Art of Reasoning

Mainstream evolutionists are well-represented by the following short video clip, as they use various inferences and argumentation to interpret what the fossil record shows.

Fossils and Transitional Forms — This 9-minute clip argues that the fossil record does beautifully support evolutionary theory, as there are a host of “transitional forms” everywhere we look.

The biggest problem in this video is its repeated appeal to question-begging, circular arguments. For example, starting about 35 seconds into the video, a quote is placed on the screen, and the conclusion is drawn: “Actually, nearly all fossils can be regarded as intermediates in some sense. They are life-forms that come between the forms that preceded them and those that followed.”

But wait! That is just begging the question, arguing circularly.

The question is whether or not the fossil record is actually a record of some long span of time that preserved the “laying down” of one generation after another in “subsequent” strata. After all, the fossil record is not a record of “transitions” at all, unless you already assume that the strata are related to each other over long spans of time in which evolution has taken place.

Of course, evolutionists refer to various isotope dating tactics as evidence that long periods of time are evidenced by the strata. It is beyond the scope of this seminar to delve into such a topic in the depth it deserves for responsible treatment. And this seminar does not presume “young Earth” thinking. What matters for our purposes is that we have excellent evidence to sustain the claim that “stratification” can occur extremely quickly, and any organisms thus buried and fossilized would not reveal any evidence of ancestry or “descent with modification.” Differences in morphology between such organisms would not indicate either “descent” or “modification,” because we would know from the burying event itself (as in the case of Mount St. Helens) that the organisms were simply different from each other at the (brief) point in time that they were collectively buried.

I’ll sum up radiometric dating by saying that the dating techniques are subject to vast quantities of question-begging inferences, in essence: The fossil record is taken to reveal transitions over long periods of time; and dating methods placing fossils at particular times in the strata are themselves validated by the fossils found in the supposedly-dated strata. The reason why scientists “never find ‘earlier’ fossils in later-dated strata is because the data is always adjusted as needed to ensure that the ‘dates make sense’ relative to the fossils being dated. You can always ensure neat, “proper” transitions if you are willing to (and often do) fix up the data to fit the model! Thus, neither the dating methods nor the “transitional” interpretations can be falsified, because both depend upon each other for “validation,” and both can be (and are) “fixed up” as needed to properly support each other.

So, the above video helps itself to the conclusions of a lot of behind the scenes “fixing” of this very sort.

Also, if every fossil “can be regarded as intermediate,” then the question-begging is even more flagrant than the above paragraphs indicate. The question is whether or not the fossil record demonstrates genuine speciation in the evolutionarily-relevant sense. Here the answer is: “But of course! Every fossil just is a ‘transition’ from one form to another!”

But that “answer” builds the “fact” of evolution right into the “answer.” That “answer” finds the conclusion to “the question” right in the question itself! Every fossil is a “transitional” species because every species emerged from the “transitions” that took place. Neat, clean, and no loose ends. How convenient!

Most of the video is spent arguing in this fashion:

1) Creationists are well-represented by the misunderstandings of the likes of child-star Kirk Cameron, who is mistaken about what the fossil record should show.

2) Such confusion has creationists holding the fossil record to a mistaken standard of demonstration.

3) Holding the fossil record to the standard of what evolutionary theory actually predicts reveals that the fossil record just about perfectly accords with the predictions of evolutionary theory.

———————

4) The fossil record beautifully demonstrates the predictive power and correctness of evolutionary theory.

The problem here is that people like Kirk Cameron are a caricature of actual creation scientists. There are many knowledgeable creation scientists that do not misunderstand what evolutionary theory claims and predicts, and they (as well as many evolutionists) recognize that the fossil record is not a record of constant “transitional forms” that neatly confirm the predictions of evolutionary theory. So, the fact that you can trot out some confused creationists does not argue against creation science in general, nor does it provide any support for evolutionary theory.

The question is whether or not the fossil record is a record of “transitional forms” everywhere you look. And this video argues in deeply circular fashion to say that “nearly all fossils can be regarded as intermediates.” Beyond that deep circularity, videos of this sort typically bolster that lame approach by referring to a couple of examples of “transitional forms” that evolutionary theory predicted to find and then did find! So, let’s examine the one actual example given in this video.

Land-animal morphology slowly transitioning into whales leaving fossils “in remarkable abundance,” and in precisely the order that makes evolutionary sense.”

