The Fossil Record Refutes Evolution

The Fossil Record Refutes Evolution

HARUN YAHYA

According to the theory of evolution, every living species has sprung from a predecessor. A previously-existing species turned into something else in time and all species have come into being in this way. According to the theory, this transformation proceeds gradually over millions of years.

If this was the case, then numerous intermediary species should have existed and lived within this long transformation period.

For instance, some half-fish/half-reptiles should have lived in the past which had acquired some reptilian traits in addition to the fish traits they already had. Or there should have existed some reptile-birds, which acquired some bird traits in addition to the reptilian traits they already had. Evolutionists refer to these imaginary creatures, which they believe to have lived in the past, as "transitional forms".

If such animals had really existed, there should be millions and even billions of them in number and variety. More importantly, the remains of these strange creatures should be present in the fossil record. The number of these transitional forms should have been even greater than the present animal species and their remains should be found all over the world. In The Origin of Species, Darwin explained:

If my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all of the species of the same group together must assuredly have existed... Consequently evidence of their former existence could be found only amongst fossil remains.(1)

Even Darwin himself was aware of the absence of such transitional forms. It was his hope that they would be found in the future. Despite his hopefulness, he realized that the biggest stumbling-block in his theory was the missing transitional forms. Therefore in his book The Origin of Species he wrote the following in the chapter "Difficulties of the Theory":

…Why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?… 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?… But in the intermediate region, having intermediate conditions of life, why do we not now find closely-linking intermediate varieties? This difficulty for a long time quite confounded me. (2)

The single explanation Darwin could come up with to counter this objection was the argument that the fossil record uncovered so far was inadequate. He asserted that when the fossil record had been studied in detail, the missing links would be found.

LIVING FOSSILS


The theory of evolution claims that species continuously evolve into other species. But when we compare living things with their fossils, we see that they have remained unchanged for millions of years. This fact is a clear evidence that falsifies the claims of evolutionists.
Believing in Darwin’s prophecy, evolutionists have been searching for fossils and digging for missing links since the middle of the 19th century all over the world. Despite their best efforts, no transitional forms have yet been uncovered. All the fossils unearthed in excavations showed that contrary to the beliefs of evolutionists, life appeared on earth all of a sudden and fully-formed. Trying to prove their theory, the evolutionists have instead unwittingly caused it to collapse.

A famous British paleontologist, Derek V. Ager, admits this fact even though he is an evolutionist:

The point emerges that if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find–over and over again–not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another.(3)

Another evolutionist paleontologist Mark Czarnecki comments as follows:

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.(4)

They have also had to deal with the futility of waiting for "missing" transitional forms to appear in the future, as explained by a professor of paleontology from Glasgow University, T. Neville George:

There is no need to apologize any longer for the poverty of the fossil record. In some ways, it has become almost unmanageably rich and discovery is outpacing integration… The fossil record nevertheless continues to be composed mainly of gaps.(5)



Life Emerged on Earth Suddenly and in Complex Forms

When terrestrial strata and the fossil record are examined, it is to be seen that all living organisms appeared simultaneously. The oldest stratum of the earth in which fossils of living creatures have been found is that of the Cambrian, which has an estimated age of 500-550 million years.

The living creatures found in the strata belonging to the Cambrian period emerged all of a sudden in the fossil record–there are no pre-existing ancestors. The fossils found in the Cambrian rocks belonged to snails, trilobites, sponges, earthworms, jellyfish, sea hedgehogs, and other complex invertebrates. This wide mosaic of living organisms made up of such a great number of complex creatures emerged so suddenly that this miraculous event is referred to as the "Cambrian Explosion" in geological literature.

