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 6th conversation with Dr. Ashton based upon his book, Evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of life on Earth.
Last time we examined the reasons why the fossil record is evidence for extinction, not evolution. Today we are continuing our examination of the fossil record. We will find that there are no fossil intermediates a further indication that evolution never occurred.
Dr. Ashton is a chemist with a PhD in epistemology a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of knowledge and truth. Welcome John.
It's great to have you in the studio again today. Good morning Barry. Good to be here again, John.
The fossil record is considered to be the strongest evidence for evolution. What does the fossil record have to reveal to be actual evidence for evolution? Yes, what to say is correct. It's generally well accepted that the clear evidence for evolution is found in the fossil record.
In fact that's the main evidence we have because that is the record of life that has existed in the past that has been preserved for us. The claim, however, that it is evidence for evolution is certainly one that we really need to examine closely in more detail because for evolution to occur we actually have to have these very, very simple life forms changing gradually into more and more complex life forms. So if you say have the evolution of say a bird you have to have some sort of forerunner of the bird, maybe some sort of reptile.
And then you have to show how that reptile has gradually developed feathers, gradually developed wings and so forth and many other structures. And this evidence, it's claimed, is in the fossil record. But actually when we look at the fossil record that evidence of change particularly from one type of animal into another type of animal is not there.
And we call these changes that would take place between say a reptile evolving into a bird or a fish into an amphibian. We call these stages the intermediate stages. So it's got to gradually progress.
Now these intermediate fossils are actually missing. They're not there. There may be a handful of fossil remains that have been discovered that some people are arguing are intermediates but essentially these intermediates are missing.
But for the fossil record to be evidence of evolution all these intermediates should be there. So this is a very, very serious aspect of the claims for evolution from the fossil record that we really need to examine. So John, this is a really crucial issue then, isn't it? If there are no fossil intermediates then the theory really has run out of options, hasn't it? Look, this is a very, very serious shortcoming of evidence for evolution and it's something really that proponents of evolution need to take very seriously.
That the claimed evidence for the theory that they're supporting is seriously missing. Seriously missing. So let's launch out into some specific investigations.
Richard Dawkins claims that the transition from fish to amphibian is beautifully documented in the fossil record. What has to happen for a fish to turn into an amphibian? And do we have any evidence of that in the fossil record right now? You've mentioned Richard Dawkins here and his claim that this particular transition of a fish to an amphibian, that is, the change of a fish, which is, say, characterized by fins attached via muscles to a fleshy part of the body. Those fins aren't attached to the backbone directly.
And he's claiming that that then has cleared. The fish have, over a period of time, clearly evolved into amphibians. And we know that amphibians have a structure where their forearms and their legs are attached to the backbone by a shoulder structure, a pelvic structure.
And so we have a clear different change here. Now, it's interesting that Richard Dawkins makes this claim that the transition is beautifully documented. And I think he makes that claim in his book evolution the Greatest Show on Earth.
Now, there's a couple of aspects to this that we need to think about. Richard Dawkins is a very highly regarded zoologist. He holds a prestigious professorial position at the University of Oxford.
I think he's retired now, though, I think, hasn't he? Well, he's retired now, as we speak now, but up until a few years ago, he held so when he's making these claims. He was at Oxford. Yes, I believe so.
His books are a few years old now, but not that old. Now, the important thing is that what he says is certainly taken on board by a lot of people because he's regarded as an authority. And so when he makes a statement like this for students and teachers, this more or less becomes a fact.
Now, when somebody with this sort of authority makes this statement but we really need to look at this much more closely, because in my view, there's virtually no evidence for the transition for a fish to amphibian. And so let's recap on this what has to happen. You've got your fish fin, and it's got to change into somehow into a leg.
Now, Dawkins goes on, as I recall, in his book, to say you've got a situation where the fish with the strongest fins could drag themselves over land, say, when there was a drought in a lake, and they could drag themselves over land to another nearby pond or lake and therefore survive. And so these fish that had stronger fins could survive. And gradually, over time, through series of droughts and ponds and so forth, you had the so development of a leg system.
And all this seems, when you explain it in little steps like this over a long period of time, it all seems feasible. But a couple of things that we need to really look at in more detail here. First of all, you've got to have the male and female Gamut cells.
