Hello and welcome to Science Conversations, a series examining the intersection of science and faith. I'm Dr. Barry Harker and my guest today is Dr.
John Ashton. This is my fifth conversation with Dr. Ashton.
But based upon his book, Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth. Today we're examining the reasons why the fossil record is evidence for extinction, not evolution. Dr.
Ashton is a chemist working in the field of food chemistry and has a PhD. In epistemology which is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of knowledge. And welcome, John.
Hello Barry. It's great to have you with us again. And we're getting through the yes, yes.
And today's topic is really all around the fossil record. So let's start by looking at the question why are fossils considered to be evidence for evolution? Well, evolution is considered to have occurred over millions of years and the fossils are believed to be the remains or evidence of animals over millions of years as well that lived millions of years ago. And of course, it is claimed that the older fossils, that is, the fossils deeper down in the Earth are simpler and that the more recent or fossils close to the surface Earth are more complex and hence more recent and that this is evidence for evolution.
So most textbooks cite the fossil record as the main evidence for evolution. So what is a fossil? Well, a fossil is the evidence of an animal or a plant that has existed in the past. It can take the form of, say, a mold where the animal died or the shell.
And as it was buried it may be dissolved away but it left a shape in the rock cavity. Sometimes the remains, when they were buried can be replaced by other minerals leaching in like silica. And so that's commonly referred to say, as petrification.
And we see that examples of that in petrified wood that we find. Other examples would be little sort of trails. We have worm trails that we find.
Sometimes an animal can completely break down and just leave sort of an arm, the carbon outline. So the carbonatious material remains and leaves the pattern. So essentially they're like a mold, somewhat like when children make a pasta cast from a mold.
Those remain in the rock. Sometimes volcanic rocks, a lava can engulf an animal. There's a classic example of that in the lava above Blue Lake in Washington State where a rhinoceros is actually buried in lava, was covered with lava and of course the lava set and solidified very quickly it would seem and left a remarkable mold of the rhinoceros.
Do we see fossils forming today? So how are they formed? Well, again, the animal has to be buried and buried fairly rapidly because we know that if an animal dies, it breaks down, it quickly breaks down. Bacteria break it down. There are flies around.
Maggots will get in and very quickly eat the flesh away, or other scavengers predator birds, other scavenger animals or fish, depending where it is. So it has to be very buried very quickly and in such a way that excludes bacteria and these sort of things from breaking the fossil down very quickly and then the rock has to harden in order to preserve it. So it requires quite unusual conditions, actually.
And we don't see fossils forming today, not easily, not on a regular situation. So how have we arrived at the use of fossils for estimating the age of rocks? Well, this is a more involved question and it involves quite a bit of history, really. Fossils were observed in the past, back hundreds of years, obviously, but geology really didn't start to take off till probably the 1617 hundreds.
And we, we there was one particular observer wrote about how if we have the layers on top, well, let's say when we look around the world, around us, we see that many of the rocks are layered there's layers, what we call strata. And he proposed that the strata on top, those rocks on top were younger than the rocks underneath. Now, that would seem very logical, but it is an important observation to make.
So that was Nicholas Steno, wasn't it? That's right, yes. Now, following that, there were a lot of canals being done dug in Europe in the latter part of the 17 hundreds. And one of the contractors, or who was responsible for looking after these canals, william Smith, noticed that when he looked at the layers of rock and you might have a limestone, a shale, and then a sandstone, a mudstone, particular layers, and he noticed that there were particular fossils in these layers.
Now, he also noticed that when they were digging canals, say, over in France as compared to England, he came across the same sort of layers with the same fossils in them. And he proposed that you could identify a particular strata by the type of fossils that they found in those layers. So that was, again another very important observation that was taken further by the famous geologist Charles Lyle.
Now, he was studying the fossil layers in the Alps and he noticed that again, that you could find a section of strata that had these particular fossils in them and say, you got to the highest level of that particular strata in that particular spot and you went somewhere else. And that particular layer was, say, near the bottom of another set of strata that continued on upwards with different fossils again. And he proposed that you could put all these together and actually form what came to be known as the geologic column, which represented all this strata over long periods of time that they proposed because they had all different fossils characterizing these layers.
And over know, geologists around the world adopted this system and combined their knowledge and observations. And that's how the geologic column was built up. And James Hutton was the Scottish geologist who developed the concept of uniformitarianism, which was that things had happened very, very slowly in the past.
