The Case for a Creator (9 page)

“It’s interesting how these misconceptions continue to thrive,” he went on. “Evolutionists used to teach that famous phrase ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,’ which is a fancy way of saying that embryos repeat their evolutionary history by passing through the adult forms of their ancestors as they develop.

“But this theory has been widely dismissed for many decades, because it’s empirically false. Even so, there are aspects of it that still come up. And ‘gill slits’ would be a prime example of that.”

WING, FLIPPER, LEG, HAND

Earlier in our interview, Wells had brought up another category of evidence for universal ancestry: homology in vertebrate limbs. I remember as a student seeing the drawings depicting the similar bone structures in a bat’s wing, a porpoise’s flipper, a horse’s leg, and a human’s hand. I was told that even though these limbs have been adapted for different uses, their underlying similarity—or “homology”—is proof that they all share a common ancestor.

Wells had briefly mentioned this phenomenon at the outset of our interview. “Isn’t homology good evidence for Darwinism?” I asked.

“Actually, these homologies were described and named by Darwin’s predecessors—and they were
not
evolutionists,” he replied. “Richard Owen, who was the most famous anatomist of Darwin’s time, said they pointed toward a common archetype or design, not toward descent with modification.”

“But,” I protested, “the similarities are there—you can’t deny that.”

“Yes, but the explanation can go either way: design or descent with modification. How do we determine which is true? Listen—similarity alone doesn’t tell us. Look at Berra’s Blunder.”

He threw out that comment assuming I would know what he was referring to. Although the term sounded vaguely familiar, I couldn’t pinpoint what it meant. “Berra’s Blunder?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“Phillip Johnson coined that term based on a book that was written by a biologist named Tim Berra in 1990. Berra compared the fossil record to a series of automobile models, saying that if you compare a 1953 and 1954 Corvette side by side, and then a 1954 and 1955 Corvette and so on, then it becomes obvious that there has been descent with modification. He said this is what paleontologists do with fossils, ‘and the evidence is so solid and comprehensive that it cannot be denied by reasonable people.’
³³

“Far from demonstrating his point, the illustration shows that a designer could have been involved,” Wells said. “These successive models of the Corvette are based on plans drawn up by engineers, so there’s intelligence at work to guide and implement the process. If you wanted to demonstrate that the similar features resulted from a Darwinian process, you would have to show that once you somehow got an automobile, the natural forces of rust, wind, water, and gravity would turn one model into its successor.

“The point I want to make is this: quite unintentionally, Berra had illustrated the fact that merely having a succession of similar forms does not provide its own explanation. A mechanism is needed. With the Corvette, that mechanism is human manufacturing.”

“What mechanism is proposed for Darwinism?” I asked.

“One is called ‘common developmental pathways,’ which means if you have two different animals with homologous features and you trace them back to the embryo, they would come from similar cells and processes. This happens to be mostly untrue.

“I mentioned frogs earlier. There are some frogs that develop like frogs and other frogs that develop like birds, but they all look pretty much the same when they come out the other end. They’re frogs. So the developmental pathway explanation is false—I don’t know anybody who studies development and takes it seriously.

“A more common explanation nowadays is that the homologies come from similar genes. In other words, the reason two features are homologous in two different animals would be that they’re programmed by similar genes in the embryo. But it turns out this doesn’t work very well, either. We know some cases where you have similar features that come from different genes, but we have lots and lots of cases where we have similar genes that give rise to very different features.

“I’ll give you an example: eyes. There’s a gene that’s similar in mice, octopuses, and fruit flies. If you look at a mouse eye and an octopus eye, there’s a superficial similarity, which is odd because nobody thinks their common ancestor had an eye like that. What’s more striking is if you look at a fruit fly’s eye—a compound eye with multiple facets—it’s totally different. Yet all three of these eyes depend on the same or very similar gene.

“In fact, it’s so similar that you can put the mouse gene into a fruit fly that’s missing that gene and you can get the fruit fly to develop its eyes as it normally would. The genes are that similar. So neither the developmental pathway explanation nor the similar gene explanation really accounts for homology.”

I asked, “What’s the answer, then?”

Wells shrugged. “Frankly, it remains a mystery. If you read the literature on homology, the experts know it’s a mystery. They may not give up Darwinism, but they know they haven’t solved the problem. To me, if you haven’t solved the problem of a mechanism, then you haven’t distinguished between common descent and common design. It could be either one. The evidence isn’t pointing one way or the other.

“I think students deserve to know that scientists haven’t resolved this problem. Instead, some textbooks simply define homology as similarity due to common ancestry. So the theory becomes true by definition. What the textbook is saying is that similarity due to common ancestry is due to common ancestry. And
that’s
circular reasoning.”

HUMAN GENES, APE GENES

Since Wells had brought up genetics, I was reminded of another question I wanted to raise with him about the theory of common descent. “What about recent genetic studies that show humans and apes share ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent of their genes?” I asked. “Isn’t that evidence that we share a common ancestor?”

“If you assume, as neo-Darwinism does, that we are products of our genes, then you’re saying that the dramatic differences between us and chimpanzees are due to two percent of our genes,” he replied. “The problem is that the so-called body-building genes are in the ninety-eight percent. The two percent of genes that are different are really rather trivial genes that have little to do with anatomy. So the supposed similarity of human and chimpanzee DNA is a problem for neo-Darwinism right there.

“Second, it’s not surprising that when you look at two organisms that are similar anatomically, you often find they’re similar genetically. Not always; there’s a striking discordance with some organisms. But does this prove common ancestry?”