This pro-evolution page from UC Berkeley shows the exact same sort of “chart” that is briefly displayed in the video. Notice, however, the second sentence on the page:

In fact, none of the individual animals on the evogram is the direct ancestor of any other, as far as we know. That’s why each of them gets its own branch on the family tree.

The video treats the chart as though it is demonstrating “transitional forms,” which must, by definition, be in ancestral relations. However, the scientists at UC Berkeley do not treat the chart as evidencing ancestral relations. These are not “transitional forms.” These are simply creatures that (even granting the evolutionist picture of temporal transitions) existed at various times and that were not “transitioning” from an earlier, land-based morphology to a later, ocean-based morphology. If the forms are not ancestral, then there is no evidence that one form is “transitioning” into another.

And the interpreting of morphology to infer “relatedness” in any sense is particularly striking on the UC Berkeley page. You find verbiage like this (emphasis supplied):

These first whales, such as Pakicetus, were typical land animals. They had long skulls and large carnivorous teeth. From the outside, they don’t look much like whales at all. However, their skulls — particularly in the ear region, which is surrounded by a bony wall — strongly resemble those of living whales and are unlike those of any other mammal. Often, seemingly minor features provide critical evidence to link animals that are highly specialized for their lifestyles (such as whales) with their less extreme-looking relatives.

Interpreted: “We see similarities, so we detect relatedness, even ancestry. And we ‘often’ do this interpretation on the basis of the scantiest of ‘evidence.'”

Compared to other early whales, like Indohyus and Pakicetus, Ambulocetus looks like it lived a more aquatic lifestyle.

Interpreted: “There are (often scant) features that could mean many different things, but we take them to mean what fits our model because they don’t not fit our model. We see ‘more aquatic’ features because we can, and that works for the model.”

An article on famed TalkOrigins tries to make the “transitional forms” argument even more compellingly:

Of course, for many years the fossil record for the whales was quite spotty, but now there are numerous transitional forms that illustrate the pathway of whale evolution. Recent discoveries of fossil whales provide the evidence that will convince an honest skeptic.

Okay, we are ready to be convinced!  Let’s focus on the fossil evidence, as is carefully summarized in the TalkOrigins article:

* We start with Sinonyx, a wolf-sized mesonychid…. Okay, we start with a fossil that was clearly a land-based creature, and from scant evidence about tooth count, tooth shape, and such classic “looks like” lines as this: “The elongation of the muzzle is often associated with hunting fish.” Okay, so we have a land-based creature that has been placed at the starting point of the “transitions” on the basis of the tiniest and quite possibly entirely irrelevant features. Remember the Berkeley article: “Often, seemingly minor features provide critical evidence to link animals that are highly specialized for their lifestyles (such as whales) with their less extreme-looking relatives.” Yup, the features “seem minor” because they are.

* The next fossil in the sequence, Pakicetus, is the oldest cetacean…. And we “know” that this is the “next” in “the sequence” because “from fragmentary skull remains” (you can’t make this stuff up!), we are able to tell with virtual certainty that “… those remains are very diagnostic, and they are definitely intermediate between Sinonyxand later whales.”

* Dating from the early to middle Eocene, about 50 million years ago, Ambulocetus is a truly amazing fossil…. And “fossil,” singular, is the critical point here! As one pro-evolution site puts it, the scientist discovered “several” fossils, with “the most complete one consisting of parts of the skull and jaw, a number of vertebrae, some ribs and nearly complete front and hind limbs.” In fact, there were not “several” individuals found. All of the Ambulocetus “evidence” derives from a single very incomplete skeleton.

This website sums up the problems very well, including some pictures that are properly cited but from which the links are now broken.

The entire Ambulocetus fossil!

Here is how National Geographic drew the skeleton and then compared it to the reality of what was found:

The upper sketch is as presented, and lower is reality.

The situation is even worse for National Geographic than it might initially seem! The top skeleton pictured Ambulocetus swimming (because this is a proto-“whale,” remember), with its position in the “power stroke.” However, the red-colored bones were actually found five meters above (in strata) the rest of the bones. The fact that the discovering scientist put them all together, and the fact that the scientific community continues to hold “the whole” together as “one creature,” indicates how lax the community is about what the strata themselves really signify.

