased for each. In other words…impossible.”

#16 How did life learn to reproduce itself? This is a question that evolutionists do not have an answer for.

#17 In 2007, fishermen caught a very rare creature known as a Coelacanth. Evolutionists originally told us that this “living fossil” had gone extinct 70 million years ago. It turns out that they were only off by 70 million years.

#18 According to evolutionists, the Ancient Greenling Damselfly last showed up in the fossil record about 300 million years ago. But it still exists today. So why hasn’t it evolved at all over the time frame?

#19 Darwinists believe that the human brain developed without the assistance of any designer. This is so laughable it is amazing that there are any people out there that still believe this stuff. The truth is that the human brain is amazingly complex. The following is how a PBS documentary described the complexity of the human brain: “It contains over 100 billion cells, each with over 50,000 neuron connections to other brain cells.”

#20 The following is how one evolutionist pessimistically assessed the lack of evidence for the evolution of humanity…

“Even with DNA sequence data, we have no direct access to the processes of evolution, so objective reconstruction of the vanished past can be achieved only by creative imagination.”

#21 Perhaps the most famous fossil in the history of the theory of evolution, “Piltdown Man”, turned out to be a giant hoax.

#22 If the neutron were not about 1.001 times the mass of the proton, all protons would have decayed into neutrons or all neutrons would have decayed into protons, and therefore life would not be possible. How can we account for this?

#23 If gravity was stronger or weaker by the slimmest of margins, then life sustaining stars like the sun could not exist. This would also make life impossible. How can we account for this?

#24 Why did evolutionist Dr. Lyall Watson make the following statement?…

“The fossils that decorate our family tree are so scarce that there are still more scientists than specimens. The remarkable fact is that all of the physical evidence we have for human evolution can still be placed, with room to spare, inside a single coffin!”

#25 Apes and humans are very different genetically. AsDarwinConspiracy.com explains, “the human Y chromosome has twice as many genes as the chimpanzee Y chromosome and the chromosome structures are not at all similar.”

#26 How can we explain the creation of new information that is required for one animal to turn into another animal? No evolutionary process has ever been shown to be able to create new biological information. One scientist described the incredible amount of new information that would be required to transform microbes into men this way…

“The key issue is the type of change required — to change microbes into men requires changes that increase the genetic information content, from over half a million DNA ‘letters’ of even the ‘simplest’ self-reproducing organism to three billion ‘letters’ (stored in each human cell nucleus).”

#27 Evolutionists would have us believe that there are nice, neat fossil layers with older fossils being found in the deepest layers and newer fossils being found in the newest layers. This simply is not true at all…

The fossil layers are not found in the ground in the nice neat clean order that evolutionists illustrate them to be in their textbooks. There is not one place on the surface of the earth where you may dig straight down and pass through the fossil layers in the order shown in the textbooks. The neat order of one layer upon another does not exist in nature. The fossil bearing layers are actually found out of order, upside down (backwards according to evolutionary theory), missing (from where evolutionists would expect them to be) or interlaced (“younger” and “older” layers found in repeating sequences). “Out of place” fossils are the rule and not the exception throughout the fossil record.

#28 Evolutionists believe that the ancestors of birds developed hollow bones over thousands of generations so that they would eventually be light enough to fly. This makes absolutely no sense and is beyond ridiculous.

#29 If dinosaurs really are tens of millions of years old, why have scientists found dinosaur bones with soft tissue still in them? The following is from an NBC News report about one of these discoveries…

For more than a century, the study of dinosaurs has been limited to fossilized bones. Now, researchers have recovered 70 million-year-old soft tissue, including what may be blood vessels and cells, from a Tyrannosaurus rex.

#30 Which evolved first: blood, the heart, or the blood vessels for the blood to travel through?

#31 Which evolved first: the mouth, the stomach, the digestive fluids, or the ability to poop?

#32 Which evolved first: the windpipe, the lungs, or the ability of the body to use oxygen?

#33 Which evolved first: the bones, ligaments, tendons, blood supply, or the muscles to move the bones?

#34 In order for blood to clot, more than 20 complex steps need to successfully be completed. How in the world did that process possibly evolve?

#35 DNA is so incredibly complex that it is absolutely absurd to suggest that such a language system could have “evolved” all by itself by accident…

When it comes to storing massive amounts of information, nothing comes close to the efficiency of DNA. A single strand of DNA is thousands of times thinner than a strand of human hair. One pinhead of DNA could hold enough information to fill a stack of books stretching from the earth to the moon 500 times.

Although DNA is wound into tight coils, your cells can quickly access, copy, and translate the information stored in DNA. DNA even has a built-in proofreader and spell-checker that ensure precise copying. Only about one mistake slips through for every 10 billion nucleotides that are copied.

#36 Can you solve the following riddle by Perry Marshall?…

1) DNA is not merely a molecule with a pattern; it is a code, a language, and an information storage mechanism.

2) All codes are created by a conscious mind; there is no natural process known to science that creates coded information.

3) Therefore DNA was designed by a mind.

If you can provide an empirical example of a code or language that occurs naturally, you’ve toppled my proof. All you need is one.

#37 Evolutionists simply cannot explain why our planet is so perfectly suited to support life.

#38 Shells from living snails have been “carbon dated” to be 27,000 years old.

#39 If humans have been around for so long, where are all of the bones and all of the graves? The following is an excerpt from an article by Don Batten…

Evolutionists also claim there was a ‘Stone Age’ of about 100,000 years when between one million and 10 million people lived on Earth. Fossil evidence shows that people buried their dead, often with artefacts—cremation was not practised until relatively recent times (in evolutionary thinking). If there were just one million people alive during that time, with an average generation time of 25 years, they should have buried 4 billion bodies, and many artefacts. If there were 10 million people, it would mean 40 billion bodies buried in the earth. If the evolutionary timescale were correct, then we would expect the skeletons of the buried bodies to be largely still present after 100,000 years, because many ordinary bones claimed to be much older have been found. However, even if the bodies had disintegrated, lots of artefacts should still be found.

#40 Evolutionists claim that just because it looks like we were designed that does not mean that we actually were. They often speak of the “illusion of design”, but that is kind of like saying that it is an “illusion” that a 747 airplane or an Apple iPhone were designed. And of course the human body is far more complex that a 747 or an iPhone.

#41 If you want to be part of the “scientific community” today, you must accept the theory of evolution no matter how absurd it may seem to you. Richard Lewontin of Harvard once made the following comment regarding this harsh reality…

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, . . . in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated commitment to materialism. . . . we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

#42 Time Magazine once made the following statement about the lack of evidence for the theory of evolution…

“Yet despite more than a century of digging, the fossil record remains maddeningly sparse. With so few clues, even a single bone that doesn’t fit into the picture can upset everything. Virtually every major discovery has put deep cracks in the conventional wisdom and forced scientists to concoct new theories, amid furious debate.”

#43 Malcolm Muggeridge, the world famous journalist and philosopher, once made the following statement about the absurdity of the theory of evolution…

“I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.”

#44 In order to believe the theory of evolution, you must have enough blind faith to believe that life just popped into existence from nonlife, and that such life just happened to have the ability to take in the nourishment it needed, to expel waste, and to reproduce itself, all the while having everything it needed to survive in the environment in which it suddenly found itself. Do you have that much blind faith?

For years, I have been looking for someone that can explain to me the very best evidence for the theory of evolution in a systematic way. My challenge has been for someone to lay out for me a basic outline of the facts that “prove” that evolution is true.

Blackshoes: Certainly didn't take long for the trolls to appear

Blackshoes: "The Elephant in Evolution’s Living Room



Dr. John Morris is affiliated with the Institute for Creation Research in El Cajon, California. He produces a column each month in a publication called Back to Genesis.

In a past issue, there appeared a fascinating piece regarding the startling admission of a molecular biologist who was interviewed earlier this year by a journalist in Virginia (Morris, 2000). I would like to pass along the gist of this piece because many of our readers likely are unacquainted with this valuable little paper, and because the incident is so telling.

The interviewer and the experimental biologist were discussing the matter of the incredible volume of complicated information that is packed into the human genetic code.

The newsman asked the researcher if he believed the astounding array of information in the DNA code—which the scientist had compared to a document “larger than four complete sets of Encyclopedia Britannica,”—could have evolved by chance.

The scientist replied:

[N]obody I know in my profession believes it evolved. It was engineered by “genius beyond genius,” and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book! Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise.

The biologist was then asked if he had stated that conclusion in public. He replied that he had not. It simply was not feasible, he said, as a working scientist, to reveal a view of that nature.

He admitted that he could not deny the evidence for design, but that it would be professional suicide to deny that the genetic process had evolved. He confessed that if he openly expressed his true feelings, he’d soon “be out of a job, or relegated to the outer fringes where [he] couldn’t earn a decent living.”

The biologist then compared his plight to the old quip about the elephant in the living room. He said that “creation design” is:

“like an elephant in the living room. It moves around, takes up an enormous amount of space, loudly trumpets, bumps into us, knocks things over, eats a ton of hay, and smells like an elephant. And yet we have to swear it isn’t there!” (emphasis added).

Is that not pathetic? Even sad? The gentleman knows that the genetic code of the “fearfully and wonderfully made” human being could not have designed itself (Psa. 139:14). Hence, it must have proceeded from a Mind characterized by “genius beyond genius.”

And yet he is so intimidated by his science peers, he is so fearful for his reputation, and he is so afraid of losing his income, that he refuses to acknowledge his Creator in a candid and public way.

There are so many of this caliber. They might as well hang a sign around their neck with these words: “Integrity for sale.”

And all of them are not “in the world.” There are those in the church—elders, preachers, and others—who know the truth on various issues, but they are afraid, for various reasons, to teach it.

That is not, I would surmise, a good feeling with which to retire each night.
By Wayne Jackson



Scientific Facts and evidence




1 ROCKS DON'T BEND. Rocks break !
2 Dinosaur flesh cannot survive for millions of years.
3 Abiogenesis is naturalistically impossible.
4 Orphan genes refute common ancestry.
5 4000 years of selective breeding and over 100 years of Evolutionary research and observation refute evolutionary fairytales and silly theories.
6 Worldwide flood layering and geology prove a global catastrophe.
The lack of 99% of the world's topsoil (aka Billions of years of missing topsoil ) proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that something removed it 6000 to 8000 years ago.
7 Genetic limitations and the complexity of life show no possibility of Macroevolutionary development whatsoever.


Evolutionary denials and pathetic answers to the facts

1 Rocks bend no matter how thick or cold, because evolutionist believe, time makes all Evo assumption science
2 Iron within the blood makes the impossible and unlikely possible
3 Abiogenesis is possible because Evo says so
4 Orphan gene can mean only what Evo assumptions say they do
5 Evo doesn't accept any historical facts or research that doesn't aline with Evo fairytales
6 Evo needs no stinking observations
7 Evo states that eons of time and unscientific processes are generally used as an excuse for any facts and observations or science that doesn't fit their opinions


Evo rejects real science and again makes up eons of time to excuse them from reality, so /as to endlessly masquerade their humanistic naturalistic worldview and religious biased beliefs as science"


"Fantastic folds
Curvy rock layers undermine millions of years


three_ways_stress_acts_on_rocks
Have you ever walked along the beach and looked up to admire folded strata (rock layers) in cliffs? There are plenty of examples of folding in rocks along the south coast of England. Most examples involve multiple layers of rock, bent together. How did they get like that, and what were the forces needed to bend the rocks in such dramatic ways?

