POE: The transmutation of species has been scientifically established for more than one hundred years. There are thousands of examples, such as the reptile’s scales evolving into the mammal’s insulating coat of fur—probably under the influence of climate cooling. Robert Broom, evidently one of your heroes, did a fine job showing how South African reptiles led to the first mammals.
A: OK, here’s my position: No animal ever became human, nor did man develop organically at any time in the past. The French paleontologists, for one, refused to buy into the development of later forms out of earlier ones. “Evolution is a fairy-tale for grown-ups,” quoth Jean Rostand. Even Lyell and Hooker, Darwin’s closest allies, held to the permanence (immutability) of species.
Let a sign be upon the earth, so that man in his darkness may not believe that one animal changes and becomes another. . . . [When] different animals bring forth a new living animal . . . unlike either its mother or father . . . the new product [is] barren. . . . And this shall be testimony . . . that each and all the living were created after their own kind only.
OAHSPE, BOOK OF JEHOVIH 5:10–12
A: The penalty imposed by nature for an attempt to introduce confusion of species is barrenness, such as sterile mules, for in the mismatch the generative organs are thrown out of balance.
Figure 4.2. Cartoon by Marvin E. Herring.
POE: Barren, that’s right. Darwin, from these facts, inferred that the result of a cross (of different human races) is inferior vitality and lessened fertility, possibly even premature death.
A: Wait a second. With Homo, we are not talking about different species, but only different races (subspecies). And with crossings of different races comes, not inferiority, but hybrid vigor, known as heterosis, which actually increases fertility and resistance to disease. Mixed off-spring tend to inherit the strong traits of their parents (getting bigger and stronger) especially in the first few generations. Such hybridization, when you come down to it, precludes all need for human evolution!
POE: Nevertheless, we do indeed witness evolutionary changes in, say, the Neanderthal transition to the modern type. Excavations at the Israeli rock shelter of Skhul, for example, showed a population of Neanderthaloids trending in the modern direction: reduced dentition, a more vertical forehead, and the first sign of a genuine chin—all showing the gradual process of evolution toward true man. There are many such intermediate forms, all proving evolution.
A: For the moment I’ll skip over Neanderthal’s ineligibility as our ancestor, but only consider this: If species are forever changing by small degrees to become some other species, why do we have today only clearly defined ones?
POE: Remember selection? Survival of the fittest? The unmodified ones, or half-baked ones, if you will, simply die out. That’s why.
A: Uh, let’s get our terms straight, OK? What I am calling mixing of races (say, of Neanderthal and mod), you are calling evolution, that is, continuous change or transmutation or speciation, which you say are proven by transitional forms, like those intermediates at Skhul. You call it continuity. But all I see in the animal world is discontinuity, which is to say, deep divisions in the order of nature, a natural gulf between species that cannot be spanned. Why are there no transitional fossils between the major phyla? Even Darwin’s most loyal devotees have admitted that his attempts to come to grips with nature’s discontinuities were muddled and incoherent.5
POE: Concerning this gulf or deep division or discontinuity that you mention, well, the intermediates are missing simply because intervals of speciation may be quite brief. We are lucky to find the ones we have. Still and all, there are cases, such as the walking whales: You can still see vestigial legs and pelvis bones in today’s whales. One of the bestdocumented examples of large-scale evolutionary change is Pakicetus, the 47-million-year-old ancestors of whales who were walking creatures. Pakicetus’s stubby forelimbs helped it steer through water, although its spine indicates it swam, like whales, by moving its lower back up and down. Pakicetus, discovered in 1994 in Pakistan, had hind legs, apparently something like a seal. Its skull, moreover, had whalelike morphology, altogether suggesting an amphibious stage between land and sea; they walked and swam.
A: Who says those flippers were ever any larger? Who says anything is vestigial? Today there are some snakelike lizards who have tiny, perfectly useless legs. Is that vestigial? Those tiny “feet” on whales, are you sure they are shrunken hind limbs?
POE: Sure, even snakes lost their legs
A: I doubt that!
