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Another one gets “Expelled”
A partnership between the Cincinnati Zoo and the nearby Creation Museum disintegrated after hundreds of individuals complained to the zoo about its joint venture with the faith-based organization. Under the original plan, the two institutions promoted each other by offering a special ticket package that gave discounts to individuals who visited both sites.
“It’s a pity that intolerant people have pushed for our expulsion simply because of our Christian faith,” [said Creation Museum founder Ken Ham], expressing disappointment in the zoo’s decision but also understanding of its perspective.
“Some of their comments on blogs reveal great intolerance for anything having to do with Christianity,” he added. …
“Frankly, we are used to this kind of criticism from our opponents,” Ham said regarding the latest controversy, “and so being ‘expelled’ like this is not a huge surprise.”
Nonetheless, Ham said the Creation Museum will, for a limited time, honor the special ticket pricing, and will also continue promoting the zoo: “We are committed to promoting regional tourism.”
back to top34 Comments to “Another one gets “Expelled””
It is too bad that “politically correct” people can’t see the bigger picture. The Creation Museum is a wonderful place. It has drawn many people to the greater Cincinnati area. It is building the local economy. It is too bad the Cincinnati Zoo caved into the pressure, but I guess it is to be expected. Perhaps the continued controversy will draw more curiosity-seekers to the Museum. If you haven’t been to it, you should go. For those who believe in a literal creation, it will build your faith. For those who aren’t sure, or who don’t think creation is true, it is only fair to view the “other side.”
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Classy response from the Museum.
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Intolerance is something only Christians practice, or so it would seem.
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Sheesh, it’s a tourist attraction. If you don’t believe in the content, who cares? People go to Disneyland without thinking the Pirates of the Carribean ride is real. Why on earth to they have to be so picky?
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Peter L’s response is typical of non-christians or even political liberals. Peter, it is truly unfounded. It is good you tried using the quaifier: or so it seems because it just might seem that way to you, but not to logical people.
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The Zoo’s mission statement is: The mission and vision of the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden is dedicated to creating adventure, conveying knowledge, conserving nature, and serving the community.
I can understand why people might see the Creation Museum as incompatible with that mission.
http://www.creationmuseum.org/
That said, I would still go if I were in the area with some time to kill.
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I’d like to take our family one day for a field trip. If it comes to affording one or the other, I’d choose the Creation Museum hands down.
Cinncinnati ought to be encouraging the CM…people like me wouldn’t go all the way to Ohio for a zoo.
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#5, I think Peter L forgot to say “sarcasm off”
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We went up in September. We noticed the package deals with the Zoo, but we went to see the Creation Museum. It is unusual and unique; we could see our own zoo here in SC.
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Ken Ham says, “It’s a pity that intolerant people have pushed for our expulsion simply because of our Christian faith,” but perhaps the reason the zoo ended this program isn’t because the creation museum is Christian, but because the creation museum promotes really, really bad science.
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Kevin N.-
You hit the nail on the head. This story is simply more of the Christianity as poor oppressed victim nonsense this place loves to promote.
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Kevin, the Creation Museum doesn’t promote science of any kind, good or bad. It promotes religious dogma pretending to be science.
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Theophilus #5: See #8.
Thank you, mmacmurray. I forget that some people don’t have my kind of sense of humor and cannot see obvious sarcasm when it statres them in the face. (Or maybe Theo dies and was pointing out the part of my post that made it obvious.)
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Interesting. Unless the Creation Museum was trying to pull something over on folks (which I can’t see the zoo as cooperating with), it looks simply like good business sense. The zoo gets money from religious folks, and people going to the zoo can visit the Creation Museum for a reduced fee if they desire. And, since most folks aren’t forced to visit any museum (except perhaps school kids for educational purposes), this seems to be related to secular anti-religious bigotry.
Shame the secularists around here won’t simply admit to the bias and bigotry.
Here’s the question: will the secular bigots make up the lost income to the zoo? Think of the poor suffering animals!
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#14. Again, is it anti-religious bigotry, or a decision based on not wanting to be associated with bad science. If it were a museum about Christian history, or Christian art, or Christian music, then the secular museums in the Cincinnati area might not object to reciprocal agreements like this.
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Indeed. Why would an organization with the mission to “convey knowledge” associate itself with the Creation Museum, whose website reads in part: “Using the Bible as your starting point, prepare to travel back 6,000 years to the dawn of creation….”
And has the tag line “Prepare to Believe”
And “Walk through the Cave of Sorrows and see the horrific effects of the Fall of man. Sounds of a sin-ravaged world echo through the room. Finally, see the sacrificial Lamb on the cross, and the hope of redemption.”
I’m sorry, but if I were a donor to the Zoo, I’d ask for my money back if they endorsed this crazy theme park.
