Episode Transcript
Welcome to Science Conversations. I'm Kaysie Vokurka.
Our fossils evidence for evolution.
Joining me to discuss part two of this topic is Dr. John Ashton.
Thank you for joining again, Dr. John.
Ah, you're very welcome.
We had a great discussion last time. I'm looking forward to this program.
Dr. John has written a book entitled Evolution Impossible,
12 Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth.
We're discussing chapter five in this program.
And it's a fascinating topic all about fossils.
And my question for you to start off with is,
what can we learn from the fossil record
about the diversity of life in the past?
Right, OK, so there are massive array of fossils
that are being found around the world.
And I think this is the fascination that children have,
particularly with dinosaurs.
We don't see dinosaurs in zoos today.
But of course, they're only a small part of a huge array of animals
that existed in the past that don't exist today.
When you think, of course, of maybe, you know,
large animals like woolly mammoths and woolly rye and ossers and this sort of thing.
But when we look at all the other kingdoms as well, you know,
insects and, you know, much smaller animals and insects and plants
that exist in the past that don't exist today.
And essentially estimates have been made
that something like 99 to 98% of the fossils of the species
that we see in the fossils don't exist today.
So we've got evidence of massive extinction that has occurred.
That's huge.
I mean, that's almost like we've only got 2% of the original diversity.
Yeah, there are less, maybe 1%.
Yes, that's huge.
That is huge, yes, when we think of the number.
So this is amazing.
And so it's a twofold problem, actually.
It's a twofold problem because in the past, there was massively much larger
genetic information available.
So we have a much larger amount of genetic information
has to somehow rise by random mutations, not just the amount that we observe today.
But, you know, 100 times that nearly has to exist in the past.
But also, there's evidence of massive extinction events.
So in one of the periods somewhere between about conventionally
dated as 200 to 250 million years ago, they say essentially 95%
of the marine life in the world was made extinct.
There was a massive extinction event in that period.
And then the second largest extinction event was believed to be in the
accretaceous, about 65 million years ago.
And that's when the dinosaurs and a whole lot of those animals that we have
portrayed in the movies became extinct.
So they have a massive amount of particularly the land-dwelling animals
becoming extinct at that time of all the dinosaurs and so forth.
Now, there are about another three extinction events.
Now, the thing is that these extinction events are global.
They occurred all over the world because we find these fossils all over the world
and they were water extinction events.
All of them? Yes.
Yes. So there's about five.
They're the two major ones and there's two or three other ones that are listed
occurring where smaller numbers of species were destroyed again by mass global extinction events.
Now, this is exactly what the Bible tells us.
The Bible tells us that there was a global flood
and that all these extinction events occurred at the one time.
Now, one of the things is that, well, hang on,
they're separated by all these layers and this is the argument when they get into
radiometric dating of putting all these layers in that separate them,
such as in the Grand Canyon.
You've got these massive layers there that span about, I forget exactly,
but something like 250 million years of layers are spanned in parts of the Grand Canyon there.
And a lot of these layers are laying conformably on top of the other.
In other words, there's no signs of erosion in between.
Now, the problem is, a couple of fold problem is that if these layers are laid down millimeters
per year, how are they going to bury these big animals?
How are you going to bury a dinosaur?
You know, it's got to be a catastrophic event.
And so if you have a catastrophic event, putting down enough sediment to be able to bury a dinosaur
and some of these other large animals, and then you do your calculations based on a millimeter
or two or sediment, you've got to be way out.
And so these calculations of long ages that essentially set the original dates for the fossil
column have got to be way out.
They've got to be way too long for reality.
It must have been a much shorter time because secondly, you know, carcasses,
animals break down very quickly or get eaten by other animals, these sort of things.
And so even small animals still require, you know, amounts of material to be fossilized.
And for example, a few years ago, we had massive floods probably more than 10 years ago.
Now in Queensland, where a massive portion of Queensland was covered,
size of the state of New South Wales, but it didn't result in fossilized kangaroos and lizards and so
forth, nothing happened.
And again, we don't find when we walk on the beach, our footprints don't become fossilized.
All right, it's got to be something, it's got to be buried.
Those footprints have to be buried very rapidly and then set to preserve them in something
that's very solid.
So we walk in the sand, more sand washes over the top, but it doesn't,
when that sand washes away, it doesn't expose footprints because it hasn't been solidified.
So we've got to have a catastrophic condition that involves, yeah, setting those footprints up
so they become like concrete.
Now another fascinating thing that I guess a few people are aware of, and I talk about this
in my book, in chapter five there, that if we take the Morrison formation in America,
which is a huge formation that spreads from New Mexico up to Canada, covers a vast area of the
United States, full of sedimentary rock, huge areas, you know, me and Sasquik, kilometers are
covered in this particular area, that had to be spread by some massive catastrophic effect.