POE: Well, take Basilosaurus, then, another ancestor of the whale, as Darwin thought, with semiaquatic otters or sea hogs as the in-between types. The hind limb of Basilosaurus has been reconstructed from fragments. It seems that over time, these creatures stayed more and more in the water until—
A: Please. Just picture it: If you convert a land quadruped into a whale while it is still on land, this imagined transitional beast could not use his hind legs and would be obliged to keep them permanently stretched out backward and drag himself about using his forelegs. I ask you, how could whales possibly have evolved from terrestrial animals by small genetic changes, if the advantage that is involved actually requires the full development of those features? A land mammal in process of becoming a whale would fall between two stools—fitted neither for life on land or sea.
POE: Clumsy perhaps, lumbering about a bit like a sea lion, but it could still get around.
A: Put it this way: The whale’s skin, musculature, lungs, nose, and hemoglobin are so fitted to its seaborne life and so different from terrestrials, they could not conceivably have evolved from landlubbers by any pileup of genetic changes.
POE: It was a question of diet, you see, of survival; their ancestors, these four-legged mammals, turned to the sea for its resources, adapting to hunt in the oceans. Having been scavengers living near the sea, about 55 mya, they first ate dead fish along the shore, then began to chase prey in the shallows, wading deeper and deeper and—
A: Say, that Basilosaurus looks more like an eel. But look at the whale, its shape is that of a fish. Your theory rests on rampant guesswork: naming the ancestor of the whale either a deer, a pig, a wolf, or a bear!! But the recipe for whales is not contained in the genetic makeup of pigs, wolves, or bears.
POE: It remembers being a landlubber, though; when we see a beached whale, we are witnessing its residual instinct to return to land. I should also mention fossil types that phyletically link reptiles to birds, Archaeopteryx, for example—a reptilian protobird with teeth.
A: Last time I checked, Archaeopteryx was just an early bird about the size of a crow, skeletally like a swan.
POE: The resemblance between birds and predatory dinosaurs is undeniable. The theropod Ornitholestes, for example, had very birdlike feet. Just look at the morphology—it is halfway between a reptile and a bird: hips, pelvis, and legs of dinos are quite similar to birds. Anyone can see that such reptiles evolved to the avians.
A: Well, then, you might as well call the penguin an intermediate between a bird and a fish, if you are calling Archaeopteryx a phylogenetic link between dinosaur and bird. But birds already lived in the age of reptiles, like that fossil found in Colorado in 1977—a true bird that lived at the same time as Archaeopteryx. The latter, of course, had excellent wings, was a genuine bird with modern feathers—
POE: —but a long bony trailing tail just like a reptile and reptilian features of the skull and pelvis.
A: Even today some birds have bony tails. Besides, that Colorado bird had the telltale “wishbone” like all birds, and there are other primitive birds in addition to Archaeopteryx that had teeth. Even today’s newborn birds have teeth to break the shell. In Chile they found a huge prehistoric seabird whose beak was full of spiky protrusions of bone. And why do we get fossils of modern birds in the same rocks as Archaeopteryx? Indeed, birds are found in a horizon below it. Professor Ernst Mayr said: “The particular bipedal dinosaurs that are most birdlike occurre
d . . . some 70 to 100 mya, while Archaeopteryx, the oldest known fossil bird, lived 145 mya . . . no birdlike dinosaurs are known from that period. . . . It is quite inconceivable how they could have possibly shifted to flight.” In fact, bird and bat wings, when they appear in the record, are already developed, with no evidence of metamorphosing from any anterior type. Darwin himself brooded that his theory would fall to pieces if serial modifications could not be demonstrated for such complex structures as wings.
Figure 4.3. This drawing represents the first Archaeopteryx found in 1861.
No amount of variation within . . . the [reptilian] Crocodilia would allow for the origin of the birds. For in the latter we find a number of innovations of which there are no trace in any crocodile, and if there was, then it would not be a crocodile. . . . A transitional stage between [the feather] and the reptilian scale is hardly imaginable.
SOREN LOVTRUP, DARWINISM: THE REFUTATION OF A MYTH
The great reptilian life . . . had no descendants.