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Steve G (#12):
It’s a matter of definition whether to call young-Earth creationism “bad science” or “not science.” I’ll stick with calling it bad science. If science is our attempt to understand the natural world, and young-Earth creationism is an attempt to describe the natural world, then it is within the realm of science. It is just really bad science. (And don’t nitpick about my definition of science; anyone who has read much philosophy of science knows that the term is really hard to define).
I view the young-Earth creationism of the creation museum as Biblically unnecessary and scientifically invalid. I see two risks of presenting this stuff:
1. Many of our youth raised on this stuff will sooner or later see that it just doesn’t work. Because it has been tied to the truthfulness of Scriptures, they will possibly reject Christianity along with their young-Earth creationism. This is a great tragedy.
2. Scientists will continue to look at Christianity as foolish. Young-Earth creationism cannot explain the rock or fossil records. Earth history cannot be compressed into 6000 years (and the Bible doesn’t require any of this!). Let it be the foolishness of the cross that is rejected, not the foolishness of the creation museum’s presentation.
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RPN (#16):
I don’t accept the “science” of the creation museum, but the problem of sin is real (unless you’ve buried your head in the sand), and the message of redemption through Jesus Christ is very real as well. Don’t let the bad science of the creation museum block your view of the central message of the Scriptures.
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Kennethos: Your assertion that the objection is “anti-religious bigotry” is so far off the mark it’s not even close enough to be called wrong.
The problem here is the zoo lending any credibility to Creationism which is religion pretending to be science. And that’s where the objection arises.
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Hello Kevin N.
I know that both The General Theory of Evolution, and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution are really, really bad science, a view I can easily defend, but I am not familiar with The science presented at the Creation Museum, as you claim – ‘is really really bad science’. Please explain why you believe this is so.
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Kevin N.
Reading further, I see you reject their 6,000 year old earth, and I suppose this to be the reason why you consider the Creation Museum to present bad science.
Well, I have heard Ken Ham and his associates speak and have read some of their writings and I do believe they do raise some very good points for the reality of Creation and against the Theories of Evolution.
However, I too disagree with their 6,000 year old Earth. For I personally believe that the Geneologies in the Old Testament trace back to at least 14,000 years. I believe the world wide flood occurrred about 5,000 BC. In the Hebrew, a Father is not just the Father of his son, but of His grandson and great grandsom etc. Thus in Jesus day, all Jews called Abraham their father. So it appears to be impossible to determine age by the geneologies of the Bible.
Of course, such contemplations are not science. For something to be scientifically established as fact, it must be repeatedly observable and capable of being reasonably testable. Much of the Biblical Creation and of the materialistic Evolutionary theories of origin deal with singular events that occurred in the past and thus, are similar to historical searches, which places them outside the realm of science, e.g. they are metaphysical searches.
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SteveG writes: “Kennethos: Your assertion that the objection is “anti-religious bigotry” is so far off the mark it’s not even close enough to be called wrong.
“The problem here is the zoo lending any credibility to Creationism which is religion pretending to be science. And that’s where the objection arises.”
And what do you think SteveG, that evolution is not the religion of the materialists pretending to be science?
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Kevin N: “Young-Earth creationism cannot explain the rock or fossil records.”
Well, I guess it depends which evidence you look at. So far creationism explains it fairly well for me (what parts didn’t it explain, again? I hope you don’t mean carbon dating, the mere existence of fossils, and other such subjects that are easily dealt with). And old-earth naturalism does a pretty poor job of explaining certain structures that we see.
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Tyrus888 & sodiumpowered:
I’ll give just a few, brief reasons why I reject creationism as presented by Answers in Genesis and the Kentucky creation museum:
1. It is Biblically unnecessary. I’ll give just one reason from the Scriptures. In Genesis 1-2, the word for day is “yom”, and it is used in a figurative sense at least once in the passage (2:4, use a more literal translation, not the NIV), which implies that it might be used in a figurative sense in other places in the passage. Reasons to Believe gives a list of prominent Christians who are open to or advocate an old earth: http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/notable_leaders/index.shtml
2. The Bible does not say that the sedimentary rock record was formed in Noah’s flood, though this is a point of dogma at the creation museum. Geological features that cannot be explained by the flood include:
–complete reef systems preserved in rock, preserving their ecological zonation
–fossil dinosaur nests with multiple generations of dinosaurs (babies that haven’t left home yet plus eggs that haven’t hatched)
–large igneous bodies formed by multiple intrusions of magma that cooled and crystallized before the next intrusions
–many, many more
3. Noah’s flood cannot explain the fossil record. That there is an order to the fossil record (called the principle of fossil succession) was worked out long before Darwin came around. For example, only simple organisms are found in Precambrian rocks, trilobites are only found in Paleozoic rocks, dinosaurs in Mesozoic, etc. Young-earth creationists have attempted to explain this by various means, but none of them make any sense at all.
