The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins: CHAPTER 6 'Missing Link? What do you mean, missing?'
What ‘could have been’?
Returning to the present chapter, RD now discusses the fossil record.
His first task it appears is to play down the fossil record.
“we don’t need fossils in order to demonstrate that evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution would be entirely secure, even if not a single corpse had ever fossilized.” p145
“there is more than enough evidence for the fact of evolution in the comparative study of modern species (Chapter 10 and their geographical distribution (Chapter 9). We don’t need fossils- the case for evolution is water tight without them;” p146
This is indeed a bold statement, but I am not sure how accurate it is. All we see in the ‘here and now’ are organisms that reproduce organisms similar to them, or to borrow a biblical phrase, that ‘bring forth after their kind’. Though there are discoveries of ‘new species’ being made all the time at the bottom of the ocean or deep in the jungle, there are no reports of new order or class being discovered. As to ‘how’ the higher classifications are formed and all we do are offered are ‘inferences’ and speculations from other ‘evidences’. None of these methods can ‘demonstrate’ a common ancestor; though some of the other methods do ‘interpret’ that all living forms are derived from one. His claim, is that all life on the planet at the moment, is descended from one original life form that lived billions of years ago. It would be difficult to ‘demonstrate’ this without showing how organisms have changed over billions of years, on the way to becoming what we see around us. It would appear that the fossil record is the best place to show this. I would hazard a guess though that he is aware of the weaknesses of the fossil record to ‘demonstrate’ his view, so he tries to play it down.
Though he does try to play it down, he has to acknowledge that there is a fossil record, and therefore adds; “It is a bonus that we do actually have rich seams of fossils to mine, and more are discovered every day. The fossil evidence for evolution in many animal groups is wonderfully strong.”p145
Unfortunately, this chapter spends very little time discussing the “fossil evidence for evolution in many animal groups”, which he says” is wonderfully strong”, instead he spends a lot of the short time he lays aside for the fossil record explaining why he thinks ‘creationists’ are wrong.
“Creationists are deeply enamoured of the fossil record, because they have been taught (by each other) to repeat, over and over, the mantra that it is full of ‘gaps’...They...imagine that these ‘gaps’ are an embarrassment to evolutionists. Actually, we are very lucky to have any fossils at all,” p145
“The biggest gap, and the one the creationists like best of all, is the one that preceded the so-called Cambrian Explosion. A little more that half a billion years ago, in the Cambrian era, most of the great animal phyla – the main divisions within the animal world – ‘suddenly’ appear in the fossil record. Suddenly, that is, in the sense that no fossils of these animals groups are known in the rocks older than the Cambrian, not suddenly in the sense of instantaneously: the period we are talking about covers about 20 million years.” p147
Though many of you are aware, I am not convinced by the ‘accuracy’ of the dates given to the strata, or the age of the Earth, but to discuss RD evidence for ‘common ancestry’ I am going proceed on the premise that they are correct. Using these figures, I have worked out how long things would have taken on ‘a 24 hour clock’. The figures are my own, and not ‘copied’ from anywhere, so any errors are my own.
Using the assumption that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old, on ‘a 24 hour clock’, each minute would cover about 3.2 million years. Using this 24 hour clock, if we use the ‘here and now’ as our time zero then the Earth formed 24 hours ago. For the first 4 hours or so there was no life on Earth, then 20 hours ago, the first record of life, in the form of ‘simple’ marine life is found in the fossil record. Life only exists as ‘simple marine life’ for the next 17 hours, then just about 3 hours ago in the space of about 6 minutes, almost all of the presently known phyla first show up in the fossil record.
So, for almost seven eighths of the time that Earth has been here, there was no life except for small marine life, and then in an extremely brief period, almost all of the different phyla appear in the fossil record “already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear.”
It took life about 17 hours to ‘evolve’ from a small simple life form to the huge array of different organisms that appear at the start of the Cambrian, but once it reaches this milestone things progress very rapidly, organisms grow from microscopic marine life, to the huge dinosaurs in less than 2 hours of this clock. In fact in this 2 hour period all the familiar forms of life that we know of today, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds are said to have ‘evolved’.
In this time frame the dinosaurs only died out 21 minutes ago, the ‘common ancestor’ of men and apes lived just 2 minutes ago, and our own species of Homo sapiens appears only 3 seconds ago.
Indeed on this time scale all of the accomplishments of man throughout history take place only in the last fraction of a second! So when we come to examine the ‘fossil record’ we need to remember that what he is discussing only covers the last 2 hours of this 24 hour clock. His ‘evidence’ from the fossil record for mammals and man in this book only covers a period of a few minutes in the last hour of the day. So according to the information he presents in this book, man made the journey from the caves to the moon in less than a second of this day. So rather than progressing in a regular or predictable rate, ‘evolution’ remained almost stagnant for the first 21 hours of the day, and then in the last 3 hours it appears to accelerate to a phenomenal rate in the last few hours.
In the last chapter, RD told us of some interesting experiments that have taken place, and that are still taking place now, in this chapter we do not have any scientific data to go on, but we once again rely on RD to take us on a journey through some of the ‘interpretations’ of the data, offered by evolutionists on what is found in the fossil record.
He tells us that evolution would be very easy to disprove, all it would need “would be the discovery of a single fossil in the wrong geographical stratum.”
By the term ‘evolution’, he is presumably once again referring to ‘common ancestry’ as ‘change over time’ does ‘not require us to have a single fossil’; we can see this ‘before our eyes’.
“An observation that would disprove the theory of evolution, ‘Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian! No such rabbits, no authentically anachronistic fossils of any kind have ever been found...not a single solitary fossil has ever been found before it could have evolved....Evolution could be so easily disproved if a just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order.” p147
I will acknowledge that I have insufficient information to question that the statement that no fossils have been found in the wrong date order, but I do know that whole strata appear in the ‘wrong date order’ but that is another story, and I know that evolutionists have an ‘explanation’ why rocks that are hundreds of millions of years older appear above rocks that are much younger than them.
But for the sake of this review, I will give him ‘the benefit of the doubts’ I have, and assume that this information is ‘correct’. That said, there are a number of reasons why we would not expect to find any rabbits in the Precambrian, and why this is a bit of a ‘red herring’ of an argument.
Though I am far from an expert in this area, I have several paleontology books written by ‘renowned evolutionists’ that give me information which can illustrate why we would not expect to find rabbits in the Precambrian rocks. Firstly, we need to recall where fossils are found. “Fossils are found in sedimentary rocks like limestone and sandstone” RD tells us on page 97; where he goes on to tell us, “sedimentary rocks are the only rocks that contain any fossils worth speaking of”. What are sedimentary rocks? “They are layers of mud or silt or sand, gradually laid down on the floor of a sea or lake or estuary.” He also tells us that “corpses that are trapped in the mud have a chance of fossilizing”. So from the information RD gives us we know that fossils form “on the floor of a sea or lake or estuary”, and that “The named strata are usually identified by the fossils they contain”.
So, how do we identify rocks as ‘Precambrian’? We identify the rocks by the fossils they contain, so therefore, by definition, rocks that contain ‘fossil rabbits’ would not be classed as ‘Precambrian’.
But this is not the only reason we would not ‘expect’ to find fossil rabbits in the Precambrian, there is a more fundamental reason why. From the figures I have read, it appears that about 95% of all the fossils found are marine organisms, and the majority of them are invertebrates. Only an extremely small percentage of any of the fossils found, are land animals, and of these only a small minority of them are mammals of any species. Many of the fossils of land animals contain little more than a few bones, and even some of these are only fragments. So from these figures, we can see that the vast majority of the fossils found are ‘marine invertebrates’, which is what you are likely to find in sediments “laid down on the floor of a sea or lake or estuary”. The astounding fact is not that we have so few land mammals in the fossil record, but that we have any at all! Why would you expect to find land mammals at the bottom of a body of water? The fact that we have so many is evidence that for ‘some reason’ these animals found themselves covered by water, and in some instances, it is obvious that it was a ‘catastrophic event’ which caused them to be ‘trapped’ in the water.
In is interesting that shortly after the passage speaking about fossil rabbits, RD makes this statement.