And this was the basis, when Lyle looked at Hutton's work as he saw these layers, and that this was all being laid down in a uniform fashion, that this was going to mean long ages for these layers. Yes. So there's two interesting concepts here.
First of all, we have and just recapping, we have the observation that the rock layers on top are going to be younger than the rocks underneath. Then we have the observation that there are lots of strata that are laid down, lots of different mudstones, limestones, conglomerates, sandstones and shales and so forth. And these are in layers.
And many of these layers had fossils in them. And the layers seem to have fossils or collections of fossils that are characteristic of those layers. And we can build these layers over a very long period.
In other words, well over a very large depth, I should say. So there are quite and they go over thousands of feet. These layers extend for now.
The interesting thing is that these layers represent rocks that have been mostly, if not 99% of the time, laid down underwater. This is a very interesting concept, that all these layers, thousands, ten, 20,000ft of these layers in places have been laid down underwater. Now, Hutton that you referred to, James Hutton, he lived in the late 17 hundreds, and he didn't believe the biblical account of the world, that the world was only thousands of years old, and that the surface of the world, life on Earth, was only thousands of years old, as the Bible outlines.
And he believed that, in fact, it was very old, much, much older. And his basis for this was that when he observed these layers forming in river deltas, such as where the sediments being carried down for a river were then being deposited, they were only depositing a few millimeters per year. These layers were forming very slow or in lakes, as rivers were washing sediments into lakes.
They were building up these little layers only a few millimeters per year. So seeing you had layers that were thousands of meters thick, and you just do the simple calculation, you see that these have got to be millions of years old. Now, this led to the concept that these vast layers were millions of years old.
And Lyle also adopted that concept. And so this laid the foundation. Now that you now have all these fossils spread over rock layers that were supposedly laid down over millions of years, very long periods of time, and that created this whole new picture of geology.
There's lots of fossils, large fossils in the fossil record. How are you going to lay those down if you're only getting very small layers of sediment over long periods of time? Because you have to capture these animals and bury them. How are you going to do that? If Hutton is correct right now, what you've hit on is a very, very important problem for the evolutionary model.
See, what happened was, when you have these layers of strata over millions of years now and you have all these different fossils over millions of years, you have this picture that people can perhaps create in their mind of this slow change over millions of years, and hence this concept of evolution. And indeed, Darwin was given a copy of Lyle's first edition of his Principles of Geology that he wrote in the early 1830s, in which he proposed this concept of the geologic column over millions of years. And that gave Darwin the time that he needed in his mind as he was developing his theory.
But what you've alluded to is exactly that. You can't bury a fish just with a few millimeters of sediment per year. It's impossible.
It doesn't work. We know that these animals have to be buried under catastrophic conditions. A couple of years ago, we had those huge floods in Queensland.
I think there was an area of Queensland covered the size of New South Wales, but we didn't see massive numbers of kangaroos being fossilized or lizards or beetles or anything else. I walked along a beach recently and there are a lot of dead seabirds that have washed up on the beach, but they're not being fossilized. I don't go along later and see them fossilized, nor are my footprints being fossilized in the beach or anything like that.
We don't see this happening. So this is clear evidence, the fact that these animals are buried, and imagine what it takes to fossilize a whale or dinosaur, particularly the big dinosaurs. Some of them might be 100ft long, 30 meters long.
You've got to have massive catastrophic conditions to do that. And water, massive catastrophic conditions. Well, of water to bury these animals not only have to do they have to be buried quickly, but those rocks also have to harden fairly quickly too, and stop other action taking place.
So if it's just soft sediment, it could move. You don't want bacteria action to break it down and deform it. So the evidence we have is that these fossils are buried very, very quickly under massive catastrophic conditions.
And so this is an obvious it's staring us right in the face. This whole theory that these layers will lay down very slowly over millions of years just falls flat straight away. If there was massive amounts of water involved, would that help to explain the actual progression of the fossils, the laying down of the fossils? Well, yes, certainly.
There's a lot of evidence that's been done just recently where they've been able to use this GPS tracking, where they can actually measure not only the physical location of an object, but its sort of depth accurately. Now, when they apply this to fossils, they find that in many instances, the fossils are sorted according to size. So this is what you would expect in a rapid flowing situation where the size and so you have the smaller objects being sorted at the bottom, the larger objects being then carried away and sorted at different layers.