4. The age of the earth. Creationists have become a little more sophisticated with their arguments about radiometric dating (e.g. the RATE study) in that they finally acknowledge that we really can get a good idea of initial concentrations of isotopes in minerals. The current status of their arguments, however, would have the earth melting, or even vaporizing, during the flood, and I don’t think that happened. Their argument here isn’t with geology (my field) but with physics. (Sodiumpowered: carbon-14 dating has nothing to do with the age of the earth, it works back only about 60,000 years, so it says nothing about millions or billions of years. Other isotopes are used for longer periods of time).
In summary: this is a vital issue in apologetics. So, I’ll revise my statement. The creation museum doesn’t just present bad science, it presents bad apologetics. It provides a faulty foundation for trust in the Bible, and therefore for trust in what the Bible says about sin and salvation in Christ. It also provides a weak apologetic foundation for evangelism, as there are people who might otherwise be open to the gospel, but who will reject Christianity because of what is presented at the museum as Biblical truth.
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A very nice post Kevin, clear and precise.
As a geologist, you must be fully aware that Lyell’s uniformitarianism beliefs about the geologic record has long been negated by actual observations that clearly show the overall fossil record is one of catastrophisms. Also, it was once believed that each thin layer of a geological column represented a year to form, though some lakes were known to lay several layers of sediment a year. However Mt St Helens demonstrated that a lake flow could carve out a Canyon 1/40th the size of the Grand Canyon, and that thousands of thin layers of rock was layed down in less than an hour, if not minutes, the day that canyon was formed.
I have not seen RateII and geology is not my specialty, Physics is. And I never cared weather the earth is thousands of years old or Billions of years old.
What has become very clear is that the fossil record looks like creation and not at all like evolution predicts. In fact, it looked like that in Darwins day, and it looks like that today. Most dating is not done by radioactive dating, but by the fossils found in the layers. Thus if a fossil contains a multiple cell creature, it is autmatically determined that the rock is not Cambrian. So it is disingenoues to claim that only simple organisms are found in Cambrian rocks. Such a statement is circular reasoning, which is quite common in the field.The researcher arranges the data according to evolutionary theory which he was taught to be fact. He publishes his paper, and others read it and claim this demostrates evolution. Well it would, wouldn’t it?
Polystrate fossils are found everywhere. The forest at Yellowstone shows deposits of trees at different levels which were once believed to be multiple forests that succeeded each other over time. However a similar deposit of trees occurred at Mt St Helens and what seemed as multiple forest were actually the same forest. Ondeed, the yearly tree rings of the yellowstone alleged multiple forest were identical and proved they were from the same single forest.
Out of sequence fossils are found everywhere and Evolutionists try to explain this away by claiming the strata has been contaminated with fossils from other strata. A hominid fossil was determined to be 3.1 million years old by radioactive dating techniques, but evolutionary anthropologists argued its’ features were far too advanced for it to be 3.1 million years old, it would falsify their theory of human evolution at that age. they found a pig fossil near that location and since the pig fossil was believed to be 1.7 million years old, they threw out the radioactive date and used the 1.7 million year date which fit in with evolution. If the pig was dated at 3.1 million years old and the the radioactive date was 1.7 million years, you better believe they would have ignored the pig and used the ‘reliable’ radioactive determined date.
The fossil record gave such poor support for evolution Theory that evolutionary biologists kept insisting the fossil record was incomplete, a claim that paleontologists knew was false.
Return of: THE MYTH OF THE INCOMPLETE FOSSIL RECORD! 1991.
One evolutionist that recently argued forcibly for the incompleteness of the fossil record is geologist Tjeered H. van Andel (Nature, 294; 1991,397-398; Consider the Incompleteness of the Fossil Record). Van Andel points out that rates at which sediment is deposited in the Gulf of Mexico is well known. He applies this rate to the Wyoming marine strata that was once submerged under water similar to the Gulf of Mexico. He concludes that the Wyoming strata could have been deposited in 100,000 years using uniformitarian assumptions and the known rate of deposition from the Gulf of Mexico. He then points out that paleontologists have that strata pegged at occurring over 6 million years. Tjeered H. van Andel, like the good evolutionists he is, ignores the possibility that the strata in question most likely had been deposited over a period that could not more than 100,000 years. Instead, he keeps the evolutionary timetable of the paleontologists and concludes that 5.9 million years of deposition is missing from the geological record and that “key elements of the evolutionary record may be forever out of reach.”
Next, Van Andel tackles the question: Shouldn’t the lack or erosion forces present on land continental land masses be absent at the sea bottom result in a more complete record at the sea bottom sediments? Using the same logic as above, he points to the South Atlantic and concludes that of the 125 million years of sediment deposition, half of it is missing.