Most of the life forms found in this stratum have complex systems like eyes, gills, circulatory system, and advanced physiological structures no different from their modern counterparts. For instance, the double-lensed, combed eye structure of trilobites is a wonder of design. David Raup, a professor of geology in Harvard, Rochester, and Chicago Universities, says: "the trilobites used an optimal design which would require a well trained and imaginative optical engineer to develop today".(6)

These complex invertebrates emerged suddenly and completely without having any link or any transitional form between them and the unicellular organisms, which were the only life forms on earth prior to them.

Richard Monastersky, the editor of Earth Sciences, which is one of the popular publications of evolutionist literature, states the following about the "Cambrian Explosion" which came as a total surprise to evolutionists:

A half-billion years ago, the remarkably complex forms of animals we see today suddenly appeared. This moment, right at the start of Earth's Cambrian Period, some 550 million years ago, marks the evolutionary explosion that filled the seas with the world's first complex creatures. The large animal phyla of today were present already in the early Cambrian and they were as distinct from each other as they are today.(7)

How the earth came to overflow with such a great number of animal species all of a sudden and how these distinct types of species with no common ancestors could have emerged is a question that remains unanswered by evolutionists. The Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, one of the foremost advocates of evolutionist thought in the world, comments on this reality that invalidates the very roots of all the arguments he has been defending:

For example the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years, are the oldest ones in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists.(8)

THE EYE OF THE TRILOBITE T he trilobites that appeared in the Cambrian period all of a sudden have an extremely complex eye structure. Consisting of millions of honeycomb-shaped tiny particles and a double-lens system, this eye "has an optimal design which would require a well-trained and imaginative optical engineer to develop today" in the words of David Raup, a professor of geology.
This eye emerged 530 million years ago in a perfect state. No doubt, the sudden appearance of such a wondrous design cannot be explained by evolution and it proves the actuality of creation.

Moreover, the honeycomb eye structure of the trilobite has survived to our own day without a single change. Some insects such as bees and dragon flies have the same eye structure as did the trilobite.* This situation disproves the evolutionary thesis that living things evolved progressively from the primitive to the complex.

(*) R. L. Gregory, Eye and Brain : The Physiology of Seeing, Oxford University Press, 1995, P.31

As Dawkins is forced to acknowledge, the Cambrian Explosion is strong evidence for creation, because creation is the only way to explain the fully-formed emergence of life on earth. Douglas Futuyma, a prominent evolutionist biologist admits this fact and states: "Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from preexisting species by some process of modification. If they did appear in a fully developed state, they must indeed have been created by some omnipotent intelligence."(9)

Darwin himself recognized the possibility of this when he wrote: "If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life all at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of descent with slow modification through natural selection."(10) The Cambrian Period is nothing more or less than Darwin’s "fatal stroke". This is why the Swiss evolutionist paleoanthropologist Stefan Bengston confesses the lack of transitional links while he describes the Cambrian Period and says "Baffling (and embarrassing) to Darwin, this event still dazzles us".(11)

As may be seen, the fossil record indicates that living things did not evolve from primitive to the advanced forms, but instead emerged all of a sudden and in a perfect state. In short, living beings did not come into existence by evolution, they were created.



1 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition, Harvard University Press, 1964, p. 179.
2 Ibid, pp. 172, 280.
3 Derek V. Ager, "The Nature of the Fossil Record", Proceedings of the British Geological Association, Vol 87, 1976, p. 133.
4 Mark Czarnecki, "The Revival of the Creationist Crusade", MacLean's, January 19, 1981, p. 56.
5 T. Neville George, "Fossils in Evolutionary Perspective", Science Progress, Vol 48, January 1960, pp. 1, 3.
6 David Raup, "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology", Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History, Vol 50, January 1979, p. 24.
7 Richard Monastersky, "Mysteries of the Orient", Discover, April 1993, p. 40.
8 Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, London: W. W. Norton 1986, p. 229.
9 Douglas J. Futuyma, Science on Trial, New York: Pantheon Books, 1983, p. 197.
10 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition, Harvard University Press, 1964, p. 302.
11 Stefan Bengston, Nature, Vol. 345, 1990, p. 765.