What About Origins? (CreationPoints)

by Dr A J Monty White

  Having looked carefully at the fossil record, we have to conclude with Dr Duane Gish that the fossils continue to shout a resounding ‘No!’ to evolution. We have seen that the supposed evolution of dinosaurs into birds is not confirmed by the fossil record, and that there is overwhelming evidence—from a written description, drawings, carvings and the remains of soft tissues, including red blood cells—to suggest that dinosaurs were living on the earth recently.

  Despite all the evidence against evolution having taken place in the past, or taking place in the present, people are still inclined to believe in evolution for one reason or another. When they cannot provide any evidence, they indulge in wishful thinking, as Charles Darwin did in On the Origin of Species. In the first edition, he wrote that ‘I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale’.40 The reason why Charles Darwin could write such nonsense was because he was ignorant of genetics that show genetic homeostasis—that all attempts to transform one kind of plant or animal into another demonstrate that there are strict genetic barriers that will not allow such a transformation. In other words, there are genetic barriers to each kind, preventing one kind being changed into another, different kind. This shows the reliability of the clear teaching of the Word of God in Genesis 1, where we read about plants and animals reproducing after their own kinds.

  Notes

  1 See ‘History of Evolutionary Thought’, at: en.wikipedia.org.

  2 H. M. Morris, The Troubled Waters of Evolution (San Diego: Creation-Life, 1974), p. 55.

  3 Ernst Mayr, Animal Species and Evolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 12.

  4 G. Simpson, This View of Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), p. 81.

  5 See Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb, The Genesis Flood (London: Evangelical Press, 1969), p. 66.

  6 Savolainen et al., ‘Genetic Evidence for an East Asian Origin of Domestic Dogs’, in Science, 298/5598 (2002), pp. 1610–1613.

  7 Elizabeth Pennisi, ‘Canine Evolution: A Shaggy Dog History’, in Science, 298/5598 (2002), pp. 1540–1542.

  8 Norman Macbeth, Darwin Retried (New York: Dell, 1971), p. 40.

  9 Ibid. p. 47.

  10 G. G. Simpson, The Major Features of Evolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), p. 146.

  11 G. G. Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 81.

  12 J. H. Moore and H. S. Slusher, Biology: A Search for Order in Complexity (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1974), p. 98.

  13 Julian Huxley, Evolution in Action (New York: Mentor, 1957), p. 35.

  14 Professor Jerry Coyne, ‘Not Black and White’, review of Michael Majerus, Melanism:

  Evolution in Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), in Nature, vol. 396 (5 November 1998), p. 36.

  15 Ibid.

  16 Henry Morris, ‘Preface’, in Duane T. Gish, Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No! (San Diego: Institute for Creation Research, 1995), p. v.

  17 Daniel Axelrod, ‘Early Cambrian Marine Fauna’, in Science, vol. 128 (4 July 1958), p. 7.

  18 S. C. Morris, quoted in Gish, Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No!, p. 61.

  19 Richa Arora, Encyclopaedia of Evolutionary Biology ([n.p.]: Anmol Publications Pvt, 2004), p. 226.

  20 Gish, Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No!, p. 69.

  21 Arthur N. Strahler, Science and Earth History: The Evolution/Creation Controversy (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1987), p. 316.

  22 Gish, Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No!, p. 92.

  23 The complete lack of transitional forms between amphibians and the different forms of reptiles is documented in Gish, Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No!, pp. 97–129.

  24 Gish, Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No!, p. 167.

  25 George Gammov and Martynas Ycas, Mr Tomkins Inside Himself (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968), p. 149.

  26 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 292.

  27 NOW with Bill Moyers, 3 December 2004, PBS; transcript at: pbs.org.

  28 See ‘Mussaurus’ on Wikipedia, at: en.wikipedia.org.

  29 Quoted in Joe Cellini, ‘Tyrannosaurus Wren?’, at: apple.com/pro/video/naturalhistory.

  30 The finding of the seventh specimen of Archaeopteryx was reported in 1993 and it included a bony sternum. No evidence of a bony sternum had been found on the previous six specimens, which had led evolutionists to conclude that Archaeopteryx either could not fly or was a poor flier.

