The Antiquity of Dinosaurs

Will Darwinism End With a Big Bang? 10/08/2007
We may be seeing the end of Darwinism as we know it. Eugene Koonin of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, has written a devastating critique of traditional Darwinism in an open-source journal, Biology Direct.1 Koonin, an evolutionist himself, basically said that all major life forms, with all their complexity, appear suddenly in the record without intermediate forms, and this fact can no longer be denied.

Quote:

Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin's original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution. The cases in point include the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla. In each of these pivotal nexuses in life's history, the principal "types" seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate "grades" or intermediate forms between different types are detectable. .....

Rubbish. That FAQ on Talk Origins is well researched and provides decent references for each and every single example mentioned.

http://www.answersincreation.org/transitional_fossils.htm

Young Earth Creationism and the denial of the existence of transitional fossils are both delusional.

"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing'
evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the
most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record.
Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does
not provide them ..."

David B. Kitts, PhD (Zoology)
Head Curator, Dept of Geology, Stoval Museum
Evolution, vol 28, Sep 1974, p 467

"The curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps;
the fossils are missing in all the important places."

Francis Hitching
The Neck of the Giraffe or Where Darwin Went Wrong
Penguin Books, 1982, p.19

"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."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
"Is a new general theory of evolution emerging?"
Paleobiology, vol 6, January 1980, p. 127

"...Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when
they say there are no transitional fossils ... I will lay it on the line,
there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight
argument."

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist,
British Museum of Natural History, London
As quoted by: L. D. Sunderland
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 89

"We do not have any available fossil group which can categorically be
claimed to be the ancestor of any other group. We do not have in the fossil
record any specific point of divergence of one life form for another, and
generally each of the major life groups has retained its fundamental
structural and physiological characteristics throughout its life history
and has been conservative in habitat."

G. S. Carter, Professor & author
Fellow of Corpus Christi College
Cambridge, England
Structure and Habit in Vertebrate Evolution
University of Washington Press, 1967

"The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with
gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during
their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the
same as when they disappear ... 2. Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a
species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its
ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
Natural History, 86(5):13, 1977

"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?" (p. 206)

"Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such
intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely
graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps is the most obvious and gravest
objection which can be urged against my theory (of evolution)." (p. 292)

Charles Robert Darwin
The Origin of Species, 1st edition reprint
Avenel Books, 1979

The Abundance of Fossils

"Darwin... was embarrassed by the fossil record... 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, ... 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."

David M. Raup, Curator of Geology
Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago
"Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology"
Field Museum of Natural History
Vol. 50, No. 1, (Jan, 1979), p. 25

"Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological
exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely
more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been
discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are
filled with over 100-million fossils of 250,000 different species. The
availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit
objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What
is the picture which the fossils have given us? ... The gaps between major
groups of organisms have been growing even wide and more undeniable. They
can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection
of the fossil record."

Luther D. Sunderland (Creationist)
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems,
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 9

"My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more
than 40 years have completely failed. ... The fossil material is now so
complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack
of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to the scarcity of
material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled."

Prof N. Heribert Nilsson
Lund University, Sweden
Famous botanist and evolutionist
As quoted in: The Earth Before Man, p. 51


"The family trees which adorn our text books are based on inference,
however, reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
"Evolution's Erratic Pace"
Natural History, May, 1977, p. 13

"... if man evolved from an apelike creature he did so without leaving a
trace of that evolution in the fossil record."

Lord Solly Zuckerman, MA, MD, DSc (Anatomy)
Prof. of anatomy, University of Birmingham
Chief scientific advisor, United Kingdom
Beyond the Ivory Tower
Taplinger Publishing Company, 1970, p 64

"The entire hominid (a so-called 'ape-man' fossil) collection know today
would barely cover a billiard table... Ever since Darwin... preconceptions
have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man."

John Reader
"Whatever Happened to Zinjanthropus?
New Scientist, March 26, 1981, pp. 802-805

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

"Modern apes, for instance, seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have
no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans -- of
upright, naked, tool-making, big-brained beings -- is, to be honest with
ourselves, an equally mysterious matter."