So depending on their size, the objects are sorted. And they've found this particularly stronger evidence for this, say, where you have dinosaurs that have been buried and occasionally they find dinosaur remains. That articulate, that is, all the bones that still join together.
But there are many cases, say, for example, in the Morrison Formation, where there are fragment or parts of dinosaurs and they're separated and they're separated according to the size of the bone fragment. And this is with regard to depth as well. And again, I'm sorry for memory, I can't remember which way it goes round, but they're sorted depth wise according to size.
Now, this again suggests very rapid flowing water. And then you've got to have catastrophic burial of these bones and parts as well to preserve them. So how did we get to the point where we have had the uniformitarian model really dominate geology over the last 150 plus years? Take us through the work that Lyle did at Niagara Falls and explain to us the impact of his work on the way that we've looked at geology subsequently.
Yes, the uniformitarian model, see, it became very predictable. I mean, how can you predict or do calculations on the basis of catastrophes? And the biblical model is a model of a massive catastrophic event that occurred in the past. And there's actually evidence for this, too, that I can talk about a little bit later.
But this uniformitarian view dominated because it enabled you to do calculations. It fitted into the current mechanical worldview that everything was systematic and obeyed laws. And I think one of the really important things that led to the acceptance of the uniformitarian model and put a death blow to the biblical Flood model in terms of science review was Lyle's study, as you mentioned, of the Grand Canyon.
So not the Grand Canyon of Niagara Falls Canyon. So Niagara Falls Canyon is about 35,000ft long. And so when Lyle talked to one of the locals, he asked one of the locals, how much does the waterfall move backwards? How rapidly is it moving backwards? And one of the locals said, oh, I think it's about a yard 3ft a year.
And Lyle thought to himself, Well, I think that's too much. And he conjectured that it was about a foot a year. Now, on that basis, it meant that the canyon was about 35,000 years old if it's moving back a foot a year.
And I think this seemed to be prima facie evidence to many people that the Bible account was wrong. The Flood wasn't four and a half thousand years ago, because here you had the Grand Canyon at least 35,000 years old. The important thing to remember, though, is sorry to go back again, that had a big effect on people's views of the age of the earth, because Lyle was certainly a brilliant geologist.
He devised the geologic column, he'd written extensively. His book had become the main textbook that was used, and so his views were extremely influential. The point is that it was based on an estimate.
It actually wasn't based on hard evidence. What does that hard evidence, by the way, I think you mentioned the Grand Canyon, I think you were referring to the Niagara Falls Canyon. Again, the evidence actually shows that the initial observation was correct, that it was about a yard per year or a meter per year, which means that it was going to collapse the timescale quite considerably, wasn't it? Oh, yes.
It'll bring it back down to say, 7000 years. But again, what happens is that how do we know that it was just that constant flow all the time? What about if there were the ice ages, which we know in the past, which may have involved much more rapid water flows, and certainly if there were catastrophic conditions in the past and there's massive evidence of that, as we've seen. Just the fact that you've got buried dinosaurs and whales and all these other big animals that are buried.
You've got evidence of tree trunks going vertically up through fossil through the fossil layers. All this evidence that these things involve massive movements of water, massive movements of sediment, then if you have much faster water flows, if you have a lot more solid material in the water, hence a greater erosive rate on the surface there a shorter time is going to be very, very feasible. And this is the evidence that we can see.
Now, if there was a catastrophe, that Niagara Falls Canyon could form much, much more rapidly. But I think the important thing is that a lot of this early work was based on estimates and guesses. And we know from other evidence the fact that you can't bury animals, as you mentioned earlier, by a few millimeters of sediment a year.
They're just going to decompose rotoray or be eaten or washed away. We've got a major problem for the uniformitarian model. Major problem, and the problem for Lyle's work was that when it was applied, the estimates of geological time could actually vary by I think you mentioned a factor of ten in your book.
Oh, yes. When they attempted to apply the sedimentation rate model to estimate the ages, there were massive variations, but nonetheless, they stuck to their millions of years model and they averaged the results out. And that's how essentially, we have the dates of the fossils that are used today.
Now, later on, there were half a dozen measurements that were done and the initial radiometric dating measurements from memory were only half a dozen measurements. They were done over in the Appalachian Mountains in eastern United States from memory and they gave values that roughly approximated the levels that have been estimated on the basis of sedimentation rates. And I think those half a dozen values that just happened to come out corresponding to the sedimentation rate values clinched the radiometric dating methods.