  31 W. J. Bock, ‘Explanatory Theory of the Origin of Feathers’, in American Zoology, vol. 40 (2000), p. 480.

  32 ‘Scientists Say No Evidence Exists that Therapod Dinosaurs Evolved into Birds’, in Science Daily, 10 October 2005; at: sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051010085411.htm.

  33 Gish, Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No!, p. 137.

  34 Correspondence, Nature, 410/6752 (30 September 1999), p. 423.

  35 Doug Sharp, ‘Dinosaur Petroglyphs at Natural Bridges National Monument’, 7 June 2001, at: rae.org/dinoglyph.html.

  36 ‘Dinosaurs in Ancient Cambodian Temple’, at: bible.ca/tracks/tracks-cambodia.htm.

  37 Philip Bell, ‘Bishop Bell’s Brass Behemoths’, in Creation, 25/4 (September 2003), pp. 40–44; also at: creation.com.

  38 Mary Higby Schweitzer, Jennifer L. Wittmeyer and John R. Horner, ‘Soft Tissue and Cellular Preservation in Vertebrate Skeletal Elements from the Cretaceous to the Present’, in Proceedings of the Royal Society, B22, 274/1607 (January 2007), pp. 183–197.

  39 Mary H. Schweitzer et al., ‘Biomolecular Characterization and Protein Sequences of the Campanian Hadrosaur B. canadensis’, 1 May 2009, at: sciencemag.org. This was also reported in Chemistry World (June 2009), p. 4.

  40 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 184.

  Chapter 9

  The origin of humans

  From November 2008 to April 2009, the Darwin Big Idea Big Exhibition was held at the Natural History Museum in London. In this exhibition it was stated that ‘all modern humans are descendants of people who lived in Africa between 100,000 and 150,000 years ago’.1 In spite of this bold assertion, however, it would appear that, at present, evolutionists are reluctant to commit themselves to giving us a detailed account of this evolution, with exact descriptions of each stage of this evolution of ape-like creatures into humankind.2 Perhaps the reason for this is the mistakes and blunders that evolutionists have made over the last one-and-a-half centuries; they are perhaps deliberately vague about the process of this supposed evolution so that they will not be easily made to look fools in the future.

  The reason why evolutionists now believe that humans evolved from apes in Africa is because this is what Charles Darwin advocated in 1871. He argued that, because the closest living relatives of modern humans (that is, the chimpanzee and the gorilla) are both confined to Africa, it is probable that the common ancestor of modern humans also lived in Africa. This argument is, of course, based on the premise that chimpanzees and gorillas are our closest living relatives. Why do evolutionists believe this? It is because chimpanzees and gorillas have a similar anatomical structure to that of humans, and because their biochemistry (for example, the chemicals that make up their proteins) is also similar.

  The argument is based on the assumption that, because these three creatures (humans, chimpanzees and gorillas) are similar, they therefore have a common ancestor. But this has not been proven! It is like arguing that, because different cars have a similar shape and similar components, they have therefore evolved from a common ancestral car! In fact, the reason why cars are similar is because they have been designed and modified (for use as family cars, sports cars, vans, etc.) and have been constructed from similar components (engines, gear boxes, batteries, electrical components, s
eats, etc.). This ‘design argument’ is also the reason why humans, chimpanzees and gorillas have similar body shapes and biochemistry: because they have been created by the same Designer—Almighty God. Their similarity has nothing to do with evolution from a common ancestor.

  Past mistakes and frauds

  Despite Darwin suggesting an ‘out of Africa’ ancestry for humans, in the middle of the nineteenth century and in the early part of the twentieth century evolutionists had other ideas. They were insisting that the evolution of humans from their ape-like ancestors took place in Central Europe, England or in the USA. This was simply because the European nations and the USA were considered to have advanced civilizations. This resulted not only in claims that some very odd ape-people—the Neanderthals, Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man—had been ‘discovered’, but also in a number of mistakes being made and even fraud being perpetrated in the name of science.