“Interestingly, there are as yet no fossils linking that ancestor (which was neither chimpanzee nor human) to modern chimpanzees. Perhaps this is because chimpanzees live in forests, which don’t provide good fossilizing conditions.” p151
So even RD recognizes the part that the local environment plays in whether or not a creature is fossilized or not. I found it interesting that one of my university text books chose a ‘rabbit’ to illustrate the ‘preservation potential’ of an organism. It states that “A rabbit certainly has hard, potentially fossilizable bones and highly resistant teeth, but if it dies a natural death its remains will probably be chewed and dispersed by scavengers, and exposed to the elements. Any remaining soft tissues will soon be eaten and decomposed by small organisms, especially bacteria. The bones and teeth may be worn down by movement in a stream, and possibly covered by sediment. Any burial is likely to be very short lived, however, and the remains may soon be exhumed by erosion during the next storm and, eventually, after many such episodes, be completely weathered away.” (Fossils and the history of life p8)
This is written in an evolutionary book, and both it and RD recognize that where an organism lives plays a large part in its ‘preservation potential’. Rabbits don’t live at the bottom of the sea, where all ‘Precambrian’ fossils lived; therefore since there are so few land animals found in the fossil record at all, it is not surprising that we do not find ANY of them in the Precambrian rocks, which are ALL marine organisms. Is there a reason why 95% of ALL fossils found are marine organisms? I would say, yes, because they are the ones with the best, ‘preservation potential’, as they live in water.
The fact that there are so many land animals preserved as fossils, is not due to when they ‘evolved’ but it ‘could’ be down to where they lived. Organisms that live in, or close to bodies of water, are most likely to be fossilized, those that don’t, will only fossilize in very ‘unusual circumstances’, such as a catastrophic flood!
So when RD says “Creationists are deeply enamoured of the fossil record” he could be right, but not because of any mantra chanting sessions, but because the fossils are more in line with a Special creation scenario, than that of an evolutionary one.
According to evolutionists, life began on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago, but to be fair, RD does not discuss this in this chapter and he really does not go back before the Cambrian Explosion. (Perhaps this is because he is aware that the data is not clear on when life began) If life did begin 3.8 billion years ago, it apparently remained as microscopic marine life for 3.2 billions years or so, then ‘suddenly’ almost all of the phyla appear in the fossil record over a brief 20 million year period.
This favours the ‘idea’ that organisms were ‘specially created’ and then they fossilized over a 20 million year period, not that they ‘evolved’ slowly but remained hidden from view until the Cambrian.
Next RD quotes himself from an earlier book.
“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.” p147, 148
He then bemoans the fact that ‘creationists love to quote this back to him’. And why not, it is a gem from the master of evolutionary story telling, why would he not expect to have it quoted back to him?
He claims of course that it is taken out of context and that they do not quote his ‘explanation’ of this fact, but then he does not quote his explanation either in this book!
He does though move on to tell us about some ‘flatworms’.
“there are more than four thousand species: that’s about as numerous as all the mammal species put together.” p148
This is an interesting thing to bear in mind, the next time someone says that Noah could not have fitted all the animals on the Ark.
“The (flat worms), are already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear...But in this case, ‘the very first time they appear’ is not in the Cambrian but today....the flatworms must have been living alongside (other organisms all along), but without leaving any significant trace of their presence in the rocks....You cannot have it both ways. This argument, at a stroke, completely destroys the creationist case that the Precambrian gap in the fossil record weakens the case for evolution.” p148, 149
Far from ‘destroying’ the creationist case, this actually illustrates that organisms can be living but not appearing in the fossil record, this could also be true of other organisms which live in environments which do not provide good ‘preservation potential’. There may be lots of organisms living now, which have not appeared in the fossil record, as the case of the Coelacanth’s illustrates, creatures can live for millions of years and leave no fossil record.
“Why …are there so few fossils before the Cambrian era?... Probably, most animals before the Cambrian were soft-bodied...- just not good fossil material.” p149, 150
So, it appears that he is saying that soft-bodied organisms just don’t fossilize very well. Of course this does seem to be true, but then there are lots of soft-bodied organisms in the fossil record like jelly fish and the like, so they can, and do fossilize, and he does seem to be ignoring the fact that ALL the earliest fossils are thought to have been soft-bodied organisms, and all those claimed to be billions of years old are soft-bodied. So whilst they may be less likely to fossilize, soft-bodied organisms occur right from the start, and have apparently survived the longest.
