Evolution

Dr. Colin Patterson

One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, or let's call

it a non-evolutionary view, was last year I had a sudden realization for over twenty years I had

thought I was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up and something

had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years

and there was not one thing I knew about it. That's quite a shock to learn that

one can be so misled so long.

Either there was something wrong with me or there was something wrong with

evolutionary theory. Naturally, I know there is nothing wrong with me, so for the last few weeks

I've tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. Question is:

Can you tell me anything you know about evolution,

any one thing that is true?

I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural

History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary

Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of

evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person

said, "I do know one thing--it ought not to be taught in high school."

Former Senior Principal Scientific Officer of the Paleontology Department of the British Museum

of Natural History, London Keynote address at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, November 5, 1981.

Colin Patterson's 1981 lecture was not published, but I have reviewed a transcript and Patterson restated his position,

which I would label "evolutionary nihilism" in an interview with the journalist Tom Bethell.

(See Bethell, "Deducing from Materialism," National Review, Aug. 29, 1986, p. 43.) I discussed evolution with

Patterson for several hours in London 1988. He did not retract any of the specific skeptical statements he has made,

but he did say that he continues to accept "evolution" as the only conceivable explanation

for certain features of the natural world. Darwin on Trial, Phillip E. Johnson,

Inter Varsity Press, 1993, p. 173

Dr. Niles Eldridge

If life had evolved into its wondrous profusion of creatures little by little, then one would

expect to find fossils of transitional creatures which were a bit like what went before them and a bit

like what came after. But no one has yet found any evidence of such transitional creatures.

This oddity has been attributed to gaps in the fossil record

which gradualists expected to fill when rock strata of the proper age had been found.

In the last decade, however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last

500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them.

Former Paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History

The Guardian Weekly, 26 November 1978, vol. 119, no. 22, p. 1

See Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, Michael Denton Adler & Adler 1986 Chapter 8

Stasis

Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth.

They appear in the fossil record looking pretty much the same as when they disappeared; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.

Sudden appearance

In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation

of its ancestors; it appears all at once and "fully formed."

Former Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University

"Evolution's Erratic Pace", Natural History, Vol. 86, No. 5, May 1977, p.13

"Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?", Paleobiology, January 1980, P.127

See Darwin On Trial, Philip E. Johnson, Inter Varsity Press, 1993, Chapter 4rr

Dr. Lyall Watson

The fossils that decorate our

family tree are so scarce that there are still more scientists than specimens. The remarkable fact is that all our physical evidence we have for human evolution can

still be placed, with room

to spare, inside a single coffin! Modern apes...seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record.

And the origin of modern

humans is...if we are honest

with ourselves, an equally

mysterious matter.

Anthropologist

"The Water People," Science

Digest, May 1982, p.44

The fossil record supports Creation

In the 1970's it was becoming very apparent that the theory of gradualistic evolution was

not supported by the fossil record. Paleontologists Stephen J. Gould and Niles Eldrige constructed a new

theory of evolution called Punctuated equilibrium in an attempt to explain why intermediate stages or missing links

could not be found. But without physical evidence belief in evolution becomes a matter of faith--not a fact of

science. The confessions of professor Gould were not an endorsement of Biblical creation, but

the sudden appearance of species fully formed is what one would expect from the fossil record if the world

was created then flooded as stated in the book of Genesis.

Marvin L. Lubenow

Fossils that are indistinguishable from modern humans can be traced all the way back to 4.5 m.y.a., according to the evolutionary time scale. Before australopithecines, Homo erectus demonstrates morphological consistency throughout its two million year history. The fossil record does

not show erectus evolving from or into something else. Homo sapiens, Neanderthal, archaic Homo sapiens, and Homo erectus all lived as contemporaries at

one time or another.

Christian Professor

Bones of Contention, Baker Books,

1992, Chap. 16, p.178-179

Stephen Jay Gould

The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design,

indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution. The extreme rarity of transitional

forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. I wish in no way to impugn the potential validity of gradualism, I wish only to point

out that it was never "seen" in the rocks. The history of most fossils species includes

two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: