Icons of Evolution

Main Sources:

Icons of Evolution by Johnathon Wells

In the Beginning by Walt Brown

Biblical Theology of Missions by John P. Harrigan

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Illustration by Rudolph Zallinger from 1965 likely based upon drawings in Huxley’s 1863 book about evolution.

How many transitional fossils have been found?

Zero

Although many have claimed (with great fanfare) to have found a transitional hominid fossils, they invariably (and often discreetly) are revealed to be mistakes or outright misrepresentations.

Lucy

Lucy is an extinct form of ape—with no human parts. She likely swung from the trees and was like pygmy chimpanzees. In 2006, a partial Australopithecus afarensis specimen—a 3-year-old baby—with clear apelike features—was announced. Experts have classified every supposed human ancestor fossil as an extinct ape, an extinct human, a mystery, or a fraud. At least some evolutionary experts disagree on every one as a human ancestor.

Africa, 1974

“Lucy”

Australopithecine Anatomy

Experts now consider the skulls of Peking “man” to be the remains of apes that were systematically decapitated and exploited for food by true man. Its classification, Homo erectus, is considered by most experts to be a category that should never have been created.

Peking man

China, 1921

Forgery: It was found to have consisted of the altered mandible and some teeth of an orangutan deliberately combined with the cranium of a fully developed, though small-brained, modern human.

Piltdown man

England, 1912

Nebraska man was mistakenly based on one tooth of an extinct pig. Yet in 1922, The Illustrated London News published this picture showing our supposed ancestors.

Nebraska man

Nebraska, USA, 1912

Forty years after he discovered Java “man,” Eugene Dubois conceded that it was not a man, but was like a large gibbon (an ape). In citing evidence to support this new conclusion, Dubois admitted that he had withheld parts of four other thigh bones of apes found in the same area.

Java man

Island of Java, Indonesia, 1891

For about 100 years, the world was led to believe that Neanderthal man was stooped and apelike. This false idea was based upon some Neanderthals with bone diseases, such as arthritis and rickets. Recent dental and x-ray studies of Neanderthals suggest that they were humans who matured at a slower rate and lived to be much older than people today. Neanderthal man, Heidelberg man, and Cro-Magnon man are now considered completely human. Artists’ drawings of “ape-men,” especially their fleshy portions, are often quite imaginative and are not supported by the evidence.

Neanderthals, etc.

Since early times, man has advanced technologically. (Gen 4:21–22) This was largely inevitable. (Gen 11:6) However, man has regressed physically, mentally, and spiritually. (Gen 3, 5, 11) The reality is that we are becoming weaker, sicker, smaller, and more wicked with each generation.

Bigger, stronger, smarter?

Darwin’s Tree of Life

Does the fossil record match the theory of slow changes over time leading to new species, kinds, and increasingly more complex organisms?

Typical Evolutionary “Tree of Life”

Predicted Evolutionary Tree

Definitive “Transitional Forms”

Gradual Evolution

Clear “Common Ancestors”

Predicted evolution of animal phyla

Actual animal phyla fossils:

The Cambrian Explosion

Morphology

Time

Darwinian Model

Actual Data

Sudden appearance of complex creatures

Created after their kind

Tree of life

December 4, 1995

Fossil Record: Missing Chains

Single cell Invertebrate

Invertebrate Vertebrate (fish)

Fish Amphibian

Amphibian Reptile

Reptile Bird/mammal

Ape-like creature Human

Ernst Haeckel

(1834-1919)

Nine years after Darwin published his theory of evolution, Professor Ernst Haeckel announced that animal embryos, including unborn humans, pass through stages that mimic their evolutionary ancestors. Human embryos begin as microscopic spheres, because, Haeckel said, humans evolved from bacteria, which are sometimes microscopic spheres. Later, unborn babies look like fish, because humans evolved from fish. Still later, human embryos look like chimpanzees, because humans evolved from some apelike ancestor. So, human embryos are not yet human.

“To support his case, he [Haeckel] began to fake evidence. Charged with fraud by five professors and convicted by a university court at Jena, he agreed that a small percentage of his embryonic drawings were forgeries; he was merely filling in and reconstructing the missing links when the evidence was thin, and he claimed unblushingly that ‘hundreds of the best observers and biologists lie under the same charge’.” Pitman, p. 120.

Haeckel faked his drawings to fit his theory. In the following 140 years, hundreds of textbook writers copied these drawings, popularizing the theory. Haeckel’s theory has since been taught as fact worldwide, even in medical schools. Today, although the theory is completely discredited, it is still taught.

Glenco Biology- Living Systems (1998), p. 311

Vestigial Structures

This is “all that is left of the tail that most mammals still use…”�(June 2004)

Vestigial Structures

Vestigial Structures

In 1895 prominent German anatomist Robert Wiedersheim compiled a list of eighty-six “vestigial” human structures, plus about a hundred he considered “retrogressive” (on their way to becoming functionless). However, as medical knowledge has increased, at least some functions of all these structures have been discovered.