And of course, then, since then, they have done more dating, radiometric dating and aligned the dates. But this really, again, provides us clues that, again, we need to really seriously question the radiometric dating methods, because how can these fossils be buried if you've only got a few millimeters of of center layers being laid down a year? If these layers represent hundreds of millions of years, how can you have huge fossils buried in these layers? It just defies logic. So our current estimates, the age of the Earth, are actually based upon radiometric dating and the assumption of uniformitarianism.
Yes. So if the layers are considered to be very old, clearly the fossils have to be very old. And if they do go largely from simple to more complex, then you would expect that there's a progression.
But this will bring us to the question of intermediates. The fossil record should also capture all the intermediates that would be required to transmute one particular organism into another type of organism. And that's going to be an issue, isn't it? Oh, yes.
Well, that's something perhaps we can discuss in detail, because that's a big area of discussion. The intermediates are missing. I think one of the other things that is important to understand is that when we look at, say, sections of whether it's the Niagara Fall Canyon or the Grand Canyon, you've got these layers that are laying on top of one another, all these different strata, and many of them are exactly level and smoothly on top of one another.
There are no signs of erosion in between. Now, we had some heavy rain a few weeks ago and I have a gravel driveway. And the erosion that took place just very quickly just in that driveway, it was amazing.
And I had to go and reshuffle gravel in its pace. What they're claiming is that you can have all these layers, what we call conformably, laying on top of one another, that is, without signs. It's like a pancake, isn't it, really? Well, like a series of pancakes.
Series of pancakes. They're on top on the without signs of erosion. And yet we're saying that all these layers are deposited underwater over millions of years, and yet there are no erosion.
Gullies and these sort of things. There will be many sections. In some places there are, but then we'll have sections representing millions of years where there's no erosion.
No erosion in millions of years. So much of this just doesn't make sense. So what we have to do is keep in mind, when we're evaluating the fossil record, the things that we've mentioned here.
Fossils are mainly found in rocks that formed underwater. Yes, water deposition of rocks was occurring regularly all over the world. Obviously, fossilization requires rapid burial, and that something like 98% to 99% of all species that once existed are extinct.
So this is really evidence for catastrophe, isn't it? Very much so. I mean, the Stand geology textbooks recognize that, say, during the Cretaceous period, which ended, say, 65 million years ago, according to their calculations, virtually the entire world was covered by water. And that's when the dinosaurs were wiped out.
That's when many of the bird species and many of the ancient animals, according to the evolutionary model, were wiped out. And so we have in the Bible that there was a major catastrophe on the Earth, and the Earth was essentially covered with water and largely destroyed. Now, according to the geologic record, there were massive, catastrophic events that wiped out huge amounts of the species on the Earth at different periods.
You have one about 450,000,000 years ago. You have the Permian at about I think at about 250,000,000 years ago, if I remember correctly. And the Permian was a massive extinction, where it was the greatest extinction of life that has occurred, and then the Cretaceous probably the next one.
So at 250,000,000 years ago, according to their timescale, again, another massive flood event occurred. But you had these massive flood extinction events occurring at 450,000,000 years, 400 million years, 250,000,000 years, 200 million years and 65 million years. So what you've got is five worldwide major extinction events, according to the geological record.
Now, they've got them separated by millions of years, tens of hundreds of millions of years in some cases. And yet, when we look at some of these layers, as I said, there's no signs of erosion and this sort of thing in between some of these layers. The other thing is these deposits where these extinction events occurred, say with the Cretaceous there's when a lot of the massive limestone deposits were formed that sort of a hundred meters thick, like the White Cliffs of Dover.
Look, those deposits extend from Ireland through England, through Europe, through France, down into Turkey and Egypt. That's a massive deposition that is just full of fossils. But we know that same period of layer is in the United States.
It's here in Australia, the big cliffs that are along the great Australian bite, and they're all full of the same fossils. So this massive extinction event that occurred over the world, then if we look at the Morrison Formation, for example, in the United States, where we find lots of the dinosaurs, that's an absolutely huge sandstone conglomerate formation that runs from New Mexico up to Canada. Now, imagine the sort of catastrophe on the Earth to bury and move that huge amount of sand.
Now, that's a massive catastrophe event that has to produce that. And yet it's full of all these layers that, according to the uniformitarian theory, were laid down over millions of years. It just doesn't work.