They come together and they've got to produce a new embryo, a new little embryo that'll grow up to a new fish, that has some mutation in it, that gives us this stronger fin. Now, if that fin, we know that mutations actually don't generate new code. And so that okay, can produce a mutation to the fin, but only all the mutations that we observe generally damage the code.
They produce less information. There's generally a loss of information, not usually a transfer of meaningful information. So for somehow mutations to accumulate so that you produce a leg, there's a massive amount of new coders required.
You've got to encode for new bone structures, but not only new bone structures. All the different cells that make up the joints in that bone to move, to flex. And when we look at that in more detail, we find that even the surfaces of those joints are composed of all different cells.
All those different types of cells have to be encoded for in the DNA. And then we have to have the muscles to control them. They've all got to be coordinated together to work the ligaments, the tendons, then the blood vessels to feed all these muscles.
Then we've got to have the nervous system. There's a massive amount of code. Now, how that code forms has got to be through the addition of the nucleotide bases to the code via some process.
Now, we don't observe any process that can add those codes. The formation of new code and the massive amounts that would be needed to transfer, transform a fin into some sort of leg has never been observed. It's a massive amount of code.
We don't have a theoretical mechanism that has been proven to demonstrate how that would work. So from our knowledge of the biochemistry of how mutations work, it's impossible. Dawkins seems to create the impression, in my view that somehow these physical changes, that drought and the fact that it has to crawl, these physical changes are going to help somehow produce a code that is adapted to the physical situation.
But the formation of new code is going to be purely random. If there is a mutation, it's not going to be in any way specifically directed to solve the environmental problem in which the organism finds itself. Environmental changes can switch on and off genes.
We know that they can switch on and off existing code that is there, but they can't direct the formation of new code. So we've got two major problems with his thesis there. Firstly, we don't have a mechanism how mutations can form the new code.
Secondly, there's no way that we know of that environmental situation can direct the information to make it suitable to provide a solution to the environmental problem. So that is two very important characteristics. The other thing is that we don't actually find these gradual steps and changes within the fossil record.
We don't find fossils of the fish slowly developing mutated fins that are getting stronger and stronger with bone structures in them. And really, we know how prolifically fish breed. We know that a huge amount of fish fossils have been found, a very large amount of amphibian fossils have been found, but we don't find the intermediates.
So this raises a very serious question, but what in my mind it challenges further is that Dawkins makes this claim that this transition is beautifully illustrated. Well, I don't believe that that is so. I don't believe that that evidence is there.
I've looked through the literature, I've read what other people have said and I don't believe the evidence is there to support that. And so it's very worrying that a person with such authority makes these sort of statements. One of the other issues that you mentioned was the issue of the respiratory system moving from fish gills to a lung in an amphibian.
That would be a massive change and would need to happen pretty, I mean, that's critical to life, I mean, the, the limbs and the fins and so forth, not quite so critical. But that lung system, the respiratory system would have to change in one go, wouldn't it? Really? Well, yes, see that's right. Perhaps people think, oh, well, there might be some structures and some so changes in the cavities and this sort of thing.
And some fish have little air sacs we know, that adjust their buoyancy and all these sort of things. And people can make claims. Well, a buoyancy air sac was modified solely mutated and it became a lung.
Now, it's very easy for those sort of statements to roll off the tongue, but for them to happen, what we have to understand is those changes require massive changes to the DNA code in those organisms. Now, when you're changing from a gill system to a lung system, you've got a whole lot of changes in enzymes that are encoded for particular molecules that are involved in the system, switching on and off system, oxygen transfer, fur membranes, all these sort of things all have to be encoded for in the code. There are changes in the biochemistry that occur, there are changes in the physical structures that occur and all these things are required to be encoded for in the code that has to then produce these new cells.
And it all has to be coordinated to work. You can imagine a cartoonist would have a whole lot of fun drawing up cartoons for what these so called supposed intermediates might look like and the problems that they could have. The imagination runs wild.
So unless this transfer is fully coordinated, it's not going to happen. And again, there should be evidence of this because these mutations are slow, they require the breeding. The male and female Gamut cells have together produce a new organism with some sort of change in it that has to be viable in terms of reproduction.