Dr. Lyall Watson
"The Water People"
Science Digest, May 1982, p 44.

"The fossil record pertaining to man is still so sparsely known that those
who insist on positive declarations can do nothing more than jump from one
hazardous surmise to another and hope that the next dramatic discovery does
not make them utter fools... As we have seen, there are numerous scientists
and popularizers today who have the temerity to tell us that there is 'no
doubt' how man originated. If only they had the evidence..."

William R. Fix
The Bone Peddlers (Macmillan, 1984), pp. 150

"A five million year old piece of bone that was thought to be a collarbone
of a humanlike creature is actually part of a dolphin rib... The problem
with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid
that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone."

Dr. Tim White
Evolutionary anthropologist
University of California at Berkeley
New Scientist, April 28, 1983, p. 199

"...not being a paleontologist, I don't want to pour too much scorn on
paleontologists, but if you were to spend your life picking up bones and
finding little fragments of head and little fragments of jaw, there's a
very strong desire to exaggerate the importance of those fragments..."

Greg Kerby
From an address to the Biology Teachers
Association of South Australia, 1976

"Echoing the criticism made of his father's Homo habilis skulls, he
(Richard Leakey) added that Lucy's skull was so incomplete that most of it
was 'imagination, made of plaster of paris,' thus making it impossible to
draw any firm conclusion about what species she belonged to."

Richard Leakey (Son of Louis Leakey)
Director of National Museums of Kenya, Africa
The Weekend Australian, May 7-8, 1983, p. 3

"The evidence given above makes it overwhelmingly likely that Lucy was no
more than a variety of pygmy chimpanzee, and walked the same way (awkwardly
upright on occasions, but mostly quadrupedal). The 'evidence' for the
alleged transformation from ape to man is extremely unconvincing."

Albert W. Mehlert, Former Evolutionist &
paleoanthropology researcher
"Lucy - Evolution's Solitary Claim for Ape/Man"
Creation Research Society Quarterly,
Vol 22, No. 3, (Dec 1985), p. 145


"One of the major unsolved problems of geology and evolution is the
occurrence of diversified, multi-cellular marine invertebrates in Lower
Cambrian rocks on all the continents and their absence in rocks of greater
age."

D. Axelrod,
Science 128:7, 1958

"The geological record has so far provided no evidence as to the origin of
the fishes ..."

J. R. Norman, Dept of Zoology
British Museum of Natural History, London
"Classification and pedigrees: fossils"
A History of Fishes, Dr P.H. Greenwood (editor)
British Museum of Natural History, 1975, p. 343

"There are no intermediate forms between finned and limbed creatures in the
fossil collections of the world."

Gordon Rattray Taylor
Award-winning science writer
Former editor of the BBC's "Horizon" series
The Great Evolution Mystery,
Harper & Row, 1983, p. 60

"The [evolutionary] origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There
is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change
from reptile to bird was achieved."

W.E. Swinton, British Museum of Natural History
Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds
A.J. Marshall (editor), Vol 1, Academic Press
New York, 1960, p. 1

"The evolution of the horse provides one of the keystones in teaching of
evolutionary doctrine, though the actual story depends to a large extent
upon who is telling it and when the story is being told. In fact one could
easily discuss the evolution of the story of the evolution of the horse."

Prof G. A. Kerkut
Dept of Physiology & Biochemistry
University of Southhampton
Implications of Evolution
Pergamon Press, London, 1960, p 144

"The family tree of the horse is beautiful and continuous only in the
textbooks. ...... The construction of the whole Cenozoic family tree of the
horse is therefore a very artificial one, since it is put together from
non-equivalent parts ..."

Prof N. Heribert Nilsson
Lund University, Sweden
Famous botanist and evolutionist
Synthetische Artbildung
Verlag CWE Gleerup Press

"It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned
as a student ... have now been 'debunked'. Similarly, my own experience of
more than twenty years looking for evolutionary lineages among the Mesozoic
Brachiopoda has proven them equally elusive."

Prof. Derek Ager
Dept of Geology, Imperial College, London
"The nature of the fossil record."
Proc. Geological Assoc. Vol. 87, 1976, p. 132


"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing
in the progress of science. It is useless."