More importantly, how long did these processes take? The information about geology on the Internet and TV constantly reinforces the idea of a vast age of the earth. The belief being upheld is that forces and rates of processes we see around us haven’t changed much in millions of years. ‘Slow and gradual’ is the constant mantra, and what we see in the present is supposedly the key to understanding the past. This idea, proposed by Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726–1797), is called ‘uniformitarianism’. Hutton, who is fêted as ‘the Founder of Modern Geology’, proclaimed (emphasis added):

The rock appears as though it has deformed like wet clay.
…the past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now … No powers are to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admitted except those of which we know the principle.1

Hutton was a deist, meaning he believed in a creator, but not the God of the Bible. And he denied biblical history—specifically a supernatural, recent creation, followed by a global Flood some 1,700 years later. Because of his deism, he ruled out interpreting things like folded strata in terms of Noah’s Flood. So even before examining the geological evidence, Hutton, and those who followed him, dismissed the Flood as the means of explaining the facts of geology.2 But, as we shall see, the Flood is the best explanation for such things as folded strata.

Stressed strata
fig-1-three-way-stress-on-rocks
Figure 1 Three ways stress acts on rocks.
Rocks are a lot like people—they can get stressed! And like people, rocks react to stress in different ways. Stress is the force acting on the rock, which can be applied in different directions. There is ‘tensional stress’, which pulls rock apart. ‘Compressional stress’ causes rock to be squeezed together. ‘Shear stress’ comes from two forces in opposite directions but offset from each other (see figure 1).

Some people can cope with stress better than others, and rocks are like that also. Change in rock shape due to stress is called strain, which leads to three types of deformation (change in shape).

There is elastic deformation, where a rock can ‘bounce back’ after stress is released. Ductile deformation means the rock changes shape under stress, and will not return to its original shape.

The rock appears as though it has deformed like wet clay.
Finally, if rocks are stressed hard enough, they will fracture, thus irreversibly changing them—termed brittle deformation. These different rock behaviours also depend upon their constituents—like a cake mix with its soft, malleable ingredients (like eggs, fruit, flour) and hard, brittle ingredients (like nuts). And like cake baking, temperature also greatly affects how rocks behave. These three different factors (stress types, constituents, and temperature) and their resultant outcomes are typically employed by geologists to explain what they see in rocks.

This includes the folding of sedimentary strata. Long-age geologists imagine that stress (with or without heating) acting on confined rock, applied gradually and for long enough (typically millions of years), can cause brittle rock to deform like plastic, and folds in rocks are explained in these terms.

Factor in the Flood!
But should folded sedimentary rock strata be explained in this way? Does folding really require millions of years? When we factor in the global Flood, the time required for these structures to form collapses. The Flood offers a simple explanatory mechanism, not requiring millions of years—a timespan which the Bible’s history rejects. Quickly deposited wet sediments were laid down around the world in vast layers during the Flood. And if strata were still soft and pliable, rather like layers of clay, they could have been quickly folded by earth movements, rather than slowly bent into shape, without breaking or crumbling.3

©Creative Commons/Callanbentleyangel-island
Blue folded metacherts with glaucophane-rich (ashy?) layers, exposed in outcrops on Kayak Beach, Angel Island.
©Creative Commons/Nilfaniofolded-rocks-in-penhalt-cliff
Folded rocks in Penhalt Cliff, just to the east of Millook in Cornwall.
©Creative Commons/Aileen Doranexceptional-folds-irish-field-trip
Taken at the first ever Irish fieldtrip for the Girls into Geoscience event at Loughshinny, Dublin on November 2nd 2019.
©Creative Commons/James St. Johnfolded-gyprock
Folded gyprock (Castile Formation, Upper Permian; State Line outcrop, southern Eddy County, New Mexico, USA).
The Bible indicates that the Flood, which lasted just over a year, was a global tectonic event, with much vertical and horizontal earth movement. This provided the forces required to mould sediments and fold rocks.4 Genesis 7:11 tells us how the Flood started, when “all the fountains of the great deep burst forth.” Genesis 8:1–3 tells us how the Flood ended: “And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided. The fountains of the deep … were closed … and the waters receded from the earth continually.” These verses are also describing vast global geological activity. Furthermore, Psalm 104:6–9 clearly describes Noah’s Flood:5 “The waters stood above the mountains. At your rebuke they fled … The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place that you appointed for them … so that they might not again cover the earth.” Evidently, huge earth-moving forces were involved that transported vast amounts of freshly deposited, wet sediments. The Flood provides all the factors necessary to fold strata quickly.6

Deep-time dilemmas
Geologists who believe in millions of years will not invoke Noah’s Flood to account for layering and folding of rocks. They think these rocks were deposited slowly. As the sediment layering became very thick (kilometres) the lower strata would have been compressed by the weight of overlying ones, thus squeezing out the water. In addition to chemical cementing action, this would have ensured that the sediment hardened into rock.

Deeply buried rock is confined by pressure and so they say it is possible for it to have been folded slowly, when solid. The problem for this idea is that solid rock will behave in a brittle fashion; if subjected to pressure, it will not fold, but snap. (Bend an old dry twig, and it will snap—suddenly!)

A fold has two components of stress operating at the same time: compression and tension. In the outermost half of the fold, tensional forces are in play, and on the innermost half, compressional forces are at work (see figure 2).

We would therefore expect to see brittle fracturing on the outermost half and evidence of compression on the innermost half. However, researchers have not observed this in folds in the Grand Canyon, for example.

The rock appears as though it has deformed like wet clay. It becomes thinner where the fold has been in tension (not showing tensional fractures), and thicker where it has been in compression (but not showing signs of being crushed). This is powerful evidence that the sediment was still wet and plastic, like clay, and not solid rock, when it was bent.4

twig-snapfig-2-tension-cracks
Figure 2. Bending causes both compression and tension. (Credit: John Morris).
Long-agers can accept that an individual rock layer could have been wet and plastic when folded. But not when there are multiple layers clearly bent together, with the top and bottom layers supposedly separated by millions of years. This is because they know it would be unreasonable to think that rock layers would stay soft for millions of years. So, at least the bottom layer of any such folded sequence would have had to be solid when bent.

In the Grand Canyon, where the folded strata are part of a larger formation called the Kaibab Upwarp (figure 3), the deepest layer (the Tapeats Sandstone) is supposed to be 550 million years old. The topmost of the folded layers (the Kaibab Limestone) was allegedly deposited 300 million years later. (The bottom layer is supposedly millions of years older than any of the intervening layers.) So, since they were all folded together in plastic fashion, the straightforward understanding of the evidence is that they were all still wet and pliable when folded.

fig-3-kaibab-upwarp-grand-canyon
Figure 3. The Kaibab Upwarp, Grand Canyon (evolutionary dates). (Credit: John Morris).
Long-agers must therefore find some way around this. To preserve long ages, rocks must be seen as able to bend without breaking—in the unobservable past, over huge time periods.3

Conclusion
The supposed millions of years to bend rock strata into folds is an illusion. Folded strata do not constitute evidence for vast amounts of time in the rocks.7 Furthermore, no one has waited for eons to watch if it really takes that long to form folds in strata. ‘Deep time’ is a philosophical idea (derived from uniformitarianism), not a scientific observation.

To the contrary, multiple layers of strata folded together are a problem for long-agers; one that needs to be explained away. The evidence strongly suggests that such sediments were all laid down quickly and together. They were folded while still wet, before hardening into solid rock.8 The history in the Bible is therefore vindicated when we realize the Flood is the best explanation for these fantastic folds .

After the magazine version of this article had gone to press, Andrew Snelling of Answers in Genesis, published some very important work he had done on the petrology of certain rocks in Grand Canyon (Bright angel Formation, Tonto Group).1 Part of his investigations demonstrated, through careful thin-section microscopic measurements and photography, that grains within the strata of tight folds are not affected by metamorphism in any way. Neither are the rocks themselves metamorphosed.

Such evidence strongly debunks the idea that these were already-lithified rocks which were folded slowly (behaving plastically) under heat and pressure. Furthermore, a host of other internal evidences—chemical, fossil, and structural—that Snelling investigated demonstrate beyond doubt that the rocks in these Grand Canyon strata must have been laid down quickly and folded, while still soft; i.e., before they had hardened to stone.


by Gavin Cox


References and notes
Snelling, A., The Petrology of the Bright Angel Formation, Tonto Group, Grand Canyon, Arizona, Answers Research J. 14:303–415, 2021; answersresearchjournal.org/petrology-bright-angel-tonto-group.






Evolutionist denies scientific facts and evidence in order to parrot academic agendas, faithful assumptions, naturalistic, and humanistic theologies, that are masqueraded as science.

Scientific Facts and evidence




1 ROCKS DON'T BEND. Rocks break !
2 Dinosaur flesh cannot survive for millions of years.
3 Abiogenesis is naturalistically impossible.
4 Orphan genes refute common ancestry.
5 4000 years of selective breeding and over 100 years of Evolutionary research and observation refute evolutionary fairytales and silly theories.
6 Worldwide flood layering and geology prove a global catastrophe.
7 Genetic limitations and the complexity of life show no possibility of Macroevolutionary development whatsoever.


Evolutionary denials and pathetic answers to the facts

1 Rocks bend no matter how thick or cold, because we believe, time makes all Evo assumption science
2 Iron within the blood makes the impossible and unlikely possible
3 Abiogenesis is possible because Evo says so
4 Orphan gene can mean only what Evo assumptions say they do
5 Evo doesn't accept any historical facts or research that doesn't aline with Evo fairytales
6 Evo needs no stinking observations
7 Evo states that eons of time and unscientific processes are generally used as an excuse for any facts and observations or science that doesn't fit their opinions


Evo rejects real science and again makes up eons of time to excuse them from reality

"Do We Find Neat Uniform Layers of Sedimentary Rock in the Geologic Record?
Whether looking into the Grand Canyon from one of the rim overlooks or traversing through the Grand Canyon on foot or by raft, the answer to this question is obviously yes. The fossil-bearing sedimentary layers deposited by the Flood can be seen exposed in the walls, stacked on top of one another like a huge pile of pancakes. And the view is much the same no matter where one views the Grand Canyon. So at the regional scale in the Grand Canyon area it is clearly evident that the sedimentary rock layers deposited there during the Flood cataclysm are neat and uniform.

Similar observations can be made in many other places across the earth’s surface. This pattern is often seen in road cuts and in mountainous areas where erosion has exposed the constituent rock layer sequences. So it is hardly necessary to defend the assertion that the fossil-bearing sedimentary layers that were deposited during the Flood cataclysm are generally neat and uniform and stacked in a sequence that is exposed to view in many places across the earth’s continents.