JAMES CHURCHWARD, THE SECOND BOOK OF THE COSMIC FORCES OF MU
POE: Now there is evidence that birds evolved from dinos: flying pterosaurs in China about the size of a falcon, in the genus respectfully named Darwinopterus, must be transitional. Also the theropod Sinosauropteryx was indeed a feathered dinosaur.
A: Show me a fossil with scales developing the properties of fur or feathers.
POE: Several Cretaceous reptiles in China had incipient feathery fuzz; many of the coelurosaurs were feathered.
A: That Chinese dinosaur—they say it had protofeathers, but from the description (hairy filaments, shaggy bristles), it sounds more like a rough coat of fur. After all, dinos had a four-chambered heart, like mammals, and they may have been warm blooded.
POE: Well, how about Mononykus, then, the bird dinosaur with teeth and a long tail and a keeled breastbone; its clawed forearms substitute for wings. In Patagonia, paleontologists have found perhaps the most birdlike dino of all, Unenlagia comahuensis. All right, it did not fly, but it did hold its forelimbs in a winglike manner. Prebirds probably evolved flight from tree-climbing reptiles who slide down to the ground. Even some mammals glide, membranes stretched between their limbs, probably showing us how bats got their start. We can also see a continuum in very small animals that tend to float gently in the air. Even today there are creatures that beautifully illustrate every stage of evolutionary continuum, say, the flying squirrel, or frogs with big webs between their toes that glide, or tree snakes with flattened bodies that catch the air, or lizards with flaps along their bodies—
A: Did a reptile lay an egg and a bird hatch from it? Who is to say those frogs ever sprouted wings or your flapped lizards ever took wing? The pectoral girdle and hind legs of the theropod dinos are way too small and weak to have served as a wing that could lift the creature to the sky. No factors are known that could have caused a sudden drastic growth of those extremities.
It is particularly remarkable that no forms with the wings at an intermediate stage of development have been found.
FRED HOYLE AND N. C. WICKRAMASINGHE, EVOLUTION FROM SPACE
Figure 4.4. Reptile egg hatches bird. Cartoon by Marvin E. Herring.
PROMISSORY MATERIALISM
For all these creatures the mystery is the same: why are there no transitional fossils leading up to them?
FRANCIS HITCHING, THE NECK OF THE GIRAFFE
A: Neither can anyone explain the hominid gap between three and two million years ago, openly called the black hole of evolution.
POE: It is only a matter of time before we recover specimens to fill that gap. Literally thousands of transitional forms are discovered every year. Are you familiar with Canada’s recently discovered Arctic fish of the Devonian, the tiktaalik, which had finlike limbs and a neck structure? Tiktaalik very nicely documents the evolution of limbs: this flat-headed fish lived in the shallows and showed rudimentary arms and joints, clearly transitional. It fills a significant gap—between swimming fish and walking animals. Lepidosiren is another outstanding transitional between fish and amphibian.
A: But with no sign of a protolimb.
POE: Eusthenopteron had a budding limb.
A: For the life of me, I cannot figure why fish would want to leave the water.
POE: A lot of reasons—drought, predators, oxygen.
A: None of them could walk, though.
POE: Alas, the vagaries of the fossil record leave the story incomplete—precisely because natural selection eliminated those imperfect forms! Living organisms, moreover, rarely die in circumstances amenable to fossilization. We simply have not yet found the more advanced ones who could walk.
A: Contrary to your promissory materialism, paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson said the record is unmanageably rich, and still, your intermediates are missing in action.
POE: Owing to tiny populations or too short a duration for fossils to have formed. Keep in mind that geologically brief intervals of speciation are likely to escape detection—and preservation—which for sedimentary beds is very episodic. You’d be surprised by how much was destroyed by glaciers, too.
A: Yes, I would. As far as I can tell, discontinuity between animal types is the rule, ubiquitous throughout the living kingdom; and even if perfect intermediates (continuities) were found, it would not prove the evolutionary transitional model, which, we both know, was rejected by the leading biologists of the nineteenth century—Georges Cuvier and Louis Agassiz, Francois Jules Pictet and Heinrich Georg Bronn, Richard Owen, William Harvey the botanist, Andrew Murray, the entomologist, and even John Henslow, Darwin’s mentor. Neither did Faraday and Maxwell, the most illustrious physicists of that day, buy into Darwinism. They simply saw no evidence for a sequential order in nature.