Much is made of the fact that 120 meters of strata separate Ambulocetus from the “earlier” Pakicetus . This supposedly signifies millions of years of evolution. However, when a “mere” five meters separate various bones in “the same” skeleton, that obvious “temporal separation” is glossed over with nary a hesitation! Ambulocetus means “walking whale,” and a land-based but also aquatic creature is what scientists “found.” Uhh… one of them. In the whole world.

Even worse for the picture painted by evolutionists, (as cited by the website linked to above, and emphasis supplied by that site):

Since the pelvic girdle is not preserved, there is no direct evidence in Ambulocetus
for a connection between the hind limbs and the axial skeleton. This hinders interpretations
of locomotion in this animal, since many of the muscles that support and move the hindlimb originate on the pelvis.

In other words, we don’t have enough of a skeleton to have the foggiest clue that this (single) creature walked, crawled, swam, or what it did to move about. Yet, “walking whale” it is, because that is what you’d need to find for the “transitional form” at this moment in evolutionary history.

Many other problems with this “transitional form” are listed at the cited web site. But the fact that this continues to be included in the “whale evolution” taxonomy is genuinely laughable.

Next….

* In the middle Eocene (46-7 million years ago) Rodhocetus took all of these changes even further, yet still retained a number of primitive terrestrial features…. Same problems as those of Ambulocetus.

Often depicted this way by scientists, the tail is a complete fabrication of wishful thinking!

There is exactly zero fossil evidence for the tail

The discoverer, Dr. Philip Gingerich, now admits (in this striking video interview), “I speculated that it might have had a fluke. I now doubt that Rodhocetus would have had a fluked tail.” Regarding the fictional front flippers, Gingerich also said: “Since then we have found the forelimbs, the hands, and the front arms of Rodhocetus, and we understand that it doesn’t have the kind of arms that can spread out like flippers on a whale.”

In short, whatever this creature was, even Dr. Gingerich now admits that this is no “transitional form” between land animals and whales. The key components of the skeleton are missing, so that locomotion is impossible to even speculate with the slightest hope of accuracy! Meet the real skeleton, with the imaginary parts x-ed out:

 

Well the evidence trotted out so far to convince the “honest skeptic” would seem to indicate that skepticism can honestly be maintained!

Next?

* The particularly well-known fossil whale Basilosaurus represents the next evolutionary grade in whale evolution…. Ah, Gingerich again. As with Irwin and the greenish warbler case, particular scientists tend to rise to the top of their particular field of research by focusing on one sort of evidence for evolution. In this case, Gingerich appears again and again as the leading expert on whale evolution. With regard to the fossil record, you can’t do better than become the expert on something like whale evolution!

Finally, here we do seem to have fairly complete skeletons (although the particularly whale-like features, such as a horizontal, fluked tail remain speculative fabrications). Many partial skeletons have been found in Alabama, Egypt, and elsewhere; and the two best (more or less complete) skeletons (from Alabama) are mounted in the Smithsonian museum and the McWane Center in Birmingham.

What is commonly overlooked by evolutionists citing such fossils as “classic examples” is that these fossils are typically discovered in disjointed “parts,” and that a great deal of, shall we say, imagination is required to reconstruct the bones into a “single” creature with particular features. As Dr. Gingerich himself said to LiveScience regarding the reconstruction of the Basilosaurus exhibit at the University of Michigan, “Just the act of mounting the skeleton makes you think about how the bones really fit together and confront uncertainties that you would never realize you didn’t understand until you try to put them together.”

But the bigger problem is that this “species” simply can’t be placed into a particular time-position relative to the grand theme of whale evolution. The overarching problem is well-summarized at this website, which quotes Henry Gee, chief science writer for Nature: “The intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.” Literally tens and hundreds of millions of years separate these supposedly related creatures. As is the case with Basilosaurus, we simply have a creature with certain skeletal features. There is exactly zero evidence linking it with modern whales.

Okay, next?

Dorudon was a contemporary of Basilosaurus in the late Eocene (about 40 million years ago) and probably represents the group most likely to be ancestral to modern whales…. Gingerich again, and note the phrase “probably represents the group most likely to be ancestral to modern whales.”