The assertion that these fossil-bearing sedimentary layers were deposited during the Flood cataclysm is easy to defend.1 The obvious observation to make is that many of these fossil-bearing sedimentary layers contain fossils of creatures that today live on the shallow ocean floors fringing the continents, and not on the continents where countless billions of them are buried in these sedimentary layers. Indeed, sedimentary rock layers containing the same fossils are not found on the ocean floors today, nor are they found in comparable dimensions on the continental shelves fringing the continents. But the vast marine-fossil-bearing sedimentary layers we find spread right across the continents today are thus consistent with the ocean waters having flooded over the continents on a global scale, tearing marine creatures from their shallow ocean floor habitats and picking up sediments, then burying those creatures in those sediments up and across the continents in vast sedimentary layers. This is consistent with the biblical description of the Flood.

“Rock
Figure 1. An example of one of the charts produced during the AAPG project showing the local strata columns in the central and southern Rockies region of the USA.

Many geologists are already aware that there are six thick sequences of fossil-bearing sedimentary strata, known as megasequences, which can be traced right across the North American continent. This was documented five decades ago in 19632 and subsequently verified by numerous observations so that it is now well recognized. In the early 1980s, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) conducted a project in which all the local geologic strata “columns” derived from the mapping of outcrops in local areas, supplemented by drill-hole data, were put on charts to show the sequences of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock layers right across the North American continent (figure 1).3

The rationale used to identify these megasequences was based on mapping the preserved rock record across the North American continent. These thick sequences or packages of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock layers were easily identified because they were bounded by erosion surfaces (called unconformities) due to the actions of the ocean waters as they advanced over the continent depositing the sedimentary rock layers before retreating again (figure 2).4 These unconformities therefore coincide with rising and falling water levels as ocean waters oscillated across the continent and back again after depositing their sediment loads, often also coinciding with the mass burial of creatures in what evolutionary geologists have called mass extinctions. Significantly, some of the fossil-bearing sedimentary layers in these megasequences can also be traced beyond North America to other continents.5

“Rock+
Figure 2. The preserved rock record, consisting of named megasequences, between major unconformities and mass extinctions (arrowed) across the north American continent.

Within each megasequence are various named strata units. For example, the first (lowermost) of these megasequences, called the Sauk Megasequence, in the Grand Canyon area consists of the Tapeats Sandstone, the Bright Angel Shale, and the Muav Limestone. Thorough geologic mapping was initially only done locally, so the rock units identified and mapped were given names locally. Therefore, even if a rock unit stretched into adjoining local areas and beyond, it often had different names in adjoining local areas. Thus, in the 1980s, when the American Association for Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) tabulated all the local strata columns across the continent, it became possible to see how some specific rock units, which had been given different names in different local areas, actually were the same unit, which could be traced vast distances across the continent. The Tapeats Sandstone in the Grand Canyon area is one of those units, and it can be traced all across Arizona northward to the Canadian border and beyond, northeastward right across the USA as far as Maine (figure 3).6 The same sandstone unit in exactly the same geologic strata position is also found in southern Israel, from where it can be traced across to Jordan and into Egypt, and then right across north Africa.7 Thus the Tapeats Sandstone represents one unit within one megasequence that is easily identified over vast continental scale areas due to its uniform makeup.

“Sandstone+
Figure 3. The distribution of the Tapeats Sandstone and its equivalents across North America, constructed from the local geologic columns compiled in the COSUNA charts produced by the AAPG.

However, while some units within megasequences traverse continents, many others are only recognizable and able to be traced over regions, though still vast in extent compared to one’s local area. In the Grand Canyon area, for example, the Coconino Sandstone, within the fourth of the megasequences, known as the Absaroka Megasequence, can be traced from northern and central Arizona across New Mexico into Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas over an area approaching 200,000 square miles, though an isolated remanent in southwestern Arizona indicates the unit previously had a wider distribution that has been reduced by erosion (figure 4).

“Sandstone+
Figure 4. The distribution of the Coconino Sandstone and its equivalents from northern Arizona into adjoining states, showing the variations in its thickness (contour lines in feet) (after Austin8).

Nevertheless, not all the strata units are uniform, the character of the rock units changing due to later variations. For example, the Toroweap Formation is a limestone in the Grand Canyon area, but laterally to the southwest it changes into sandstone, along with local variations that include beds of gypsum to the west.9 Indeed, many strata units change their rock character laterally, reflecting both the type and composition of the sediments within the mixture carried by the ocean waters over the continent to deposit them. Furthermore, not only is the sediment composition related to the source of the sediments, but changes in the sediment composition can occur. As the ocean waters carried sediments up and across the continent, they sometimes eroded underlying sediment layers of different compositions, adding them to their sediment loads before eventually depositing them.

Another aspect of this question is the thickness of the fossil-bearing sedimentary rock layers deposited across the continents. Even on local scales, variations in the thicknesses of strata units can be seen, as well as sometimes even compositional changes. So, for example, even though the Coconino Sandstone averages a thickness of 315 feet in the Grand Canyon area, it changes its thickness through the length of the Grand Canyon, thinning to the west and thickening even up to 1,000 feet toward the southeast (see figure 4). Furthermore, some rock units are made up of beds of alternating compositions, such as within some of the strata units in the Cincinnati area which consist of alternating beds of limestone and shale (figure 5).10 Sometimes these thinner beds thicken and thin even within the outcrop scale of a road cut. So whereas we do find neat, uniform fossil-bearing sedimentary rock layers across the continents as a record of the Flood, the depositional processes produced and left behind local variations, both in thicknesses of the layers and beds within the named strata units, but also variations in compositions, from local to regional scales.

Were the Fast-Moving Flood Waters Also Churning?
During the Flood cataclysm, there were four main causes for generating the surging flows of water currents that picked up and carried sediments onto and across the continents to deposit the fossil-bearing sedimentary rock layers there.

First, there was the normal ebb and flow of the rising and falling tidal oscillations. The effect of these approximately twice-daily tidal surges would have increased as the Flood waters became global. It has been shown that on a global ocean there would have been a resonating effect by which the tidal surges would have progressively built in height and, therefore, in the strength and impact of each surge, due to the close overlapping of the tidal peaks and troughs in the approximate 12–13 hour spacing between successive highs and lows.11

“Beds+
Figure 5. Alternating beds of limestone (hard) and shale (soft) in the Fairview Formation in a road cut in the Cincinnati area of northern Kentucky. (Photograph: Andrew A. Snelling)

Superimposed on those tidal flows and surges, there would have been repeated tsunamis generated by earthquakes caused by repeated catastrophic earth movements. The “fountains of the great deep” were broken up (Genesis 7:11), initiating the catastrophic plate tectonics that drove the Flood event.12 The earth’s crust was broken up around the globe, producing massive earthquakes, followed by the accelerated motion of the crustal fragments (called plates) across the earth’s surface at many-feet-per-second speed. As the Flood event progressed, plates collided with one another, or some plates were pushed under the edges of other plates. All these earth movements would have generated many catastrophic earthquakes that in turn would have repeatedly produced massive tsunamis. As these tsunamis moved, they would have surged toward and onto the continents.

Furthermore, superimposed on the tides and tsunamis would have been the progressive raising of the ocean floor. As the ocean floor plates were pushed apart, molten rock rose from inside the earth to generate new ocean floor rocks. The new warm ocean floor, being less dense, would steadily rise, thus pushing up the sea level. This raising of the sea level would have in turn caused a surge of ocean waters toward the continents to flood them.

The net result would have been huge fluctuations in the water levels combined with catastrophic surges of walls of water moving from open ocean areas toward and onto the continents and across them. Yet another force at work driving these surging water currents would have been super-storms. These would have been generated in the atmosphere as a result of the supersonic steam jets at the crustal fracture zones, catapulting ocean waters aloft before they fell back to the earth’s surface as global torrential rainfall (the “windows or floodgates of heaven” were opened, Genesis 7:11). It is estimated that such super-storms and their winds moving across the surface of the Flood waters would have driven water currents at speeds of 100 miles an hour or more.13

So there is no doubt that there were adequate mechanisms for driving fastmoving, catastrophically powerful water currents and surges from the oceans toward and onto the continents. These were thus capable of carrying the sediments and creatures to be buried in the fossil-bearing sedimentary rock layers deposited across the continents, stacked up in sequence as a result of the fluctuating water levels and the ebb and flow of the water.

Just as is observed today, in the open ocean there are no major effects on the ocean surface from the passage of tsunamis, tidal surges, and fast-moving water currents apart from waves. It is at the base of the water column deep below the surface where the moving and surging water picks up loose sediments from the ocean floor, or scours and erodes sediments from the ocean floor, and then transports them in a slurry of sediment-laden water.

What was happening at the base of the water column of these surging, fastmoving water currents during the Flood would have depended on a number of factors, which in turn would have produced differing results. Though somewhat oversimplified, if the water was flowing over uneven ocean floor topography, then turbulent flow (churning water) could be generated. But if the water was flowing over a flat surface, then the flow would be laminar and sheet-like, and any erosion would result from cavitation, a process in which the fast water flow generates vacuum bubbles that hammer rock surfaces, pulverizing the rock rapidly. If there were loose sediments on the surface being traversed, once the water reached a critical speed it would pick up those loose sediments and carry them. Often, once the process is started, if there is even the slightest of downward slopes on the surfaces being traversed, then gravity takes over to produce debris flows. Many strata units in the rock record bear testimony to having been deposited by gravity-driven underwater debris flows.

The quantity and type of sediments transported would depend on the composition and particle sizes in those loose sediments, so that generally the faster the water flow, the greater the sizes of the particles that could be picked up and transported. Below a critical speed, no sediments would be picked up and carried by the water flows. And that critical speed would likely be lower for turbulent flow and higher for laminar flow, except where gravity is driving the water’s ability to pick up sediments to produce debris flows. At higher speeds and carrying more sediment, the water at the base of the water column would become more erosive. The more sediments the water carried, the more they would add to the water’s abrasive and erosive power. At the highest water speeds though, when the amount of sediment in the water is greater than the amount of water in the slurry mixture, the density of the slurry is so great that even boulders are transported, suspended in the slurry.

Fast-moving waters are certainly capable of depositing sediments, and many strata layers in the rock record of the Flood would have been deposited in that way, as witnessed by the strata layers that were deposited right across continents. Additionally, once the water started to slow down in its passage over the continents, the water would start to drop the rest of its sediment load and deposit it in more sediment layers, also burying the creatures that had been carried by the water. An example is the postulated progressive simultaneous deposition of the Tapeats Sandstone, Bright Angel Shale, and Muav Limestone across Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico as the Flood waters advanced, the bottom current speed decreasing in the returning underflow so sediments of decreasing grain sizes were progressively deposited.14 As the water slowed it would also be less likely to erode previously deposited sediment layers, especially where the surface of those previously deposited sediment layers had started to cohere, and cementation had begun to bind the sediment particles (the first stage of the hardening process).