So far from ‘destroying’ the creationist case, the Cambrian explosion and the lack of ancestors to most of the know phylum, which appear “in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear” and “without any evolutionary history” is far better supported by a ‘special creation scenario’ rather than the ‘common ancestry’ view proposed by RD.
“The missing link...is, to put it mildly, no longer missing...for a large number of fossils, a good case can be made that every one of them is an intermediate between something and something else.”p151
(I must point out that there is a large section cut out of this quote, and I only use his words to introduce the next section)
Though RD makes the statement that a good case can be made, you will not find this good case presented in this chapter, as true to the form of the earlier chapters, he does not present any ‘scientific’ evidence, but returns to his ‘evolutionary’ story telling of how things ‘might have’ progressed.
“Just as you can find fossils that approximate to the common ancestor of a frog and a monkey, so you can find fossils that approximate to the common ancestor of elephants and chimpanzees. Here is one called Eomaia, which lived in the early Cretaceous period, a little more than 100 million years ago.” p153
This is a typical example of what will follow in this chapter, he does not go into any details, but expects you to just take for granted that what he is telling you is accurate. You can read about Eomaia and I have included a picture of it below.
As he will tell you, the common ancestor of any creature you wish to mention can be found if you go back far enough. The only reason he appears to offer this one as ‘the common ancestor of elephants and chimpanzees’, is nothing to do with any ‘scientific’ data, but it is based on the ‘belief’ that both of these creatures ‘must have had a common ancestor’, and as this is thought to one of the earliest mammals he offers it as ‘evidence’. Of course, he only shows us a black and white drawing and not the fossil itself.
After a quick snipe at some creationists, including a Muslim one who is apparently handing out a “fatuously ignorant book “ for free, he then moves on to discuss human ancestry.
“We share a common ancestor with monkeys. As it happens the common ancestor would have looked a lot more like a monkey than a man,...Huge leaps in a single generation – which is what a monkey giving birth to a human would be- are almost as unlikely as divine creation, and are ruled out for the same reason: too statistically improbable.” p155
So we learn a few things from this, monkeys don’t give birth to humans, as it is “too statistically improbable”, and divine creation is rejected for the same reason. Though he is not totally against all statistical improbabilities, as it appears to be OK when we discuss the origin of life, it is only the ones which may include a divine creator that can be immediately dismissed.
He then takes a section to clear up a few myths, the greatest of which is the Great Chain of Being
Then he takes a bit of time to tell us about Archaeopteryx and cladists.
He is simply very dismissive and says that there are no ‘missing links’ so throwing the bones of Archaeopteryx to the creationists is not necessary, as there are so many intermediates, interestingly of course, he does not name any of them.
“Some zoologists, called ‘cladists’, insist that a proper class must consist of animals all of whom share a common ancestor which belonged to that class and which has no descendents outside that group.” p159
I do think there are potential problems in this area of zoology, but rather than focus on this, I will just move on to the next major section, in which RD discusses the ‘evidence’ for fossil line of ancestry.
Up from the Sea
“If we go back far enough, everything lived in the sea” p161
This statement of course is based on the assumption that we all share a common ancestor that lived in the sea, and is of course only a speculation, as it has not, and indeed, I would contend cannot be demonstrated.
“Fortunately the transitional stages of our exodus, as fish emerged on to the land are beautifully documented in the fossil record. So are the transitional stages going the other way much later, as the ancestors of whales and dugongs forsook their hard-won on dry land and returned to their ancestral seas. In both cases, links that once were missing abound and grace our museums.” P161, 162
“fossils from the Devonian era that capture the transition between water-dwelling fish and the first vertebrates on land. Even among real fossils, we would be too optimistic if we hoped literally to find our ancestors. We can, however hope to find cousins of our ancestors that are sufficiently close to tell us approximately what they were like.” p164
RD tells us about the “Romer’s Gap” which covers a period of 20 million years which occurred from 360 million to 340 million years ago. He tells us that before this gap we see only lobe-finned fish and after it we find “unequivocal amphibians crawling through the swamps,” which “superficially resembled” crocodiles. This time is said to be “an age of giants, for there were dragon flies with a wingspan as long as my arm, the largest insects that ever lived.” At this point RD makes an interesting statement in a footnote. He tells us that this “gigantism” in insects is thought to have been due to there being “higher oxygen content in the atmosphere”.
