Timothy Birdnow

Fossils - Evidence AGAINST evolution

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1701-fossils-evidence-against-evolution

From a peer-reviewed paper by Gene Hunt in 2007: 1
"Directional evolution is rarely observed within lineages traced through the fossil record. Only ≈5% of cases (13 of 251) are best fit by the directional evolution model (...)
Some previous paleontological studies have used a model of directional change in which evolutionary changes proceed at an absolutely constant rate in the same direction indefinitely (11). Although of heuristic value, most would agree that this model is not realistic over paleontological time scales. (...)
I have used these methods to analyze many fossil sequences, but even the most promising examples (e.g., refs. 21 and 22) do not support models of sustained directional change, although single interval punctuations are sometimes implied (unpublished data). Thus, even relaxing the assumption that evolutionary mode is uniform within lineages, we are still led to the conclusion that directional change is rarely observed over paleontologically significant time scales. (...)
Despite the commonness of stasis, there is little consensus about its cause or causes."

Charles Doolittle Walcott, a paleontologist and Secretary (1907-1927) of the Smithsonian, began research in the fossil-bearing Burgess Shale region in the Rocky Mountains, Canada, and unearthed one of the greatest finds in the history of paleontology: the first fossils of Cambrian creatures 530 million years old. These approximately 530-million-year-old fossils entirely eliminated the false reasoning of gradual evolution. Yet they were brought out from where they had been stored and presented to the world only after 70 years had gone by. Walcott, a committed Darwinist, had decided to conceal the fossils he had obtained rather than sharing his findings with his fellow scientists. The Burgess Shale fossils were brought to light only in 1985, when the museum archives were reexamined. The Israeli scientist Gerald Schroeder comments: "Had Walcott wanted, he could have hired a phalanx of graduate students to work on the fossils. But he chose not to rock the boat of evolution. Today fossil representatives of the Cambrian era have been found in China, Africa, the British Isles, Sweden, Greenland. The [Cambrian] explosion was worldwide. But before it became proper to discuss the extraordinary nature of the explosion, the data were simply not reported” (Schroeder, 2000).

"A record of pre-Cambrian animal life, it appears, simply does not exist. Why this lamentable blank? Various theories have been proposed; none is too satisfactory. It has been suggested, for example, that all the Pre-Cambrian sediments were deposited on continental areas, and the absence of fossils in them is due to the fact that all the older animals were seadwellers. But that all these older sediments were continental is a theory which opposes, without proof, everything we know of deposition in later times. Again, it is suggested that the Pre-Cambrian seas were poor in calcium carbonate, necessary for the production of preservable skeletons; but this is not supported by geochemical evidence. Yet again, it is argued that even though conditions were amenable to the formation of fossilizable skeletal parts, the various phyla only began to use these possibilities at the dawn of the Cambrian. But it is, a priori, hard to believe that the varied types present in the early Cambrian would all have, so to speak, decided to put on armour simultaneously. And, once again, it has been argued that the whole evolution of multicellular animals took place with great rapidity in late Pre-Cambrian times, so that a relatively short gap in rock deposition would account for the absence of any record of their rise. Perhaps; but the known evolutionary rate in most groups from the Cambrian on is a relatively leisurely one, and it is hard to convince oneself that a sudden major burst of evolutionary advance would be so promptly followed by a marked 'slowdown'. All in all, there is no satisfactory answer to the Pre-Cambrian riddle."

Romer Alfred S. [late Professor of Zoology, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University], "The Procession of Life," The World Publishing Co: Cleveland OH, 1968, pp.19-20.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:21 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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