Vestigial Structures

Darwin’s Finches

Darwin’s Finches

When young Darwin visited the Galápagos Islands in 1835, he collected specimens of local wildlife, including some finches. 14 species of finches are scattered among the two dozen or so volcanic islands, which differ mainly in beak size and shape. According to evolutionism, they descended from birds that arrived from the mainland in the distant past, and since their beaks are adapted to the different foods they eat, it seems they are a result of natural selection and thus stand as classic example Darwinian evolution.

Research by Peter and Rosemary Grant throughout the 1970s

During the early 1970s the islands received regular rainfall (~5 inches). However, in 1977 only about an inch fell, which caused a severe reduction in the availability of seeds, and thus the populations of finches. Those birds that survived and reproduced were those with slightly larger beaks who were capable of cracking the large, tough seeds that remained. As a result of the drought, the average beak depth of medium ground finches increased about 5%.

Definitive proof of the evolution of the finches?

Nope, in the winter of 1982-83, an El Niño brought heavy rains to the Galápagos (over ten times more than normal), and with the abundance of food supply, the average beak size in medium ground finches returned to its previous value. Thus, the evolutionary change that the Grants had their colleagues had observed during the drought of 1977 was reversed by the heavy rains of 1983, and there was no net evolutionary change.

“Typical” moth

Peppered Moths

“Melanic” moth

Peppered Moths

During the 19th century, British scientists observed that peppered moths (Biston betularia) began to change colors over time, especially near heavily polluted cities. Before the industrial revolution, they were mostly “typical” (or “peppered”), mostly light gray with some black speckles, with some coal-black “melanic” forms. However, by the turn of the century more than 90% of the peppered moths near some industrial cities in England were melanic, and the phenomenon was labeled “industrial melanism.”

Peppered Moths

Kettlewell marked several hundred peppered moths, typical as well as melanic, with tiny dots of paint on the underside of their wings, and released them by day onto nearby tree trunks in the polluted Birmingham woodland. On the following nights he set out traps to recapture as many as he could, catching 27.5% of the melanics and 13.0% of the typical. Thus, he concluded that a much higher proportion of melanic had survived predation, and that “birds act as selection agents, as postulated by evolutionary theory.”

Peppered Moths

Kettlewell immediately dubbed his own results as “Darwin’s missing evidence,” and the scientific community began to rave in unison.Following the passage of anti-pollution legislation in the 1950’s, industrial melanism generally began to decrease throughout England, which continued to bolster the belief in natural selection due to camouflage. Thus, industrial melanism in peppered moths became the classic textbook example of natural selection in action.

Peppered Moths

As time went on, however, biologists began to look beyond the area where Kettlewell had conducted his experiments, and they began to find discrepancies in moth distribution, which brought the role of lichens in Kettlewell’s experiments into question.

Peppered Moths

The death knell for Kettlewell’s experiment came in early 1980s when Finnish zoologists conducted experiments to assess the normal resting places of peppered moths. They concluded that they did not normally rest on tree trunks, but rather on horizontal branches high up in the tree canopy. By releasing moths onto nearby tree trunks in daylight, Kettlewell had created an artificial situation that does not exist in nature.

Peppered Moths

The question naturally arises, “If peppered moths don’t rest on tree trunks, then where did all those pictures of moths on trunks come from?” The answer is simply that they were staged. Some were made using dead specimens that were glued or pinned to the trunk, while others used live specimens that were manually placed in desired positions, since they are torpid in the daylight and remain where they are put.

Peppered Moths

In the end, the entire example is pointless in its use as evidence for evolution. Though the moths changed color, they remained peppered moths. The only thing that happened was a change in proportion of two varieties of pre-existing moths, and though dramatic it was no more impressive than the changes domestic breeders have been producing for centuries. Like Darwin’s finches, it demonstrated nothing more than gene frequencies shifting back and forth within one created kind.

Positive Mutations

Positive Mutations

• We now have a century of fruit fly experiments, involving over 3,000 consecutive generations.
• Through breeding, scientists have been able to breed a four-winged fruit fly. Whoa!
• Four-winged fruit flies can’t fly; they are less likely to survive and breed.
• No clear genetic improvement has ever been observed in any form of life, despite the many unnatural efforts to increase mutation rates. Mutations are negative.
• No known mutation has ever produced a form of life having greater complexity and viability than its ancestors.

Coelacanth

Coelacanth

• The coelacanth fossil was used as an index fossil until 1938.
• Before 1938, the coelacanth would date its layer at 70,000,000 to 400,000,000 years old.

Coelacanth

What changed in 1938?

They caught a live one.

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Coelacanth

Coelacanth

When a live one was caught in 1938, deep in the Indian Ocean, northwest of Madagascar, scientists were astonished, since they had a large brain, no lungs, nor four bottom fins about to evolve into legs. Since then, hundreds of others have been found, as far away as Indonesia.

Today, evolutionists frequently express amazement that coelacanth fossils look so much like today’s captured coelacanths—despite more than 70 million years of evolution. If that age is correct, billions of coelacanths would have lived and died. Some should have been fossilized in younger rock; their absence implies that coelacanths have not lived for 70 million years.

What Should the Icons of Evolution be?

What Should the Icons of Christianity be?