He then tells us: “This provides a satisfying explanation for the giant dragon flies, but it may not necessarily be the right one.” p164 (footnote)
This is actually a very interesting comment, as he is acknowledging that things may ‘seem to be plausible’ but this alone does not make the ‘explanation’ the correct one. I would suggest that this statement could be applied to the ‘evidence’ that RD presents in the remainder of this chapter, and ultimately to his whole point of view. He presents what is a ‘plausible’ explanation of how ‘life may have changed over time’, but ultimately the evidence is not as conclusive as he wants us to believe.
Anyway, returning to his ‘explanation’ of “Romer’s Gap”, he tells us that his “undergraduate imagination” was fired by one of his lecturer’s description of “what drove some lobed fined fish to develop lungs and legs”. This was based on Romer’s theory, that the Devonian era was a time of drought, which “when more recent evidence undermined this assumption, it seemed to undermine the whole theory”. RD then comments “He’d have done better to omit the preamble, which was, in any case, overkill”. I would suggest this would be wise advice for RD himself to follow, as if the evidence is as good as he claims it is, it would be better if he took more time presenting it, and letting it speak for itself, rather than the “overkill” of an introduction he gives to his book. It is also a timely reminder that all the ‘interpretations’ given to the evidence in this chapter, and book, are subject to being modified or even overturned, when “more recent evidence” or more correctly, ‘new interpretations’ are given to the evidence.
“Where were the intermediates and what led them to venture out on to land?”
His candidates for the fish to land are Eusthenopteron
“It seems to have been a surface-hunting fish and probably didn’t ever come on land, notwithstanding some early imaginative reconstructions. Nevertheless, it did have several anatomical similarities to the amphibians of 50 million years later, including its skull bones, its teeth and above all, its fins. Although they were probably used for swimming and not walking, the bones followed the typical pattern of a tetrapod (the name given to all land vertebrates).” p166
Though RD tells us that this is a fish, that swims, he alludes to “some early imaginative reconstructions” as if they know better now, but if you do a search on this fish, you can still find some nice “imaginative” images of it crawling out of the water onto the land
Though this fossil is interesting, it appears to be just a variation of a type of fish, and at least RD acknowledges this, but of course he also wants to play up the “anatomical similarities” it does appear to be just a fish, which is found at ‘time’ the evolutionists ‘imagine’ that fish came unto land.
Panderichthys
“Moving back now to the fish side of the divide, Panderichthys, also from the late Devonian, is also slightly more amphibian-like, and slightly less fish-like, than Eusthenopteron. But if you saw it you would surely want to call it a fish rather than a salamander.” p168
Ichthyostega
“Ichthyostega was first reconstructed by the Swedish paleontologist Erik Jarvik in 1955, and again he portrayed it as closer to a land-dweller than modern experts do. The most recent reconstruction...places Ichthyostega mostly in the water; although it probably made occasional forays on to the land....it looked more like a giant salamander than a fish, and had a flat head that is characteristic of amphibians.” p167
Here once again we come across a problem which we reoccur time and again when we are dealing with the fossil record, who should you trust, and which “experts” have the correct ‘interpretation’.
It all depends who you ask, and when you ask it, some “experts” in the field will tell you it crawled up onto land, others will tell you it ‘probably’ spent most of it’s time in water. This is what happens when all you have to go on is a fossil, it can give you ‘clues’ as to how it lived, but in reality, most of the ‘interpretations’ are only ‘best guesses’ which will change with time and “experts”.
RD adds this comment when discussing the ‘toes’ of ‘early tetrapods’:
“Presumably at some point the embryological processes fixed upon five, and a step was taken that was hard to reverse. Although, admittedly, not as hard as all that. There are cats, and indeed humans, who have six toes. These extra toes probably arise through a duplication error in embryology.” p167
If this wasn’t one of the leading evolutionary biologists telling us this, you may imagine, that the use of words like ‘presumably’ and ‘probably’ were indications that these things are only ‘guesses’.