In other words, that mutation has to be carried on to the next generation. There's a lot of requirements. It has to be able to survive in this mutated form and go on to breed and then produce a subsequent mutation.
So you can imagine there's got to be a lot of steps in that transfer across from a fish to an amphibian. Therefore, in the fossil record, we should at least find some examples. Matter of fact, there should be thousands of examples found, given the hundreds of millions of fossils that we've found and identified.
So this is really, really a serious problem. Now, I know there are some examples that are quoted as possible intermediates, but when we look at the structure, there's quite a serious difference between a fish and an amphibian. And we've mentioned the shoulder blade and pelvic system.
Another aspect is that in fish, the head is directly connected to the backbone. In amphibians, it is separated, not directly connected there. And that gives the head flexibility to move around and gather food on land.
So there's very significant differences. Now, I'm going to try to pronounce this. This was, I think, a proposed fossil intermediate between fish and amphibian.
And I think it's an ichthyostega. Yeah, I think you've said that very well. So this was a it's actually a vertebrae amphibian, but it looks a bit like a fish.
It looks a bit like a fish with legs, particularly because of the shape of the head. But when we look at its structure, it has a clear pelvic system, it has a clear shoulder system, it has clear legs. It is clearly an amphibian, a vertebrate amphibian.
And so it's not an intermediate, it's just a funny looking vertebrate. But the thing is, the important thing is that that's a fully functioning it's clearly an amphibian. It just, as I said, looks a bit fishlike in its overall shape.
But when we look at its structure, it's clearly an amphibian. But because it looks a bit fishlike, people say, well, oh, okay, that's an example of an intermediate. But these so called debatable intermediates are so few, what we need to find to demonstrate, or the people that believe in evolution, what they need to find is an example of a series of changes progressing through.
And there are no examples of those series of changes. The so called intermediates, that the half a dozen or so that they pull up from time to time are either clearly fish or they're clearly amphibians. And so we can define them at this.
But to actually demonstrate evolution, you need examples of a whole series of all these small changes in between. And that is totally missing no matter what area of evolution we look at, whether it's from reptiles to birds or reptiles to mammals, from fish to amphibians, and the origin of fish whatever it is, it's missing and some systems would have to change just in one leap, wouldn't they? Really? Otherwise it would be fatal to the organism. You might get some small changes in the animal itself in terms of its appearance but when you're talking about like the respiratory system, two different types of systems and having to go from one to the other an intermediate phase would probably be fatal to that organism.
Let's go back a little bit further. We've talked about fish to amphibian. Are there any fossil intermediates leading to fish? Well, no, fish just appear fully formed as fish in the fossil record.
This is the other interesting aspect. So we talk about fish well, fish are there, we find worms and then we find fish. So we don't actually find the ancestors to the fish in the evolution of the fish.
What would an intermediate look like in that case? Well, I guess some sort of little wormy thing, sort of gradually developing some fins and then another wormy thing developing some more fins and so forth. And then you've got to develop the little scales that are on the fish. And of course, some fish before that would have had non scaly fish.
So there's a lot of steps involved to develop the fish and something developing the gill system, as I said. Essentially the bottom line is this when we look in the fossil record we find particular animals and then suddenly we reach the layers and we find fish and the fish are fully formed. So this is what happens when we go down through the strata.
We find further down these little mollusks and little wormy things and as we come up through the strata, suddenly we find strata where there are fish and it's the same with all these different creatures. Suddenly we come to strata where we find reptiles and often say well, when we come to strata we find dinosaurs, we also find mammals as well so it's quite interesting they just suddenly appear. So the absence of gradualism in the fossil records a serious problem? Oh, definitely.
The absence of these intermediates is the major problem. It virtually demonstrates that evolution didn't happen. I mean, it's very, very clear evidence.
We find stasis or stability in the fossil record. We find fossils indistinguishable from modern organisms we talked about that last time. We find sudden appearance with no precursor intermediates.
How can this be evidence for evolution? Well, I think what has happened is that people have been taught evolution for a long time now and I think it's when people believe something, they've been taught it for so long. When they look at the data their mind sort of either fills in the gaps or they become blinded to the observation that there are these serious gaps. I mean, I've had discussions with people and they just can't see the significance of the fact that these intermediate species aren't there.
They will come up with all sorts of solutions. Well, we haven't found them yet, or maybe there weren't that many. The changes were very quick.
They'll come up with all sorts of possible scenarios to explain away the very clear observation that we have, that there are no intermediates. But the evolutionary process by definition requires all those intermediate stages. That's what evolution is.
Evolution is slow change over a long period of time. But as you've just said, we don't find that. We find fully formed organism here, we find fully formed organism here and it doesn't change through the fossil record.
It stays exactly the same. It doesn't evolve. And then it may be extinct or else it may be still alive.
So the trilobites stay trilobites and there are different species of trilobites, but they're all trilobites and each species stays the same. And then they become extinct. We don't have any more trilobites.
Or you have something like your crocodiles and they're there. They stay the same. They stay the same.
They stay the same and they're the same up in Queensland now, or in Africa now. They're still crocodiles. Let's dip back into the specifics.
Let's have a look at a few categories. What's the fossil evidence in relation to insects? Well, the classic example of insects, again, is that they just suddenly appear in the fossil record. And this is pretty interesting because insects involve insect flight is quite complex.
Insect flight is amazing. When you see the videos of how insects can hover, they can change direction in so many ways. Their wing systems are amazing and the different types of wing systems that there are now, when we find these fossils and I know there's a professor, I think his name is Professor Wooten, and I forget the university in England where he is at at the present time.
He's a world authority on insects and he makes the observation that when insects appear in the fossil record, flight is just fully developed. We don't see this evolution of wings to develop insects from some little creepy Crawley before then. They just appear in extremely complex forms, all different types of insects.
And that represents a massive amount of new code. The codes in these insects to encode for the flight all the different shapes of the wings, formation of the wings, the phases that they go through for their different life stages in life to encode, for all these changes that take place, massive amounts of code, all new code. And in the fossil record, we suddenly find these organisms appearing in the strata, fully developed.
And so this is it's really spectacular evidence that evolution hasn't occurred. Where are the evolutionary forebears of these insects? You're talking about flight. What about birds? Well, that's right.
Look, when you read the evolutionary textbooks, they claim that dinosaurs evolved into birds. And that's because we've found flying reptile sort of species in the past. And so people have thought, well, okay, these have obviously the birds.
And there are other similarities to have evolved into these reptiles have evolved into birds, and maybe the dinosaurs, some small little dinosaur evolved into a bird. And one of the standard treatise is that the scales on the dinosaurs, that they had scaly skin and that over a period of time, these, through mutations, changed into feathers, and then you had some of these ones that had wings and and so forth. You had the the bird solely developed.
But you know, again when we sit back and we, we think about this for a scale, a piece of flesh to evolve into a feather a feather has an amazing structure, you know, the little barbules on it and how they slide along and they sort of connect together sort of like velcro, they're extremely light, extremely strong. Feather is an amazing design but the other thing is to have your feathers, you've also got to have your preening gland to provide the oil that lubricates the sliding barbules and also waterproofs the feathers otherwise when it rains, poor bird's going to drop out of the sky which is not going to be very good for evolution. So you've got to have the code for the preening gland to produce the pruning lubricant arise at the same time as the feather as well.
And so when you look at the biochemistry involved in producing the pruning oil, the pruning gland itself and the structure of the feather, that all has to be encoded for in the code, let alone birds have hollow bones with special little struts in them. When you look at the design of birds, amazing. Their bone design is amazing.
This is totally different then to reptile bones, dinosaur bones, totally different structure but the codes for these have to arise by chance to make this amazing structure that works and again they have that completely different respiratory system that's right, their birds have a flow through respiratory system. Again, the important point is all this has to be encoded for you've got to have massive changes in the code, huge numbers of base pairs, huge numbers of changes to the genes and the genetic code. This has to then take place by so called random mutations.
And to get these massive changes, they would have to take place over a long period of time with thousands of intermediate, probably millions of intermediates, really, when you consider the different structures. And you've got to get there gradually a little bit of the time. And yet no fossil intermediates of all these partly developed creatures of dinosaurs developing bones that are hollow with all struts in them, this sort of thing.