You can't move these little layers few millimeters at a time over hundreds of thousands of square miles. It just doesn't make sense, it doesn't add up. So we would expect them to see massive fossil graveyards right across the Earth? If the Bible is correct, yes, and that's exactly what we observed and recent finds, say, up in Mongolia, where they found again a lot of fossil dinosaurs.
And one of the interesting things that was observed there, and these are all results published in the mainstream science journals where they've observed dinosaur footprints that have been fossilized. Now, we know for your footprint to be fossilized, it's got to be varied very quickly, but in such a way that it then solidifies and hardens to preserve it. And the same with worm trails or whatever.
Something's got to happen quickly and the rock has to harden quite quickly to preserve the footprint, particularly in something like sand. They found these fossilized dinosaur prints and they're all different sized dinosaurs. They're all mixed up and they're all facing all the footprints are facing the same way.
And I think from memory they range from about 8 long, so they're quite a huge range in the size and all different types of dinosaurs which would indicate perhaps that they're running away from something all if they're all facing the same direction, there's a whole multitude of them and then know that's just one little snapshot event. But we have lots of examples of this in another place in the United States, for example, there's these massive insects have been fossilized. Now, insects just don't fall out of the sky, land in a pond, fall to the bottom and then get solely buried.
They'll get eaten or broken down very quickly. And yet we've got these insects buried, massive amounts of them. The other thing to consider too is when we look at some of these fossil record, is that according to the theory of evolution, fossils evolve from some previous ancestor, right? So you have this slow change over the fossil record if we go to the oldest rocks that have fossils, so they're the late Pre Cambrium.
So the Pre Cambrian rocks range from around about four, according to the secular dating system, four and a half thousand million years, up to about 550,000,000 years ago. And so from about 600 million years ago onwards, according to the conventional dating, we find fossils mainly of soft fleshy sort of little animals, coral type animals, and jellyfish and some worm trails and this sort of thing. But then we suddenly find fossils of, say, little segmented animals with legs and this sort of thing around about 600 million years mixed up with these soft bodied fossils.
So suddenly we have a creature which has a very complex DNA. You've got to have code for these little legs, these little segmented bodies, but we don't see the development of these little animals. And then once we get into the early Cambrium, we get into the trilobites and we have trilobite fossils.
So you've got eyes, you've got segmented bodies, complex reproductive system legs, very complex animal, lot of DNA, but no ancestors, no fossils of something solely developing into a trilobite. You just suddenly have trilobites. And cellular geologists have pointed out that you can have thousands of feet of, say, Cambrian rock riddled with trilobite fossils and conformably underlaying them with no signs of erosion in between.
Thousands of feet of fossils of strata with no fossils in them, just suddenly there. So we're all the ancestors. So there's clear problems for the evolutionary progression.
If you've got fully formed animals suddenly appearing and then underneath in the rock layers underneath, you don't have any evidence of those animals at all. Yes, and this occurs over and over again around the world. We find suddenly in the fossil layer, fully formed, highly complex animals in the fossil layer.
Matter of fact, in the Cambrian, there just about all the invertebrate file or are found in the Cambrian. And this is right at the bottom of the fossil layer. So the Cambrian is pretty well the oldest fossil rocks that we find.
As I said, there's a few in the upper levels of the precamium, so suddenly they appear there. So, for example, insects appear in the fossil record, fully developed flight, fully developed. Insects are extremely complex animals in their design and their DNA and a huge variation in insects.
So all that DNA has to evolve somehow and would take a huge amount of trouble. We know it's absolutely impossible, but even on the secular timescale would take a long period of time. But there's no evidence in the fossil record of the evolution of insects, no evolution evidence in the fossil record of the evolution of turtles.
Just major problems there. And then when we look at some of these other issues, like, for example, in the Cambrian nautiluses. Now, nautiluses are members of the same family as squids and octopuses.
They're highly intelligent predators and they have a jet propulsion system. Now, in some of the very bottom layers of the Cambrian, hence supposedly well, hence the oldest layers, we find very advanced propulsion systems and very complex propulsion systems. And then further up in the layer of nautiluses, we find nautiluses that have propulsion systems that aren't as complex.
So the fossil layers just don't fit the pattern of evolution that we would expect. The evidence for evolution isn't there. What you find is fully formed animals, they don't change and they then become extinct.
We don't see evidence of gradual change in the animals. The trilobites stay trilobites, the different crabs stay crabs. They just stay the same.