Acanthostega
http://tolweb.org/Acanthostega
“The scientists most responsible for our knowledge of it...believe that, like Ichthyostega, Acanthostega was largely a water-dweller, but it had lungs and its limbs strongly suggest that it could cope with land as well as water if it had to. Again, it looked pretty much like a giant salamander.”p16
I will admit that I am no expert, but when I read the web page I saw mention of functional ‘gills’ and not ‘lungs’, but I guess he has his reasons for saying ‘lungs’. Once again though, we are dependent on the ‘interpretation of ‘experts’ as the fossils can only give us clues, the ‘evidence’ is in the mind of those who ‘interpret’ the fossils.
I guess this is a bit like what some people accuse others of, when they see ‘the face of Jesus’ in fruit or something, evolutionists see fish-like and amphibian-like things merge into, Tiktaalik.
Tiktaalik
“I was privileged to be shown Tiktaalik roseae...Through rose-tinted spectacles I imagined I was gazing upon the face of my direct ancestor. Unrealistic as that was, this not-so-rose-red fossil was probably as close as I was going to get to meeting a real dead ancestor half as old as time.”p169
It appears that RD is capable of some ‘spiritual’ moments and it was nice of him to share this one, but I am confused why he thinks this is “half as old as time”? This fossil is said to be only 375 million years old, surely “time” is much more than twice this? Which also raises another interesting point, this fossil is being hailed by RD as the ‘transitional’ form of fish to tetrapod, yet if you search for information on Tiktaalik it is said to be 375 million years old which is before the “Romer’s Gap” that he has been discussing (360-340 million years ago) and it also tells us that Tiktaalik is a fish. It also shows us how ‘flexible’ the RD dating is. RD gives us the impression that each of these fossils are on either side of Romer’s Gap and that Tiktaalik falls nicely in between them, when reference to the dating assigned to the fossils, would indicate that all of them were thought to have existed BEFORE 360 MYA and therefore all lived before the ‘gap’ he has been discussing. So those who simply take RD at his word, and do not check up the details for themselves would be left with a ‘false impression’, as he has made all the fossils about 40 million years younger than other ‘experts’, this confusion could have been avoided if he had quoted or referenced things correctly. So, either his research is poor, which would lead us to question other things in the book, or other ‘experts’ are simply wrong.
“Tiktaalik is the perfect missing link – perfect, because it almost exactly splits the difference between fish and amphibian, and perfect because it is missing no longer. We have the fossil. You can see it, touch it, try to appreciate the age of it- and fail.” p169
It is interesting that he does not describe this one in more detail since it is thought to be the perfect ‘transitional’ form, and some describe it as having gills and lungs, but the lungs are only ‘inferred’ of course evidence of them and are not actually found.
The ‘interpretation’ of this ‘sequence’ may be correct, or it may just be an illustration of the diversity of life that once existed on Earth, that has been reduced over time by some ‘species’ going extinct. So whilst the ‘sequence’ has been interesting, it just shows that fossils do not really provide the ‘evidence’ that RD wants us to ‘believe’ they do, it is the ‘interpretation’ of the ‘experts’ that provide the ‘evidence’ and these are subject to ‘change over time’.
I must go down to the sea again
The move from water to land launched a major redesign of every aspect of life, from breathing to reproduction: it was a great trek through biological space. Nevertheless, with what seems almost wanton perversity, a good number of thoroughgoing land animals later turned around, and abandoned their hard-earned terrestrial retooling, and trooped back into the water again.”p169
In is interesting that RD would call this “a major redesign”, and the way he expresses this seems to suggest some conscious decision on the part of these land animals, but of course, we know he doesn’t mean either of these things.
“Seals and sea lions have only gone part-way back. They show us what the intermediates might have been like, on the way to extreme cases such as whales and dugongs.”p169 (emphasis added)
Though he will claim later that they now have the ‘cousins’ of the actual intermediates of whales and dugongs, he is admitting here that they are in fact just ‘guesses’ of what “might have been”.
“Whales were long an enigma, but recently our knowledge of whale evolution has become rather rich. Molecular genetic evidence shows that the closest living cousins of whales are hippos...whales, took off into the sea and changed so drastically that their affinities with hippos escaped all biologists except molecular geneticists.” p170
Though he ‘mentions’ the “Molecular genetic evidence” he does not actually present any of it, to let us examine what he says, so once again we need to trust him, and believe that his ‘research’ is accurate. He does not tell us where we can find this evidence, in either a footnote, or a chapter note, but perhaps if we get all the papers noted at the end, one of them will have it, but don’t expect RD to tell you which one contains it. I guess we are lucky that the “molecular geneticists” found for us, something that “escaped all” other “biologists”.
