Fossil Evidence for Evolution? part 2 - SC2517

SPEAKER 1 Welcome to Science Conversations. I'm Kaysie Vokurka. Is there any evidence of fossil intermediates? Joining me to discuss part two of this topic is Dr. John Ashton. Welcome once again, Dr. John. Hello, Kaysie. So we are looking again at Dr. John Ashton's book Evolution Impossible: 12 Reasons why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth. And we're looking at chapter six in this program. So we've been talking, John, about how we expect to find intermediate species in the fossil record, but there's a glaring lack of them for what we would expect if evolution did occur as it's been theorized. So tell us a little bit more about how we find the species. If there's a lack of intermediates, obviously we're finding them pretty much fully formed, is that right? SPEAKER 2 Yes, yes, and this is one of the fascinating things that the fossil record clearly shows that defies the evolutionary model. What we find typically in the fossil record is we find suddenly in the layers we will find, begin to find fully formed animals. If they're fully formed of a particular species. And as we go up through the layers that animal may survive for a number of layers and might survive through to the present time. But the classic thing is that it doesn't change. We don't see mutations occurring. We don't see changes over the life of that animal. It stays fully formed the same. But the fact, it's very interesting that we have layers without any fossils in them, and then suddenly we have these layers appear with fossils in them. And so particularly the lowest rocks, of course, we get to the bed rocks where there's no fossils, and then in the Precambrian we find some very simple fossils, and then in the Cambrian though, we find a lot of fossils. Now the Cambrian dates back conventionally, they say it's about 540 million years old and spans, I think, about 100 million years from memory. And so in these layers, we find a lot of creatures, like the classic trilobites that are quite complex animals, nautiloids, these sort of animals, they appear fully formed. Now, if we look at, say, trilobites here, we've got an animal, which is, I guess, you know, looking at it today, I'm just trying to think it's sort of a bit like a, like a little pill bug, those little bugs that, that curl up that you find under logs sometimes. Yeah. Little slaters. Yeah. Or maybe, you know, in some ways, too, like a little scorpion without a, out a tail. But these are essentially segmented. They have a segmented. body. They have a lot of legs. They have compound eyes. And as they've studied the eyes, these eyes are made up of a multitude of tubes, each with lenses with different focal lengths. Wow. Extremely complex. So it has digestive system, you know, reproductive system and so forth. As I said, multi-segmented body, lots of legs, so forth. And yet when we look at the layers below it, there's. There's no trial. They just suddenly appear in the fossil record. If we look so another one is nautiloids and we find nautiloids today and we know they're highly intelligent, very aggressive hunters. So they've got quite a complex nervous system and so forth. Very complex jet propulsion system that gets them along. And yet we find fossils of these in these oldest rocks. And the fascinating thing is of course that underneath these rocks we can find these fossils in the rocks and then conformably lying under these rocks can be hundreds of layers, thickesses of layers with no fossils in them at all. In other words, there's no evidence for evolution occurring. There's no evidence for species evolving into these highly complex animals. And we're getting into the oldest rocks in. And there's obviously no evidence of erosion. SPEAKER 1 In those rocks either. That's right. Is that right? Like, it's they're fully formed layers, no chains. And then bang, we've got the next layers with fully formed creatures in them. SPEAKER 2 That'S right. Because one of the arguments that sometimes they bring up is, oh, the layers are missing. Right. Of these, where the transitions occurred and all the organisms that have solely evolved that lead up to these complex organisms are missing. But we have multitudes of examples where we've got layers, as I said, conformably lying on top of one another, no signs of erosion in between, that may be, you know, hundreds, thousands of feet thick, representing, you know, a massive amount of material that's there representing many ages if you go on the uniformitarian model, and there's no evidence of any creatures there that lead up to these creatures. So nowhere around the world, and we find trilobites all around the world and so forth, nautiloid fossils, these fossils, we find them around the world, but also around the world we don't find the creatures that evolved into them. We don't find the gradual evolution into these. And there are a multitude of speeches from many different Phyla representing a whole range of different types of organisms that are quite complex that occur in the Cambrian with no evolutionary ancestors in the fossil record below them. And of course this is actually referred to as the Cambrian explosion by geologists and paleontologists. But it's powerful evidence again that these creatures were fully formed when they were buried. They haven't evolved. SPEAKER 1 Yes. SPEAKER 2 All these different complex, even though they might be found in different layers in the Cambrian layers, their ancestors fungal spores don't occur in the layers below them. Sure, we find more complex animals, they may be further up and this sort of thing in some areas, but we also find very complex animals such as the nautiluses and the trilobites among the common ones, and there are less known ones that are also very complex found in these lower layers. And the fascinating thing is too, if you look at the case of nautiloids, they're the same today. They haven't evolved. SPEAKER 1 So we're talking about things like squid. SPEAKER 2 Octopus, all of that kind of family. SPEAKER 1 Yeah, in that family. SPEAKER 2 Yeah, that, yeah, yeah. Cephalopod. So the, yeah, it's quite fascinating evidence that this complexity there hasn't changed. Now another fascinating thing is the flowering plants. The flowering plants appear fully formed in the fossil record as well. SPEAKER 1 Okay, is this in the same period or a bit later? SPEAKER 2 They're probably a bit later, a bit higher up, but they also appear there. This is quite a conundrum because for many of those you need insects and the insects occur in different layers. I can't remember where they fit in exactly. But one of the fascinating things is again