First, the phrase is riddled with “probability!” Second, inadvertently the phrase speaks the truth as it correlates with the UC Berkeley page that correctly states: “In fact, none of the individual animals on the evogram is the direct ancestor of any other, as far as we know. That’s why each of them gets its own branch on the family tree.” All of these examples in the TalkOrigins summary that was supposed to convince the “honest skeptic” suffer from the same fundamental problem: None of them represent whale evolution! At best, they all represent independent “branches” that are not ancestral to each other or to modern whales!

So, to summarize the TalkOrigins article, we remain both honest and skeptical! Most of the “transitional forms” are unrelated, not whale-like, not even based upon complete skeletons, not based upon multiple skeletons, include wild fabrications and the inclusion of needed missing parts, and are, worst of all, recognized by evolutionists themselves as not representing a “lineage” of whale evolution. At best we have a bunch of unrelated creatures, and at worst, many of the supposed “transitional forms” come down to us so incomplete and damaged that we have no idea what they really looked like!

Finally, regarding the above video, notice the picture of the classic “tree of life” that you see at about five minutes into the video. This “tree” is a complete fabrication that is nowhere evidenced in the fossil record! Nowhere! That cannot be repeated strongly enough. The “Cambrian explosion” reveals at best a “lawn of life” or “bush of life,” with the inexplicable appearance of dozens of “shoots” springing up simultaneously, with exactly (repeat, exactly) zero “transitional forms” from the earlier very simple organisms to the “Cambrian” very complex organisms that even evolutionists tout as the “starting points” for every major body plan we now recognize. The question, “How do we get there from here?” is very pressing, when the “Cambrian explosion” reveals zero evidence of how evolution “got here from there.”

Furthermore, that “bush problem” is seen throughout the fossil record, with the sudden appearance of entirely new morphologies spring up fully-formed in the absence of any evidence of how evolution “got here from there.” The theory of Punctuated Equilibrium emerged exactly because this problem in the fossil record is so pressing! The very thing the fossil record is supposed to reveal is that evolution “got here from there.” It does not. So, this very video talks out of both sides of its mouth.

Out of one side of its mouth, it blithely claims things like, “But the fossils show plenty of evidence that evolution is true,” while out of the other side of its mouth it devotes a great deal of time in its photo-album analogy to explaining how “incomplete,” burnt up, with missing pages the fossil record actually is! So, apparently the evidence is so “damaged” and “incomplete” that it indeed needs an explanation (of the sort provided by Punctuated Equilibrium). Yet, even the very few “pages” of the record that remain to us are enough for us to see “evolution everywhere.”

In point of fact, the fossil record just is a record of a “burnt up” photo album with far more “missing pages” than any pages showing “transitional forms.” And the “transitional forms” are themselves a bust. In fact, even the analogy to looking at pictures of yourself and distant relatives and seeing “no resemblance,” but knowing that these are your ancestors nevertheless, is the most question-begging part of the whole video!

The very thing we do not know (unless we are already convinced evolutionists), the very thing we wait to be convinced of, is that the “ancestors” are indeed ancestors! When you argue by presuming the relation between fossil species, it is no surprise that you are then able to conclude ancestry relations. But there is exactly zero reason to believe that one form of creature morphed into another form from the fossil record itself. You have to interpret the fossil record (filling in far more holes in the puzzle than pieces) assuming ancestry relations in order to see “transitional forms” in any respect.

And the actually-cited classic example, whale evolution, is actually an example of what is wrong with paleontology in general, which is to say that paleontology has a long, sordid history of misrepresentation, backpedaling, fabrication with imagination, and no actual evidence of ancestry.

The fossil record in general can be summarized this way:

* The fossil record is a “damaged,” “burnt up” record of at best a “bush of life” rather than a tree of life.

* The fossil record “reveals” so-called “transitional forms” only if you already believe in the evolutionary relation of the “forms” and are prepared to fabricate imaginary morphology (including entire bones and even entire partial skeletons).

* Even believing that “transitional forms” exist does not produce the conclusion that this or that fossil discovery is indeed one of the “transitional forms,” as one after another candidate is wiped off the list, just as one after another “classic example” of observed speciation (like ring species) was wiped off the list upon careful scrutiny.

* The “gaps” in the fossil record are even more pressing now than they were in Darwin’s day, and the “we’ll just keep looking” line has grown hoary with age and now seems like an act of desperation. If anything, the jury is in on the fossil record, and its conclusion is: “Evolutionary theory is acquitted for lack of evidence.”