What Story does the Fossil Record Tell? by Shawn Boonstra

Remember those half ape-half man pictures we saw in high-school textbooks? Is what we see really what the archaeologist managed to dig out of the ground? Let's see what Shawn accompanied by Dr Timothy Standish, a biologist of the Geoscience Research Institute, has to say.

Watch this video and many more for free at www.beyondpatmos.org

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[hey413m]

@FiverBeyond (c) I have sent you links for short documentaries on the creationist's explanation, as it would take way too much comment space for me to write. Thank you for your comments, take care. If I don't reply to your response right away, forgive me, as I am currently in many online discussions.

[hey413m]

@FiverBeyond (b) Mutations do not add information, they take away or change the information. Natural selection can only select from pre-existing genes. It does not know what it needs to evolve to in the future. It is a blind mechanism. Also, how would many species survive if they have to wait millions of years before they evolved a necessary function to live.

[hey413m]

@FiverBeyond (a) Many of the dating techniques such as carbon-14 dating require one to make an assumption of the geologic age of the strata based on where the fossils are in the geologic column layer. It is basically a glorified guess that is inputed. Not to mention there have been many instances when dating fossils and strata by many different people, the end result age has differed immensely from one person to the other, even when using the same dating technique.

[hey413m]

@FiverBeyond The fossils don't have a definate transistional ancestor, only disputable ones, and if millions of years have gone by, there should be an overwhelming ammount of transistional fossils. Even after scientists have known about this for 150 + years, the amount of fossils which should be there simply are not. Also, many of the fossils that we do have from the foundation layers are species which still exist today, some even in the exact forms.

[hey413m]

@FiverBeyond I agree with you on this part, I only included it because I was finishing Roth's quote.

[hey413m]

@FiverBeyond (b) “And we find many of them [Cambrian fossils] already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists.” (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, London: W.W. Norton & Company, p. 229). For more, go to 'Cambrian Period, National Geographic Online. I will send you the link in a PM.

[hey413m]

@FiverBeyond (a) “The most famous such burst, the Cambrian explosion, marks the inception of modern multicellular life. Within just a few million years, nearly every major kind of animal anatomy appears in the fossil record for the first time ... The Precambrian record is now sufficiently good that the old rationale about undiscovered sequences of smoothly transitional forms will no longer wash.” (Stephen Jay Gould, “An Asteroid to Die For,” Discover, October 1989, p. 65). 

[hey413m]

@FiverBeyond Trilobites and other species in the Cambrian explosion show that there was not a slow and gradual increase in their complexity. Thats why its so mysterious to evolutionists, because instead of finding the transistional fossils, they are found already with those complex systems. Check out some of the quotes by others in the next part.

[FiverBeyond]

@hey413m

The Cambrian Explosion is definitely a mystery in many respects. After billions of years of only single-celled organisms, and then millions of years of simple multi-celled creatures, the sudden appearance of so many body-types over only a a few million years is surprising. Modern biologists don't know if this means that the Hox genes mutated rapidly, or that pre-cambrian ancestors were difficult to fossilize.

What is the Creationist explanation?

[FiverBeyond]

@hey413m

"But the ancestors of Cambrian animals have never been found."

Again, this is simply not true. There have been many pre-cambrian arthropod fossils found.

"If the rocks were able to preserve single cells, they could have preserved any animals that were really there."

Again, simply not true. Fossilization doesn't only depend on whether an organism has soft tissue or not, but also on the organism's lifestyle and habitat. There are many groups of animals that do not fossilize well.