Creation Facts of Life (25 page)

Louis Leakey started the modern interest in australopithecines (and captured the attention of
National Geographic)
way back in 1959 with his "ape man,"
Zinjanthropus. Zinjanthropus
has since been reclassified as
Austalopithecus bosei
or
A. robustus,
and it is now considered grossly apelike, an extinct ape really not related to man at all.

In fact, it was not the skeletal features that attracted attention to the Leakey finds in the first place. It was tools. As I said at the beginning of this book, every scientist can recognize evidence of creation. Tools imply a toolmaker. Since the tools were found with
Australopithecus,
Louis Leakey assumed that that creature had made the tools. Thirteen years later, Richard Leakey found beneath the bones his father had unearthed "bones virtually indistinguishable from those of modern man." Perhaps those tools were used
on
the owner of the gorilla-like skull, making it more like man's meal than man's ancestor. At the time, Richard Leakey said his discovery shattered standard beliefs in evolution.

Actually, fossil discoveries have been
shattering
standard beliefs in human evolution with monotonous regularity. Each in its day was hailed as "scientific proof" that human beings evolved from ape-like animals, yet all the candidates once proposed as our evolutionary ancestors have been knocked off the list. The cover story in
Time
magazine for March 14, 1994,
assumes
that evolution is an absolute fact,
¹⁰⁰
but it summarizes what is really the evaporating case for human evolution with these dramatic words:

Yet despite more than a century of digging, the fossil record remains
maddeningly sparse.
With so few clues, even
a single bone
that doesn't fit into the picture
can upset everything.
Virtually every major discovery has put
deep cracks
in the conventional wisdom and forced scientists to
concoct new theories,
amid furious debate [emphasis added].

It's sad that human evolution is still taught as "fact" to school children, college students, and the general public, when "virtually every major discovery" has discredited the so-called evidence and disproved the theory. Even sadder, scientists who know the evidence are "forced to concoct new theories," but they are only concocting new theories of
how
human evolution occurred, unwilling to ask
whether
evolution occurred and to work on the truly new, non-evolutionary theories that the evidence demands. To the creationist, the evidence simply confirms that
people have always been people, and apes have always been apes, as far back as the evidence goes
(Figure 30).

Figure 30. Footprints are more distinctive of man than most bone fragments are. If the Laetoli footprints above are accepted as human, as discoverer Mary Leakey and other scientists concluded after detailed study, then evolutionists would have to say that people existed "before" mankind's supposed ancestors. Creationists say that these footprints, and many other evidences, simply suggest that people have always been people, beginning with the first created human beings.

Indeed, secular scientists have discovered molecular evidence that all human beings have descended from one woman and one man, just as the Bible says. The powerhouse organelle in living cells, the mitochondrion, contains its own loop of DNA, and mitochondrial DNA is passed from parents to children only through the mothers' egg cells. Comparative studies of mitochondrial DNA suggest all human beings had just one mother, whom the media dubbed "Mitochondrial Eve." In the Bible, Eve is called "the mother of all living" people. Studies of the Y chromosome, which is passed only from fathers to sons, suggests all people had just one father, whom we might call "Y chromosome Adam."

The first evolutionary estimates for the times of origin, however, showed a 100,000 year difference between the first man and first woman. (Talk about waiting around on a Saturday night for the telephone to ring!) Compromising assumptions were made to put the first man and woman at the same time and place — which God did by creating Adam and Eve on the same day and placing the first couple together in the Garden of Eden (which means Garden of Delight).

The Bible describes Adam and Eve as created mature, ready and able to talk with each other and with God, and to assume stewardship responsibilities for care of the earth. Until the late 1900s, skeptics were inclined to scoff at the idea that Adam, made from dust, could be walking and talking the day of his creation, but now mankind, made in the image of the Creator, has done something nearly as creative. Think about computers. The chips are made primarily of silicon, just "dust of the ground." When you plug in the computer and hook up the printer and voice synthesizer, what happens? At first, the computer just grunts, but after several weeks, it can utter words, and after a few years full sentences. Of course not! The computer can speak and write, complete with grammar, syntax, and spell-checker, right from the moment it's created and activated. If mankind, a reflection of the Creator, can program such devices for instant complex functions, how much easier would it be for God to create mature human beings?

Sometimes I like to think we could enter the data regarding human origins into a computer free of human biases and social pressures. I think the computer's conclusion about human origins would be something like this: "You got here the same way I did. Someone made you with a purpose. By the way, whoever made you did a lot better job than you did making me!"

Summary: Fossil Kinds

As far as the fossil evidence is concerned, different kinds of animals and plants have always been different kinds of animals and plants, and people have always been people.

It seems to me that "creation" is clearly the logical inference from our scientific knowledge of fossil kinds.

If the fossil evidence is as clear and simple as I'm suggesting it is, then even evolutionists would accept my description of the facts (even if they violently disagreed with my biblical inferences), and they do. At a rare conference of scientists from different specialties, leading evolutionists from around the world meeting in Chicago at least agreed on the same assessment of the fossil evidence reached (and predicted) by creationists long ago. As the summary in
Newsweek
put it (emphasis added):

Evidence from fossils now points overwhelmingly away from the classical Darwinism which most Americans learned in high school.
¹⁰¹

In building up to that monumental conclusion (which should be posted as a plaque in all the nation's science classrooms), the writer starts with man (emphasis added):

The missing link between man and the apes …is merely the most glamorous of a whole hierarchy of
phantom creatures.
In the fossil record,
missing links are the rule…. The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms between species, the more they have been frustrated.