The net result would be that the Flood waters at the base of the flow would tend to erode in source areas as the current flow increased, and then started switching to depositional mode as the water currents flowed over the continents and started to deposit their loads. Thus, when the water currents subsequently slowed as they continued further sediment deposition, they would not be eroding at the same time. The outcome would be to deposit uniform sediment layers during their passage across the continents as they progressively spread out and deposited their sediment loads. Of course, there could be lateral variations in sediment types. Sometimes as the waters slowed, the heavier particles would settle out first. Then at slower speeds finer particles would be deposited, so that the sediment particle sizes could change laterally as the one rock unit was deposited across the continent. In some strata layers the grading of the sediment particle sizes is the inverse. But many layers do not exhibit any graded bedding. Instead, the changes between water flow surges meant changes in sediment loads, with sediments of different compositions and types, each consisting of uniform similar particle sizes being deposited, such as lime mud versus quartz sand, as in the example of the Toroweap Formation in the Grand Canyon area being deposited on top of the Coconino Sandstone, as has already been mentioned.

Natural and Experimental Examples
In 1960, Hurricane Donna created surging ocean waves that flooded inland up to five miles along the coast of southern Florida for six hours.15 As a result, the hurricane deposited a neat, uniform six-inch-thick mud layer, with numerous thin laminae within it, across the area traversed by the flood waters. In June 1965, a storm in Colorado produced flooding of Bijou Creek, which resulted in the deposition from the fast-moving waters of new sediment layers containing fine laminations.16 Then on June 12, 1980, an eruption of Mount St. Helens produced a hurricane-velocity, surging-flow of volcanic ash, which accumulated in less than five hours as a neat, uniform 25-foot-thick layer of laminated volcanic ash, including uniform neat, alternating laminae of coarse and fine sediment grains (figure 6).17

“Mount+
Figure 6. The 25-foot-thick deposit is exposed in the middle of the cliff. The fine layering within this deposit was produced within hours at Mount St. Helens on June 12, 1980, by hurricane-velocity surging flows from the crater of the volcano. (Photograph: Steven A. Austin)

In a detailed study of a seven-foot-thick bed within the Redwall Limestone in the Grand Canyon area, Austin18 has convincingly argued that the evidence is consistent with the bed’s deposition by a gravity-driven debris flow. In the middle section of this bed, which has been traced over more than 11,600 square miles, are billions of straight-shelled nautiloid fossils of various lengths. Though mostly buried and fossilized horizontally, some are found at various angles, and some are even vertical. These and the ubiquitous vertical fluid evulsion structures are consistent with rapid burial in a debris flow that turbulently tossed some of the nautiloids around during this mass kill event. Yet the bed overall is neat and uniform over this large area.

The three observed examples described above demonstrate that local-regional natural catastrophes do deposit neat, uniform sedimentary rock layers, even though in most instances the flow of water and air respectively was rapid and sometimes turbulent (churning). It should also be noticed that in two of the three examples the surging, fast-moving sediment-laden flows did not erode into the surfaces they flowed over, even though those surfaces consisted of loose materials (soils and sands, and previously deposited volcanic ash, respectively). Instead, the flows left smooth, neat, uniform boundaries at the bases of the neat, uniform sediment layers they deposited. These sediment layers resulting from these local-regional natural catastrophes closely mirror at a smaller scale the neat, uniform sedimentary layers left behind by the Flood waters, stacked up neatly on top of one another with smooth, uniform boundaries between them.

Not only do we have numerous modern examples where local-regional natural catastrophic events have resulted in the rapid accumulation of neat uniform sedimentary layers, but we have numerous laboratory experiments that have allowed researchers to document the same processes. For example, using a circular flume, it was demonstrated that high-velocity water currents sort and deposit sediment grains by weight, density, and shape, and that as the fast-moving current loses its velocity, the segregation of grains produces a succession of thin, parallel laminae in the resultant neat uniform sediment layer.19 Other linear flume experiments with water swiftly carrying sand grains have demonstrated how a neat uniform sand layer is progressively deposited as the sand-carrying water current advances.20 These examples demonstrate that water moving at upper (high) flow regime speeds produces planar beds rapidly. Indeed, the results of such flume experiments correlate closely with the observed natural sedimentation processes from swift-flowing water in tidal channels, floods, and other catastrophic events, and also accurately replicate at a smaller scale the features seen in the neat uniform sedimentary rock layers preserved in the continental geologic record.

The difference between the flume experiments and the observed local-regional natural catastrophes on the one hand, and between the observed local-regional natural catastrophes and the global Flood cataclysm on the other, is in both instances the scale of the sedimentation. However, it is a progressive increase in scale from the flume experiments to the observed local-regional natural catastrophes, and then to the scale of the global cataclysmic Flood. Nevertheless, it has been demonstrated that both the flume experiments and the local-regional natural catastrophes produce neat, uniform sediment layers by deposition from the laminar (sheet) flow of fast-moving waters, rather than from turbulent (churning) flow. Thus, because the continental-scale sedimentary rock layers deposited during the Flood cataclysm are neatly uniform across the continents, it is evident that even under global cataclysmic Flood conditions it was the laminar flow of fast-moving waters, and not turbulent or churning waters, that were responsible for the deposition of these neat, uniform sedimentary rock layers.

Conclusion
In answer to the question that was posed, namely, how could neat uniform sedimentary rock layers be deposited during the Flood cataclysm with all the fast-moving waters, we have seen that the observed sedimentation processes in both flume experiments and larger scale (local-regional) natural catastrophes result in neat, uniform sediment layers being deposited from fast laminar (sheet)-flowing waters. Thus it has been argued that the observed neat, uniform sedimentary rock layers found deposited across the continents as a result of the global Flood cataclysm can be envisaged to have also been the result of the same sedimentation processes from similarly fast laminar-flowing waters. In other words, we can confidently extrapolate the orders of magnitude to the enormous scale of the global Flood cataclysm. Though the flume experiments have been conducted at various small scales, the orders of magnitude extrapolation to the observed natural catastrophes over large regions still results in the same observed pattern of uniform sediment layers deposited neatly in succession by fast-moving waters. This makes us confident that at the global scale of the Flood cataclysm the same sedimentation processes would have also been responsible for the neat, uniform sedimentary rock layers we observe to have been stacked on top of one another and preserved in the continental geologic record, even though the Flood waters were often fast-moving."

by Dr. Andrew A. Snelling




“Evolution is a theory universally accepted not because it can be proven by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.” (D.M.S.Watson; Adaptation)\

Note that the above sentence is not a Quote! It's an adaptation of his words by others.


“One might ask why the neo-Darwinian paradigm does not weaken or disappear if it is at odds with critical factual information. The reasons are not necessarily scientific ones but rather may be rooted in human nature.” (Christian Schwabe; On the Validity of Molecular Evolution, Trends in Biochemical Sciences)

“Science is fundamentally a game. It is a game with one overriding rule: Rule #1: Let us see how far and to what extent we can explain the behavior of the physical and material universe in terms of purely physical and material causes, without invoking the supernatural.” (R.E.Dickerson; Molecular Evolution)

“One of the ironies of the evolution-creation debate is that the creationists have accepted the mistaken notion that the fossil record shows a detailed and orderly progression and they have gone to great lengths to accommodate this ‘fact’ in their Flood geology.” (David M. Raup; Evolution and the Fossil Record)

“About the lack of direct illustrations in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them…..I will lay it on the line–there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.” (Colin Patterson; Evolution)

“This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists.” (George Gaylord Simpson; Tempo and Mode in Evolution)

“Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin’s argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study.” (Stephen Jay Gould; The Panda’s Thumb)

“But fossil species remain unchanged throughout most of their history and the record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition.” (David S. Woodruff; Evolution: The Paleobiological View)

“the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.” (Steven M. Stanley; The New Evolutionary Timetable)

"Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin’s time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information — what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appear to be much more complex and much less gradualistic. So Darwin’s problem has not been alleviated in the last 120 years and we still have a record which does show change but one that can hardly be looked upon as the most reasonable consequence of natural selection.” (David. M. Raup; Conflicts between Darwin and Paleontology)

zeffur: re: "BSr: Nobody will claim ToE to be "true" in the "absolute mathematical logical terminology" but damn f**king credible beyond the slightest reasonable doubt..."

That is completely bonkers, as bio-evolution is fiction & fiction cannot be proven to be true at all---obviously.

Lots of sane, honest, rational, well-informed, & intelligence people reject the myth/fiction of abiogenesis & bio-evolution, because there is literally no sound case for either fictitious notion.

Evo cult claptrap is only acceptable to atheidiots & other ignorant nitwits as a myth, because they are obviously mentally unsound (irrational, delusional, & dishonest) people.

zeffur: zeffur: re: "BSr: all of them are clearly demonstrated against science !!!"

You have no real 'science' to offer. All you have to offer are the biased, bogus, irrational, indefensible, & erroneous conclusions (i.e. assumptions/opinions/claims) of atheidiots & other nitwits.

Bring something real, credible, sound, & verifiable to the discussion, or just sit back & observe, because you have no such info to provide--which is what we all know IS truly the case with you gullible & irrational evo culters...

zeffur: You'll notice that BSr has no sound rebuttal for the articles that we've posted that clearly debunk his myths. All he can do is attack the organizations that put out such coherent publications as biased--because he knows that his shite beliefs are absurd--as do all other well-informed people...

Harp is still desperately clinging to purported fly data that can't be reproduced in any lab anywhere. lol So sad & pathetic how they cling to every idiotic & desperate fallacy & fraud that they pretend are 'the best explanations for life' on earth.

Utter nitwits is what they truly are. Abiogenesis & evolution are so obviously desperate fiction that a person would have to be blind, delusional, or nearly brain-dead to accept such utter indefensible crapola!

God IS the ONLY rational & reasonable explanation for the creation of the universe & life. Everything else is a pathetic joke in comparison!

zeffur: re: "BSr: You just need to explain us those three undeniable evidence to be invalid for ToE

ERV
Chromosome 2
Tiktaalik"

All of those ^^ have already been debunked (below) as "Sadly, “unfounded notions” of this kind continue to be uncritically taught and accepted in the popular media and in our schools. Even more sadly, these unfounded notions have been used to undermine the authority of Holy Scripture." Which is exactly the goal of atheidiots...

1. ERV:

‘Proof’ that we came from apes debunked:
https://www.newlifepublishing.co.uk/articles/proof-that-we-came-from-apes-debunked/

Humans share many genes with apes – but that’s not proof we evolved from them. After all, human beings also share 50 per cent of our genes with bananas, and 79 per cent with ducks – but no one believes we are descended from duck-billed bananas.

However, one ‘proof’ often cited for human evolution is the Endogenous Retroviruses (ERVs) found in both apes and ourselves. An ERV is a piece of DNA found inside an organism’s genome that looks like a retrovirus. These are said to be parasitic junk sequences that came from viral DNA. The likelihood that apes and humans were infected with this DNA in the same place in our genomes separately is so low that it must be something that happened in our common ancestor – proving we evolved.