Mr. Van Andel, is it not possible, even most probable, that the missing sediments are missing because the evolutionary assumptions of some evolutionary biologists and geologists are wrong and that the alleged missing sediments and the associated presumed evolutionary time never existed in the first place. Of course evolutionists cannot accept this possibility, they know evolution is a fact and, therefore the sacred evolutionary timetable must be upheld and the sediments must have existed but are now missing.
This was similar to Paleontologist J. Wyatt Durham (”The Incompleteness of our Knowledge of the Fossil Record”; Journal of Paleontology, 41: 599-565, 1967) Wherein he points out that according to evolutionary theory, 4.1 million fossilizable marine species have existed since the Cambrian and only 93,000 have been discovered. Like Van Andel, Durham’s argument for the incompleteness of the fossil record relies solely on the assumption that evolution is a fact and this many are needed to fill the evolutionary gaps. His evolutionist assumptions led him to conclude that only one out of every 100 fossil species of Cambrian invertebrates with hard parts are being found. The situation has worsened since he wrote this, fossils of every Phylum are found within a 10 million year span of the Cambrian.
Problems With The Evolutionary Time Table:
Getting back to the Wyoming Strata. Kvale, Mickelson et. al. have discovered mega track dinosaur sites (Palois, 16:233-254, 2001). Previously, Dinosaur tracks were rare in Wyoming and it was considered to be mostly marine prior to this find. In fact, the tracks were found in Carbonate units that were believed to be totally marine. This caused the evolutionists to conveniently ‘reinterpret’ the paleoenvironment of the sedimentary rock deposits. Evolutionists now see “… previously unrecognized intertidal to supratidal carbonate units once thought to be totally marine in origin.” Also, since Van Andel 1987 paper, a shoreline was invented to account for the presence of dinosaurs. [This find of buried land Dinosaurs in what scientists previously observed to be marine deposits may well be a strong evidence for Noah’s flood, but evolutionists, the media, and academia will never let that fly.]
Now it gets much worse for the evolutionists, the Dinosaur tracks appear in different strata, using the established paleontologists time scale, the lower strata tracks and the upper level tracks are separated by over 3 million years. Furthermore the tracks are all similar (tridactyl, small to medium size of bipedal dinosaurs), no other tracks of other types of dinosaurs were found. All the upper layer tracks are headed in a southerly direction and fossilized egg sites and baby dinos have been found just to the north. Absent in the mega tracks are any juvenile or baby forms of tracks. The tracks are made in flood sediments. As a whole, the 3 million years for these sediment layers on the paleontological chart seems to have been laid in days by bipedal, tridactyl dinosaurs fleeing a catastrophic flood. The lower strata tracks laid at the beginning of a great flood that quickly left many strata of sediments, followed by the water receding and the adult dinosaurs fleeing south abandoning their young and eggs as the next wave of flooding rapidly covered and preserved the second set of tracks at the allegedly presumed 3 million year younger higher strata. This scenario if further evidenced by a wet substrate, swim tracks in the lower strata, and ripple marks formed at the same time as the tracks. These events had to occur rapidly in order to cover up and preserve the large quantities of tracks. These strata may have been formed in a day, or perhaps weeks, but not the 3 million years the evolutionists assign to it.
In another paper which I can not find right now, a very similar situation occurred in Manitoba Canada.
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In fact, the ‘Basic facts of Paleontology’ actually say NO to the General Theory of Evolution (i.e. Common Ancestry), as well as to The Special Theory of Evolution (i.e. Darwin’s mechanism of how evolution is suppose to occur).
According to the theory of evolution, every species has emerged from a predecessor. One species that existed previously turned into something else over time, and all species have come into being in this way.
According to the Darwins theory on how evolution occurs, this transformation proceeds gradually over millions of years. Very long lineages of descent with very gradual modification, producing innumerable generations of intermediate species, each diverting lineage undergoing the transformations of accumulating new organs and body plans that ancestors did not have, but very gradually over long periods of time.
If this were true, there had to be billions of such creatures that made up these evolutionary trends. More importantly, the remains of these creatures should be present in the fossil record, documenting the millions of the predicted gradual trends of morphological evolutionary transformations, also known as ‘phylogenies’. This is the one solid real science prediction of evolution, that we would be able to see it in the fossil record if such broad-scale evolution is true.
The fossil record embarrassed Charles Darwin. It was suppose to provide and establish these innumerable phylogenies, but few could be found in his day, and these few were questionable. A contemporary of Darwin, a paleontologist, questioned Darwin’s Theory by pointing that if Darwin’s Theory be true, why do each successive layer of fossil beds merely have the same unchanged fossils of each type of animal or plant that are found at the different layers.