Prof. Louis Bounoure, Former:
President Biological Society of Strassbourg,
Director of the Strassbourg Zoological Museum,
Director of Research at the
French National Centre of Scientific Research
The Advocate, March 8, 1984, p. 17

"Today our duty is to destroy the myth of evolution, considered as a
simple, understood, and explained phenomenon which keeps rapidly unfolding
before us. ... The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since
some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and
refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and falsity of their beliefs."

Pierre-Paul Grasse
past-President, French Acadamie des Science
Evolution of Living Organisms
Academic Press, New York, 1977, p 8

"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."

Malcolm Muggeridge
Well-known Journalist and philosopher
Pascal Lectures, University of Waterloo

"After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle,
science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a
mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort
could not be proved to take place today, had, in truth, taken place in the
primeval past."

Loren Eiseley, Ph.D. Anthropology
The Immense Journey
Random House, NY, 1957, p. 199

"Scientists who utterly reject Evolution may be one of our fastest- growing
controversial minorities... Many of the scientists supporting this position
hold impressive credentials in science."

Larry Hatfield
"Educators Against Darwin"
Science Digest Special, Winter 1979, pp. 94-96

"Today, a hundred and twenty-eight years after it was first promulgated,
the Darwinian theory of evolution stands under attack as never before. ...
The fact is that in recent times there has been increasing dissent on the
issue within academic and professional ranks, and that a growing number of
respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp. It is
interesting, moreover, that for the most part these 'experts' have
abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical
persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances
regretfully, as one could say."

"We are told dogmatically that Evolution is an established fact; but we are
never told who has established it, and by what means. We are told, often
enough, that the doctrine is founded upon evidence, and that indeed this
evidence 'is henceforward above all verification, as well as being immune
from any subsequent contradiction by experience'; but we are left entirely
in the dark on the crucial question wherein, precisely, this evidence
consists."

Wolfgang Smith, Mathematician and Physicist
Prof. of Mathematics, Oregon State University
Former math instructor at MIT
Teilhardism and the New Religion:
A Thorough Analysis of the Teachings of de Chardin
Tan Books & Publishers, 1988, pp. 1-2

"Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are
great con-men, and the story they are telling may be the greatest hoax
ever. In explaining evolution we do not have one iota of fact."

Dr. T. N. Tahmisian, Physiologist
Atomic Energy Commission. As quoted in:
Evolution and the Emperor's New Clothes,
3D Enterprises Limited, 1983, title page

"In fact, evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all
scientists accepted it and many are prepared to 'bend' their observations
to fit in with it."

H. J. Lipson, F.R.S.
"A physicist looks at evolution"
Physics Bulletin, vol 31, 1980

"One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, was ...
it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years and
there was not one thing I knew about it. That's quite a shock to learn that
one can be so misled so long. ...so for the last few weeks I've tried
putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. Question
is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that
is true? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of
Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the
members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of
Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was
silence for a long time and eventually one person said, 'I do know one
thing -- it ought not to be taught in high school'."

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Palaeontologist
British Museaum of Natural History, London
Keynote address at the
American Museum of Natural History,
New York City, 5 November, 1981

"The twentieth century would be incomprehensible without the Darwinian
revolution. The social and political currents which have swept the world in
the past eighty years would have been impossible without its intellectual
sanction. ... The influence of the evolutionary theory on fields far
removed from biology is one of the most spectacular examples in history of
how a highly speculative idea for which there is no really hard scientific
evidence can come to fashion the thinking of a whole society and dominate
the outlook of an age. Considering its historic significance and the social
and moral transformation it caused in western thought, one might have hoped
that Darwinian theory ... a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory
that literally changed the world, would have been something more than
metaphysics, something more than a myth."

Michael Denton, Molecular Biologist
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
Adler and Adler, 1985, p. 358

"One is forced to conclude that many scientists and technologists pay
lip-service to Darwinian theory only because it supposedly excludes a
Creator..."

Dr. Michael Walker
Senior Lecturer, Anthropology, Sydney University
Quadrant, Oct 1982, p. 44

"I think we need to go further than this and admit that the only acceptable
explanation is creation. I know this is an anathema to physicists, as
indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if
the experimental evidence supports it."