He shook his head as he answered his own question: “No, it’s just as compatible with common design as it is with common ancestry. A designer might very well decide to use common building materials to create different organisms, just as builders use the same materials—steel girders, rivets, and so forth—to build different bridges that end up looking very dissimilar from one another.”

As I mentally wrestled with this concept, I stood to stretch my legs. Walking over to the window, I looked down at cars backed up along the busy street and people hustling down the sidewalks on either side. A rudimentary illustration popped into my mind.

“Let me see if I understand you. If I were to chemically analyze that street and sidewalk,” I said, pointing out the window, “I’d find they would be identical or very similar. They’d both be made of concrete. But that wouldn’t mean that they shared a common ancestor—say, a path for a golf cart—that got wider and more substantial over millions of years. A better explanation would be that there was a common designer who decided to use basically the same materials to construct similar, but functionally different, structures.”

Wells thought about my example for a moment. “Essentially, that’s right,” he said. “It sounds ridiculous to suggest a golf path could evolve into a sidewalk and street, but it’s not any more outlandish than some of the claims for biological evolution. The important point is that similarity by itself doesn’t distinguish between design and Darwinism.”

We had strayed from Haeckel’s embryos, but the issues were the same: is there persuasive evidence through embryology or homology that all living creatures evolved over time from an ancient progenitor? I concluded that Darwin was wrong: examining embryos of different creatures in their early stages does not yield support for his theory. And the undeniable similarities between some vertebrate limbs certainly doesn’t distinguish between design or descent as a cause. Once again, the persuasive power of the evolutionary icons had been deflated.

I glanced at my watch; if I were to catch my plane back to Los Angeles, I would need to turn to the last of the four evolutionary images from my days as a student: the awe-inspiring fossil of a prehistoric creature that once effectively silenced many of Darwin’s critics.

IMAGE #4: THE
ARCHAEOPTERYX
MISSING LINK

When Darwin’s
The Origin of Species
was published in 1859, he conceded that “the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory” was that the fossil record failed to back up his evolutionary hypothesis.

“Why,” he asked, “if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?” He attributed the problem to the fossil record being incomplete and predicted that future discoveries would vindicate his theory.

As if on cue, two years later scientists unearthed the
archaeopteryx
(pronounced ar-key-OPT-er-icks) in a German quarry. Darwin’s supporters were thrilled—surely this missing link between reptiles and modern birds, unveiled so promptly after the appearance of Darwin’s book, would just be the first of many future fossil discoveries that would validate Darwin’s claims.

Like many people, including the scientist who “actually fell upon his knees in awe” when he first glimpsed the
archaeopteryx
at the National History Museum in England,
³⁴
I was enthralled by the dramatic pictures of the prehistoric creature. I was under the impression that it was featured in my books on evolution because it is just one example of many transitional links that have been found. But I was wrong.

Since that time I have come to learn that the fossil record has utterly let Darwin down. Michael Denton, in his book
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
, summarized the bleak situation this way:

. . . [T]he universal experience of paleontology . . . [is that] while the rocks have continually yielded new and exciting and even bizarre forms of life . . . what they have never yielded is any of Darwin’s myriads of transitional forms. Despite the tremendous increase in geological activity in every corner of the globe and despite the discovery of many strange and hitherto unknown forms, the infinitude of connecting links has still not been discovered and the fossil record is about as discontinuous as it was when Darwin was writing the
Origin
. The intermediates have remained as elusive as ever and their absence remains, a century later, one of the most striking characteristics of the fossil record.
³⁵

As a result, said Denton, the fossil record “provides a tremendous challenge to the notion of organic evolution.”
³⁶
But what about the
archaeopteryx
?
The fossils of this magnificent creature, its detailed image pressed into fine-grained limestone, still seemed to stand in stark contrast to this trend.

“Doesn’t
archaeopteryx
fill the gap between reptiles and modern birds?” I asked Wells.

“There are several problems with that,” came his reply. “Does it show Darwinian evolution? Well, no, for the same reason that the Corvettes don’t illustrate Darwinian evolution. We would need more than an intermediate form to show that; we would need to know how you get from one to the other.

“The question is, do you get from a reptile to a bird—which is an astonishingly huge step—by some totally natural process or does this require the intervention of a designer? An
archaeopteryx
, as beautiful as it is, doesn’t show us one way or the other. Besides, we see strange animals around today, like the duck-billed platypus, which nobody considers transitional but which has characteristics of different classes.”

“But the
archaeopteryx
is a half-bird, half-reptile, right?”

“No, not even close,” he insisted. “It’s a bird with modern feathers, and birds are very different from reptiles in many important ways—their breeding system, their bone structure, their lungs, their distribution of weight and muscles. It’s a bird, that’s clear—not part bird and part reptile.

“But there are more interesting parts to the
archaeopteryx
story,” he added. “The main one comes from a branch of evolutionary theory called
cladistics
. This takes Darwinian theory to the extreme. Cladists define homology, or physical similarities, as being due to common ancestry. Then they say, well, the main way we can group animals in the evolutionary tree is through homologies, which is already a bit of a circular argument. When they go back into the fossil record, they assume birds came from reptiles by descent, and they look for reptiles that are more bird-like in their skeletal structure.”

“Where do they find them?” I asked.

Wells smiled. “That’s the fascinating part,” he said. “It turns out they find them millions of years after
archaeopteryx
! So here we have
archaeopteryx
, which is undeniably a bird, and yet the fossils that look most like the reptilian ancestors of birds occur tens of millions of years
later
in the fossil record. The missing link is still missing! Now evolutionists are stuck looking for another theoretical ancestor to try to fill the gaps, but it hasn’t been found.”