“The once rather scanty fossil record of whale evolution has been convincingly filled out, mostly by a new trove from Pakistan. However, the story of fossil whales has been so well treated in other recent books, for example Donald Prothero’s Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters...that have decided not to cover the details her. Instead I have confined myself to one diagram (below) taken from Prothero’s book, showing a sequence of fossils ordered in time.” p170, 171
“Note the careful way the picture is drawn. It is tempting – and older books used to do this – to draw sequences of fossils with arrows form older to younger ones. But nobody can say, for example, that Ambulocetus was descended from Pakicetus. Or that Basilosaurus was descended from Rodhocetus.
Instead, the diagram follows the more cautious policy of suggesting that, for example, whales are descended from a contemporary cousin of Ambulocetus...the fossils shown are representative of various stages of whale evolution.” p171, 172 (emphasis added)
So, this is the evidence that RD presents us, to show us how ‘whales evolved from land animals’.
He basically tells us that we should look elsewhere for the details, and recommends a book which contains things which he admits elsewhere that are erroneous.
There are a number of observations that we can make about this ‘drawing’ of the fossil evidence of ‘the evolution of whales’. Firstly, it is interesting that we are only shown two ‘actual’ fossil in this chapter, (Tiktaalik and of course ‘Ida’) and that we have to rely on ‘line drawing’ and ‘artist’s impressions’ of how the creatures ‘might have looked’. Some of the fossils contain only a fraction of the creature, and a lot of ‘artistic license’ is required, to inform us how they ‘may’ have looked or behaved. This drawing also totally ignores any scale, and could give the impression that the creatures have only slight differences in size, when in reality, Pakicetus is thought to have been the size of a wolf, and Basilosaurus, is said to be ‘as big and bigger than modern whales’. It also shows that many of the different creatures lived at the same time. But as we should remember that, just because we only find some fossils in some time periods, this does not mean that they had not lived long before, or long after their occurrences in the fossil record. So just because we find certain creatures living at a particular time and place, this does not mean that this is the only time period in which they existed. They may have been alive and well in other times and places at other periods, and have simply not been preserved in the fossil record. Their disappearance from the fossil record does not mean that they ‘evolved’ into something else either; they could also have just gone ‘extinct’. Indeed, we may find them in other periods unaware that they should have ‘evolved’ or ‘gone extinct’ just as we found with the Coelacanths.
“Coelacanths had been known before, as fossils, but they had been thought extinct since the time of the dinosaurs.” p163
Some people have suggested that the Coelacanths living today are greatly different from the fossils of millions of years ago, but then we do not define living and fossil species in the same way, so this cannot be known for sure. This though can be answered by the quotes that RD tells us in his book.
He quotes J L B Smith, the biologist responsible for bringing them to the world’s attention.
“Yes there was not a shadow of doubt, scale by scale, bone by bone, fin by fin, it was a Coelacanth. It could have been one of those creatures of 200 million years ago come alive again.” p163
So though there are thought to be about 80 species of Coelacanth, when you realize that most ‘fossil species’ are distinguished by physical appearance alone, it should become clear that the living species may just be another variation of the ‘type’ of fish that makes it of the same order as the fossil ones. In reality, maybe the Coelacanth is a single species that has a similar amount of ‘physical variations’ as our single species of ‘dog’ has. The variations that we see in the dog would likely be given hundreds of different ‘species’ names if they were found in the fossil record.
Once again, the fossil record does not provide the evidence that RD is telling us it does, and we are once again reliant on the ‘fickle’ interpretations of the ‘experts’ which can only ‘suggest’ what might have happen, and show us what they consider as ‘cousins’ of whale ancestors.
A lot of the interpretations are reliant on ‘visual similarities’ and do little more than point out where they think the origin of some features come from, and do not actually present ‘scientific evidence’ but just ‘imaginative speculations’.