Dinosaurs that have developed long feathers but perhaps not a pruning gland, they're just not there. They're not there and yet that's a massive change. What we find is fully developed birds ready to fly, they're flying, they don't change and then they either become extinct or the same as they are today.
We find birds living today that are the same as the birds that were flying around at the time of the dinosaurs. Matter of fact, we find birds at the time of the dinosaurs. And this is interesting when we think of Barbara Style now, she was a professor of paleontology at Harvard University, a world earner, and back in the 70s, she pointed out, we're actually not finding evidence for evolution in the fossil record.
She pointed that out back then, and she was at Harvard. She was one of the world leading paleontologists at that time. You mentioned the turtle.
Yes. Tell me about that. Well, a turtle is another clear example.
Turtles have a pretty characteristic shape, turtles and tortoises and these groups of animals. And so we should see clear evidence of turtles in the fossil record. I mean, they have quite a shell that would fossilize reasonably well, we would think, given the other fossils that we find.
But turtles, again, just appear fully formed as turtles in the fossil record. We don't find ancestors to the turtles in the fossil records. And you've also mentioned plants.
Tell us about those. Well, that's right. Flowering plants appear fully formed.
Now, flowering plants are a real enigma for evolutionists because you've got many cases, male and female flowers. You've got to then have pollination occurring. And so there's a link between the insects and the flowers.
As a matter of fact, some flowers require, say, for example, a specific wasp with a specific body shape in order to actually cross pollinate them. And it's almost as if one is designed for the other. And so for the evolution of these different body parts of the plants to evolve massive, again, codes and code for this sexual reproduction that works for the pollinators.
It's all got to be really coordinated to work. No point having a flowering plant if you don't have an insect or some aspect of pollinating it. So we have the same sorts of problems with plants as we do with animals.
Oh, yes. And the other characteristic is, again, in the fossil record, flowering plants appear just suddenly in the fossil record. No slow development of the sexual reproduction components of the flowering plants.
Tell us about the Cambrian explosion. We talked about this last time. Just refresh our memories.
Okay, well, in the Cambrian are very old rocks. They're essentially date from about 540,000,000 years ago, according to the conventional dating theory. So they are among the oldest fossil bearing rocks.
So the ones before that, the Precamian. Very few fossils in the Pre Cambrian era that run up to that particular time, 500 and 4550 million years ago by conventional dating. So we suddenly find in these particular layers, highly developed animals and a whole range of filer.
Many of the invertebrate phyla are found there. And we also have the characteristic animals that are very highly developed, such as Trilobites and Nautiluses. Now, this is very significant because we find the Trilobites as I mentioned, I think in a previous talk, they have a head with a very complex eye system involving hundreds of tubes, so they can see in all different sorts of directions.
They have a segmented body, they have legs, fully developed legs, reproductive system and so a lot of components. They're a very complex organism and a whole variety of these. Now these highly complex organisms just suddenly appear in this Cambrian and the nautilus is the same.
And as I said, I've read where most of the major invertebrate phyla are found in these Cambrian layers. So we've got suddenly from virtually nothing, no fossils, suddenly all these animals appear in these layers or they're all highly complex, representing massive amounts of new genetic code. So where did this code come from? There's no evidence of the evolution of the code for these animals and therefore fully formed.
They're not intermediates, they're fully formed, fully functioning, complete animals. And we couldn't really say that somehow the intermediates haven't been captured in the fossil record for some reason, could we? Well no, because we have conformable strata. So that means what we've got is when we look at these strata, they're laying on top of one another, there's no evidence of erosion or geological disruption of the layer, they're just uniformly laid down.
And this is one of the classic examples. We can find the Cambrian of trilobites in the Cambrian laying conformably over thousands of feet of sedimentary layers that are not showing you signs of layers. So they're all conformably laying down there with no fossils, no evolutionary ancestors to the trilobot.
So you'd think that over thousands of feet of sediment representing millions and millions of years that at least you would find some now. And the fact that these are conformably laid down layers, in other words, there's no signs of erosion, there's no signs of geological disruption. So they, according to the uniformitarian theory, would have been laid down successively and again, this is really, really powerful evidence that the uniformitarian model and the model of evolution are not correct.
