Well I guess that makes me a kook too P-Marlowe!
Non-Sequitur wrote:
...science can look at fossil records and trace the evolutionary development of a horse, for example. Or a bear, or finches or moths, etc., etc. Are they all wrong?There's nothing in Non-Sequitur's statement that supports macroevolution theory on the basis of the fossil record. All his examples are of microevolution, or evolution within species. Basically that's all the fossil record shows.
Macroevolution theory posits a gradualist development in which a species that existed before gradually turned into another, and that every present species emerged in this way. All have descended from some common ancester.
The only problem with this is, the fossil record doesn't support this expectation. What it shows, remarkably, is stasis, the very opposite of evolution: the tendency of species to remain unchanged, even over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Stephen J. Gould put it this way:
Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change. That's bothersome... brings terrible distress.... They may get a little bigger or bumpier. But they remain the same species and that's not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don't change, it's not evolution so you can't talk about it.Or how about this, from the eminent paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson:
It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly. They are not, as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptibly changing forerunners such as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution.Even Richard Dawkins seems to acknowledge this. In an evidently unguarded moment, he allowed that
...[T]he Cambrian strata of rocks ... are the oldest in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.It's surprising to me how many working paleontologists are not Darwinists.
In closing, I wholly agree with you, P-Marlowe: "There is no natural explanation for life or for its utter complexity."
Thank you ever so much for your excellent essay/post!
And I shall take this opportunity to direct Lurkers to your article on this very subject!
All that I can add is that there is no laboratory experiment that can falsify an alternative explanation for the findings in the paleontogist's dig, e.g. Special Creation, Panspermia.
Not by any definition of the term that I've been able to find. Microevolution is defined as change over a short and observable period of time. A few generations, for example. Macroevolution is defined as evolution over a much longer period of time which spans geologic time or which results in the creation of new species. The fossil record of the evolution of a horse spans over 50 million years and multiple branches, most of which died out.
The only problem with this is, the fossil record doesn't support this expectation. What it shows, remarkably, is stasis, the very opposite of evolution: the tendency of species to remain unchanged, even over the course of hundreds of millions of years.
It shows nothing of the kind, as this link explains.