So the stasis in the record exactly. It's not changing. Just before we go to the break, John, I'd like to just make a comment about rapid fossilization.
In the book, you also give examples of animals giving birth, being captured in the fossil record or fish swallowing another fish. So this is. Sort of added to your dinosaur footprints that clearly indicates that something's happening very very rapidly.
But I wanted just to get you to comment on the explosion of Mount St. Helens in 1980 and the implications for how rapidly layers can form. Can you just briefly give us an overview of that in a couple of minutes? Yeah, sure.
When the St. Helens exploded, a volcano exploded there. We had massive mud deposits and volcanic ash deposits.
And when you look at these layers they formed for example in a day. But when you look at these layers that are formed over hundreds of feet if you use the uniformitarian model you'd say that those layers were represented thousands of years but we know they formed in a day. So here we have classic evidence that we see that was observed that this sort of structure can form in a day and yet according to how it's being interpreted it took thousands of years to form.
Another classic example was a couple of years later there was a massive snowmelt caused by another minor eruption at the volcano. As this water and mud rushed down the mountain it actually gouged out a canyon like the Grand Canyon and so again that formed in about 6 hours. We had a miniature Grand Canyon form with similar structure and again, if you looked at it from the uniformitarian model you'd say that that canyon formed over thousands of years but we know that it formed in 6 hours.
We even have the day that it formed. And so here, if we look at observational science what we can go out and observe today it just throws the whole uniform model out the window. I'm Dr.
Barry Harker, and you're listening to science conversations. My guest is Dr. John Ashton, author of Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth.
John has been explaining why the fossil record is evidence for extinction, not evolution and why catastrophism not uniformitarianism is the best explanation of the fossil record. When we come back, John will focus on the problems for evolutionary theory in the discovery of DNA in supposedly very ancient fossils. If you have any questions or comments in relation to today's program you can call Three ABM, Australia radio within Australia on 024-97-3456 or from outside of Australia on country code 612-497-3456.
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If you've just joined us. I'm Dr. Barry Harker and you're listening to science conversations.
My guest is Dr. John Ashton, author of Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth. John has been explaining why the fossil record is evidence for extinction, not evolution and why catastrophism not uniformitarianism is the best explanation of the fossil record.
In this part of the program, John will focus on the problems for evolutionary theory in the discovery of DNA in supposedly very ancient fossils. John DNA should have degraded completely in the time assigned to very ancient fossils, supposedly in the order of millions or tens of millions of years old. Yet DNA has been found in a number of different fossil types.
What are these fossil types and what are their assumed ages? Yes, the discovery of soft tissue and DNA fragments and protein fragments in fossils has certainly thrown a real spanner in the works, in my view, anyway, of the dating of these fossils as millions of years old. Matter of fact, I was reading a paper recently where they've now extracted viable proteins from dinosaur remains that were dated conventionally at 150,000,000 years old. So we know that these long protein chains break down.
We have studies where we've studied the breakdown of collagen and some of these other proteins, and we know how quickly they break down under different conditions. And this is published in the literature. So it's highly unlikely that any of these molecules would survive more than thousands of years or few 10,000 years at the most.
So it's just not possible, it would seem, that they could be millions of years old. And so this has really, really thrown major questions over the dating of these fossils. And they've been able to extract DNA from leaf fossils that were sort of tens of millions of years old and from various dinosaur and ancient lizard fossils.
Again, tens up to some of them, 120, and the oldest one that I've seen, 150,000,000 years old, according to the conventional dating. So the fact that they've actually found these soft tissues with these long biopolymer molecules in them, and we know that these biopolymer molecules break down, they have particular confirmations that they have and structures which are not very stable in the long term. And we know that these structures break down over time.
So this is really, really powerful evidence that these fossils are not that old. So it's very interesting that they've been able to extract these from the bones of dinosaurs and, as I said, from remains of leaf tissue that has been preserved to the point that they could cause antibody reactions in the detection for proteins and these sort of things. So it's quite spectacular evidence.
When it first came out, of course, when it was first reported, a number of scientists just said to the scientists that discovered it, mary Schweitzer, that you just can't do science. He made a mistake. But subsequent multiple studies have confirmed that that is the case.
They've found the soft tissue in these dinosaurs. So these dinosaurs can't be that old, these remains can't be that old. And I think this is highlights the major problem of the uniformitarianism model that is based on this really naive assumption that these conditions, much as they are in the world now are what have prevailed over hundreds of millions of years.