But what if these ERVs actually have a function and are not ‘junk’ after all? If so, then shared ERVs could be evidence of common design not common descent. They should certainly no longer be touted as the ‘smoking gun’ that proves ape-to-human evolution.

A 2013 paper in PLOS Genetics* reported that up to 80 per cent of human ERVs are transcribed non-randomly, strongly suggesting a functional role. It said that “thousands of ERV-derived sequences” are “associated with cell type-specific expression of neighbouring genes”.

In fact, we’re gradually finding more and more examples of viral sequences that have some kind of function in human cells. For example, many ERV sequences play a role in human gene regulation.

So if ERVs are functional, they are there for a reason, and so are highly unlikely to have come from retroviruses – which if true neutralises the whole ERV argument.
And if thousands of ERVs really were inserted by retroviruses, the body’s own defence mechanism (apoptosis) should have destroyed most of them long ago. The fact that we still have so many ERVs suggests they were not caused by retroviruses.

* Pierre-Étienne Jacques, Justin Jeyakani, Guillaume Bourque, ‘The Majority of Primate-Specific Regulatory Sequences Are Derived from Transposable Elements’, PLOS Genetics, 9 May 2013.

========================================================
2. Chromosome 2:

Human Chromosome 2 Fusion Never Happened:
https://www.icr.org/article/human-chromosome-2-fusion-never-happened/

Human Chromosome 2 Fusion Never Happened
BY JEFFREY P. TOMKINS, PH.D. * |
THURSDAY, APRIL 30, 2020

One of the more popular arguments used for humans supposedly evolving from apes is known as the chromosome fusion. The impetus for this concept is the evolutionary problem that apes have an extra pair of chromosomes—humans have 46 while apes have 48. If humans evolved from an ape-like creature only three to six million years ago, a mere blip in the grand scheme of the evolutionary story, why do humans and apes have this discrepancy?

The evolutionary solution proposes that an end-to-end fusion of two small ape-like chromosomes (named 2A and 2B) produced human chromosome 2 (Figure 1). The concept of a fusion first came about in 1982 when scientists examined the similarities of human and ape chromosomes under a microscope. While the technique was somewhat crude, it was enough to get the idea going.1

The So-Called Fusion Site
Figure 1. Hypothetical model in which chimpanzee chromosomes 2A and 2B fused end-to-end to form human chromosome 2. The chromosomes are drawn to scale according to cytogenetic images published by Yunis and Prakash.1 Note the size discrepancy, which is about 10% or 24 million bases based on the known size of human chromosome 2.


The first actual DNA signature of a possible fusion event was discovered in 1991 on human chromosome number 2.2 Researchers found a small, muddled cluster of telomere-like end sequences that vaguely resembled a possible fusion. Telomeres are a six-base sequence of the DNA letters TTAGGG repeated over and over again at the ends of chromosomes.

However, the fusion signature was somewhat of an enigma based on the real fusions that occasionally occur in nature. All documented fusions in living animals involve a specific type of sequence called satellite DNA (satDNA) located in chromosomes and found in breakages and fusions.3-5 The fusion signature on human chromosome 2 was missing this telltale satDNA.6

Another problem is the small size of the fusion site, which is only 798 DNA letters long. Telomere sequences at the ends of chromosomes are 5,000 to 15,000 bases long. If two chromosomes had fused, you should see a fused telomere signature of 10,000 to 30,000 bases long—not 798.

Not only is the small size a problem for the fusion story, the signature doesn’t really represent a clear-cut fusion of telomeres. Figure 2 shows the DNA letters of the 798-base fusion site with the six-base (DNA letter) intact telomere sequences emphasized in bold print. When the fusion sequence is compared to that of a pristine fusion signature of the same size, it is only 70% identical overall.
Figure 2. The 798 sequence of the alleged fusion site. Intact forward (TTAGGG) and reverse complement (CCCTAA) telomere sequences are in bold font. The actual alleged point of fusion (AA) is underlined.


Secular researchers have pointed out this discrepancy and have labeled the fusion site as significantly “degenerate.”7 Given the standard theoretical model of human evolution, it should be about 98 to 99% identical, not 70%. The researchers describing this discovery commented, “Head-to-head arrays of repeats at the fusion site have degenerated significantly (14%) from the near perfect arrays of (TTAGGG)n found at telomeres” and asked the pertinent question “If the fusion occurred within the telomeric repeat arrays less than ~6 Mya, why are the arrays at the fusion site so degenerate?”7 It should be noted that the 14% degeneration cited by the authors refers to the corruption of just the six-base sequences themselves, not the whole 798 bases.

The Fusion Site Inside a Gene?

The most remarkable anti-evolutionary finding about the fusion site turned out to be its location and what it actually does. This discovery came about while I was reading the research paper that reported a detailed analysis of 614,000 bases of DNA sequence surrounding the alleged fusion site. I noticed in one of the figures that the fusion site was located inside a gene, and quite remarkably this oddity wasn’t even acknowledged in the text of the paper.8

A finding like this is highly noteworthy. Perhaps this piece of information would’ve been the nail in the evolutionary coffin, so to speak, which is why the researchers declined to discuss it. This major anomaly inspired me to give the fusion site a much closer examination. This paper was published in 2002, and I took notice of it in 2013. A huge amount of data on the structure and function of the human genome had been published in the meantime, and there was likely much more to the story that needed to be uncovered.
Figure 3. Simplified illustration of the alleged fusion site inside the first intron of the DDX11L2 gene. The graphic also shows two versions of short and long transcript variants produced, along with areas of transcription factor binding. The arrow in the first exon depicts the direction of transcription.


When I performed further research, I verified that the fusion site was positioned inside an RNA helicase gene now called DDX11L2. Most genes in plants and animals have their coding segments in pieces called exons so they can be alternatively spliced. Based on the addition or exclusion of exons, genes can produce a variety of products. The intervening regions between exons are called introns, which often contain a variety of signals and switches that control gene function. The alleged fusion site is positioned inside the first intron of the DDX11L2 gene (Figure 3).9

The DNA molecule is double-stranded, with a plus strand and a minus strand. It was engineered this way to maximize information density while also increasing efficiency and function. As a result, there are genes running in different directions on the opposing strands. As it turns out, the DDX11L2 gene is encoded on the minus strand. Because genes in humans are like Swiss army knives and can produce a variety of RNAs, in the case of the DDX11L2 gene it produces short variants consisting of two exons and long variants with three (Figure 3).9

The Fusion Site Is a Gene Promoter

What might this DDX11L2 gene be doing? My research showed it’s expressed in at least 255 different cell or tissue types.9 It’s also co-expressed (turned on at the same time) with a variety of other genes and is connected to processes associated with cell signaling in the extracellular matrix and blood cell production. The location of the so-called fusion sequence inside a functional gene associated with the genetics of a variety of cellular processes strongly refutes the idea that it’s the accidental byproduct of a head-to-head telomeric fusion. Genes are not formed by catastrophic chromosomal fusions!

Even more amazing is that the fusion site is itself functional and serves an important engineered purpose. The site actually acts as a switch for controlling gene activity. In this respect, a wealth of biochemical data showed that 12 different proteins called transcription factors regulate this segment of the gene. One of these is none other than RNA polymerase II, the main enzyme that copies RNA molecules from DNA in a process called transcription. Further supporting this discovery is the fact that the actual process of transcription initiates inside the region of the so-called fusion site.

Technically, we would call the activity in the alleged fusion site a promoter region. Promoters are the main switches at the beginning of genes that turn them on and are also where the RNA polymerase starts to create an RNA. Many genes have alternative promoters like the DDX11L2 gene.

There are actually two areas of transcription factor binding in the DDX11L2 gene. The first is in the promoter directly in front of the first exon, and the second is in the first intron corresponding to the fusion site sequence. Not only is the DDX11L2 gene itself complexly controlled, with the alleged fusion sequence playing a key role, but even the RNA transcripts produced are very intricate. The RNAs themselves contain a wide variety of binding and control sites for a class of small regulatory molecules called microRNAs.9

Functional Internal Telomere Sequences Are All Over the Genome

The presence of internally located telomere sequence is found all over the human genome. These seemingly out-of-place telomere repeats have been dubbed interstitial telomeres. The presence of these sequences presents another challenge for the fusion site idea. It’s a fact that very few of the telomere repeats in the fusion site occur in tandem. As noted in Figure 2, the sequence of the 798-base fusion site contains only a few instances where two repeats are actually in tandem and none that have three repeats or more. However, there are many other interstitial telomere sites all over the human genome where the repeats occur in perfect tandem three to ten times or more.10-11

Even besides their role at the ends of chromosomes, it appears interstitial telomeric repeats may serve an important function in the genome related to gene expression. In a recent research project, I identified telomere repeats all over the human genome and then intersected their genomic locations with a diversity of data sets containing functional biochemical information for gene activity.12 Literally thousands of internal telomeric repeats across the genome were directly associated with the hallmarks of gene expression. The same type of transcription factor binding and gene activity occurring at the alleged fusion site was also occurring genome-wide at numerous other interstitial telomeric repeats. Clearly, these DNA features are not accidents of evolution but purposefully and intelligently designed functional code.

Bogus Cryptic Centromere Inside a Gene

Another key problem with the fusion model is the lack of viable evidence for a signature of an extra centromere region. Centromeres are sections of chromosomes, often in central locations, that play key roles during cell division. As depicted in Figure 1, the newly formed chimeric chromosome would’ve had two centromere sites immediately following the alleged head-to-head fusion of the two chromosomes. In such a case, one of the centromeres would be functional while the other would be disabled. The presence of two active centromeres is bad news for chromosomes and would lead to dysfunction and cell destruction.

Interestingly, the evidence for a cryptic (disabled) centromere on human chromosome 2 is even weaker than that for a telomere-rich fusion site. Evolutionists explain the lack of a clearly distinguishable nonfunctional secondary centromere by arguing that a second centromere would’ve been rapidly selected against. After that, the disabled centromere would’ve deteriorated over time since there were no functional restraints placed on it anymore by its doing something useful in the genome.

However, the evidence for a second remnant centromere at any stage of sequence degeneration is problematic for the evolutionary paradigm. Functional centromere sequences are composed of a repetitive type of DNA called alphoid sequences, with each alphoid repeat being about 171 bases long. Some types of alphoid repeats are found all over the genome, while others are specific to centromeres. The structure of the sequences found at the cryptic centromere site on human chromosome 2 doesn’t match those associated with functional human centromeres.13 Even worse for the evolutionary model is that they have no highly similar counterparts in the chimp genome—they are human-specific.13

The alleged fossil centromere is also exceptionally tiny compared to a real one. The size of a normal human centromere ranges in length between 250,000 and 5,000,000 bases.14 The alleged cryptic centromere is only 41,608 bases long, but it’s also important to note that there are three different regions of it that aren’t even alphoid repeats.15 Two of these are called retroelements, with one being a LPA3/LINE repeat 5,957 bases long and the other an SVA-E element with 2,571 bases. When we subtract the insertions of these non-alphoid sequences, it gives a length of only 33,080 bases, which is a fraction of the length of a real centromere.