Darwin was well aware of this, and in his book, Charles Darwin attempts to explain this ‘unpleasant’ fact away by appealing to the imperfection of the fossil record in his day. Darwin gambled the validity of his theory on his prediction that future generations of paleontologists will discover the phylogenies. For the next 100 and so years after Darwin, Paleontologists (and others) traveled the world hoping to make a name for themselves by finding these phylogenies that Darwin’s Theory predicts, must exist.
They were never found in the geological record. They do not exist. Not even one.
Testimonies to this fact include:
Botanist and evolutionist Dr. Heribert Nilsson (From a 1953 Science Journal, as quoted in Arthur C Constance book: `The Earth Before Man’, part 2, Doorway Publications, Ontario Canada, 1984):
“My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed. At least, I should hardly be accused of having started from a preconceived anti-Evolutionary standpoint. … It may be firmly maintained that it is not even possible to make even a caricature of an Evolution out of paleo-biological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to the scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they never will be filled.”
Confirming this view in 1960, Evolutionary paleontologist Neville George stated:
“There is no reason to apologize any longer for the poverty of the Fossil record. In some ways it has become almost unmanageably rich.”
Evolutionary paleontologist David Kitts, Ph.D. Zoology, Head Curator of the Department of Geology of the Stoval Museum, `Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory’, Evolution, Vol. 28, Sept. 1974, p 467. Writes: “Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides as a means of `seeing’ Evolution, It has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of `gaps’ in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them.”
Evolutionists Dr. Edmund J. Ambrose, Emeritus Professor of Cell Biology at the University of London, writes:
“At the present stage of geological research, we have to admit that there is nothing in the geological record that runs contrary to the view of conservative creationists, that God created each species separately, presumably from the dust of the earth.”
Right after the pounding of Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution presented by mathematicians at the 1966 Wistar Symposium that was held in Philadelphia and was titled, ‘Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution’. A young Stephen Gould and Niles Eldredge published:
“Under the influence of phyletic gradualism, the rarity of transitional series remains our persistent bugbear. … it has stood as the bulwark of anti-evolutionist arguments: “For evolution to be true, there had to be thousands, millions of transitional forms making an unbroken chain.” (Anon., 1967- from a Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet).
Thus, not only in Darwin’s day, but throughout the Twentieth century the creationists were rightly rejecting Darwin’s theory on this basis, as Gould and Eldredge pointed out.
By the 1970’s there came a big rumble against the two Darwinian Theories of evolution emanating from the Field of Paleontology, led by the Evolutionary Paleontologists: Stephen Gould, Niles Eldredge, Steven Stanley, and Colin Patterson. Gould and Eldredge believed they were saving The General Theory of Evolution, by casting out Darwin Theory, and the Neo-Darwinian Theory called ‘The Modern Synthesis’. Gould and Eldredge believed that their new theory for the mechanism of evolution (Punctuated Equilibrium) would replace the false Darwinian Paradigm and thereby preserve the Academic credibility of the General Theory of Evolution (i.e. Common Ancestry). P.E. basically states that evolution occurs in small populations and in too short a time period, and therefore is not recorded in the fossil record. This did not at all sit well with the evolutionary biologists (e.g. Dobzhansky, Mayr, Maynard Smith, Dawkins etc.)
Perhaps unwittingly, in one of his earlier books, Ernst Mayr laid the groundwork for G&E’s Theory of Punctuated Equilibria. Mayr went against the Modern Synthesis in proposing that rapid speciation occurred in geographical isolated areas and that this may account for the abrupt appearance of species and the lack of evidence of transition found in the fossil record. However, according to Paleontologist Steven Stanley: “little attention was paid to the punctuational elements of his work until the 1970’s. This paradox was partly the result of the diffuse, but ever present, counter pressure supplied by the field of genetics, in which Mayr was not a specialist. This gradualistic march of the geneticist had gathered too much momentum to be diverted by peripheral activities.”
(Steven Stanley, “The New Evolutionary Timetable”, 1981, p.78).
Now, back to Darwin’s prediction:
Gould (Natural History, May 1977) writes of Darwin’s gradualism:
“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. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record: “The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps. He who rejects these views on the nature of the geologic records, will rightly reject my whole theory.”
“We have all heard the traditional response so often that it has become imprinted as a catechism that brooks no analysis: the fossil record is extremely imperfect. … This traditional approach to morphological breaks merely underscores what Feyerabend meant … in comparing theories to party lines, for it renders the picture of phyletic gradualism virtually unfalsifiable.” (G&E, 1972).
Gould & Eldredge, explaining PE’s departure from the Modern Synthesis:
“To Darwin… speciation entailed the same expectation as phyletic evolution: a long and insensibly graded chain of intermediate forms. Our present texts have not abandoned this view, although modern biology has.” (G&E, 1972).