And it just is so ridiculous that you can have all these layers lay on top of one another, no evidence of erosion, and yet at the same time, you've got the burial and preservation in forms of fossils of huge animals, as well as small ones, of course, that would require massive amounts of sediment to bury them. Secondly, you've got the evidence, as you pointed out from the museums. We've got fossils of fish eating another fish, of a reptile, marine reptile, giving birth.
They've found fossils of dinosaur eggs where the embryos have been preserved. Now, once the embryo dies, it's going to break down, just go to mush very quickly. So for that to be buried and preserved requires very unique conditions.
And we don't see those conditions happening today. It's very, very different to what we see happening today. So even with large catastrophes today, we don't see the fossilization that we see in the fossil record.
Not to the extent, nowhere near the extent. We have the example, say, from Mount St helens that we know, again, just recapping what we said in the last little bit, that we can see how these layers can form very, very quickly, very rapidly. So the whole concept of time based on this uniformitarian principle just falls over.
We now have the evidence that it doesn't work. We can't estimate time there. And this in turn, seeing the radiometric dating aligns with this should throw major concerns over radiometric dating.
But there's more, and that is the fact that the fossils really haven't changed. The animals in the fossils really haven't changed. Now we know the dinosaurs were wiped out, sorry, the Trilobites were wiped out, say, I think, 250,000,000 years ago.
Why haven't they reevolved since then? A whole lot of the Brachiopodum and marine invertebrate that were wiped out 400 million years ago, why haven't they reevolved? Why have we lost 98% of the species? So what the fossil record shows us is massive extinction. It shows us that somewhere between 98 and 99% of the life that has ever existed on this Earth has been wiped out in major catastrophes. Why hasn't it reevolved? If we had the largest catastrophe on Earth with the permian 250,000,000 years ago, why hasn't life reevolved? And there's another issue too, isn't there? And that is that we have animals today that are virtually indistinguishable, or are indistinguishable from animals that we find in the fossil records supposedly hundreds of millions of years ago, exactly like seapens.
We have sea pens today. You could get them for your aquarium, although they're fairly difficult to maintain. We find fossil seapens on the lower layers of the Cambrium, possibly even the upper layers of the pre cambrium from memory.
And they're the same. They haven't changed. Sea pens are seapens and they're a little coral, like an enemy type little creature, and they haven't changed.
We've got the horseshoe crabs. We find fossils of those in the ancient rock lows exactly the same as the horseshoe crabs today. The colicants that we find fossilized in the Cretaceous found alive swimming in the Atlantic Ocean in 1938, they, they haven't changed.
And, and this is the important point. We haven't observed the evolution of these new animals. What we observed is the extinction.
Now there's another very fascinating point that comes out from this and that is the diversity of the DNA. When we have been able to analyze and track sort of ancient DNA so that is DNA of animals where the DNA has been preserved maybe in Ice Age or something like this, we find that that DNA has much greater diversity encoder within it than the modern DNA. And so this is, for example, with one of the Australian studies have shown, for example, that a giant zebra that used to live in Africa was the same as the current plain zebra.
It was just a variation of that. So that zebra had very diverse DNA in its genes. So it had DNA carrying for a lot of different types of zebras, we could say.
And a matter of fact, one of the leading researchers said that often number of the species that we've said in the past were all different species were actually probably not as diverse as we thought because that DNA was actually all those different varieties were actually encoded in the DNA. Now this is exactly the biblical model. The biblical model is that God created in the beginning and we would understand that God created massive diversity in the DNA initially that there and that as these spread and different environmental conditions they led to the variations that fits in with the biblical model, that fits in with what we observe.
The evolutionary model says that no, slowly we're developing more and more complex DNA. What do we observe? The fossil record. We observe the loss of DNA.
And the thing is that leading paleontologists also recognize this. Several leading paleontologists have recognized that you don't see evidence of evolution in the fossil record. What you see is a fully formed, fully functioning animal appearing and then it doesn't change in the fossil record and then it becomes extinct.
You don't see evolution. What we see is just in people's mind. They have constructed a series of fully formed animals and they have claimed, well, this evolved into this and this evolved into that.
But the evidence isn't there. That's just a story. The evidence isn't there.