The most serious evolutionary problem with the idea of a fossil centromere, though, is that like the alleged fusion site, it’s positioned inside a gene. The alleged cryptic centromere is located inside the ANKRD30BL gene, and its sequence spans both intron and exon regions of the gene.12,15

In fact, the part of the alleged fossil centromere sequence that lands inside an exon actually codes for amino acids in the resulting gene’s protein. The gene produces a protein that’s believed to be involved in the interaction of the structural network of proteins inside the cell called the cytoskeleton in connection with receptor proteins embedded in the cell membrane.16 The fact that the so-called fossil or cryptic centromere is a functional region inside an important protein-coding gene completely refutes the idea that it’s a defunct centromere.

Conclusion: No Fusion

Due to the muddled signatures and small sizes of the alleged fusion and fossil centromere sites, it’s highly questionable that their sequence was evolutionarily derived from an ancient chromosome fusion. Not only that, they represent functional sequence inside genes. The alleged fusion site is an important genetic switch called a promoter inside the DDX11L2 long noncoding RNA gene, and the so-called fossil centromere contains both coding and noncoding sequence inside a large ankyrin repeat protein-coding gene.

This is an undeniable double whammy against the whole mythical fusion idea, utterly destroying its validity. The overwhelming scientific conclusion is that the fusion never happened.

References

Yunis, J. J. and O. Prakash. 1982. The origin of man: a chromosomal pictorial legacy. Science. 215 (4539): 1525-1530.
Ijdo, J. W. et al. 1991. Origin of human chromosome 2: An ancestral telomere–telomere fusion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 88 (20): 9051-9055.
Chaves, R. et al. 2003. Molecular cytogenetic analysis and centromeric satellite organization of a novel 8;11 translocation in sheep: a possible intermediate in biarmed chromosome evolution. Mammalian Genome. 14 (10): 706-710.
Tsipouri, V. et al. 2008. Comparative sequence analyses reveal sites of ancestral chromosomal fusions in the Indian muntjac genome. Genome Biology. 9 (10): R155.
Adega, F., H. Guedes-Pinto, and R. Chaves. 2009. Satellite DNA in the Karyotype Evolution of Domestic Animals—Clinical Considerations. Cytogenetic and Genome Research. 126 (1-2): 12-20.
Tomkins, J. P. and J. Bergman. 2011. Telomeres: implications for aging and evidence for intelligent design. Journal of Creation. 25 (1): 86-97.
Fan, Y. et al. 2002. Genomic Structure and Evolution of the Ancestral Chromosome Fusion Site in 2q13–2q14.1 and Paralogous Regions on Other Human Chromosomes. Genome Research. 12 (11): 1651-1662.
Fan, Y. et al. 2002. Gene Content and Function of the Ancestral Chromosome Fusion Site in Human Chromosome 2q13–2q14.1 and Paralogous Regions. Genome Research. 12 (11): 1663-1672.
Tomkins, J. P. 2013. Alleged Human Chromosome 2 “Fusion Site” Encodes an Active DNA Binding Domain Inside a Complex and Highly Expressed Gene—Negating Fusion. Answers Research Journal. 6: 367-375.
Azzalin, C. M., S. G. Nergadze, and E. Giulotto. 2001. Human intrachromosomal telomeric-like repeats: sequence organization and mechanisms of origin. Chromosoma. 110: 75-82.
Ruiz-Herrera, A. et al. 2008. Telomeric repeats far from the ends: mechanisms of origin and role in evolution. Cytogenetic and Genome Research. 122 (3-4): 219-228.
Tomkins, J. P. 2018. Combinatorial genomic data refute the human chromosome 2 evolutionary fusion and build a model of functional design for interstitial telomeric repeats. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism. J. H. Whitmore, ed. Pittsburgh, PA: Creation Science Fellowship, 222-228.
Tomkins, J. and J. Bergman. 2011. The chromosome 2 fusion model of human evolution—part 2: re-analysis of the genomic data. Journal of Creation. 25 (2): 111-117.
Aldrup-Macdonald, M. E. and B. A. Sullivan. 2014. The Past, Present, and Future of Human Centromere Genomics. Genes (Basel). 5 (1): 33-50.
Tomkins, J. P. 2017. Debunking the Debunkers: A Response to Criticism and Obfuscation Regarding Refutation of the Human Chromosome 2 Fusion. Answers Research Journal. 10: 45-54.
Voronin, D. A. and E. V. Kiseleva. 2008. Functional Role of Proteins Containing Ankyrin Repeats. Cell and Tissue Biology. 49 (12): 989-999.

* Dr. Tomkins is Life Sciences Director at the Institute for Creation Research and earned his Ph.D. in genetics from Clemson University.

Cite this article: Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. 2020. Human Chromosome 2 Fusion Never Happened. Acts & Facts. 49 (5).

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3. Tiktaalik:

Is Tiktaalik Evolution’s Greatest Missing Link?
https://answersingenesis.org/missing-links/is-tiktaalik-evolutions-greatest-missing-link/
by Dr. David Menton on July 11, 2014
Featured in The New Answers Book 3

The media’s excitement over Tiktaalik seems to stem not so much from being able to report a real scientific discovery as in being able to discredit the biblical account of creation.

In both the print and broadcast media in 2006 and 2007, reports of the discovery of the fossil fish known as Tiktaalik were hyped as convincing proof that, through a random chance process of evolution, fish sprouted legs and walked out onto the land, where they turned into amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and, ultimately people. But the media’s excitement seems to stem not so much from being able to report a real scientific discovery as in being able to discredit the biblical account of creation.

A front page article in the New York Times,1 for example, hailed Tiktaalik “as a powerful rebuttal to religious creationists, who hold a literal biblical view on the origins and development of life.”

Walking Fish Symbol: The walking fish has become symbolic of evolutionism.

The whole idea of walking fish has come to be symbolic of the evolutionary worldview and its opposition to biblical Christianity. Many evolutionists display the familiar “Darwin fish” symbol on their automobiles, T-shirts, and office doors as a public declaration of their allegiance to evolution. The “Darwin fish” is a desecration of the fish symbol used by early Christians as a means of mutual identification during a time of persecution. Christians chose the fish symbol because the individual letters of the Greek word ichthys (for “fish”) served as an anagram for “Jesus Christ Son of God, Savior.” Evolutionists have substituted the word “Darwin” for “ichthys” and have placed walking legs with feet on the fish. Thus, the Darwin fish reflects the fact that many evolutionists have indeed replaced Christianity with Darwinism. As for the legs on the Darwin fish, we will see that there are no known fish with true “legs” (and certainly no feet), and none capable of actually “walking”—except in the most trivial sense of the word.

We Must Be Cautious of Evolutionary Claims

In the next months and years, there will doubtless be further claims in the popular media of “irrefutable proofs” for evolution and, more importantly, “proofs” against the biblical account of creation. The popular media—as with tax-supported zoos, science museums, and public schools—are often zealous supporters of the quasi-scientific religion of materialism.

However, few reporters, teachers, or laymen have ever read the original scientific reports upon which grandiose evolutionary claims are based. Moreover, these reports are often convoluted, conflicting, and couched in unprovable assumptions that make evolutionary claims difficult to evaluate even for those who do examine the original scientific papers.

To evaluate the claims that there are fossil fish with legs that walked out of water to take up permanent residence on the land, one needs to understand something about fish, tetrapods (limbed vertebrates including humans), legs, and what is required anatomically to walk and swim. So let us begin by looking at the wide world of fish, and see which ones are supposed to be the “walkers.”

There Are Lots of Fish!

The first thing to consider is that there are a lot of fish—both living and fossilized. Approximately 25,000 species of currently living fish have been identified, with 200–300 new species discovered—not evolved—every year. Indeed, fish comprise fully half of all known vertebrates!

It is not clear how many different fish species have been found as fossils, but some experts claim that there were once nearly a million species of fish! It appears that over time we have lost a lot of species of fish—and retained relatively fewer. But losing thousands of species of fish is hardly evolution—it’s extinction. The question is, have we really gained any fundamentally new fish (to say nothing of fish that evolved true legs and walked out onto the land as permanent residents)?

Classification of Fish

Fish come in a bewildering variety of forms that defy consistent classification. As a result, there are competing classification schemes based on the particular bias of the classifier.

Basically, all species of fish have been divided into two main types—the jawless fish (hagfish and lampreys) and the jawed fish (all the rest). The jawed fish are, in turn, divided into two groups: the cartilaginous fish (such as the sharks and rays that have a skeleton made of flexible cartilage) and the much more numerous bony fish, which have hard bony skeletons.

Many of the so-called transitional forms have been greatly disputed, discovered (e.g., coelacanth), or dismissed, and Tiktaalik has recently been propped up as the “savior” of the evolutionary paradigm. How soon will it be before Tiktaalik is abandoned also?

Evolutionists believe that it took about 100 million years for invertebrates (animals with no bones) to evolve into vertebrates (animals with backbones). However, no compelling fossil evidence documents this purported major and unambiguous transition. While evolutionists believe that fish were the first true vertebrates, they’re not sure which evolved first—cartilaginous or bony fish.

During the embryological development of vertebrates, most bones develop first as cartilage models that are later replaced by bone (called endochondral bone). Following the dictates of the embryonic recapitulation myth, it would be attractive for evolutionists to propose that cartilaginous fish evolved into bony fish, but most evolutionists consider the cartilaginous fish to be far too specialized to have been the ancestors of the bony fish.

The Bony Fish (Osteicthyii)

Bony fish are by far the most numerous of all fish, comprising about 24,000 living species, and they come in an amazing variety of forms and sizes (ranging from a half-inch-long sea horse weighing a fraction of an ounce to a 1,000-pound blue marlin). The purported evolutionary relationship of all these fish is at best highly speculative.

All bony fish have gills for breathing and fins for swimming. Starting from front to back, the most important fins for swimming are the paired pectoral fins (which are typically attached to the posterior margin of the skull), the generally smaller paired pelvic fins (that occupy a position near the anus), and the caudal fin (tail fin).

Bony fish are divided into two groups, the lobe-finned fish, known mostly from fossils, and the vastly more numerous ray-finned fish. Both have fins made up of bony rays, but the lobe-fins have fin rays mounted on a short, fleshy stalk supported by successive segments of bone. It is the superficial resemblance of these bony fins to tetrapod legs that has led evolutionists to speculate that the lobe-fin fish are the ancestors of tetrapods in the late Devonian (approximately 380 million years ago). So let’s focus our investigation on the lobe-fins.

The Lobe-fin Fish (Sarcopterygii)

The lobe-finned fish have been divided into two rather dissimilar groups, the Dipnoi (lungfish) and the Crossopterygii (coelacanths and fossil relatives).