Now we've buried the dinosaurs.
But what people don't realize is that, and I just read from the evidence here from scientific
reports there, that furthermore, buried with the dinosaur remains, are fossils of fish,
frogs, salamanders, lizards, crocodiles, turtles, crayfish and clams, as well as
predators or paradactyls, they're all mixed up with the dinosaurs.
So we've got, you know, terrestrial animals and marine animals mixed up in this massive
sediment. And that's the same layers.
That's right, in the same layer, buried together with the dinosaurs.
How would that happen?
So yeah, fish, turtles.
So what we have here is a picture exactly what we would expect from Noah's father,
and the catastrophic conditions there. Now this isn't, you know, this sort of scenario,
I was painted around the world. Often when we hear pictures about, you know, particular areas,
we don't realize that the fossils are often so mixed up. Another stunning discovery was made,
I think, in China, in Mongolia somewhere, of thousands of dinosaur footprints, all going the
same way that were all preserved of all different types of dinosaurs, as if they were
fluing some catastrophic event that happened and obviously preserved their footprints as well,
in the end. So there are lots of examples, I talk about these in the book, of course,
and spell them out. So we have this massive evidence of, you know, rapid burial of very large
animals that only can occur under catastrophic conditions. And yet we worked out,
well, I worked out the timeline largely for our geologic column based on the so deposition
on the basis of the uniformitarian principle, which still underpins the evolutionary model
today. Because if we shorten it, under catastrophic conditions, there's not enough time for supposed
evolution to occur, although there are other reasons why I can't occur, but they have to cling to
that model. And yet the evidence is in their face. There was a cover story on the journal
geology published some years ago of whale remains that were found on the top of mountains in a
desert in Peru. Yeah, this desert area on the top of mountains. Yeah, so it wasn't one or two,
I think they were about a hundred, but I saw an article the other week about beach whales,
but this is on mountains, like, this is something up on the top of the Peru and
if you had a step further. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. And the photographs are there.
And one of the things was that the whales were very well preserved, in other words,
the part of the front of the whale that separates out soon after the whale breaks down, they were
all joined and complete. But they're also fossils of the remains of sharks and other marine animals
found up there again as well. So what we can see is a number of things have happened. Those whales
were obviously buried catastrophically to be able to preserve them, so they weren't eaten by other
things and they're preserved whole. But yet that whole strata was also moved up. There was a catastrophic
event that occurred. And of course, we observed this around the world as well. We see, you know,
I've seen these myself when the travels, particularly up in the Kimberley's view of
northwest Australia, you find these strata that are just curved and bent. You know, and you think,
how can these rock layers be bent in an S-shape sort of thing? And this is clear example that
these multiple layers were laid down while they were still soft. And then there were massive
earth movements that were part of the catastrophic event that was occurring. And then they were set.
Yeah. And the same, these mountains were, you know, were moved up there. So we've got this
massive evidence from a number of different areas that the uniform material model just
doesn't fit. And this shortens the age is tremendous. Yeah. And of course, all the fossils
are found in sedimentary rock. So that means, well, most of them anyway, it means, of course,
with the water layer, like it's water that lays that down, isn't it? Yes, it is. Most of the
fossils have formed this way. Some are buried by volcanic ash and some of course we find in
tarpets and these sort of things. Another fascinating thing is so that when we look at these fossils,
particularly very low down in the so-called column, some of those fossils or creatures are
the same today. They haven't changed. And animals that we find buried with mammals and so forth
that we find buried with the dinosaurs, many of their animals today, they're exactly the same.
They haven't evolved. So where animals have continued on, they haven't evolved over that time.
They haven't changed. So we have powerful evidence that over hundreds of millions,
tens of millions of years, that species don't change. They stay the same. They go on. And again,
so we have evidence that evolution hasn't occurred from that point of view. We don't see
these slight changes occurring on these creatures evolving over time. And it's quite fascinating
too. Another thing we often think of mammals coming later, I remember visiting Hawaii a few
years ago, and there happened to be a display in the museum. They're a fossil display. And one
of the fossils on display was the fossil of a large mammal that had just eaten a baby dinosaur.
And the remains of the baby dinosaur were still in the stomach of the mammal.
So again, we have this picture, the massive catastrophic of it. Again,
and that was buried very quickly. So it fits again, the flood model.
And once you have these catastrophic of it, you can't calculate your ages assuming the uniform
material and that drastically shortens our ages down and fits the biblical model.
Very fascinating, compelling thoughts about the evidence there. So thank you for sharing with us.
We have more to discuss on this topic. Next time we'll continue to examine the question,
are fossils evidence for evolution? Be sure to join us.