you don't see the evolution of flowering plants in the fossil records and these are bits that you think fall on the ground, get buried and we should find heaps of fossils of intermediates of the gradual development of the reproductive parts of flowers and so forth evolving. a major stage in the development of plants, but they appear fully formed. The other fascinating area is insects, flying insects. Now flight is another thing that appears in the fossil record. So you've got flying reptiles, pterosaurs for example, you've got insects, you've got bats, and you've got birds. So they're your four main categories. Now of course the flying reptiles are all extinct now, but flight is an extremely complex you know, order to develop, to develop organisms that fly. Now they have, they, you know, classically say that, you know, birds evolved from dinosaurs and, and this sort of thing. Mind you, we find fossils of birds in the same layers that we find fossils of dinosaurs anyway. But essentially the scenario is that dinosaur scale somehow evolved into feathers. And then the, you know, the little dinosaurs, of course, then became sort of evolved into birds. But this is a huge arch. Again, many people don't recognise the difference. For example, if we look at birds, they've got hollow bones to produce lightness with special little struts inside. So this is remnant of design, not random mutations to produce the hollow bones. They have a totally different breathing system and air flow with different sacs next to the heart and so forth, digestive system and so forth, air sacs that the air flows through. and of course they have feathers. Now of course this scenario that dinosaur scales evolved into feathers and I think they may have found some dinosaurs that had what appeared to be feather-like structures. But again the complexity of a feather is amazing. So we've got these little barbules and so forth that slide along. We have this sort of like velcro arrangement, but it's a sliding arrangement that allows it to slide as well. and flexible, it's lightweight, huge amount of genetic information to produce those structures. But again, the moment it got wet, it would fail if it wasn't lubricated and waterproof. And this is another amazing thing is not only have you got to have feathers evolve, but you've got to have the preening gland evolve at the same time. And again, this is complex biochemistry involved here, where you've got to have the mutations to produce the biochemistry to synthesise the lubricant oils. You know, and the chemistry of this is quite involved. And again, to assume that this random mutation occurs that produces this preening gland just at the same time it feathers evolve. And then, okay, what if the preening gland evolved on the back of the bird's head? It wouldn't be able to reach it to be able to spread the oil. It's just in the right part on its back where it can reach and can spread the oil on its feathers. When we look at these and the fact that we don't see dinosaurs in no evidence of dinosaurs, you know, evolving pruning glands and, you know, these sort of things. But the amount of genetic code that is involved to produce the proteins and other biochemical Pathways, the other molecules that are involved, they're all encoded in the DNA, all have to be produced again from the male and female gamete cell combining to produce a new organism that has this mutation with this new piece of code in it. And we don't observe it. The codes are extremely complex, would take a long time for the mutations to accumulate. And a lot of the mutation is going to be a hazard. So a feather with a dinosaur with all these wet, feathery scales hanging off isn't probably going to be survival. It's going to be caught and eaten by another dinosaur. SPEAKER 1 Natural selection just wiped that one out. SPEAKER 2 That's right, yes. So there's so much evidence that, and when we see birds appear fully formed, they're not evolving. you know, and developing these structures, when we find a fossil of birds, we find the fossils of all these particular components necessary for flight are already there. We don't find these intermediates between a dinosaur and a bird. And the same with insects. Flight in insects, the insects appear with flight fully developed. And insect flight is extremely complex. The types of wings and so forth, the coordinated systems that operate those wings, to enable them to beat at very rapid frequencies, all these sort of things are all coordinated again. So the insect hatches out of its egg, it can fly. It doesn't fly with just wings on one side, you know, all these sort of things that crash into the earth. SPEAKER 1 It would fly for something if I ever was doing that. SPEAKER 2 And again, we don't see the evolution of the insect structures anywhere in the fossil record. What do we find? We just find insects fully developed, fully capable of complex flight manoeuvres, fully developed in the fossil record. And they're into different types of insects. And so, well, thousands of different types of insects, I suppose. But again, what we would find is. SPEAKER 1 That. SPEAKER 2 Because they breed so rapidly, have such short lifespan, we should expect to find examples of these. Because we find some pretty good examples trapped in amber and this sort of thing, and fossils that are around, but we don't find at all. So we had this sort of, you know, and of course, you know, turtles are another obvious one that has been reported, you know, turtles just suddenly appear in the fossil record. Surely we would see the evolution of a turtle. SPEAKER 1 Yeah, some sort of shelled creature, a reptile shell. SPEAKER 2 Yeah, this is a classic one that is brought up by, you know, creationists that, you know, there are some classic examples there that we don't find in the fossil record. immediates of their gradual development. We find them as fully formed animals that have been catastrophically buried and preserved, which again is powerful evidence for creation and the flood, not evolution over millions of years. SPEAKER 1 Fascinating stuff. And just to consider how much not only are all of those parts related within an organism, but there's interdependence between organisms, because you mentioned about the plants, they need the insects to pollinate, and so how did that all work at the same time? Like everything here is so connected that the chance factor is dropped pretty well to zero. So fascinating things to explore. Well, we're going to talk a little bit more about this in the next section. So next time we're going to continue exploring the question, is there any evidence of fossil intermediates? Be sure to join us. 2