“Just as whales related to hippos, so sirenians are related to elephants, as a great deal of evidence, including the all-important molecular evidence, attests. Pezosiren, however, probably lived like a hippo...Pezosiren may or may not be the actual ancestor of modern manatees and dugongs, but it is certainly excellent casting for the role.” p172 (emphasis added)
Once again, we are not shown what “the all-important molecular evidence”, is but we are left to discover it for ourselves. But how many are convinced by his “probably” and “may or may not be” language which reveals how ambiguous the ’evidence’ actually is, otherwise I am sure he would be a little less ‘suggestive’ and would tell us with the full confidence he has in chapter one, when he tells us things are ‘facts’.
What use is half a shell?
To conclude the review of this chapter, I will discuss another new fossil just found recently Odontochelys an ancient chelonian or turtle.
This part of the chapter is actually quiet ‘revealing’ about how things go on in the evolutionary mind, when they find a new fossil.
When this fossil was found, (and I am not sure how many examples there are of it) it was discovered that it only had the lower half of the shell, and no upper shell. This has led to much ‘speculation’ on the part of many evolutionists, including of course RD himself. He tells us:
“we have an interesting controversy. The authors of the paper that introduced Odontochelys to the world…think that their animal was indeed halfway towards acquiring a shell. Others dispute…and they offer an alternative interpretation. Maybe the whole shell had already evolved on land, before Odontochelys’s ancestors went back into the water. And maybe Odontochelys lost its carapace (top shell) after they returned to the water…their theory is quite plausible.” p175
So we have 2 different teams of ‘experts’ trying to decide whether this fossil is an example of a turtle gaining a shell or losing one, and also at the same time trying to decide whether it ‘evolved’ on land and went back to the water, or if it ‘evolved’ in water. So once again the ‘experts’ dispute the finding of others and RD adds his voice of ‘maybe’ to the mix. It is interesting though, after his long lecture in chapter one, telling us the difference between using the word ‘theory’ in a scientific context, and a layman’s use, that he now uses this word here. In what sense is he using the word ‘theory’ here in a ‘scientific’ or ‘layman’s’ context? Would the correct word not be a ‘hypothesis’ as neither of the ‘experts’ views have been tested and shown to be correct?
This “interesting controversy” shows us that the only explanations that can be explored are ones which try to decide which way animals ‘evolved’ any other explanations and not even considered.
“We are already pretty confident of the remarkable fact that the turtles accomplished an evolutionary doubling back to the land: an early marque of land ‘tortoises’ went back to the watery environment of their even earlier fish ancestors, became sea turtles, then returned to the land yet again…That we know, or are nearly certain of. But now we are facing up to the additional suggestion that this doubling back happened twice!” p179
“Did their ancestors move directly from the sea into brackish and then fresh water? Do they represent an intermediate stage on the way from the sea back to the land? Or is it possible that they constitute yet another doubling-back to the water from ancestors that were modern land tortoises? Have the chelonians been shuttling back and forth in evolutionary time between water and land? Could the palimpsest be even more densely over-written than I have so far suggested?” p180
This is how RD closes this chapter on ‘missing links’, full of questions!
I think that this is a very apt way to close his chapter, as in reality, rather than answering questions, the evidence of evolution from a common ancestor is totally missing, and each fossil, rather than bringing the evolutionists closer to the ‘common ancestor’ of all living creatures, only end up posing many more questions than they actually answer.
In this chapter RD has once again failed to present any ‘scientific evidence’ for a ‘common ancestor’ in the only place that we are likely to discover any, the fossil record. Instead we find that all phyla appear in a brief period of time, “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.”
RD fails to present any ‘conclusive’ evidence, but instead offers lots of competing ‘experts’ opinions and interpretations of bones they find in marine deposits.
In reality, the fossil record is not in line with the evolutionary model, and the only way it can be made to appear that way, is to appeal to ‘experts interpretations’, and add in some more “undergraduate imagination”, to fill out what they do not find in the fossil record itself.
Of course as one of the premier evolutionary story tellers, he makes it all sound so plausible, but then we should also remember RD statement from earlier in this chapter “This provides a satisfying explanation...but it may not necessarily be the right one”
I do not think he has provided any ‘scientific evidence’ in this chapter, and I do not find it ‘conclusive’ or beyond reasonable doubt either.
In the end, the fossil record is not in favour of a slow steady, little by little process, but we find a wide variety of organisms appear suddenly, with no apparent ancestors.