  First of all, let us look at how and why the earliest depictions of the Neanderthals were ape-like in their appearance. The Neanderthals are named after the German Neander Valley3 (Neandertal in German), where the first fossilized remains of a Neanderthal were discovered in August 1856. Some quarrymen were clearing out a cave, the entrance of which was over eighteen metres up a precipitous cliff. Among the debris from the cave floor they found some bones which they brought to the attention of Dr Johann Carl Fuhlrott, a local teacher and amateur naturalist. He took them to Professor Hermann Schaaffhausen, who was Professor of Anatomy at the University of Bonn. Professor Schaaffhausen is credited as naming Neanderthal Man and presenting him to the world in 1857.

  When they were first discovered, it was thought that the Neanderthals were the link between apes and humans. Consequently, Neanderthals were depicted as having divergent toes, just like the apes, and as walking on the outer edges of their feet, just like orang-utans. It was said that the Neanderthals could not straighten their knees and that they lacked the convex spine for upright posture. Their heads, with their heavy eyebrow ridges, retreating foreheads and protruding jaws, were depicted as jutting forward, just like those of gorillas. Their faces were given large eyesockets, broad noses and receding chins. All this was done to emphasize the ape-like appearance of these creatures because it was firmly believed that the Neanderthals were half-ape/half-human.

  Since the discovery of the first Neanderthal in the middle of the nineteenth century, many hundreds of specimens of Neanderthal have been found all over Europe (Belgium, the Channel Islands, Croatia, England, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Italy and Spain), the Middle East (Iraq, Israel, Syria and Uzbekistan) and North Africa (Morocco). A Neanderthal jaw-bone has even been dredged up from the seabed of the North Sea.4 Research on these discoveries has established that the curve of the limb-bones of some of the skeletons was due to rickets, a disease caused by vitamin-D deficiency. Other research has shown that the stooped skeletal structure of other Neanderthals (especially the one found at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in central France in 1908) was the result of those individuals suffering from arthritis, and had nothing at all to do with their being in any way ape-like.

  There is still much debate about the relationship between the Neanderthals and modern humans. Some anthropologists maintain that the Neanderthals are a sub-species of Homo sapiens and think that they should be designated Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. This would mean that modern humans are also a sub-species of Homo sapiens and would have to be designated Homo sapiens sapiens. Others argue that the Neanderthals’ DNA places them outside the reaches of the variation that we find in modern humans (Homo sapiens) and so they should be classified as a different species altogether—Homo neanderthalensis. This is surprising as there is evidence that modern humans and Neanderthals interbred.5 More analysis of the Neanderthal genome is expected to throw further light on this.6

  Remains of Neanderthals that have been found also indicate that they commonly hunted large animals, including horses and mammoths; that they used fire and hotplates to cook their food; that they were proficient at crafting basic tools and weapons; that they fashioned flutes from bone; that they attempted writing; and that they buried their dead in graves, some of which contained flowers that are known to have medicinal properties, indicating that they had a rudimentary knowledge of medicine. All this evidence seems to suggest that the Neanderthals were indeed human; from what the Bible teaches about the creation and early history of the earth, this should not surprise us.

  The idea that Neanderthals were human is supported by what a couple of anatomists wrote about them as long ago as 1957.7 They concluded that there was ‘no valid reason for assuming that the posture of Neanderthal Man differed significantly from that of present day man’, and they went on to say that if a Neanderthal male was bathed, shaved and dressed in modern clothing, he would pass unnoticed on the New York subway. The humanness of the Neanderthals is further demonstrated by the fact that, when the faces of Neanderthals are recreated using forensic science techniques that involve computer morphing, the results show that the Neanderthals looked human. Furthermore, Dr Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, stated in 2007 that ‘If you saw one [a Neanderthal] she or he would strike you as very robust and muscular with a big brow ridge and bigger musculature [the muscular system of the body]. But they had, for example, just as big a brain as we have.’8