By 1981 The Biologists and powers that be in Academia were very upset with the ‘Punctuationists’ and forced them to tone down their theory, particularly because it is a theory not based on observing evolution in action, but rather, it was based on the inability to see evolution in action in the geological fossil record. They were forced to say their theory of PE was complementary to the Modern Synthesis (even though at one point Gould and Eldredge already called the Modern Synthesis ‘dead’). They were also coerced into putting out attacks on creationary scientists, who used the punctuationists admissions as confirmation of what they had been saying all along.
The answer to the question, is the fossil record vastly incomplete? : NO!!!
The real problem is that the fossil record is not at all as Darwin and Neo Darwinists predict it ought to be. It looks like Creation, not Evolution. The old argument by evolutionists for dismissing the fossil evidence against Evolution is the claim; the fossil record is very incomplete.
The new argument by evolutionists for dismissing the fossil evidence against evolution is the claim by Gould/Eldredge that Evolution occurs in spurts and happens to occur too rapidly to be preserved by the fossil record (i.e. Punctuated Equilibria. Gould, Eldredge, Stanley, Patterson and many other paleontologists and geologists recognized that the fossil record looks very unlike Evolution and that this is not at all due to a poor incomplete fossil record, that the true fossil record is a tale of the abrupt appearance of the species followed by stasis for their duration in the fossil record. Thus they invented the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria to save Evolution as a materialistic explanation of life on Earh. They were forced to tone down their claim when it became apparent that a lack of evidence is not evidence for a theory. In any case P.E. put the paleontologists and geologists at odds with the biologists who had been suppressing the true fossil record with their claims that the record was very imperfect and incomplete.
The correct observation, derived from an extensive and exhaustive review of the fossil record, is that there are no known transitional series clearly linking any of the natural groups of animals or plants above the species level.
Today leading evolutionary scientists, though not talked about publicly, that the gaps in the fossil record are huge, and not a question of filling in a few minor speciation events know it. Further, the trend has been that the more fossils found, the more fossils species discovered, the clearer the gaps and the inconsistencies become. This is contrary to the prevailing rumor that new fossil finds are closing the gaps in the fossil record. Rather, fossil finds are clarifying the gaps in the fossil record.
For example, with a few fossils, evolutionists were able to fill the gaps with their imagination. Niles Eldredge once wrote of what appeared to be a significant transition in lineage. The fossil record had recorded a certain trilobite species as lasting for millions of years and then becoming extinct, only to be replaced in higher strata by a similar, but significantly different, trilobite species of the same family. Evolution in action? Well not quite. As more fossils were found, these two species turned out to be contemporaries at their point of origin in the geological strata.
Though it is true that rocks containing fossils do erode and some fossils end up in private collections, these are lame excuses for explaining away why the fossil record has not provided any of the millions of transitional series that must have existed if large scale Evolution truly occurred.
The truth of the matter is that the Fossil record is abundantly rich. Over a quarter billion fossils have been catalogued of over 300,000 species. The gaps can no longer be rationalized away with appeals to the imperfection of the fossil record.
“All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; Transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.” Stephen J. Gould, `Return of the Hopeful Monster’ Natural History, Vol. 86, 1977, p. 22)
“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persist as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes on their branches, the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.” Stephen J. Gould, `Evolutions Erratic Pace’ Natural History, 1979.
Paleontologists Steven Stanley (1979) points out:
“In part, the role of paleontology in evolutionary research has been defined narrowly because of a false belief, tracing back to Darwin and his early followers, that the fossil record is woefully incomplete. Actually, the record is of sufficiently high quality to allow us to undertake certain kinds of meaningful analysis at the level of the species.”
In the same book (’Macro-evolution: Pattern and Process’, p.38), Stanley points out:
“The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition.”
Dr. Steven Stanley repeats this fact in his 1981 book “The New Evolutionary Time Table:
“Since the time of Darwin, paleontologists have found themselves confronted with evidence that conflicts with gradualism, yet the message of the fossil record has been ignored. This strange circumstance constitutes a remarkable chapter in the history of science, and one that gives students of the fossil record cause for concern,.”
Dr. David Raup, curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, stated in a lecture at his Museum in 1979:
“Darwin’s’ theory of natural selection has always been closely linked to evidence from fossils, and probably most people assume that the fossils provide a very important part of the general argument that is made in favor of Darwinian interpretations of the history of life. Unfortunately this is not strictly true. … The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with Darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be. Darwin was completely aware of this. He was embarrassed by the fossil record, because it didn’t look the way he predicted it would, and, as a result, he devoted a long section of the ‘Origin of the Species’ to an attempt to explain and rationalize the differences. … Darwin’s general solution to the incompatibility of fossil evidence and his theory was to say the fossil record was a very incomplete one. … 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 million fossil species, but the situation has not changed much. The record of evolution is surprisingly jerky, and, ironically, we have 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 – that 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. …”
Dr. Kenneth Hsu, geologist at the Geological Institute of Zurich, (’Darwin’s Three Mistakes’ Geology, Vol. 14 1986) Shows that the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record cannot be blamed on the inadequacy of the Fossil record:
“We know that Lyell and Darwin were wrong on their insistence on the imperfection of the geologic record. … The Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary falls within magnetostratigraphic Chron C29R, which was less than .5 m.y. in duration (Kent, 1977). The boundary is recorded by precision stratigraphy, which has a resolution power to recognize events in thousands, if not hundreds, of years duration.”
“Paleontology is now looking at what it actually finds in the fossil record. Not what it is told by that it supposed to find. As is now well known, most fossil species appear instantaneously in the fossil record, persist for millions of years virtually unchanged, only to disappear abruptly – The Punctuated equilibrium Pattern of Eldredge and Gould.” Tom Kemp, Curator of the University Museum at Oxford University, `A Fresh Look at the Fossil Record’, New Scientist, Vol 108, No: 1485, Dec. 5, 1985, p. 66)
And what they were definitely not finding were the evolutionay transistion, the phylogenies predicted by the Theory of Evolution.
As is often the case in evolution theory, hopeful confirmations along new lines of inquiry often end up to be bitter disappointments for the evolutionists. Evolutionist N. Macbeth and E. Saif give yet another example.
” A. The Commitment in Theory: Darwinian theory asserts the physical descent with modification has been universal, which means that every modern species is the latest link in a phylogeny. There must therefore have been hundreds of thousands of phylogenies, and it was Darwin’s’ expectation that these would be found. His followers, sharing his expectation, felt a duty to seek and find the phylogenies. …
B. Another Miserable Failure: The expectations were in vain. In the 125 years since the Origin was published, nothing has been accomplished. No phylogenies have been established and the pursuit of them has fallen into dispute.”
Evolutionists E. Saiff and Norman Macbeth. Evolution, 1985.
I could go on with quotes into the 1990’s, but I growed tired. I will finish by pointing that the Fossil records fails to support the Theory of Common Ancestry because it is a record abrupt appearance the species followed stasis (no chnage) and with all major transformations of Bauplane undocumented.
Yet even more peculiar, the whole fossil record is backwards from what evolution predicts. Your suppose to start with a single species. 1st life, which evolves into two species, which evolves into genus which evolves into a family. And family members spread out and evolve separately into new species, genuses, families – until new orders become distinguished, and the proces continues with many major transistions occurring over very long periods of time, causing all the different Phyla to evolve into existence.
But the fossil record truly starts with the Burgess explosion of life, immedaitely followed the totally unconnected Cambrian Explosion of life, where all Phyla known today are found in a very short geologic span of less than 10 million years. All major body plans appear in a very short geologic time. Impossible for it to have evolved in that time period. The only life onserved before these explosions of life are four bacteria that go back billion years, plus one unrelated type whose name I can’t remember at this time, totally different from the bacteria. These 5 are alive and well today, and completely unchanged.
Conclusion, the fossil record does not look at all like Evolution, but it does resemble special creation: i.e. sudden appearance followed by stasis (no change) for its duration in the fossil record.
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Tyrus888:
I’ll give only a few comments:
1. Geologists haven’t held to Lyell’s version of uniformitarianism since some time in the 1800s. Lyell had constant rates of geological processes throughout time; modern geologists emphasize constant laws, allowing for variations in rates and even for catastrophic events, such as asteroid impacts and tsunamis.
2. It has long been recognized that most layering in sedimentary rocks is not reflective of annual cycles, but of individual events or settings in a depositional environment.
3. The erosion and deposition that occurred at Mt. St. Helens can be models for events that happened at that scale, but I see no reason to extrapolate these to a global scale.
4. The principle of fossil succession states that fossils occur in a certain order in the fossil record. This is an observation, not an interpretation. There are no trilobites in post-Paleozoic rocks. There are no primate fossils in pre-Cenozoic rocks. There are no human footprints mixed in with dinosaur footprints (http://geochristian.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/dinosaur-footprints-part-3/) etc. These statements are not generalizations, they are observations that have been observed over and over.
5. “Out of sequence fossils” do not occur all over the place.
6. The geologic column is real, not an invention of geologists. Read the following by Glenn Morton, a Christian geologist and former young-earther: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/geocolumn/
7. “Polystrate fossils” in Yellowstone show that the depositional environment for these could have been somewhat like that at Spirit Lake at Mt. St. Helens; nothing more. If these trees had been caught up in a global deluge, they would have been scattered all over the planet, not confined to one sequence of volcanic layers in NW Yellowstone Park.
8. Etc., etc.
Back to the topic: Young-earth creationism is bad apologetics. I would like to see churches and Christian schools distance themselves from the Kentucky creation museum, not just the Cincinnati Zoo.
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My last sentence could have been worded more precisely:
I would like to see not only the Cincinnati Zoo, but also churches and Christian schools distance themselves from the Kentucky creation museum.
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Kevin, what you say is simply not true.
Lyell’s Uniformitarian Geology was still being taught at the City University of NY at least into the late 1970’s. And it was in my children’s High School Textbooks.
Sure. some geologists were aware it was untrue. Stephen Gould came out against it in the 1970’s. It was being kept alive because it supported Darwinian evolution which was based on Lyell’s concept of gradualism. Both are false, but the powers that be in Academia are very protective of their materialistic Theory of Evolution, so students are still taught lies in the science class whenever Evolution is taught. Cant blame the teachers, they are merely retelling the lies they were taught to be fact in College when earning their degree to teach science.
Are you aware that 93% of the scientists who are members of the prestigious National Academy of Science (NAS) do not believe a God exist. Thus evolution must be a fact if their materialistic worldview is truly legitimate. The science taught in schools that is most distorted by this worldview is Biology.
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Uniformitarianism may have been taught at CUNY in the 1970s, but it was probably not the uniformitarianism of Lyell.
Uniformitarianism is still taught in geology departments, but in a modified form from the strict uniformitarianism of Lyell, which hasn’t been taught for a very long time. Lyell taught that processes have occurred at a uniform rate throughout time. Geologists have long known that this is not true. The laws that govern geological processes have not changed, but the rates can vary considerably.
Here are two ideas that shaped geologists current view of uniformitarianism, each of which has had more of an impact on geological thought than Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium:
1. In the 1920s, J Harlan Bretz proposed that surficial features in eastern Washington were formed by catastrophic floods. It took over forty years of persistence on his part to convince geologists of this. The source of these floods was glacial Lake Missoula, formed by an ice dam in northern Idaho that flooded the mountain valleys of western Montana. This is an example of a catastrophic event that fits within the modern understanding of uniformitarianism (which is not at all Lyellian).
2. In the 1980s, Alvarez et al. came up with their asteroid impact hypothesis as the event that ended the Cretaceous period. The Lake Missoula floods were of a somewhat local extent; the asteroid impact had a global catastrophic extent. Again, this fits with a modern, non-Lyellian version of uniformitarianism.
Young-earth creationists work somewhat within this uniformitarian framework as well, though they wouldn’t admit it. When one tries to explain the rock record through a global flood caused by the collapse of the vapor canopy or through enormous springs of subterranean water, this is an explanation that relies on natural processes. Water works sediments in certain ways, and creationists attempt (unsuccessfully) to explain layers of sandstone, shale, and limestone based on these laws. That is, in some ways, similar to uniformitarianism.
And yes, I am aware of the high rate of unbelief among scientists at higher levels, especially in biology. That ties in with my point. Perhaps one reason that scientists are turned away from the faith is because they think they would have to believe what is taught at the Kentucky creation museum; things they know simply do not work.
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Post #26 on the fossil record demonstrates the monumental ignorance (almost always accompanied by bold assertion reflecting misplaced confidence) that makes this argument probably not worth my wading into it yet again.
I’ll just ask one question for the Creationists: If Genesis is a literal account of the earliest humans, how did they know what a sword is?
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All right, I have to say this:
Tyrus888: But the fossil record truly starts with the Burgess explosion of life, immedaitely followed the totally unconnected Cambrian Explosion of life, where all Phyla known today are found in a very short geologic span of less than 10 million years. All major body plans appear in a very short geologic time.
Wrong. And this is a perfect example of how your sources outright lie to you, and you lack the necessary curiosity to look any further to confirm their information
Phyla are the highest order of taxonomic classification. “All major body plans” is claiming a LOT more for it than any scientist would.
For example, the first vertebrates appear during the Cambrian explosion period … very primitive fish. There are many many “body plans” among vertebrates that didn’t appear until much later. You would not find fossils of dinosaurs, horses, monkeys, tigers or birds among the Cambrian fossil record.
And as detail points: The Burgess event was not independent of the Cambrian Explosion, it’s part of it … and the time frame is closer to 80 million years, not 10 million.
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I agree with SteveG’s statement (#32) regarding what Tyrus888 (#26) said about the Burgess Shale. The amazing fossil beds of the Burgess Shale are from the Middle Cambrian, which is after (!!!) the Cambrian explosion. To say that all that existed before this were four species of bacteria (plus one other species) is more than fifty years out of date. The end of the Precambrian had a rich diversity of soft-bodied multicellular organisms known as the Ediacaran biota, and this pre-dated the Cambrian explosion by tens of millions of years.
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Continuing my previous post…
This is one more reason why young-Earth creationism (e.g. the Creation Museum) is anti-apologetics. It drives people away from Christ, not because of the foolishness of the Gospel, but because of the foolishness of the reasoning.
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