The Webs They Weave

The Practice of Deceit 

For the Darwinists and the evolutionists, the Fossil Record has turned out to be a fizzer.  Well, more than a fizzer--it is now a downright embarrassment.  But don't tell the natives.

As youngsters we recall being inveigled with grand pictures in the Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia portraying the evolution of the horse.  Gradually, over millions and millions of years the horse evolved from a nothing to a something, and all the stages of gradual adaptation and change were catalogued in glorious technicolour, until a grand magnificent stallion was portrayed racing across the plains.

A picture can paint a thousand words, they say--and who needed hard evidence in the face of such compelling images?  But as Stephen Jay Gould--the Archbishop of the Grand Church of Evolutionism--once candidly admitted, those pictures represented a "just so" story, with little or no basis in research or evidence.  It was a fairy story that evolutionists liked to tell their children around the fire on a snowy winter's night.

Here is Gould the scientist versus Gould the ideologue:

New species almost always appeared suddenly in the fossil record with no intermediate links to ancestors in older rocks of the same region. . . . The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.  The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. . . . Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth . . . . In any local area, a species doe snot arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and "fully formed".  [Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution's Erratic Pace", Natural History, May 1977, p.12, 14.]

The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago possesses one of the most comprehensive fossil collections in the world.  In 1979, its Dean, Dr David Raup wrote:

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 still hasn't changed much.  The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky, and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition 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 appears 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", Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Vol. 50, No. 1, January 1979, p. 25.  Cited by Douglas Kelly, in Creation and Change: Genesis 1:1--2.4 in the Light of Changing Scientific Paradigms (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications, 2015), p.90.]

Naturally paleontologists have felt compelled to construct possible, theoretical explanations for a problem such as this--that is, little to no evidence for Darwinism.  One such suggestion has been "saltationism" which has evolution still being true, but proceeding by means of sudden jumps.  That is, no intermediate evolutionary transitions.  One day you had a mouse, then hey presto, the next you had a horse.  However, as curmudgeon, Richard Dawkins put it--that sounds suspiciously like creation.  Oh dear.  Never mind.

But, let's be clear on this: the overwhelming majority of people alive today in the West believe with the utmost certainty that Darwinian evolutionism is true.  Because they have been told so.  By "experts".  By scientists.  Repeatedly and endlessly.  It is the greatest just-so fairy story on earth.  Doubtless future generations will look back and shake their heads at the folly of one of the most stupid generations in the history of mankind.  Evolutionism will likely be judged the flat-earthism of its day.  But at least it made for wonderful pictures in a children's encyclopaedia.