POE: Au contraire, we see a nice sequence in the primate order itself, with the beginning of communication symbols and speech in the great apes.
A: Just because animals have certain communication faculties does not mean they are precursors to human speech. Have you ever found an actual sequence from the African apes to man? Of course not.
POE: Well, dry conditions in Africa and acid soils of the forest, as you know, are not conducive to fossilization, so the best we can hope for is that more fossils will be found over the next few years, which will fill the present gaps and demonstrate a true, orderly, step-by-step sequence. Only when sufficiently abundant material is available for comparative study will the question be decided.
A: Which was OK to say in Darwin’s time, but can we get away with it today? Let’s face it, we never hit pay dirt and we never will. Some zoologists have declared that more than 80 percent of the varieties of mammals, reptiles, and amphibians have already been found—but not their transitional forms.
The fossils go missing in all the important places.
FRANCIS HITCHING, THE NECK OF THE GIRAFFE
POE: We simply have not yet assembled the record in enough detail. Many fossil-bearing strata lay on plates that have been subducted by tectonics. There are certain cases, too, where daughter species could have evolved elsewhere, or were very thin on the ground.
A: That’s thin, all right. Even Darwin worried that the record would not support his theory: “Why is not every geological formation . . . full of such intermediate links?” Remember, his most formidable opponents were not clergymen, but fossil experts. Today there are numerous animal behaviorists who cannot abide step-by-step evolution, if only because the clumsy intermediate stages could not give the animal any evolutionary “advantage.” Behavioral systems, it has so often been pointed out, are useful for an animal only at their full level of development. Previous steps would not have furnished any benefit at all—more likely a hindrance. Try to picture an elephant whose trunk does not reach the ground.
POE: Nevertheless, there are many useful gradations: animals with half a wing, a quarter of a wing, and so forth and what about the ear? Can’t you imagine sensitive skin detectors being transformed into protoears in a step-by-step
process? Every intermediate stage must have assisted survival to some degree.
A: That puts me in mind of Dr. Stephen Jay Gould’s comment on the dung beetle, which, looking so much like dung, avoids predators. Did this evolve gradually? Gould’s reply: “Can there be any advantage in looking 5 percent like a turd?” Ultimately the question is: Do your half wings and so forth really represent intermediate forms? This is sheer supposition. My guess is that Darwin, were he alive today, would most likely reject the theory of evolution on this basis: The fossil record today should be brimming with invertebrates possessing partially developed backbones, fish with little legs, reptiles with primitive wings.
Naturalists are chasing a phantom in their search for some material gradation among created beings.
LOUIS AGASSIZ, METHODS OF STUDY IN NATURAL HISTORY
It might have been expected . . . that in those cases where the geological record is more or less complete . . . we would find closely graduated varieties of species. . . . Yet we do not find such a graduated series.
GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB, DARWIN AND THE DARWINIAN REVOLUTION
POE: Ah, but you do find a state bridging aquatic invertebrates and vertebrates, in the hagfish, for example, which is capable of taking in food like an invertebrate. All right, I know it’s the human record that interests you: so think of Laetoli Man—a transitional hominid somewhere between archaic and modern anatomy. Laetoli apparently had no divergence of big toe in those famous footprints, making it clearly transitional—
A: Wait a second. Transitional? How could they be transitional if they were contemporaries with their “ancestors,” the australopiths? These Laetoli features are not modifications at all, only the result of blends—hybrids. That shortness of Laetoli stature (they stood only 130 cm high) came from the little people, Ihin genes, same with their modern foot.
POE: Well, they are a bit too human to belong to Australopithecus afarensis (although some say they do fit Lucy). There are many opinions; no one can be sure. But if I may jump ahead in time, the considerable anatomical variability among Neanderthals indicates evolutionary progression—which is to say, transitional forms evolving to the modern type.
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 14