Lungfish (Dipnoi)

There are only three surviving types of lungfish. They are all eel-like in appearance, and have long and slender fleshy pectoral and pelvic fins, which are highly mobile. This group derives its name from the fact that these fish have air sacks (“lungs”) that function at least partially in breathing (though all, at least in their immature state, have functional gills as well). The fact that these fish can breathe air, survive out of water for long periods of time, and have the ability to pull themselves along on their bellies (i.e., “walk”) across mud flats with the aid of their fins, has caught the imagination of some evolutionists who consider them to be ancestral to tetrapods.
Many Living Fish Are Air-Breathers and “Walkers”

But air-breathing fish are not uncommon among living fish species. For example, many popular aquarium fish (such as the paradise fish, betta, and gourami) are surface air-breathers that can actually drown if kept under water! Evolutionists are not even in agreement on whether lungs evolved before gills (as proposed by the famous vertebrate evolutionist Alfred Romer), or gills evolved before lungs.

Even the sort of “walking” that lungfish engage in is not uncommon among living fish species. Many fish are known to pull themselves along on their bellies, with the help of their pectoral fins, across large expanses of mud flats and even dry land. For example, the northern snakehead (Channa argus) and the walking catfish (Clarias batrachus) are air-breathing fish that can travel overland for considerable distances. The mudskippers are fish that breathe oxygen through their skin and “skip” along on land with the aid of their fleshy fins—indeed some of the larger species are said to skip faster than the average person can run! The climbing perch (Anabas testudineus) not only breathes air and “walks” on land but is even said to be capable of climbing trees! Yet none of these curious fish are considered by evolutionists to be ancestors of tetrapod they are simply interesting and specialized fish. In fact there are even “flying fish” (with specialized fins that permit them to fly or glide in the air for hundreds of yards over water), but evolutionists have never considered them to be ancestors of birds.

Crossopterygians (Snakehead Fish)

Most evolutionists now look to fossil Crossopterygians for the ancestors of tetrapods—even though none of them are known to be capable of either walking or breathing out of water.

The distinguishing features of these fish are the division of the skull into anterior and posterior units (considered similar to embryonic tetrapod skulls); and fleshy pectoral fins containing bony elements (considered similar to tetrapod legs). These similarities have prompted evolutionists to confidently declare that Crossopterygians evolved into tetrapods.

According to evolutionists, the Crossopterygians flourished during the middle to late Devonian (extending from 385 million years ago to 365 million years ago) and all were once believed to have become extinct about 80 million years ago (even before the extinction of the dinosaurs).2

The Coelacanth—One of Many “Living Fossils”

Contrary to early suggestions of walking behavior, coelacanths have only been observed using their fins to swim.

However, in 1938 a fishing trawler netted a strange large blue fish in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Madagascar. This distinctive fish was soon identified as a Crossopterygian fish previously known only from the fossil record as the coelacanth.

Coelacanths are distinctly different from all other living fishes. They have an extra lobe on their tails (compared to other lobe-finned fish) and are the only living animal to have a fully functional joint in their cranium, which allows the front part of the head to be lifted when the fish is feeding.

The discovery of a coelacanth came as a surprise to evolutionists. (It was comparable to finding a living dinosaur, because these fish were believed to have become extinct 80 million years ago when they disappeared from the fossil record.) However, since 1938, dozens of living coelacanths have been found and studied, some as far as 7,000 miles away from the location of the first sightings!3

Understandably, evolutionists are puzzled by how coelacanths could disappear for over “80 million years” and then turn up alive and well in the 20th century. They speculate that the fossilized coelacanths lived in environments favoring fossilization, whereas modern coelacanths live at great depths (over 600 feet) in caves and overhangs of steep marine reefs that don’t favor fossil formation. This, however, is special pleading, since essentially no modern marine environment favors the formation of fossils and, indeed, none are being formed, as this would require rapid burial, which is not observed under normal conditions.

More importantly the coelacanth (and many other “living fossils”) show that evolutionists can never assume that a plant or animal did not live during any particular period of assumed geologic time simply because it does not appear in the fossil record of this period. If 200-pound coelacanths can “hide” for “80 million years,” it would seem anything can hide.

Another reason finding a living coelacanth caused so much surprise at the time of its discovery was that coelacanths were widely believed to be the ancestors of the tetrapods. Indeed, many evolutionists assumed that the very reason the coelacanths disappeared from the fossil record was because they evolved into land-dwelling tetrapods; yet here they were very much alive—and swimming!

Coelacanths Don’t Walk

At the very least, evolutionists expected to observe some hint of walking behavior in the coelacanth, but the fish have done nothing to accommodate them. Although living coelacanths have often been observed swimming in their natural habitat, they have never been observed walking. Indeed, coelacanths have been observed swimming backward, upside-down, and even standing on their head! Alas—they absolutely refuse to walk on land or in the sea.

Evolutionists Look to Other Lobe-Fins

Since living lobe-fin fish have not met expectations, evolutionists have turned to other fossilized lobe-fins for the ancestors of tetrapods. (After all, one can speculate endlessly about fossils without fear of contradiction—until they turn up alive.)

Currently, the three most popular Crossopterygian candidates for ancestors of tetrapods are Eusthenopteron, Panderichthys, and the recently discovered Tiktaalik.

Eusthenopteron

For several years, the evolutionist’s “gold standard” of fish with “legs” has been the fossil fish Eusthenopteron (which, like the coelacanth, has fleshy pectoral fins with bones). If you have seen an artist’s illustration in a textbook showing a fish walking out of the water, most likely it was Eusthenopteron.

Like most other jawed fish, Eusthenopteron has its pectoral fin girdle (bones that anchor the pectoral fins) attached to the back of its skull by means of a dermal bone called the cleithrum. Dermal bones develop directly from connective tissue cells under the skin, rather than from cartilage models as is the case for endochondral bones. (Fish scales, by the way, are dermal bones as well, and reside just under the superficial layer of the skin.)

Panderichthys

Panderichthys is yet another fossil Crossopterygian fish that has been declared to be an ancestor of tetrapods. Panderichthys lacks dorsal and ventral fins and has a relatively small tail fin (thus looking less obviously fish-like than Eusthenopteron).

Like the other Crossopterygian fish, Panderichthys has thick bony pectoral fins. Evolutionists argue that the shape of these fins and their pectoral girdle look more like that of tetrapods than Eusthenopteron. But Daeschler, Shubin, and Jenkin—the discoverers of Tiktaalik—claim that “Panderichthys possesses relatively few tetrapod synapomorphies, and provides only partial insight into the origin of major features of the skull, limbs, and axial skeleton of early tetrapods.” As a result, they insist that “our understanding of major transformations at the fish-tetrapod transition has remained limited.”4

Tiktaalik to the Rescue?

In the April 2006 issue of Nature, Daeschler et al. reported the discovery of several fossilized specimens of a Crossopterygian fish named Tiktaalik roseae. These well-preserved specimens were found in sedimentary layers of siltstone—cross-bedded with sandstones—in Arctic Canada.5

Like the other lobe-fin fish, Tiktaalik was declared to be late Devonian (between 385–359 million years old) by means of a “dating” method known as palynomorph biostratigraphy. This method presumes to date sedimentary rock layers on the basis of the assumed evolutionary age of pollen and spores contained in the rock. Most importantly, the discoverers of Tiktaalik claim that it “represents an intermediate between fish with fins and tetrapods with limbs.”

Tiktaalik Is a Fish

Whatever else we might say about Tiktaalik, it is a fish.

Whatever else we might say about Tiktaalik, it is a fish. In a review article on Tiktaalik (appearing in the same issue of the scientific journal Nature that reported the discovery of Tiktaalik), fish evolution experts Ahlberg and Clack concede that “in some respects Tiktaalik and Panderichthys are straightforward fishes: they have small pelvic fins, retain fin rays in their paired appendages and have well-developed gill arches, suggesting that both animals remained mostly aquatic.”6

In other respects, however, Ahlberg and Clack argue that Tiktaalik is more tetrapod-like than Panderichthys because “the bony gill cover has disappeared, and the skull has a longer snout.” The authors weakly suggest that the significance of all this is that “a longer snout suggests a shift from sucking towards snapping up prey, whereas the loss of gill cover bones probably correlates with reduced water flow through the gill chamber. The ribs also seem larger in Tiktaalik, which may mean it was better able to support its body out of water.”

Without the author’s evolutionary bias, of course, there is no reason to assume that Tiktaalik was anything other than exclusively aquatic. And how do we know that Tiktaalik lost its gill cover as opposed to never having one? The longer snout and lack of bony gill covers (found in many other exclusively aquatic living fish) are interpreted as indicating a reduced flow of water through the gills, which, in turn, is declared to be suggestive of partial air-breathing—but this is quite a stretch. Finally, what does any of this have to do with fish evolving into land-dwelling tetrapods?

Are the Pectoral Fins of Tiktaalik Really Legs?

Before we get into Tiktaalik’s “legs,” it might be instructive to consider an old trick question. If we call our arms “legs,” then how many legs would we have? The answer, of course, is two legs—just because we call our arms “legs” doesn’t make them legs. The same might be said of the bony fins of Crossopterygian fish—we may call them “legs” but that doesn’t necessarily make them legs.

Shubin et al. make much of the claim that Tiktaalik’s bony fins show a reduction in dermal bone and an increase in endochondral bone.7 This is important to them because the limb bones of tetrapods are entirely endochondral. They further claim that the cleithrum (a dermal bone to which the pectoral fin is attached in fish) is detached from the skull, resembling the position of the scapula (shoulder blade) of a tetrapod. They also claim that the endochondral bones of the fin are more similar to those of a tetrapod in terms of structure and range of motion. However, none of this, if true, proves that Tiktaalik’s fins supported its weight out of water, or that it was capable of a true walking motion. (It certainly doesn’t prove that these fish evolved into tetrapods.)

The Limbs of Tetrapods

The limbs of tetrapods share similar characteristic features. These unique features meet the special demands of walking on land. In the case of the forelimbs there is one bone nearest the body (proximal) called the humerus that articulates (flexibly joins) with two bones, the radius and ulna, farther away from the body (distal). These in turn articulate with multiple wrist bones, which finally articulate with typically five digits. The hind limbs similarly consist of one proximal bone, the femur, which articulates with two distal bones, the tibia and fibula, which in turn articulate with ankle bones; and finally with typically five digits. In order to support the weight of the body on land, and permit walking, the most proximal bones of the limbs must be securely attached to the rest of the body. The humerus of the forelimb articulates with the pectoral girdle, which includes the scapula (shoulder blade) and the clavicle (collar bone). The only bony attachment of the pectoral girdle to the body is the clavicle.

The femur of the hind limb articulates with the pelvic girdle, which consists of fused bones collectively called the pelvis (hip bone). It is this hind limb—with its robust pelvic girdle securely attached to the vertebral column—that differs radically from that of any fish. (The tetrapod arrangement is important for bearing the weight of the animal on land.)

All tetrapod limb bones and their attachment girdles are endochondral bones. In the case of all fish, including Tiktaalik, the cleithrum and fin rays are dermal bones.

