* Dr. Tomkins is Director of Life Sciences at the Institute for Creation Research and earned his Ph.D. in genetics from Clemson University.
Cite this article: Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. 2016. Evolutionary Crisis and the Third Way. Acts & Facts. 45 (8).
Thanks for the post, fishtank.
OK, I'll bite.
There are no "glaring contradictions" in the fossil record, none, zero.
That's because a real "glaring contradiction" would be elephants older than dinosaurs, or humans riding on pterodactyls, and nothing like that has been found.
So what these guys are talking about are alleged "missing links", or "gaps" in the fossil record, gaps so serious some evolution scientists proposed a theory of "punctuated equilibrium" to account for them.
Theory says that species can remain unchanged for millions of years, until something new -- i.e., climate change -- forces them to quickly adapt & evolve or go extinct.
But there are at least two false premises in this idea:
An example might be Zebras, which to most people all look the same, but in fact are divided among different species which don't normally interbreed.
Of course the idea that species can change rapidly is glaringly obvious when we consider man-made species such as domesticated dogs.
They were once wolves, now dogs and all within a few thousand years.
So under the right circumstances evolution can happen very quickly indeed.
But even where fossils suggest similarities and relationships, DNA tells us that, for example, wolves of five million years ago were not the same, and could most likely not interbreed with wolves of today, much less with modern dogs.
from the article: "...some biologists have expressed doubt that the Synthetic Theory... based principally on mutation, genetic variation, and natural selection, adequately accounts for macroevolution, or evolution above the species level."
First, the false premise: that a mother of any species can ever give birth to a child of another species.
Physically, so far as we know, and certainly amongst vertebrates, that's impossible.
But what certainly does happen are small changes in every generation such that over geological time periods different populations of the same species can become so genetically different they no longer interbreed.
Then we call them separate species.
Second, that other factors may also operate in evolution should surprise nobody, but defining exactly what those factors are, and how they work, remains the subject of investigations, experiments and hypotheses.
They represent no more a "crisis in evolution" than would, for example, discovery of a new dwarf-planet in the Kuiper Belt create a "crisis in astronomy".
We already suspect something's there, just not exactly sure what.