The response to the living fossils is usually the world. The animal is so perfectly adapted to its environment. But if that environment is going to be exactly the same over millions of years, you have to explain how those environments could be the same over hundreds of millions of years of time and not have any really any observable adaptation in the animal itself.
How can you say that an animal is hundreds of millions of years old and you see in the fossil record and then you have counterparts today looking exactly the same and then you have to say, well, it was so perfectly adapted then wouldn't all of those animals at that time be adapted to their environments? And so there's really significant problems for the evolutionary model in trying to explain how you can have animals that are supposedly hundreds of millions hundreds of millions of years old but not demonstrating any evolutionary development. Yes, exactly. And this is where the fossil record in itself is showing that evolution doesn't occur because you have these animals, the crocodiles just stay crocodiles all the way through and then we have them today.
As I said, the horseshoe crabs stay exactly the same. One of the fascinating things is, though that where different species have been wiped out. If we've wiped out 400 million years ago 95%, I think I remember of one of certain types of invertebra were wiped out at that particular extinction over the next 400 million years.
Why haven't they reevolved? Why haven't we seen that? What we see is instead, once these things become extinct, they're lost forever. The fossil record is the record of extinction. It's the record of the loss of DNA.
It's the record of the loss of genetic information. What evolution claims is that no genetic information builds up over time. What we observe in the fossil record is no, in the past there was a massive amount of genetic information and it has been lost.
And we observe it still happening today. As we mentioned the other week, what we observe is today extinction is going on. We can see extinction occurring today with environmental conditions, with human intervention.
We can see extinction going on all around us. We see the loss of code, land being cleared, insects being destroyed and so forth. But we haven't seen any evolution.
We can't even produce evolution in the lab. So the observational evidence is actually telling us that evolution hasn't taken place, that the anomalies for evolution are fatal to the theory. Essentially when we look at the fossil record well, yes, the evolution requires a long period of time.
And what they're claiming from the fossil record and from the uniformitarianism model is that we have a long period of time. What we're saying is, hang on, you can't work out the ages of these rocks by adding up the thickness of the strata which is what Hutton did and Lyle did and so forth and estimate their ages that way because the only way you can bury and have the fossils forming is through catastrophes. If you have a catastrophe, then you're not forming the layers over a uniformitarian system.
So they've got a major inconsistency in their model. It just doesn't work. When we have the flood model, though, the biblical flood model tells us that there was a worldwide flood that wiped everything out.
What the uniformitarian model is says that there was a whole series of floods millions of years apart that wiped out different parts of different types of animals at different times. So that's the difference in the model. When we look at the actual evidence that we have here and now that we can measure here and now, it fits the biblical model to a T.
The biblical model says in the beginning God created. Since that time we've lost information, the codes, the genetic material that God has created over time. The Bible says there was a massive worldwide flood.
Cultures all around the world tell us that there was a massive worldwide flood in their records, in their traditions, so that's in living memory we also have the dragon situation where in history people talk about these dragons. Now the word dragon was used before the term dinosaur, but many of the dragon descriptions, many of the dragon artwork, the dragon accounts fit these large predator dinosaurs that we know that were around. So when we look at the evidence we have, it actually remarkably fits the biblical model.
The scientific model of uniformitarianism slow deposition over millions of years just doesn't fit the observed data. The fossil record is a remarkable record confirming the biblical account. This is such a crucial topic that we're going to spend another conversation on this next week.
We haven't been able to focus on the missing intermediates today of the fossil record so much, but next week we're going to spend a whole hour on that. Right? I think that would be really good because this is one of the claims of evolution is that, okay, this fish evolves into an amphibian, amphibian into a reptile and so forth. If that's the case, where are all the intermediate fossils? And I think this is fascinating further evidence that the theory of evolution is just a made up myth.
Just briefly John, what are we going to find next week? Well, we're going to find that there aren't those missing links that the theory of evolution requires. And we have top geologists and paleontologists that recognize that, that those missing links aren't there, still missing. They're still missing, yes, that's for sure.
John, it's been great talking with you again today. I'm sure this is just another link in the chain of the evidence that you've accumulated in your book which indicates very strongly that your title is correct, that evolution is impossible, absolutely impossible, and it didn't occur. I'm Dr.
Barry Harker, and you've been listening to science conversations. My guest has been Dr. John Ashton, author of Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth.
Next week our conversation will be on the missing fossil intermediates needed by a viable evolutionary theory. Don't miss this important topic until then, bye for now and God bless.