It is significant that the “earliest” true tetrapods recognized by evolutionists (such as Acanthostega and Ichthyostega) have all of the distinguishing features of tetrapod limbs (and their attachment girdles) and were clearly capable of walking and breathing on land. The structural differences between the tetrapod leg and the fish fin is easily understood when we realize that the buoyant density of water is about a thousand times greater than that of air. A fish has no need to support much of its weight in water where it is essentially weightless.

The Fins of Fish (including Tiktaalik)

Essentially all fish (including Tiktaalik) have small pelvic fins relative to their pectoral fins. The legs of tetrapods are just the opposite: the hind limbs attached to the pelvic girdle are almost always more robust than the forelimbs attached to the pectoral girdle. (This is particularly obvious in animals such as kangaroos and theropod dinosaurs.) Not only are the pelvic fins of all fish small, but they’re not even attached to the axial skeleton (vertebral column) and thus can’t bear weight on land.

While the endochondral bones in the pectoral fins of Crossopterygians have some similarity to bones in the forelimbs of tetrapods, there are significant differences. For example, there is nothing even remotely comparable to the digits in any fish. The bony rays of fish fins are dermal bones that are not related in any way to digits in their structure, function, or mode of development. Clearly, fin rays are relatively fragile and unsuitable for actual walking and weight bearing.

Even the smaller endochondral bones in the distal fin of Tiktaalik are not related to digits. Ahlberg and Clack point out that “although these small distal bones bear some resemblance to tetrapod digits in terms of their function and range of movement, they are still very much components of a fin. There remains a large morphological gap between them and digits as seen in, for example Acanthostega: if the digits evolved from these distal bones, the process must have involved considerable developmental rearranging.”8

So Is Tiktaalik a Missing Link?

Finally, what about the popular claim that Tiktaalik is the “missing link” between fish and tetrapods?

In their review article on Tiktaalik, Ahlberg and Clack tell us that “the concept of ‘missing links’ has a powerful grasp on the imagination: the rare transitional fossils that apparently capture the origins of major groups of organisms are uniquely evocative.” The authors concede that the whole concept of “missing links” has been loaded with “unfounded notions of evolutionary ‘progress’ and with a mistaken emphasis on the single intermediate fossil as the key to understanding evolutionary transition.”

Sadly, “unfounded notions” of this kind continue to be uncritically taught and accepted in the popular media and in our schools. Even more sadly, these unfounded notions have been used to undermine the authority of Holy Scripture.

Footnotes

John Noble Wilford, “Fossil Called Missing Link From Sea to Land Animals,” New York Times, Late Edition—Final, Section A, Page 1, Column 5, April 6, 2006.
“New Fossils Fill the Evolutionary Gap Between Fish and Land Animals,” www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=106807, 2006.
Another was recently caught near Indonesia. See news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6925784.stm.
Edward B. Daeschler, Neil H. Shubin, and Farish A. Jenkins, “A Devonian Tetrapod-like Fish and the Evolution of the Tetrapod Body Plan,” Nature 440 no. 6 (2006): 757–763.
Edward B. Daeschler, Neil H. Shubin, and Farish A. Jenkins, “A Devonian Tetrapod-like Fish and the Evolution of the Tetrapod Body Plan,” Nature 440 no. 6 (2006): 757–763.
P.E. Ahlberg and J.A. Clack, News and Views, Nature 440 no. 6 (2006): 747–749.
Neil H. Shubin, Edward B. Daeschler, and Farish A. Jenkins, “The Pectoral Fin of Tiktaalik roseae and the Origin of the Tetrapod Limb,” Nature 440 no. 6 (2006): 764–771.
Ahlberg and Clack, News and Views.
__________
Banner Fossil for Evolution Is Demoted
https://www.icr.org/article/banner-fossil-for-evolution-demoted/

BY FRANK SHERWIN, D.SC. (HON.), WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27, 2010

Evolutionists celebrated in 1996 the discovery of what they considered to be a clear transitional form between fish fins and land legs in the features of an extinct lobe-finned fish later dubbed Tiktaalik.1 Creation scientists and some evolutionists remained skeptical of this interpretation of the fossilized creature—to the contempt of mainstream paleontologists.2 Those who doubted Tiktaalik’s “missing link” status, however, have been proved right.

Recently, a study in the technical journal Nature examined evidence that tetrapods were walking on open ground “397 million years ago” in what is now Poland.3 But this date is 18 million years earlier than expected, based on the long-held Darwinian view. This evidence, like many others before it, “pushes back evolution.”4 The Nature article stated, “[The tracks] force a radical reassessment of the timing, ecology and environmental setting of the fish-tetrapod transition, as well as the completeness of the body fossil record.”3

The evolutionary story goes that lobe-finned fishes clumsily crawled out of water and onto land millions of years ago. Some of these animals subsequently evolved into Tiktaalik-like creatures, with better working legs. But after Cambridge paleontologist Jennifer Clack reviewed the timing of these Polish tracks, she told UK newspaper The Guardian, “It blows the whole story out of the water, so to speak.”5

Whatever made the tracks in Poland does not look transitional, because they “were walking” with “stout legs.”5 How could fully-formed land walkers have evolved from lobe-finned fish if they were walking around in a time before the fishes’ ancestors were alive?

According to the creation science model, these fossil tracks were formed along with most fossils during the single year of Noah’s Flood. Thus, although one would expect to find an ecological grade from marine to terrestrial life appearing vertically through sedimentary rocks (since marine animals would naturally have been buried first), one would not expect evolutionary relationships to be borne out in fossils. And indeed they are not.

Tiktaalik needs to be removed from textbooks and museum displays where it is currently positioned as a creature with key transitional features. The evolutionary story of how fish sprouted limbs just went back to square one. The slate is blank, and it can either be filled in with a new speculative story about how sea life moved onto land—or with a new paradigm altogether.

References

Shubin, N. H., E. B. Daeschler, and F. A Jenkins. 2006. The pectoral fin of Tiktaalik roseae and the origin of the tetrapod limb. Nature. 440 (7085): 764-771.
See Sherwin, F. 2006. Tiktaalik: Our Ancestor? ICR News. Posted on icr.org April 11, 2006, accessed January 21, 2010. For instance, creation paleontologist Kurt Wise suggested that Tiktaalik’s features would have worked well in the marshy interface between open water and land, making it well suited to an ecological transition. But it didn’t show signs of evolutionary transition.
Niedzwiedzki, G. et al. 2010. Tetrapod trackways from the early Middle Devonian period of Poland. Nature. 463 (7277): 43-48.
Roach, J. Oldest Land-Walker Tracks Found—Pushes Back Evolution. National Geographic Daily News. Posted on news.nationalgeographic.com January 6, 2010, accessed January 21, 2010.
McVeigh, K. Footprints show tetrapods walked on land 18m years earlier than thought. The Guardian. Posted on guardian.co.uk January 6, 2010, accessed January 21, 2010.

TheloniousSphereMonk: Holy spamathon, Batman!!!

TheloniousSphereMonk: Bobby, why the redux??

GeraldtheGnome: Why do either of you go against anything about evolution when your own book has things for the creation theory and includes verses that show that there was support for evolution well before the word was first used ?

zeffur: Evolution is fiction. If you can prove otherwise, then show a sound case for your erroneous beliefs...

zeffur: My Position:

My position has NOT changed. Abiogenesis & evolution are imaginary, irrational, absurd, & indefensible evo cult claptrap & that is a FACT! There is literally NO unbiased, credible, & empirical evidence, proven & verifiable facts, & sound reasoning that can show that either delusional belief is true or has ever occurred. Anyone who believes such ridiculous absurdities is as gullible as they come... There is NO sound reason to accept the absurd notions of evo cult believers.
What they believe is nothing but a stupid myth...

zeffur: A fact must be true or it isn't a fact. If your 'scientific' facts aren't proven true then you do NOT know that they are true--hence it is DISHONEST to claim that they are facts when you do NOT have the proof that they are true.

zeffur: Evo culters have no sound case that proves that evolution is true or has ever actually occurred. When directly questioned for actual verifiable unbiased, credible, & empirical evidence, proven facts, & sound reasoning, they have nothing credible to offer. They just peddle their irrational & indefensible claptrap stories/assumptions/opinions/claims/etc.

Evo culters ignore the available evidence that doesn't fit their confused, irrational, & delusional beliefs & pretend that the origin of the cosmos from nothing doesn't matter, when in fact it matters a lot! The cosmos/nature has no intelligence or capability to originate & evolve itself & life. We know this because we have studied nature & life for generations & we have found NO unbiased & credible evidence or sound reasoning of any kind that substantiates that the cosmos/nature has ANY intelligence or capability to originate & evolve itself & life.

1. The universe is finely-tuned to very precise quantities that cause it to exist. Small variations in such fine-tuning & matter & other things could not form/function properly.

2. The earth has all that it needs for life to survive on it. Without our planetary composition, nuclear & molten core, magnetosphere, & proximity to the sun, earth would not have an atmosphere or liquid water, as it would boil off from the extremes of solar & cosmic radiation.

3. Mankind has known for millennia (it's documented history) that the God of Abraham, Isaac, & Jacob exists because God revealed Himself to them, blessed them, & commanded them to document how the universe & all life came to exist & how kinds reproduce only with their own kinds & not with other kinds. There is ZERO credible evidence or sound case to the contrary that has ever been shown that any new kind has ever emerged from any existing kind. What would any purported new kind breed with, since it would not be able to breed with its own kind anymore?? There is also zero proof or any sound case that any series of mutations have ever occurred that has led to any new kind. Beliefs & opinions to the contrary aren't proven facts--they are indefensible notions.

4. Secularists have no proof & no sound case to substantiate that abiogenesis or evolution are valid/true or have ever occurred. Evolution is a proven 100% indefensible lie & fraud that has NO sound basis whatsoever. It is not even a valid theory, as it has never ever been proven to be true or having ever actually occurred. Evolutioners have failed to meet their burden of proof for their absurd & indefensible claims. There is NO sound reason to accept that abiogenesis or evolution are valid/true or have ever occurred. This is the reason that sane, honest, rational, well-informed, & intelligent people reject the myth of abiogenesis & the myth of evolution. Such notions are relegated as a myth/fairy tale to atheist & other nitwits.

5. The Bible provides the ONLY reasonable/rational explanation for how the universe & life came to exist. All other claims are nothing but claptrap fiction.

If they can prove otherwise, then a Nobel Prize awaits them! (which none of them can prove, obviously!)

Immense intelligence & power are required to originate the universe & all life.

GeraldTheGnumbnut: If it's the science of evolution, it follows that it must be science.
Own goal!

zeffur: Evolution is not science--it is science fiction. Science should be about studying real phenomena & documenting the truth that can be known about it. Evolution does NONE of that. It peddles a myth that it has never met the burden of proof to substantiate that it is true or that it has ever actually occurred. It just peddles the fiction that it is true--when there is no proof that it is actually true...