  We have to accept, therefore, that the early reconstructions of Neanderthals were incorrect, mistakes having been made as a result of misdiagnoses of illnesses—rickets and arthritis, to be precise. Our concept of Neanderthals must therefore change. Instead of thinking of them as being shambling, frowning brutes of low intelligence, we should think of them as our cousins. They used animal skins for clothing and even sewed them together. We have to accept that they lived in caves—but so did some people in England until the 1960s,9 and even today many people still live in caves in many countries. The Neanderthals actually built shelters of saplings covered with animal skins and furs within the mouths of the caves. We can therefore imagine these red-headed10 Neanderthal cousins of ours sitting in their shelters within their caves at night, eating their mammoth stew which has been cooked over the fire, or eating their mammoth steaks which they have cooked on their hotplates. Meanwhile, some of their friends and relatives entertain themselves by playing music on their flutes, while others sing along or dance by the light of the fire.

  Now let us look, not at another mistake, but at a fraud. We have seen that it took over a hundred years for evolutionists to realize that they had made mistakes in the reconstructions of Neanderthal people. It took them over forty years to realize that the Piltdown Man was a fraud: that what was considered to be the remains of a half-ape/half-human creature was in fact the remains of a woman and an orang-utan.

  The story of the discovery of Piltdown Man starts at the beginning of the twentieth century, when some labourers found a few pieces of old bones while digging in a gravel pit near the village of Piltdown in East Sussex, south-east England. Realizing the potential value of these bones, their employer gave them to Charles Dawson, a local archaeologist, and it was he who verified their antiquity and pronounced them to be parts of a skull that was possibly human. Dawson began to search for the rest of the skull and in 1912 a jaw-bone was uncovered. Arthur Woodward of the British Museum verified that the bones were ancient, that the skull had human features and that the jaw was ape-like. Whether the jaw fitted the skull could not be determined because the point of attachment, or joint, on the jaw was missing. The fossils became known as Piltdown Man and were given the scientific name Eoanthropus dawsoni, which means ‘Dawson’s dawn-man’.

  In 1915, more fossils were found in a gravel pit adjacent to the site of the original find. Other fossils—a canine tooth and a tool made from a fossil elephant thigh-bone—had been uncovered in the same stratum and these finds supported the conclusions reached from the first find. Piltdown Man therefore appeared to be a creature that had both ape-like and human-li
ke characteristics, and reconstructions of him were put on prominent display in museums all over the world. Here, they declared, was incontrovertible proof that humans had evolved from apes, and that they did so in England!

  What was not known at the time was that Piltdown Man was a fraud, one that stayed undetected for over forty years. It was not until 1953 that the cranium was shown to be human and the jaw-bone was shown to be from an orang-utan. It was shown that both the cranium and the jaw had been stained to make them appear old, and that the teeth in the jaw had been filed in order to make them look more human. It was also shown that the bones in the original site, together with the materials in the adjacent site, had been deliberately planted in these areas.

  The identity of the person responsible for this forgery will never be known because it happened a hundred years ago and all the people concerned with the discovery of Piltdown Man are now dead. It is worth noting, however, that politicians in the UK were so shocked when the forgery was uncovered, and by the fact that it had gone undetected for so long, that a motion was tabled in the House of Commons ‘that the House has no confidence in the Trustees of the British Museum’.11

  But it was not only in the UK that people were eager to accept that humans had evolved from apes in their own country; it also happened in the USA. The Piltdown Man was a fraud, but in the USA, Nebraska Man turned out to be an appalling mistake. In March 1922, Harold Cook, an amateur geologist, sent a fossil tooth that he had found in 1917 to Henry Fairfield Osborn, who at the time was not only President of the New York Zoological Society, but also President of the American Museum of Natural History. Cook informed Osborn that he had found this fossil tooth in the Snake Creek fossil beds in the Pliocene (now designated Miocene) deposits in the state of Nebraska and, thinking that it might be from some kind of ape-man, he had decided to send it to him. Osborn believed that he could see that the tooth had human, chimpanzee and ape-man characteristics and declared that the tooth spoke volumes of truth and afforded evidence of humankind’s descent from apes. Osborn gave the scientific name Hesperopithecus haroldcookii (‘Harold Cook’s ape from the land where the sun sets’) to the creature from which the tooth had come.