The evidence that we find, that we can go and observe, we can go to these structures around the world where these fossils are found, we can look at the strata and examine here and there. Now and the evidence says that these slow changes did not occur. And if you have this uniformitarian data, well, where are all the missing fossils? Where are all the missing forebears of these species? The two theories exclude one another.
I'm Dr. Barry Harker, and you're listening to science conversations. My guest today 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 absence of fossil intermediates is fatal to a viable theory of evolution. When we come back, John is going to talk a little more about living fossils and he's also going to focus on the crisis and evolutionary. Theory that has emerged from this absence of fossil intermediates.
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. Our email address is
[email protected] au.
That is radio at the number three ABN, Australia. All one word Au. Our postal address is three ABN, Australia, Inc.
PO. Box seven five two. Morissette, New South Wales 2264, Australia thank you for your prayers and financial support.
If you've just joined us. I'm Dr. Barry Harker and you are 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 absence of fossil intermediates is fatal to a viable theory of evolution.
John is now going to talk briefly about living fossils and then we're going to focus on the crisis and evolutionary theory that has emerged from this absence of fossil intermediate. John, tell us a little more about living fossils. Well, the fossil record contains remains of animals that are now extinct but it also contains remains of animals that are alive today.
And so a classic example would be, say, seapens and you can even get some for your aquarium. And these are a little sort of coral like animal and we find those in the Cambrian. Horseshoe crabs are another one that are found very low on the fossil strata and they're exactly the same as the ones that we find today.
Well, there might be a slight variant of species but there's no major signs of evolutionary changes. They're the same as we find today. And there's a huge number of I mean, you could catalog pages and pages of living counterparts like the crinoids and feather stars, sea cucumbers, starfish, lobsters, shrimp, crayfish.
We've got your termites and different types of beetles and crickets and cockroaches and clams and mussels and oysters and nautiloids. All sorts of different types of shells and earthworms and corals and as we said, the colicanth and lungfish and garfish and eels and herring, orange, ruffy, for example, different sharks and rays and crocodiles and snakes and lizards, turtles, different types of birds. And of course, if we go to plants there's different types of pines and psychads and ferns and mosses and rhododendrons, lilies and poplars, sassafras, lots of trees and plants.
I mean, the list just goes. It's a huge list. And the important thing is that people have documented these.
So what we've done is people have made studies carl and Debbie Werner, for example in their books Evolution the Great Experiment they have cataloged a lot of these examples. They've got two volumes that are just full of photographs where they show here's the photograph of the fossil from the museum. Here's the photograph of the animal alive today.
They provide the direct photographic evidence and one of the comments that they make in their book is that say, for example, with the dinosaurs, I think it's something like 400 different species of mammals have been identified or found in the layers with the fossil, with the dinosaurs. But Dr. Werner points out that in none of the museum displays that he's been to anywhere in the world and he's been to hundreds of museums where they've been photographing the fossils.
Has he ever seen mammals on display with dinosaurs? So in other words, we are creating this picture that no, the mammals came after the dinosaurs from these displays. And this fits into the characteristics that are often portrayed in the textbooks as well. You don't see drawings of mammals being demonstrated in the same time period on fossil layers as the dinosaurs.
And similarly with birds, they come after because the birds are supposed to evolve. So what is happening here is, whether it's deliberate or not, I don't want to judge anybody, but what is happening is that these particular fossils are being characterized as occurring in particular time periods that creates this apparent succession development. Whereas in actual fact, the fossils are mixed up much more than that.
For example, during the ages when the dinosaurs lived, virtually all the filer of plants, all the different filer of plants that we find alive today also existed. The representatives that were existed during the dinosaur age or exist today similarly with mammals and many other creatures. So what we're saying is, during the time of the dinosaurs, there are representatives from all the fola that existed then are found today.
That's really interesting. So you've got really stasis or stability in the fossil record. So unless an animal has become extinct, there's a modern version.
Yes, they've stayed the same. Yes. And we know, of course, whether you're looking at alligators, there are different species of alligator, whether they're slightly different and the same with in Australia.
Here we have the common freshwater crocodile and the saltwater crocodile. They're different species of crocodile. And so today the species might be slightly different, but in many they're exactly the same.
And this is the point. They haven't changed. There's no change in the fossils of a particular species, they change the same.
And that's exactly what we would expect because as we study DNA, we know that there are DNA repair mechanisms. If there's a mutation, there are DNA repair mechanisms to correct that. When the male and female Gamut cells combine, they combine in such a way that they tend to correct for any mutations that may occur in one or the other of the gamet.
Cell code, DNA code so that the offspring is more or less repaired compared to the parent or the parent to give the best chance of reproducing the same. And that's what we expect. We expect when we have a baby that it's going to be a human, not some mutation.
And this is what we observe. We don't observe evolution change. So if in the Gamut cell.
There is too much damage to the DNA, it dies. It doesn't form some new type of animal. So what we see is a whole lot of mechanisms to preserve the species, to keep it exactly the same.
And I think I talked about this some time ago too. You can't produce these changes through sort of interbreeding because the Gamut cells have particular proteins where they will only combine and link up when those particular proteins line up with the particular receptor proteins on the other Gamut cell. Sure, in bacteria we can have the transfer of small amounts of genetic code via prions, but that's back down at the bacteria level and it's preexisting genetic code for something.
There's no mechanism for producing the new codes as, say, from our fish to an amphibian or from a non flowering plant to a flowering plant. There's just no code there. Now, this absence of intermediates in the fossil record has been acknowledged by some evolutionists, and I'm thinking particularly of the late Stephen J.
Gurd, who was professor of paleontology at Harvard. He recognized that the fossil evidence didn't really line up with the neo Darwinian synthesis. And he was proposing that I think it was called punctuated equilibrium.
He was reviving some ideas from past decades in which evolution would go along very, very slowly for lengthy periods and not leaving any evidence. And then there would be these rapid leaps forward in the evolutionary process and then settle back down into stasis again. I think it was called punctuated equilibrium.
Yes, that's right. I mean, this was an attempt to try and come up with some explanation for the lack of evidence for evolution. And that's what he recognized.
He recognized that the evidence for evolution wasn't there and therefore we need some sort of different mechanism to explain why it isn't there. I'm not quite sure who said this, but someone said that evolution was too fast to leave fossils. This is the punctuated equilibrium idea, but too slow to be observed.
Yes. The thing is, we don't observe evolution in the laboratory. And we talked earlier about how, look, we've bred E.
Coli through 60,000 generations, still E. Coli. It hasn't even changed into a different species of bacteria.
So this is pretty obvious. But there are major problems with the evidence for evolution in the fossil record. And that's why Gould attempted to say, well, somehow you could have this massive evolutionary changes, but there's no known mechanism to produce the massive amounts of code.
And biologists recognize this too. I mean, Dr. Eugene Kunan, National Institute of Know, a brilliant biologist, he published a paper, I can't remember the exact name something like the Biological Big Bang, where he said the standard neo Darwinian theory doesn't work.
It doesn't work from a biological mechanism. So there must have been somehow, some way that suddenly a whole lot of new genetic code could form. And it's interesting, some of his reviewers.
He was criticized for publishing that paper because he said hang on. One of the reviewers said really we don't want people to know that there are major biological problems with theory of evolution. You publishing a paper like this is just highlighting this.
And so both the biologists recognize this as well. But Gould isn't the only one. What did Gould by the way, what did Gould say about evolutionary trees and textbooks? Well again Gould stated quite clearly that the geological or palantological evidence for the so called evolutionary trees was lacking in the geological record.
And he said look it's just based on inference. It's not actually based on science. It's based on we've got this animal, it looks this animal, it's got similar homology and therefore it evolved there.
That's where the tree comes from, just looking at the shapes of the animals, not from the fossil record. If we look at the fossil record it doesn't fit, it doesn't work. And Gould actually said that.
So here you have one of the top paleontologists in the world saying that when you look at the fossil record it doesn't support the evolutionary trees that we see in textbooks. And I mean he's not the only one that has said that. I mean David Robb, he was curator of the big fossil museum in Chicago I think and former president of the Palantological Society.
And he said the evidence for evolution is not in the fossil record. The fossil record doesn't provide the evidence for evolution that we'd like to find. So here we have top palaeontologists so these are the fossil experts.
We've got Dr. David Raub as I said, former president of the Palantological Society, probably former curator of one of the largest fossil museum or fossil collections in the world. We've got Stephen J.
Gould from Harvard. We've got Barbara Starr from Harvard, who was earlier on, I think her book Problems With Evolution, it's called, came out in 1985, also from Harvard, another brilliant paleontologist. And they're all saying the same thing, but it's not getting through, because I think, well, that's really not what people who support theory of evolution, they don't want to hear that.
They don't want to hear that the evidence for evolution is not there in the fossil record. And yet when we start our talk you mentioned that well isn't the fossil record the main evidence for evolution? And it is. But yet when we drill down into that evidence and we look at the experts in their field that are coming straight out and saying well hang on, the evidence for evolution is not in the fossil record and if it's not in the fossil record and it's not in the laboratory, what is the evidence for evolution? It's not there.
We don't have that evidence for evolution that is claimed that everybody is being taught that evolution occurred. And this I guess frustrates me when I hear just on everyday programs and National Geographic programs and these nature documentaries. This evolved into this, and this has occurred because it's evolved to fit into its environment.
And yet when we drill down to hard science, there's no evidence for evolution. There's no evidence that this occurred apart from, as we mentioned earlier on, okay, slight environmental changes can cause the loss of code, and we can have adaption to environment, and we can have natural selection where the most adapted species survives. But in all these cases, the frogs are still frogs.
The finches are still finches, the beetles are still beetles. Evolution requires this totally new change of organism that's over a long period of time. And really, the bottom line is this has been pushed on people, in my view, to discredit the Bible.
The Bible says that we were created. It clearly says that God created god created all these species, and he created them in the past, a whole lot of species. And that's what we find.
We find these species fully formed there, and then they've lost over time. But people are trying to destroy, in my view, in the minds of people, the evidence that what the Bible says is true. And I think this is something we really need to speak out about.
And that's why I'm so appreciative to have this opportunity to talk about this on your radio program, because it's very important that people understand that the claimed evidence for evolution is just not there. And the thing that really impresses me about this whole thing is that there isn't a consensus, there isn't a scientific consensus around this issue that you do have competing groups, one recognizing that the evidence isn't there and the other suggesting that it is, and quite a bit of animosity between these groups. And they try to keep it out of the public domain because, as they've said, they don't want this to become evident to the creationist community because this would rather spoil their party.
Yes, well, that's right. You've got the neodarwinian synthesis. And really, again, this requires that the new code forms, and the biologists are realizing now, well, hang on, we've got no mechanism for this.
They're really scratching around for some new hypothesis to explain how evolution can occur. So they're clinging to the theory that life on Earth is very old and it has evolved. And what they're desperate now is to find evidence to support that theory.
But the evidence isn't there. Everywhere. They're looking everywhere.
They're trying to get the evidence, whether it's by mapping the DNA and trying to draw these evolutionary trees using DNA, they get some absolutely crazy connections there that common sense tells us, well, hang on, no, it didn't go this way, and it's not supported in the fossil record either. And so there's really serious issues for evolution now, but this really isn't getting out to our education system. It's not getting out to the general public.
John, that seems to sum up a really deadly problem for evolution. But we're going to continue this series and next week we're going to be looking at the evidence for a catastrophic global flood. Tell us in just a couple of minutes what we're going to find next week.
Well, that's right. I think we've got people pushing evolution where all around us we've got evidence for a massive flap. We have sedimentary deposits that are absolutely huge like the Morrison Formation stretches from New Mexico up to Canada.
It's huge. That's where we find a lot of the dinosaur fossils. How could these massive sandstone and conglomerate layers be laid down over that huge area by just some slow little uniformitarian process? Absolutely impossible.
You've got the White Cliffs of Dover that huge Cretaceous limestone deposit that spreads from Ireland through to Turkey. Here, a massive limestone deposit spreads over what we now know as Europe. That wasn't laid down under just slow conditions.
It required a massive movement of water to lay down that massive amount of limestone. 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. John has been explaining why the absence of fossil intermediates is fatal to a viable theory of evolution.
John has also discussed the crisis and evolutionary theory that has emerged from this absence of fossil intermediates. Next week, our conversation will be on the geological evidence for a catastrophic global flood. Don't miss this important topic.
Until then, bye for now, and God bless.