The concept of evolution touted in textbooks, then, is based on phantoms and figments of the imagination,
not
on fossils and the facts of science. In a landmark paper that helped pave the way for the Chicago conference, Gould and Eldredge
¹⁰²
put it this way: "Phyletic gradualism [gradual evolution] was an
a priori
assertion from the start [something believed ahead of time]; it was never 'seen' in the rocks."
Evolution was never seen in the rocks!
Evolution is
not
a logical inference from scientific observations, because the observations were contrary to the theory right from the start, even as Darwin said.

If it wasn't based on evidence or logic, then, where did the concept of evolution come from? Gould and Eldredge supply the answer: "It [gradual evolution] expressed the cultural and political biases of 19th century liberalism." That's what has been passed off in our school systems for 100 years as the "fact of evolution"
— "the cultural and political biases of 19th century liberalism."

When it comes to the fossil evidence, what are the facts? Believe it or not, when it comes to fossils,
evolutionists and creationists now agree on what the facts are.
The overwhelming pattern that emerges from fossils we have found is summarized in the word
stasis. Stasis
and
static
come from the same root word, a word that means "stay the same." Gould and Eldredge are simply saying that most kinds of fossilized life forms appear in the fossil sequence abruptly and distinctly as discrete kinds, show relatively minor variation within kind, then often abruptly disappear.

Steven Stanley,
¹⁰³
fossil expert from Johns Hopkins University, provided several examples of stasis. Elephants appear as a distinct group abruptly in the fossil sequence, diversify immediately into three subtypes, which then persist unchanged (except those which became extinct) without noticeably changing into anything else. Similarly, the modern horses
(Equus)
appear abruptly, Stanley said, "and their origin is not documented by known fossil evidence." Stanley also noted that the excellent fossil history of bowfin fishes shows only trivial changes, and no basic shift of adaptation, making them very much like their descendants.

The victory of stasis over gradualism did not come easily at the  Chicago conference. As Lewin
¹⁰⁴
mentioned in his professional summary for
Science,
"The proceedings were at times unruly and even acrimonious," but, on the positive side, "many people suggested that the meeting was a turning point in the history of evolutionary thought."

Perhaps the most dramatic response came from leading evolutionary geneticist Francisco Ayala. After admitting that neo-Darwinists "would not have predicted stasis from population genetics [extrapolation from mutation and selection]," he concluded, "but I am now convinced from what the paleontologists say that
small changes do not accumulate"
(emphasis added). No one finds it easy to change years of thinking, but a willingness to adapt theory to fact is the mark of a true scientist, and Ayala deserves a lot of credit for his statement.

When the dust finally settled, Gabriel Dover of Cambridge University summarized the Chicago conference by calling species stasis "the single most important feature of macroevolution." Note, again, that at least the creationists and evolutionists agree on what the fossil facts represent, namely, stasis:
sudden appearance of complete forms, minor variation, and sudden disappearance.

Perhaps you also detected a note of irony in Dover's comment. If stasis means anything, it means staying the same; if evolution means anything, it means change. It seems to me, then, that evolutionists are actually saying (without quite meaning to, of course) that
the most fundamental fact of their theory of change is that everything stays the same!

Creationists prefer a much more direct approach to the evidence. Each basic kind of plant and animal life appears in the fossil sequence
complete, fully formed,
and
functional;
each classifies according to the criteria we use to distinguish groups today, with "boundary problems" generally no greater nor different for extinct forms than for those living today; and each kind shows broad but quite finite ecologic and geographic variation within its kind. The most direct and logical inference (to a heart and mind open to the possibility) appears to be, it seems to me,
creation, and variation within the basic created kinds.
Differences such as extinction and decline in size and variety seem to point to
corruption
and
catastrophe
in the created order, not at all to "upward, onward" evolution.

When Darwin published
Origin
back in 1859, no one knew what discoveries would be made or what patterns would emerge in the new science of paleontology. On the basis of their theory and observations of heredity and reproduction, creationists predicted that only distinct kinds would be found, variation only within kind, and persistence of the criteria for classification. Evolutionists predicted a series of links would be found to show how complex types today evolved slowly and gradually from common ancestral stocks that finally blurred into simple, indistinct, and difficult-to-classify early forms.

The real test of a scientific theory is its ability to predict in advance of observation. When it comes to fossils,
creation has passed the scientific test with flying colors.
The original Darwinian theory of evolution and the neo-Darwinist and punctuationalist views have been disproved twice, both by genetics and by the fossil evidence.

In his final chapter, as he reviews his reasons for calling his book
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis,
Denton
¹⁰⁵
makes the following strong, sometimes harsh, statements:

We now know, as a result of discoveries made over the past thirty years, that not only is there a distinct break between the animate [living] and inanimate [non-living] worlds, but that it is one of the most dramatic in all nature, absolutely
unbridged by any series of transitional forms
["missing links"], and like so many other major gaps of nature,
the transitional forms are not only empirically absent but are also conceptually impossible
[p. 347, emphasis added].