H. S. Lipson
Prof of Physics, University of Manchester
A paper published by The Institute of Physics
IOP Publishing Ltd., 1980

"In a certain sense, the debate transcends the confrontation between
evolutionists and creationists. We now have a debate within the scientific
community itself; it is a confrontation between scientific objectivity and
ingrained prejudice - between logic and emotion - between fact and fiction.
" (pp. 6-7)

"...In the final analysis, objective scientific logic has to prevail - no
matter what the final result is - no matter how many time-honored idols
have to be discarded in the process." (p. 8)

"... After all, it is not the duty of science to defend the theory of
evolution, and stick by it to the bitter end - no matter what illogical and
unsupported conclusions it offers.... If in the process of impartial
scientific logic, they find that creation by outside superintelligence is
the solution to our quandary, then let's cut the umbilical cord that tied
us down to Darwin for such a long time. It is choking us and holding us
back." (pp. 214-215)

"... every single concept advanced by the theory of evolution (and amended
thereafter) is imaginary as it is not supported by the scientifically
established facts of microbiology, fossils, and mathematical probability
concepts. Darwin was wrong." (p. 209)

"... The theory of evolution may be the worst mistake made in science." (p.
210)

I. L. Cohen, Mathematician, Researcher, Author,
Member New York Academy of Sciences
Officer of the Archaeological Institute of America
Darwin Was Wrong - A Study in Probabilities
New Research Publications, Inc., 1984.

The irony of your posts is astounding.

It's very easy to know next to nothing about a subject, then spout utter crap about it and argue against the crap, like you do. Now I have to read every single damned quote to see where you've taken it out of context and if you haven't taken it out of context, where the logic falls flat on its face. This might take a while...

The simpler alternative of just grasping the fact that no competent scientist believes in gradualistic evolution any more wouldn't occur to you, would it?

gungasnake wrote:

The simpler alternative of just grasping the fact that no competent scientist believes in gradualistic evolution any more wouldn't occur to you, would it?

It is blatantly wrong and every competent scientist I have talked to has believed in gradualistic evolution, Gunga.....

As I noted, pretty much EVERYBODY with anything like brains or talent who's ever commented on the subject over the last 50 years...

When somebody basically just makes noise without having anything to say, I pretty much ignore them.

Have you ever considered changing your name to "The Cowardly Lion"

[ bogus claims of all quotes being out of context, "supported" by links to ideological talk.origins website... ] and then:

This stuff is way out of date. Find some new material.

Will Darwinism End With a Big Bang? 10/08/2007
We may be seeing the end of Darwinism as we know it. Eugene Koonin of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, has written a devastating critique of traditional Darwinism in an open-source journal, Biology Direct.1 Koonin, an evolutionist himself, basically said that all major life forms, with all their complexity, appear suddenly in the record without intermediate forms, and this fact can no longer be denied.

Quote:

Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin's original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution. The cases in point include the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla. In each of these pivotal nexuses in life's history, the principal "types" seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate "grades" or intermediate forms between different types are detectable.....

What you present is basically a lame attempt at what politicians call "damage control" and spin. The quotes I cite in these arguments about intermediate fossils stand alone and do not require any context.

So you STILL haven't told us why you are covering for your commie loving Republican buddies. Who have, among other things, done the following:

WTO entrance for Communist China: under Bush administration

Preferred Nation Status for Communist China: under Bush Administration

$230+ Billion trade deficit with Communist China and heading for a new record this year: under Bush Adminstration

Massive move of high technology and tons of God-fearing American jobs to Communist China: under Bush Administration

Your best and ONLY response is:

Quote:
When somebody basically just makes noise without having anything to say, I pretty much ignore them.


So Godless communists who FORCE people with more than one child to have abortions, by law; outlaw and ruthlessly suppress religion, and send people to prison because they want to surf the web should be subsidized by Americans to the tune of $230 billion a year. With Bush/Cheney and the Republicans blessing, no less, and you think this not worthy of response.


Yet you want to talk about one professor at one U.S. university!!!